The interesting part of the problem is identifying and mapping the mines, and this device seems to handle both unexploded ordinance and surface mines. I wonder how well it will do with surface mines after a winter - or two. It would certainly beat having people do this stuff by hand.
Once you know of a mine you can mark it and avoid it. As for clearing it, I have to believe that there are any number of ways to clear it without using lasers, and this is where the heat concern is.
Well, who needs Carnivore in such an environment? The government can look at whatever records are sent to you. Phone bills, credit cards. Great privacy.
I'd normally believe that number, given that large numbers of people have NO computers, and those who do will probably go through at least two others between now and then, given planned obsolesence.
On the other hand, since the number did come from Gartner, I'd be inclined to disbelieve it on those grounds alone. These are the same people who told me in 1992 that ATM would take over the LAN market by 1994. Anyone remember LANE?
The guy goofed. What's nice to read is that he was upset about collecting information on innocent Americans, and that he deleted it. I would have been more upset if he did something with the information. Could you imagine the slashdot headline for *that*?
Two comments have been made in this discussion that warrant reply. The first is that 802.11 cannot be used because of signal problems. Nonsense. Those who read the article would realize that you're going to use antennae that focus the signal (i.e., use hyperbolic dishes). This lessens noise and increases signal strength. For those in the Bay Area, a great example of this can be found in The Exploratorium, where two people can sit *inside* a pair of hyperbolic dishes about 40 ft away from each other and hear each others' whispers.
In addition, this nonsense about being afraid of wireless access to the Internet due to security is *silly*. You're connecting to the Internet. What sort of security do you expect on a normal *wire*? Want real security? Use IPsec, TLS, or ssh.
Remember, here in America we have our own troubles with last mile access, the cost of getting into COs and all that fun. This is a good alternative in other countries where access is even more impeded.
Depending on the scope, Systems Experts did a very good job for my company, and we're about 30,000 people. These guys are just what their name states- experts in the field. I've worked with two of them, and they take their job very seriously. Their job is to find vulnerabilities. They will, if you ask them, recommend a fix. See www.systemexperts.com.
Another company that you might find useful is Lumeta. This is Bill Cheswick's company, and they take an innovative approach, in particular relating to networking audits. They map your network and create visualizations. See www.lumeta.com. One of their senior folk is Tom Limoncelli, whose book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" was recently reviewed on SlashDot.
I can't get upset over this one. Whereas you have what amounts to structured wiring in a telco CO you have shared media in the cable environment. And, the router actually terminates the cable (think a Cisco 7246). So there's a lot less hardware.
No DSLAM. No separate L2 infrastructure. So what are we talking about here? Allocating frequencies on the cable? There are only so many. How do you decide who gets one?
On old Pyramid 90x hardware (anyone remember them?) you could play Space Invaders on the system console, in what was known as the Console Operating System (COS) while the kernel was running. If you played too long, the console buffer would fill and the system would crash.
In other words, when you won, everyone else on the system lost.
It's unfortunate that we do not yet have a good ipv6 routing model (it's roughly the same as ipv4, which has serious multihoming scaling problems), since these guys are now going to deploy this stuff in h/w. It gives companies like Cingular the excuse to keep their networks private.
As for video on my cell phone, the cell phone has a form factor designed for a human hand. So far as I know there is no plan for a human hand upgrade;-)
Are there Net resources - or books - that provide basic instructions for the would-be local startup 3rd-World ISP?
Absolutely. We just completed a three week seminar for countries who are still getting their feet wet with the Internet. That seminar taught them POP design, building Internet exchanges (without spending an arm and a leg), fault management, security management, etc. We do this semi-regularly.
Your point is spot on. The answer to being cut off by two countries is to be connected to more countries. But America has a tremendous amount of financial power that transcends technology. This is why we geeks cannot absent ourselves from the political world.
