This company's name is indeed a palindrome - most specifically the entity providing Internet service to the communities is. I work for the company that manages operates the network. We have been doing far north and otherwise remote earth station installation and Internet provision for many years now. Both backhaul and last mile. We've developed a fairly unique skill set around this exact challenge. We are northerners ourselves, and no one else was coming in and bringing Internet to these places for us, so we did it ourselves.
If you have a large enough dish and transmitter, on C-Band, and you have a satellite with the right coverage footprint, it's really no problem at all going beyond 70 degrees. The company I work for provides high speed Internet service into Grise Fiord, Nunavut at 76.4N on Anik F2. There is a limit of course, but 70 degrees is not it. It's really a question of throwing adequate resources at the problem (dish size, and power). It's also possible to get fairly respectable bandwidth out of C-Band if you are able to use higher MODCODs (as a result of having adequate dish size and transmitter power). You can get >90Mbps on a full transponder of C-Band with 16APSK 8/9.
We do have competition, it happens to be the incumbent telco who is also the only transit provider in our region. I could grumble about the frustrations involved when your provider is a regulated monopoly, and also your competition, but that is a discussion for another time.
We charge what the market can bear for our service. We are an old skool ISP from back in the days of yore, well before the world of consumer broadband. We understand our market and its unique nature very well. We can and do make provisions for customers who require or desire guaranteed service at a certain data rate for whatever traffic they want. We are talking huge $$$$$ to do that.
What people do with their connection is, technically speaking, my business. I don't want to be in the business of policing peoples' usage, really I don't. I don't even really see it as policing quite as much as I see it as traffic directing. I understand you see it differently. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I do have to wonder if your idealism is tempered by a technical appreciation of how P2P traffic grows without bounds. Mine is.
We have a choice to make. I can give preferential treatment to protocols I recognise as as being less of the swamp-my-entire-network variety, or I can engineer to an extent where just the capital expenditure alone would increase the cost-per-sub into the hundreds of dollars a month, or I can just let P2P kill my network, piss off all my customers, including the 90% of subs who aren't P2P users, and go out of business. If it were really a black and white world, I would come down unequivocally on the side of information wants to be free. The world isn't black and white, it comes in shades of grey, and when it comes to Internet traffic, information may want to be free, but I can't allow it to be free enough to destroy my network and undermine the viability of our company.
So yes, I get to decide what rogue traffic is on my network. I am not forcing anyone to be a customer, but if you are my customer I promise to do my best to provide you with the best possible service I can. I take a lot of pride in it, and most of our customers are satisfied ones. We do outline that we shape traffic in our ToS, I don't think it is buried on page 4, it is probably buried on page 3 or something.
We try and act in good faith in our traffic shaping policies. If I am informed that I am failing to classify traffic fairly, I approach it with humility, and I rectify it. If someone really wants to get up my nose and down my throat because they see their P2P performance as inadequate on my network, oh well. I might lose some of those customers. Ironically, I actually provide each customer with CIR for their P2P, it is just a really low CIR. I see making most of my customers happy most of the time as my main job. I believe I am mostly successful in that. I have had to make tough choices and compromises to achieve that. Anyone is welcome to come into this market and make different choices, and I will wish them the best of luck in their endeavours. Cheers.
I can't speak to the specific networks involved, and what their real capacity issues may or may not be, but P2P tends to expand to fill available capacity. I operate a broadband Internet service in northern Canada where bandwidth is more than 10x the cost of transit services in the south. Obviously we can not charge people 10x southern rates for our service, so we have to manage our capacity very carefully, and that includes traffic shaping that deprioritises traffic that can not be identified as a common protocol. It is an ugly solution, I hate having to do it, but it is a necessary evil. The circumvention measures P2P applications use to avoid detection are the principal reason that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater in these cases. It is either that or allow all traffic for all customers to suffer.
That being said, all is not lost. I have no idea if you will have any luck contacting someone clueful at Rogers to help you out, but on my network I am more than happy to ensure that VPN traffic, and previously unrecognised game traffic - and so on - gets proper quality of service. It is not uncommon for one of our customers to call and say their application performance is poor, and I am able to confirm that their traffic is mistakenly being considered rogue, and I will ensure thereafter their application data is recognised as non-evil. It might be worth contacting Rogers if you think your non-evil traffic is being shaped down incorrectly.
Re:The electromagnetic spectrum has limits, people
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Companies Betting on WiMAX
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I manage network operations for a large ISP in northern Canada and we use the same technology as Clearwire (not WiMAX - it is sort of a proto-WiMAX) for providing high speed Internet service. This technology is non-line-of-sight. I am not talking pseudo, I am talking the full meal deal. The technology actually depends on multipath reflection off of various surfaces, and this is what allows it to be NLOS. The fact that the frequency used is licensed means that they can be given additional power, which enhances signal reflectivity, and NLOS reception.
We are in a fairly large city in northern Canada, and there is nowhere in town we fail to receive a signal, from a fairly small number of cells located around town. As an old-school dial-up ISP without access to cable or copper infrastructure, NLOS high speed wireless was our holy grail, and this technology delivered. The stuff is black magic, it is something to behold.
Over here in computerland, we have a concept known as full disclosure, regarding computer security vulnerabilities. The idea is that full disclosure benefits all users of computers better than concealment, as disclosure creates the impetus to have those vulnerabilities fixed. Full disclosure works great in the realm of computer and network security, but maybe not so well in broadcast television with materials that go *boom*.
