I don't get it. MySQL releases under the GPL, but they also release under a proprietary license as well. They must require that patches be submitted with copyright assigned to MySQL AG... right?
There's a very good reason to put the WiFi equipment on the roof as close to the antenna as possible. Wiring to connect the radio to the antenna incurs massive signal loss, or is very expensive (and still incurs loss). It's generally accepted in the 802.11 community networking community;-) that the best place to put the AP is in a tupperware or other similar weather resistant container right next to the antenna.
I haven't read the review and I'm not going to. The idea that software is a craft is right on. Managing a successful software project is much more about getting the right people on the job and trusting them to write good code, than it is about engineering practises. Software is invisible to anyone but the active coder. That's the whole point of good APIs -- they are very small, understandable interfaces to the invisible code.
Since the code can't be seen, then it can't be engineered. I suspect that software will remain a craft until code visualization tools progress to the point where I can look at a visualization of someone else's code and understand it in a general sense almost immediately.
Actually it doesn't really beg those questions at all. It might lead you to ask them though. Begging the question is more like "beggaring the question" in that it makes an unspoken assumption that really should be challenged.
so you'd best figure out a way to deal with this issue technologically right now (something they have been VERY reluctant to attempt)
Actually, lots of people have tried to solve the issue technologically. It's not really possible. There's always the analogue hole, and it's also really easy to attack an encryption system when you have it running constantly on your own system.
the stagnant price curves of wireline telephony in its cage of copper, dominated by the costs of rolling out trucks, digging trenches, laying wire and climbing poles.
Think about it... 500 km with a pole every 25 m, that's 10000 poles, each one has to be put up, the cable strung, etc. etc.
I'm really not following your logic here. You're suggesting that if a region doesn't have a power grid, then we can still go ahead and put in a Wi-Fi network anyway? You need a computer to use Wi-Fi, and you can't use a computer without electricity! In any case, providing electrical power is far more important than Wi-Fi, so it's not a simple dollar-for-dollar comparison. I mean, being able to turn on a light bulb is more important than hooking up to a Wi-Fi network, so a power grid should take priority over Wi-Fi even if it costs more.
No, again you are wrong. Laptops run on solar power. So do PDAs. network equipment also requires little power typically. There are VoIP "phones" that are not full computers, that can connect directly into the IP network. Also, there are many locations that have power through generators, or wired power, but gaps between them that don't.
Oops. I was typing too fast and doing the calculations in my head, and I got to thinking in Kbps instead of Mbps. Sorry. Let me revise my figures then. Let's say 802.11g is giving you 30 Mbps, as you said. That means if there are 1000 users online at once (quite possible, since you're suggesting we share the Wi-Fi link with all 10 million people in Senegal), then each user would get less than 4 kilobytes per second. And besides, isn't Wi-Fi limited to 256 simultaneous connections, anyway? I think my points still stand, or did I have another brain-fart?...
Perhaps I don't, so please explain what I said that was so "lame". Am I wrong in thinking that most Wi-Fi routers puke out when they get to around 30 or so simultaneous connections?
Yes, you're wrong about that. Although there are Wi-Fi APs that include routers, many don't. Those are just home/SOHO solutions. WiFi is really just a "wireless ethernet" at it's most basic, that is, a way to get data from one point to another. At each base station, the WiFi devices may be connected to any of the available routing and switching equipment that can be used with a normal TCP/IP network. So, each base station can tap into the data stream, and do whatever they like with it. Wi-Fi doesn't care how many "connections" there are, it's all TCP/IP packets.
Anything that's possible with regular wireline, can be done with WiFi. WiFi doesn't care about routing, switching etc. The intelligence is at the edge of the network, just like the internet.
I realize you think I'm only trying to attack your ideas, but I'm not -- I had the same ideas myself when I was in the Peace Corps! But after reading up on Wi-Fi and thinking a lot about the possibilities, I realized that there are just too many problems with Wi-Fi, and I'm mentioning the caveats here. It would be great if it could work, but I don't believe it's possible for Wi-Fi to share an Internet connection throughout the rural areas of a developing country.