What is the difference between this stuff and what Cray & SGI did in the mid '90s? Same speeds, point to point (~ 6GB/s). I think the MSS on HPPI was large, but what are the other differences?
You're right. It's not a ruling, per se, and no precedent is set. However, this represents finality as far as the findings of fact in the Microsoft case are concerned. They *did* violate the law, and there will be no further appeal on that matter.
> Why break up perfectly good company ?
> Don't we have enough problems already ?
I'm not an expert on law enforcement or corporate structure. However, I do believe in a free and fair market. I would rather have capitalism rule and people demonstrate the full extent of their creativity than to have to artificially limit that creativity because a company has grown too large. As it stands every large company that interacts with Microsoft's development process has got to be questioning how those interactions will be scrutinized by the government.
Here's another thought: in each case where a company's been broken up because they've gotten too big, the baby companies have gone on to be hugely successful for their stock holders. This was the case with Standard Oil, AT&T, and I see no reason to believe why it wouldn't be the case with Microsoft.
This ruling means most of Judge Jackson's findings of facts are upheld. It means that Microsoft broke the law. And it means that Bill Gates and the people in Seattle were, quite simply wrong.
But it doesn't mean a thing in terms of Microsoft's behavior, right now. Here comes Windows XP, clearly with Microsoft having set their sites on Real, Inc. Now we'll have to see what sort of a deal Bill can buy from the Bush administration.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that the Bush administration is arguing for oversight, rather than breakup. Fox watching the chickens? I hope not.
My identity is MINE. There is no RIGHT for a corporation to know it. The appelate court recognized this, and put limits on corporations. Otherwise, merely threatening a law suit would cause sites like Yahoo and slashdot to be subjected to all sorts of Discovery processes.
If you look at those four requirements, any legitimate law suit should be able to make the hurdles the court set, but mere conjecture and fishing expeditions won't do it.
Bravo to the court...
Re:So many misconceptions, so little time...
on
Smart Routers
·
· Score: 1
1) On the topic of encryption, you're talking about something at layer 5 or 6, whereas these routers would be looking at layer 4. At least, that's my view of how they work.
IPSEC is at layer 3. TLS sits atop layer 4, but in front of the data. If you wish to follow a stream on a core device without looking at port information (implied by others), then you're hosed.
2) QoS. Again, we are talking about the core. The backbone providers presently use a 'dumb' core. It doesn't care about QoS and can't implement it. They route purely at layer 3, usually using IS-IS as a routing protocol. What Caspian is proposing is to enable the backbone to route at a higher layer - presumably 4 - to prioritize packets, and to keep packets of the same stream together, rather than scattering them all over the place, hoping that they all get to the destination in some useful order.
First, I don't know what you mean by "scattering them all over the place", but I presume you mean in time, and not in route, since routing on the Internet doesn't change all that much from moment to moment, and when it does change, it does so due to a legitimate outage.
While it's true that backbone routers route at layer 3, they can and do implement QoS. This is particularly true for the GSR. Go check the web pages at Cisco. For interactive communications, by the way, you do not WANT the packets kept together. Instead you want them transmitted in the core at the same rate they were transmitted by the edge device. If you bunch traffic the humans on either end will notice, and/or you'll need buffering in the end devices to cover it.
3) The ISP's and backbone providers to a degree can already favor one customer over another. They can adjust BGP costs, set static routes, etc. so that certain traffic flows in a certain way.
The play for an ISP is to have a small percentage of priority traffic and a high percentage of non-priority traffic. So, what you want to sell is the right to have SOME high priority traffic, like interactive voice or video from a customer and a lot of low priority from that same customer.
Also, customers who pay for priority service want to know that they're getting it. That means that you need to know where the customer is going to be transmitting high priority traffic (i.e., provisioning bandwidth). That turns out to be a tricky problem solved by RSVP.
4) They new routers are meant for the backbone/ISP level. Your typical business won't have them.