And if you're referring to Wi-Fi, then that's also not feasible, since 802.11b only goes about 10 miles max, even with a line-of-sight high-gain directional antenna. You'd have to put repeaters all over the countryside.
Err.. no. Wi-Fi works perfectly well out to 25km and longer distances have been done. For references have a look here and look at the archives for the wireless-longhaul mailing list.
Also Senegal isn't that big a country... with 25km hops you can go border to border (about 500km) with 20 hops. Each hop is a tower, a couple of antennas and a couple of APs... costing maybe $1200 total.
The solution, I think, is not technical but rather economical. Instead of building some fancy wireless mesh network, developing countries should work to deregulate the phone industry and open it up to competition, thus lowering the cost of Internet access everywhere.
That would be "political" actually, I agree but you're missing a couple of other important policy needs. The country must normalize their spectrum with the international open spectrum bands to make sure WiFi is legal. The other policy need is to make sure that VoIP is fully legal and unrestricted, since it makes much more efficient use of existing resources, thus dropping call costs and allowing more people to make calls.
OK, practically speaking, you can't go straight to a FedEx society without the roads, the factories, the airports, etc. But do you really need FedEx? What do you really need for an information society?
- education - wealth to allow time to educate - communication tools - electricity to power the tools
Sure, no one in Senegal is going to have the latest greatest hardware but you don't need that. You need solide reliable hardware with interchangeable parts. With that minimal infrastructure people in the developing country can join in the information economy by collaborating collectively in a global information space created by the internet. Sounds familiar? Sounds like open source...
Actually I think the idea is to leapfrog the "industrial age" and go straight to an information-based society. Developing nations can skip a whole bunch of unpleasant environmental nastiness and get the benefits of the Information Age now.
"traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest"
Are you saying that Wi-Fi infrastructure would somehow be invincible to these issues? Let's say there's a coup, and the new leader wants to cut off Internet access. All he has to do is cut the SAT-3 link that you speak of. This would affect Internet links throughout the country, whether they were wireless or not.
Do you even know what SAT-3 is? It's an undersea cable, that is very difficult to cut. The SAT-3 connection in Senegal lands on the coast and then is connected in various network that are internal to the country.
As for environmental conditions, sub-Saharan West Africa may be harsh, but so is North America!
This is true; however the ability to recover from environmental damage is different... in the US you will spend the necessary money to rebuild after a tornado or whatnot. In a developing nation that rebuilding may be delayed by years.
What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth...
You're joking, right?
"Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop"
From what I've read, 30 km is a best-case scenario for Wi-Fi under good weather conditions,
Weather conditions make no difference to 802.11b Wi-Fi. There may be some effect on 802.11a because it operates at a higher frequency.
and it only provides minimal bandwidth (on the order of one or two Mbps). More importantly, this can only be acheived with a high-gain directional antenna!
It is possible to have higher bandwidth using directionals, and the antennas are cheap, in the range of $50-$100.
Even if you could get this to work as an Internet link between towns, you still haven't solved the last-mile problem!
I'm not concerned about the last-mile problem. In Senegal, people will walk a mile to use the telephone, if that's the only option. In the case where there's a more developed city, then it's a business opportunity for a wireless ISP (wISP) to purchase some of the bandwidth from the backhaul provider and the hub-and-spoke model is well documented and in use in many places now.
"the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators"
Do you have any idea how much that would cost?...
No, but it's cheaper than building a power grid (since that, too, doesn't exist in much of the developing world). If a power grid is present, the generator is only for backup. In addition, Wi-Fi equipment has a minimal power use.
"Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps."
This shows me that you really haven't thought this idea through. Let me get this straight: You're suggesting that we take the fiber optic backbone coming into Senegal and span it out across the country using Wi-Fi repeaters. Sorry, but Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared! If 30 users are on a "fast" 802.11g channel, then they'll each see less than 1 Mbps -- even worse than dial-up!
This shows me that you are missing a clue. Since when does dial-up give you 1Mbps? Perhaps you're thinking of DSL... which isn't available in most developing areas and for that matter isn't available in much of the developed world as well, since it requires you to be within just a few km of an appropriately outfitted (expensive) telecom office.
1Mbps is most definitely broadband, and currently an essentially unavailable luxury in Senegal (since you'd have to pay tens of thousands a month to pull 1Mbps through VSAT, and even then the roundtrip latency sucks).
Thanks for your reply, because you've helped me show that my concept stands up to (admittedly lame) criticism. I'm not even going to bother addressing your last comment since you clearly have little grasp on the concepts of network design.
phone lines get stolen quite often for the copper many places... or get washed away by monsoons in Bangladesh, or get cut during conflicts. Wireline infrastructure is not the answer. Cellphone penetration in developing nations is far exceeding wireline telephones in growth, for the same reasons wireless internet is also the best solution. The towers can be built on top of the cyber cafes, telecenters, schools, that use the bandwidth, thus ensuring they are well maintained by people with a vested interest in keeping them at peak operation.
Right, that's why what's needed is voice over internet protocol (VoIP) access in the rural areas. It's all about the rural internet... something that can now finally be built using wireless technology (e.g. Wi-Fi)... and bringing services that rural people can really use - like cheap voice communication as a replacement for expensive or non-existant telephone service.
Senegal is a great place to mount an initiative like this because they have access to some serious bandwidth. The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE undersea fibre optic cable landed in Senegal last year, delivering multiple gigabits of internet bandwidth. This is in contast to the previous situation, where basically all of Africa had less bandwidth than the headquarters of my former employer.
But the idea of wiring Senegal is all wrong. What's needed is wireless. Wireless internet (e.g. 802.11b Wi-Fi) is a far more appropriate solution in a country like Senegal where traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest. Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop, and the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators. Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps.
Broadband is essential. With broadband you can deliver the killer app (yeah, I said killer app) of the rural internet which is Voice over IP. People in Senegal, well, the literacy rate isn't so high, and VoIP is what's really useful to people as it allows them to call members of their family who may be off making money in other parts of the world, to call into town to check crop prices, to call their relatives in the city. Of course this requires policy to make sure that VoIP is legal and that the national telco doesn't try to block it to protect their own profits.
If you're interested in wireless long-distance links, you might be interested in a mailing list on the subject, wireless-longhaul@openict.net. You can subscribe here, and the mailing list home page is here.
I've only read half of the article so far but already, I've seen lots of little mistakes. This guy is obviously oriented towards small business, he doesn't really understand open source, or XML, but he's got the big picture view and he's put together a lot of trends into a very interesting mural.
Fortunately that mural looks pretty good for Microsoft going down and OSS going up:-)
Sure, he makes small errors, he treats Linux like a product, he says that XML is just a data interchange language (no...) but he understands the business side and people should pay attention to that.
The full quote, which I'm guessing you haven't heard, is from Stewart Brand, stated in print for the first time as follows
Blah, blah, blah. I'm allowed to make my own interpretations of someone else's words. In my opinion Information Wants to be Free is worthy of standing alone, since it represents a fundamental quality of information, that you can give it to someone without losing it yourself.
You're essentially claiming she should have been more careful in some fashion that would have prevented the email fro being leaked in the first place.
No, I'm not. I'm claiming that this article on LawMeme is essentially a fabricated conflict that has been understood and absorbed by our culture years ago. The article claims that fundamental changes to the way people communicate will result, my point is that fundamental changes/haven't/ resulted, and this kind of thing has been going on for years.
I would suspect that Laurie's response is at least in part due to the possibility that she won't get invited to the next party because she leaked like a sieve.
This just requires spammers to use more simultaneous connections to overcome the slowdown; it doesn't really increase their network requirements much, only their host CPU requirements. 20,000 simultaneous TCP connections from one process is quite possible with/dev/kqueue under FreeBSD, for example; and you can do the same, but with a bit more CPU wasted, using plain old select() on almost any Unix.