You are correct so long as you use the word "typical", since large businesses buy a lot of the same gear as even the largest ISPs. Look at how many companies have 7500s today. Many of those same companies are looking at GSRs.
And I guess this says something about the technical prowess of Wired, if they gave you these misconceptions.
The major problems with ISPs today are as follows:
1] space
1a] power
2] truck roles
3] support
Putting aside [2] right now, I think [1] and [3] are going to be seriously impacted by mechanisms that don't make judicious use of well known ports.
Looking inside the packet is exceedingly complex, and it subjects the router to all sorts of state changes based on potentially buggy user code at the end station.
I apologize if my response was short in tone, but we've got to remember why we moved the intelligence out of the core in the first place. Remember, with a telephone you get O(1) stream, fixed rate, and there is no buffering on the ends.
Today, you can bunches of streams running simultaneously to your laptop/handheld/desk side. You could be watching a movie while talking to your brother on the phone, reading mail, playing with GNUtella, running IRC/Aimster/...
Re:Network Dynamism issues
on
Smart Routers
·
· Score: 1
The only place you NEED QoS is in your network, and not in "the protocol". You need QoS properly implemented in ANYTHING that buffers, and at each and every buffer location.
Any time you make a QoS decision you make it based on your resources and policies, not just on request. As an administrator you need to decide what's important. The routers help you implement that choice today. And you can provide special queue handling or you can redirect the path of the packet (policy based routing). All of this works today.
A lot of what you're talking about sounds an awful lot like RSVP. It's already here for IPv4. Ipv6 solves the addressing shortage today, and that's about it.
And where do you need to put that stream, state, memory, and $$?
Answer: everywhere in the core!
This is *precisely* why SMART edges are a good thing. Buffering video is a good thing. Beyond that, identifying interactive flows without retaining state is important.
There are three classes of people where you would find pro Napster sentiment. The first are unsigned artists who are looking for an easy way to diseminate their music. Many of them, and many of their production team LOVE Napster, since it's an easy way to get their music in front of people. And that's the first step to hitting it big- getting your music played by as many people as possible.
The other group of people who you might want to check in with are those who hate the RIAA. I know, it's an "enemy of my enemy" thing, but maybe try a site like http://www.boycott-riaa.com.
Finally there's the obvious place to check. Call Napster and ask their legal team for pointers.
Which part of "We don't like monopolies" did this guy not understand?
Re:RFC821 obsolete but refer to it anyway...? Amaz
on
New Mail RFCs Released
·
· Score: 1
The world is a very different place than it was when those two documents were released. I presume they are talking about primitives such as SEND, SAML, SOML, TURN, and the like. Some of these mechanisms have security problems. Others are just plainold outdated. For instance, SEND was used to send an interactive message to an individual who was logged on to that very computer. How many people log into their mail server to receive instant messages? Those computers are unlikely to even know that your PC is online.
It says quite a lot for the developers of 821 and 822 (and 1123) that those standards have withstood such a long period of time without update. But that's not to say that mail hasn't changed. In that time, we've seen the creation of POP, IMAP, MIME, ldap, --->>> BIND ---, and all sorts of fun stuff.
If for no other reason, these new documents offer us an opportunity to look at them in light of the world we live in, and not "the good old days" (which maybe weren't quite as good as the days we live in).
Mostly Akamai is in the image business, since images have been shown to take up most bandwidth (in some cases up to 85%). The reasons they decrease download times is two-fold: they're probably physically closer to the client than the source otherwise would be. Second, they probably have more bandwidth.
Even so, you could be right. The overhead shifts from the image download to the DNS. Thus it wouldn't make sense for Joe Homeuser to "akamaize", but it does for Yahoo and CNN simply because there are so many people over a such a diverse area attempting to retrieve their pages.