No, that won't be effective for the spammer. If I'm receiving 20,000 messages from the same server simultaneously it's pretty obvious that's a spammer, so I block the server completely for a short period. They can choose between painful or nothing.
This long, rambling, long, LawMeme article spends a lot of time huffing and puffing about nothing important. News flash to the writer: "information wants to be free" (a property or quality of information actually).
The article isn't really worth reading because it's a long, drawn out self-debate about whether people are going to stop using email because there's a chance it'll escape. To most people, nothing they write about is important enough to really make this a serious problem. People like Laurie should be more careful.
There's no great lesson here. But it's obviously a fascinating leaked email;-)
The Internet as Americans know it today is built on competition, choice and low-cost access--attributes not usually associated with the Bell monopolies. In fact, it appears that the DSL debacle may have only been the first course and that the Bells are now moving in for the kill, with the Internet itself as the ultimate entree. We all deserve better.
No kidding!
The remaining venue of competition is the Wireless ISP market (wISP). wISPs can deliver broadband last-mile connections using point-to-multipoint connections and new APs are coming out that make it trivial to set up the customer premises equipment. wISP can install faster than wireline providers like cable and DSL, because they often don't even need to visit the customer, the APs can be placed in a window or the like. The available bandwidth is dramatically faster than even current broadband offerings.
VoIP is better than traditional telecomm because it can run over any internet connection, bringing comptetion for telephony from the cablemodem providers, for example. Also, it uses less available bandwidth than traditional phone comm (people are running reasonable connections at 12Kbps these days) and the technology is good enough today to work without gaps and delays.
Obviously the wISPs will be offering Voice over IP service to their customers. It's a killer app, as the customer can do all of their data and telecomm through the wISP and cut the cables completely. If the Bells succeed in taxing VoIP it may not only stall VoIP generally, but might potentially also take away a substantial business model from the wISPs.
I still get the site from lynx when I use www.isonews.com and I get this info from host and dig. But I don't get the site when I use the DNS number given below. Odd. The error from lynx is at the bottom.
% host www.isonews.com www.isonews.com is a nickname for isonews.com isonews.com has address 66.201.243.172 % dig www.isonews.com
; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> www.isonews.com ;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch ;; got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2 ;; QUERY SECTION: ;; www.isonews.com, type = A, class = IN
;; ANSWER SECTION: www.isonews.com. 7h15m29s IN CNAME isonews.com. isonews.com. 7h15m29s IN A 66.201.243.172
;; AUTHORITY SECTION: isonews.com. 1d23h20m47s IN NS NS1.isonews.com. isonews.com. 1d23h20m47s IN NS NS2.isonews.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: NS1.isonews.com. 1d23h20m47s IN A 149.101.1.3 NS2.isonews.com. 1d23h20m47s IN A 149.101.1.6
;; Total query time: 44 msec ;; FROM: Simons-TiBook.local. to SERVER: default -- 207.236.176.28 ;; WHEN: Wed Feb 26 21:31:56 2003 ;; MSG SIZE sent: 33 rcvd: 131
% lynx 66.201.243.172 Looking up 66.201.243.172 first Looking up 66.201.243.172 Making HTTP connection to 66.201.243.172 Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. Alert!: HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable Retrying as HTTP0 request. Looking up 66.201.243.172 Making HTTP connection to 66.201.243.172 Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. Alert!: HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable Data transfer complete
lynx: Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain
Exiting...
Indeed, it's critical. Otherwise the press just becomes another branch of the police.
Speaking from someone in a country much higher on the list, I can confirm that the US news is much narrower in scope than foreign, and very focused on purely domestic affairs as opposed to other countries.
Here's the list of countries that came in BEFORE the USA on the R.W.Borders list:
1 Finland - Iceland - Norway - Netherlands 5 Canada 6 Ireland 7 Germany - Portugal - Sweden 10 Denmark 11 France 12 Australia - Belgium 14 Slovenia 15 Costa Rica - Switzerland 17 United States
poke your browser over the some foreign english-lanugage news sites from those countries to find out if you're missing anything if you live in the USA.