By the way, the estute will notice that the diagram in that article is wrong. The client contacts the client name server, which then will contact Akamai's name servers. This means that the DNS optimization is the client name server and not the client itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting part of the problem is identifying and mapping the mines, and this device seems to handle both unexploded ordinance and surface mines. I wonder how well it will do with surface mines after a winter - or two. It would certainly beat having people do this stuff by hand.
Once you know of a mine you can mark it and avoid it. As for clearing it, I have to believe that there are any number of ways to clear it without using lasers, and this is where the heat concern is.
Well, who needs Carnivore in such an environment? The government can look at whatever records are sent to you. Phone bills, credit cards. Great privacy.
I'd normally believe that number, given that large numbers of people have NO computers, and those who do will probably go through at least two others between now and then, given planned obsolesence.
On the other hand, since the number did come from Gartner, I'd be inclined to disbelieve it on those grounds alone. These are the same people who told me in 1992 that ATM would take over the LAN market by 1994. Anyone remember LANE?
The guy goofed. What's nice to read is that he was upset about collecting information on innocent Americans, and that he deleted it. I would have been more upset if he did something with the information. Could you imagine the slashdot headline for *that*?
Two comments have been made in this discussion that warrant reply. The first is that 802.11 cannot be used because of signal problems. Nonsense. Those who read the article would realize that you're going to use antennae that focus the signal (i.e., use hyperbolic dishes). This lessens noise and increases signal strength. For those in the Bay Area, a great example of this can be found in The Exploratorium, where two people can sit *inside* a pair of hyperbolic dishes about 40 ft away from each other and hear each others' whispers.
In addition, this nonsense about being afraid of wireless access to the Internet due to security is *silly*. You're connecting to the Internet. What sort of security do you expect on a normal *wire*? Want real security? Use IPsec, TLS, or ssh.
Remember, here in America we have our own troubles with last mile access, the cost of getting into COs and all that fun. This is a good alternative in other countries where access is even more impeded.
Depending on the scope, Systems Experts did a very good job for my company, and we're about 30,000 people. These guys are just what their name states- experts in the field. I've worked with two of them, and they take their job very seriously. Their job is to find vulnerabilities. They will, if you ask them, recommend a fix. See www.systemexperts.com.
Another company that you might find useful is Lumeta. This is Bill Cheswick's company, and they take an innovative approach, in particular relating to networking audits. They map your network and create visualizations. See www.lumeta.com. One of their senior folk is Tom Limoncelli, whose book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" was recently reviewed on SlashDot.
Guys,
I can't get upset over this one. Whereas you have what amounts to structured wiring in a telco CO you have shared media in the cable environment. And, the router actually terminates the cable (think a Cisco 7246). So there's a lot less hardware.
No DSLAM. No separate L2 infrastructure. So what are we talking about here? Allocating frequencies on the cable? There are only so many. How do you decide who gets one?
Eliot
On old Pyramid 90x hardware (anyone remember them?) you could play Space Invaders on the system console, in what was known as the Console Operating System (COS) while the kernel was running. If you played too long, the console buffer would fill and the system would crash.
In other words, when you won, everyone else on the system lost.
It's unfortunate that we do not yet have a good ipv6 routing model (it's roughly the same as ipv4, which has serious multihoming scaling problems), since these guys are now going to deploy this stuff in h/w. It gives companies like Cingular the excuse to keep their networks private.
;-)
As for video on my cell phone, the cell phone has a form factor designed for a human hand. So far as I know there is no plan for a human hand upgrade
Are there Net resources - or books - that provide basic instructions for the would-be local startup 3rd-World ISP?
Absolutely. We just completed a three week seminar for countries who are still getting their feet wet with the Internet. That seminar taught them POP design, building Internet exchanges (without spending an arm and a leg), fault management, security management, etc. We do this semi-regularly.
Your point is spot on. The answer to being cut off by two countries is to be connected to more countries. But America has a tremendous amount of financial power that transcends technology. This is why we geeks cannot absent ourselves from the political world.
What is the difference between this stuff and what Cray & SGI did in the mid '90s? Same speeds, point to point (~ 6GB/s). I think the MSS on HPPI was large, but what are the other differences?
You're right. It's not a ruling, per se, and no precedent is set. However, this represents finality as far as the findings of fact in the Microsoft case are concerned. They *did* violate the law, and there will be no further appeal on that matter.
> Why break up perfectly good company ?
> Don't we have enough problems already ?
I'm not an expert on law enforcement or corporate structure. However, I do believe in a free and fair market. I would rather have capitalism rule and people demonstrate the full extent of their creativity than to have to artificially limit that creativity because a company has grown too large. As it stands every large company that interacts with Microsoft's development process has got to be questioning how those interactions will be scrutinized by the government.
Here's another thought: in each case where a company's been broken up because they've gotten too big, the baby companies have gone on to be hugely successful for their stock holders. This was the case with Standard Oil, AT&T, and I see no reason to believe why it wouldn't be the case with Microsoft.
This ruling means most of Judge Jackson's findings of facts are upheld. It means that Microsoft broke the law. And it means that Bill Gates and the people in Seattle were, quite simply wrong.
But it doesn't mean a thing in terms of Microsoft's behavior, right now. Here comes Windows XP, clearly with Microsoft having set their sites on Real, Inc. Now we'll have to see what sort of a deal Bill can buy from the Bush administration.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that the Bush administration is arguing for oversight, rather than breakup. Fox watching the chickens? I hope not.
Please check out the MIDCOM working group of the IETF on this very topic. See http://www.ietf.org (under "working groups") for more information.
I kid you not- literally today I finally got around to upgrading to 2.4.6. It looks really good- the OSS support for Yamaha is just fine!
My identity is MINE. There is no RIGHT for a corporation to know it. The appelate court recognized this, and put limits on corporations. Otherwise, merely threatening a law suit would cause sites like Yahoo and slashdot to be subjected to all sorts of Discovery processes. If you look at those four requirements, any legitimate law suit should be able to make the hurdles the court set, but mere conjecture and fishing expeditions won't do it. Bravo to the court...
1) On the topic of encryption, you're talking about something at layer 5 or 6, whereas these routers would be looking at layer 4. At least, that's my view of how they work.
IPSEC is at layer 3. TLS sits atop layer 4, but in front of the data. If you wish to follow a stream on a core device without looking at port information (implied by others), then you're hosed.
2) QoS. Again, we are talking about the core. The backbone providers presently use a 'dumb' core. It doesn't care about QoS and can't implement it. They route purely at layer 3, usually using IS-IS as a routing protocol. What Caspian is proposing is to enable the backbone to route at a higher layer - presumably 4 - to prioritize packets, and to keep packets of the same stream together, rather than scattering them all over the place, hoping that they all get to the destination in some useful order.
First, I don't know what you mean by "scattering them all over the place", but I presume you mean in time, and not in route, since routing on the Internet doesn't change all that much from moment to moment, and when it does change, it does so due to a legitimate outage.
While it's true that backbone routers route at layer 3, they can and do implement QoS. This is particularly true for the GSR. Go check the web pages at Cisco. For interactive communications, by the way, you do not WANT the packets kept together. Instead you want them transmitted in the core at the same rate they were transmitted by the edge device. If you bunch traffic the humans on either end will notice, and/or you'll need buffering in the end devices to cover it.
3) The ISP's and backbone providers to a degree can already favor one customer over another. They can adjust BGP costs, set static routes, etc. so that certain traffic flows in a certain way.
The play for an ISP is to have a small percentage of priority traffic and a high percentage of non-priority traffic. So, what you want to sell is the right to have SOME high priority traffic, like interactive voice or video from a customer and a lot of low priority from that same customer.
Also, customers who pay for priority service want to know that they're getting it. That means that you need to know where the customer is going to be transmitting high priority traffic (i.e., provisioning bandwidth). That turns out to be a tricky problem solved by RSVP.