Fair enough. Executive level managers should not be making decisions about programming language use in that case. This I suppose is one of the largest problems that results in IT debacles around the world, that executives are making such technical decisions. These sorts of choices must include the line-level managers and coders who know and understand the technical issues. They are, after all, the people who will write the code, and will be the only ones who understand it, since source code is basically opaque.
In other words, you have assumed that the answer to that question is "yes" therefore you are dismissing so-called scripting as not being programming since it's not up to the task of a real enterprise level system (which I disagree with as well, but that's another post and another story).
Small, one-off jobs sometimes (often?) get overengineered because people start throwing around the term "Enterprise Level" like it's a foregone conclusion. There's lots of cases where, even in a true enterprise, the task at hand is small enough and isolated or isolatable enough that scripting is not only possible, but the better approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it. MySQL releases under the GPL, but they also release under a proprietary license as well. They must require that patches be submitted with copyright assigned to MySQL AG ... right?
What are you talking about? The suggestion was to put the radio inside the house, so you would have to run antenna cable from there to the roof.
There's a very good reason to put the WiFi equipment on the roof as close to the antenna as possible. Wiring to connect the radio to the antenna incurs massive signal loss, or is very expensive (and still incurs loss). It's generally accepted in the 802.11 community networking community ;-) that the best place to put the AP is in a tupperware or other similar weather resistant container right next to the antenna.
Your suggestion about mineral oil is smart IMHO.
simon
I haven't read the review and I'm not going to. The idea that software is a craft is right on. Managing a successful software project is much more about getting the right people on the job and trusting them to write good code, than it is about engineering practises. Software is invisible to anyone but the active coder. That's the whole point of good APIs -- they are very small, understandable interfaces to the invisible code.
Since the code can't be seen, then it can't be engineered. I suspect that software will remain a craft until code visualization tools progress to the point where I can look at a visualization of someone else's code and understand it in a general sense almost immediately.
simon
Actually it doesn't really beg those questions at all. It might lead you to ask them though. Begging the question is more like "beggaring the question" in that it makes an unspoken assumption that really should be challenged.
simon
so you'd best figure out a way to deal with this issue technologically right now (something they have been VERY reluctant to attempt)
Actually, lots of people have tried to solve the issue technologically. It's not really possible. There's always the analogue hole, and it's also really easy to attack an encryption system when you have it running constantly on your own system.
simon
Are you honestly saying that Wi-Fi access and VoIP are more important than these things?
No I'm not, and your aggressive tone has made me unwilling to further pursue this, sorry.
simon
No, I'd really like to see some figures on that. Wooden poles and copper wires are cheaper than steel towers and wireless routers. (Was that a rhyme?)
I can't find a hard price. I found http://www.gildertech.com/public/telecosm_series/
Think about it
I'm really not following your logic here. You're suggesting that if a region doesn't have a power grid, then we can still go ahead and put in a Wi-Fi network anyway? You need a computer to use Wi-Fi, and you can't use a computer without electricity! In any case, providing electrical power is far more important than Wi-Fi, so it's not a simple dollar-for-dollar comparison. I mean, being able to turn on a light bulb is more important than hooking up to a Wi-Fi network, so a power grid should take priority over Wi-Fi even if it costs more.
No, again you are wrong. Laptops run on solar power. So do PDAs. network equipment also requires little power typically. There are VoIP "phones" that are not full computers, that can connect directly into the IP network. Also, there are many locations that have power through generators, or wired power, but gaps between them that don't.
Oops. I was typing too fast and doing the calculations in my head, and I got to thinking in Kbps instead of Mbps. Sorry. Let me revise my figures then. Let's say 802.11g is giving you 30 Mbps, as you said. That means if there are 1000 users online at once (quite possible, since you're suggesting we share the Wi-Fi link with all 10 million people in Senegal), then each user would get less than 4 kilobytes per second. And besides, isn't Wi-Fi limited to 256 simultaneous connections, anyway? I think my points still stand, or did I have another brain-fart?