4) They new routers are meant for the backbone/ISP level. Your typical business won't have them.
You are correct so long as you use the word "typical", since large businesses buy a lot of the same gear as even the largest ISPs. Look at how many companies have 7500s today. Many of those same companies are looking at GSRs.
And I guess this says something about the technical prowess of Wired, if they gave you these misconceptions.
The major problems with ISPs today are as follows:
1] space
1a] power
2] truck roles
3] support
Putting aside [2] right now, I think [1] and [3] are going to be seriously impacted by mechanisms that don't make judicious use of well known ports.
Looking inside the packet is exceedingly complex, and it subjects the router to all sorts of state changes based on potentially buggy user code at the end station.
I apologize if my response was short in tone, but we've got to remember why we moved the intelligence out of the core in the first place. Remember, with a telephone you get O(1) stream, fixed rate, and there is no buffering on the ends.
Today, you can bunches of streams running simultaneously to your laptop/handheld/desk side. You could be watching a movie while talking to your brother on the phone, reading mail, playing with GNUtella, running IRC/Aimster/...
The only place you NEED QoS is in your network, and not in "the protocol". You need QoS properly implemented in ANYTHING that buffers, and at each and every buffer location.
Any time you make a QoS decision you make it based on your resources and policies, not just on request. As an administrator you need to decide what's important. The routers help you implement that choice today. And you can provide special queue handling or you can redirect the path of the packet (policy based routing). All of this works today.
A lot of what you're talking about sounds an awful lot like RSVP. It's already here for IPv4. Ipv6 solves the addressing shortage today, and that's about it.
stream = state
state = memory
memory = $$
And where do you need to put that stream, state, memory, and $$?
Answer: everywhere in the core!
This is *precisely* why SMART edges are a good thing. Buffering video is a good thing. Beyond that, identifying interactive flows without retaining state is important.
There are three classes of people where you would find pro Napster sentiment. The first are unsigned artists who are looking for an easy way to diseminate their music. Many of them, and many of their production team LOVE Napster, since it's an easy way to get their music in front of people. And that's the first step to hitting it big- getting your music played by as many people as possible.
The other group of people who you might want to check in with are those who hate the RIAA. I know, it's an "enemy of my enemy" thing, but maybe try a site like http://www.boycott-riaa.com.
Finally there's the obvious place to check. Call Napster and ask their legal team for pointers.
Which part of "We don't like monopolies" did this guy not understand?
The world is a very different place than it was when those two documents were released. I presume they are talking about primitives such as SEND, SAML, SOML, TURN, and the like. Some of these mechanisms have security problems. Others are just plainold outdated. For instance, SEND was used to send an interactive message to an individual who was logged on to that very computer. How many people log into their mail server to receive instant messages? Those computers are unlikely to even know that your PC is online.
It says quite a lot for the developers of 821 and 822 (and 1123) that those standards have withstood such a long period of time without update. But that's not to say that mail hasn't changed. In that time, we've seen the creation of POP, IMAP, MIME, ldap, --->>> BIND ---, and all sorts of fun stuff.
If for no other reason, these new documents offer us an opportunity to look at them in light of the world we live in, and not "the good old days" (which maybe weren't quite as good as the days we live in).
Mostly Akamai is in the image business, since images have been shown to take up most bandwidth (in some cases up to 85%). The reasons they decrease download times is two-fold: they're probably physically closer to the client than the source otherwise would be. Second, they probably have more bandwidth.
Even so, you could be right. The overhead shifts from the image download to the DNS. Thus it wouldn't make sense for Joe Homeuser to "akamaize", but it does for Yahoo and CNN simply because there are so many people over a such a diverse area attempting to retrieve their pages.
By the way, the estute will notice that the diagram in that article is wrong. The client contacts the client name server, which then will contact Akamai's name servers. This means that the DNS optimization is the client name server and not the client itself.