Perhaps I don't, so please explain what I said that was so "lame". Am I wrong in thinking that most Wi-Fi routers puke out when they get to around 30 or so simultaneous connections?
Yes, you're wrong about that. Although there are Wi-Fi APs that include routers, many don't. Those are just home/SOHO solutions. WiFi is really just a "wireless ethernet" at it's most basic, that is, a way to get data from one point to another. At each base station, the WiFi devices may be connected to any of the available routing and switching equipment that can be used with a normal TCP/IP network. So, each base station can tap into the data stream, and do whatever they like with it. Wi-Fi doesn't care how many "connections" there are, it's all TCP/IP packets.
Anything that's possible with regular wireline, can be done with WiFi. WiFi doesn't care about routing, switching etc. The intelligence is at the edge of the network, just like the internet.
I realize you think I'm only trying to attack your ideas, but I'm not -- I had the same ideas myself when I was in the Peace Corps! But after reading up on Wi-Fi and thinking a lot about the possibilities, I realized that there are just too many problems with Wi-Fi, and I'm mentioning the caveats here. It would be great if it could work, but I don't believe it's possible for Wi-Fi to share an Internet connection throughout the rural areas of a developing country.
OK.
simon
And if you're referring to Wi-Fi, then that's also not feasible, since 802.11b only goes about 10 miles max, even with a line-of-sight high-gain directional antenna. You'd have to put repeaters all over the countryside.
... with 25km hops you can go border to border (about 500km) with 20 hops. Each hop is a tower, a couple of antennas and a couple of APs ... costing maybe $1200 total.
Err.. no. Wi-Fi works perfectly well out to 25km and longer distances have been done. For references have a look here and look at the archives for the wireless-longhaul mailing list.
Also Senegal isn't that big a country
The solution, I think, is not technical but rather economical. Instead of building some fancy wireless mesh network, developing countries should work to deregulate the phone industry and open it up to competition, thus lowering the cost of Internet access everywhere.
That would be "political" actually, I agree but you're missing a couple of other important policy needs. The country must normalize their spectrum with the international open spectrum bands to make sure WiFi is legal. The other policy need is to make sure that VoIP is fully legal and unrestricted, since it makes much more efficient use of existing resources, thus dropping call costs and allowing more people to make calls.
simon
OK, practically speaking, you can't go straight to a FedEx society without the roads, the factories, the airports, etc. But do you really need FedEx? What do you really need for an information society?
...
- education
- wealth to allow time to educate
- communication tools
- electricity to power the tools
Sure, no one in Senegal is going to have the latest greatest hardware but you don't need that. You need solide reliable hardware with interchangeable parts. With that minimal infrastructure people in the developing country can join in the information economy by collaborating collectively in a global information space created by the internet. Sounds familiar? Sounds like open source
simon
Actually I think the idea is to leapfrog the "industrial age" and go straight to an information-based society. Developing nations can skip a whole bunch of unpleasant environmental nastiness and get the benefits of the Information Age now.
simon
"traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest"
... in the US you will spend the necessary money to rebuild after a tornado or whatnot. In a developing nation that rebuilding may be delayed by years.
...
... which isn't available in most developing areas and for that matter isn't available in much of the developed world as well, since it requires you to be within just a few km of an appropriately outfitted (expensive) telecom office.
Are you saying that Wi-Fi infrastructure would somehow be invincible to these issues? Let's say there's a coup, and the new leader wants to cut off Internet access. All he has to do is cut the SAT-3 link that you speak of. This would affect Internet links throughout the country, whether they were wireless or not.
Do you even know what SAT-3 is? It's an undersea cable, that is very difficult to cut. The SAT-3 connection in Senegal lands on the coast and then is connected in various network that are internal to the country.
As for environmental conditions, sub-Saharan West Africa may be harsh, but so is North America!
This is true; however the ability to recover from environmental damage is different
What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth...
You're joking, right?
"Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop"
From what I've read, 30 km is a best-case scenario for Wi-Fi under good weather conditions,
Weather conditions make no difference to 802.11b Wi-Fi. There may be some effect on 802.11a because it operates at a higher frequency.
and it only provides minimal bandwidth (on the order of one or two Mbps). More importantly, this can only be acheived with a high-gain directional antenna!
It is possible to have higher bandwidth using directionals, and the antennas are cheap, in the range of $50-$100.
Even if you could get this to work as an Internet link between towns, you still haven't solved the last-mile problem!
I'm not concerned about the last-mile problem. In Senegal, people will walk a mile to use the telephone, if that's the only option. In the case where there's a more developed city, then it's a business opportunity for a wireless ISP (wISP) to purchase some of the bandwidth from the backhaul provider and the hub-and-spoke model is well documented and in use in many places now.
"the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators"
Do you have any idea how much that would cost?
No, but it's cheaper than building a power grid (since that, too, doesn't exist in much of the developing world). If a power grid is present, the generator is only for backup. In addition, Wi-Fi equipment has a minimal power use.
"Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps."
This shows me that you really haven't thought this idea through. Let me get this straight: You're suggesting that we take the fiber optic backbone coming into Senegal and span it out across the country using Wi-Fi repeaters. Sorry, but Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared! If 30 users are on a "fast" 802.11g channel, then they'll each see less than 1 Mbps -- even worse than dial-up!
This shows me that you are missing a clue. Since when does dial-up give you 1Mbps? Perhaps you're thinking of DSL
1Mbps is most definitely broadband, and currently an essentially unavailable luxury in Senegal (since you'd have to pay tens of thousands a month to pull 1Mbps through VSAT, and even then the roundtrip latency sucks).
Thanks for your reply, because you've helped me show that my concept stands up to (admittedly lame) criticism. I'm not even going to bother addressing your last comment since you clearly have little grasp on the concepts of network design.
simon
phone lines get stolen quite often for the copper many places ... or get washed away by monsoons in Bangladesh, or get cut during conflicts. Wireline infrastructure is not the answer. Cellphone penetration in developing nations is far exceeding wireline telephones in growth, for the same reasons wireless internet is also the best solution. The towers can be built on top of the cyber cafes, telecenters, schools, that use the bandwidth, thus ensuring they are well maintained by people with a vested interest in keeping them at peak operation.
simon
Right, that's why what's needed is voice over internet protocol (VoIP) access in the rural areas. It's all about the rural internet... something that can now finally be built using wireless technology (e.g. Wi-Fi) ... and bringing services that rural people can really use - like cheap voice communication as a replacement for expensive or non-existant telephone service.
Senegal is a great place to mount an initiative like this because they have access to some serious bandwidth. The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE undersea fibre optic cable landed in Senegal last year, delivering multiple gigabits of internet bandwidth. This is in contast to the previous situation, where basically all of Africa had less bandwidth than the headquarters of my former employer.
But the idea of wiring Senegal is all wrong. What's needed is wireless. Wireless internet (e.g. 802.11b Wi-Fi) is a far more appropriate solution in a country like Senegal where traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest. Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop, and the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators. Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps.
Broadband is essential. With broadband you can deliver the killer app (yeah, I said killer app) of the rural internet which is Voice over IP. People in Senegal, well, the literacy rate isn't so high, and VoIP is what's really useful to people as it allows them to call members of their family who may be off making money in other parts of the world, to call into town to check crop prices, to call their relatives in the city. Of course this requires policy to make sure that VoIP is legal and that the national telco doesn't try to block it to protect their own profits.
If you're interested in wireless long-distance links, you might be interested in a mailing list on the subject, wireless-longhaul@openict.net. You can subscribe here, and the mailing list home page is here.
I've only read half of the article so far but already, I've seen lots of little mistakes. This guy is obviously oriented towards small business, he doesn't really understand open source, or XML, but he's got the big picture view and he's put together a lot of trends into a very interesting mural.
:-)
Fortunately that mural looks pretty good for Microsoft going down and OSS going up
Sure, he makes small errors, he treats Linux like a product, he says that XML is just a data interchange language (no...) but he understands the business side and people should pay attention to that.
simon
The full quote, which I'm guessing you haven't heard, is from Stewart Brand, stated in print for the first time as follows
/haven't/ resulted, and this kind of thing has been going on for years.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm allowed to make my own interpretations of someone else's words. In my opinion Information Wants to be Free is worthy of standing alone, since it represents a fundamental quality of information, that you can give it to someone without losing it yourself.
You're essentially claiming she should have been more careful in some fashion that would have prevented the email fro being leaked in the first place.
No, I'm not. I'm claiming that this article on LawMeme is essentially a fabricated conflict that has been understood and absorbed by our culture years ago. The article claims that fundamental changes to the way people communicate will result, my point is that fundamental changes
I would suspect that Laurie's response is at least in part due to the possibility that she won't get invited to the next party because she leaked like a sieve.
simon
No, that won't be effective for the spammer. If I'm receiving 20,000 messages from the same server simultaneously it's pretty obvious that's a spammer, so I block the server completely for a short period. They can choose between painful or nothing.
This long, rambling, long, LawMeme article spends a lot of time huffing and puffing about nothing important. News flash to the writer: "information wants to be free" (a property or quality of information actually).
;-)
The article isn't really worth reading because it's a long, drawn out self-debate about whether people are going to stop using email because there's a chance it'll escape. To most people, nothing they write about is important enough to really make this a serious problem. People like Laurie should be more careful.
There's no great lesson here. But it's obviously a fascinating leaked email
simon
No kidding!
The remaining venue of competition is the Wireless ISP market (wISP). wISPs can deliver broadband last-mile connections using point-to-multipoint connections and new APs are coming out that make it trivial to set up the customer premises equipment. wISP can install faster than wireline providers like cable and DSL, because they often don't even need to visit the customer, the APs can be placed in a window or the like. The available bandwidth is dramatically faster than even current broadband offerings.
VoIP is better than traditional telecomm because it can run over any internet connection, bringing comptetion for telephony from the cablemodem providers, for example. Also, it uses less available bandwidth than traditional phone comm (people are running reasonable connections at 12Kbps these days) and the technology is good enough today to work without gaps and delays.
Obviously the wISPs will be offering Voice over IP service to their customers. It's a killer app, as the customer can do all of their data and telecomm through the wISP and cut the cables completely. If the Bells succeed in taxing VoIP it may not only stall VoIP generally, but might potentially also take away a substantial business model from the wISPs.
Indeed, it's critical. Otherwise the press just becomes another branch of the police.
Speaking from someone in a country much higher on the list, I can confirm that the US news is much narrower in scope than foreign, and very focused on purely domestic affairs as opposed to other countries.
Here's the list of countries that came in BEFORE the USA on the R.W.Borders list:
1 Finland
- Iceland
- Norway
- Netherlands
5 Canada
6 Ireland
7 Germany
- Portugal
- Sweden
10 Denmark
11 France
12 Australia
- Belgium
14 Slovenia
15 Costa Rica
- Switzerland
17 United States
poke your browser over the some foreign english-lanugage news sites from those countries to find out if you're missing anything if you live in the USA.
simon
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/17/etoys.html
Fair enough. Executive level managers should not be making decisions about programming language use in that case. This I suppose is one of the largest problems that results in IT debacles around the world, that executives are making such technical decisions. These sorts of choices must include the line-level managers and coders who know and understand the technical issues. They are, after all, the people who will write the code, and will be the only ones who understand it, since source code is basically opaque.
"is only enterprise coding REAL PROGRAMMING"
In other words, you have assumed that the answer to that question is "yes" therefore you are dismissing so-called scripting as not being programming since it's not up to the task of a real enterprise level system (which I disagree with as well, but that's another post and another story).
Small, one-off jobs sometimes (often?) get overengineered because people start throwing around the term "Enterprise Level" like it's a foregone conclusion. There's lots of cases where, even in a true enterprise, the task at hand is small enough and isolated or isolatable enough that scripting is not only possible, but the better approach.
simon