In Mythbusters you are testing conventional wisdom, and this could potentially lead to discovering serious flaws in household items, unintended dangerous uses of common materials, or means of circumventing the law. A couple of obvious myths that potentially fall into the latter category are the attempts to circumvent radar guns and the breathalyzer. I wonder what the show's philosophy is around disclosure of controversial information. Had you discovered a way of circumventing the breathalyzer, would it have made it to air, or would that have been kept off broadcast? As a corollary, have there been any myths that failed to make it to air because your discovery was too controversial or too great a liability if the information "fell into the wrong hands"?
My immediate thought on seeing this posting was, "oh man, did *no one* see ReGenesis?"
One of the great things about this show was that they did not dumb down advanced microbiology concepts for the "comfort" of the viewing audience. Undoubtedly some of the science was make-believe, as they danced that line between science and science fiction, but much of it was drawn from well researched advanced science. I would love to see how this show might do on HBO - it's got that same sort of edge as, and much of the production values of, HBO original programming - I would like to see more of this show. Can't recommend it too much for hard science nerds.
The company I work for, SSI Micro, has provided full-mesh frame relay and Internet services over satellite throughout northern Canada, well into the high arctic, since early 2000. We continue to expand the number of communities we service across the north all the time. The Outback almost sounds like a walk in the park by comparison - assuming you don't mind snakes. We also recently deployed a six site satellite network in Zambia to provide Internet services to an international development organisation there. Certainly each of these remote regions provide their own set of challenges.
In addition to dial-up, we have always used wireless technologies as a last mile solution. We used 802.11 for many years in those applications, and continue to do so. Currently we are also working with Inukshuk to roll out MCS wireless services, as mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story, and it is simply an amazing technology. The broadband picture keeps getting better and better up here all the time.
Satellite is definitely here to stay. It is going to be a long time before every nook and cranny of this world is wired, and frankly, I hope it never is.
No, hadn't seen part-15.org before now. I would be happy to answer any questions about our roll-out of the service. Feel free to email me at grahamb"at"ssimicro.com.
Anyone who has ever dreamed of true NLOS, this is it. Believe me, we are an extremely cynical group of techs, and we wouldn't have believed this kind of coverage was possible if it weren't staring us in the face. We've been looking for this very kind of solution for a long time, and have repeatedly been disappointed by bullshit marketing.
I can't say how ideal of a solution this will be in true urban environments. We will have to see how this Fido service turns out. In small markets, with inadequate cable or DSL service, this could be exactly what the small provider could be looking for to get back into the game.
We watched our dial-up service erode away while customers migrated over to the cable and DSL services we are excluded from. We have been going crazy for years wanting to compete in the broadband market, and this is the first product that has enabled us to do it. We repeatedly hear from people how dissatisfied they are with cable in our market. I would say approximately 75% of our wireless sign-ups have been migrations from cable to us. We have heard of *line-ups* of people at the local cable provider returning their cable modems. That's fun!
The near complete lack of technical support new customers require is truly astonishing. This gear requires no truck roll, and almost everyone has been able to immediately lock on to a strong enough signal for a perfect data link. The NextNet gear uses 1/2 FEC, which some might consider a waste of bandwidth, but it means an essentially rock solid connection for everyone. Generally, this gear either works perfectly, or it doesn't work at all - and that has been a dramatic exception to the norm.
Anyhow, yeah... obviously I am enthusiastic about this gear, and I could go on and on. We take a lot of pride in being an old-school, small scale ISP that busts our ass to be the best at what we do. I have watched blood, sweat, and tears go to waste as our customer base dwindled these past few years. Now our customer base is growing again, and I couldn't be more stoked. Cheers.
[Disclaimer: Our company was the first to roll out MMDS based service in Canada, back on February 11, and we are partners with Inukshuk.]
We have been working with wireless technology for years, and until a few months ago I would have agreed 100% that non-line of sight was snake oil, a holy grail, and called it a few other things inappropriate for mixed company.
OFDM is simply black freaking magic. We have had somewhere in the order of 95% penetration in a 4km radius of our primary base station. (Fido's distance estimate is highly conservative.) We have a second base station online now, and it is almost impossible to find places in this town where you can not find a hot signal. As someone who never would have believed it possible, it blew me away completely, and continues to do so.
Frankly, we never would have launched the service if it wasn't true non-line of sight. This product is true multi-path, and is transmitting at high power. There is a 200' hill of ROCK between my house and our base station, and in my basement, facing away from the base, I get a perfect signal. Any suggestion that it is remotely similar to or even resembles 802.11 is completely off base.
We have rolled quite a few CPEs out the door now. Pretty much without exception every single customer has gone home, plugged it in, and it has worked. I am not lying when I say literally not more than 1% of end users have had a problems getting a signal. Of the 99% who had no problem, there are a good handful who are in marginal areas and it has fully tripped me out that they found signal.
Anyhow, this stuff is seriously cool technology that has a real chance to compete with cable and DSL. Cheers, Graham Blake Manager, Network Operations SSI Micro Internet Services Yellowknife, NWT
What is being contradicted is the notion of there being certainty with regards to an object's position in time. In fact, he goes further to suggest there is no certainty with regards to any instantaneous physical values or magnitudes. To quote, "..once granted indeterminacy in precise relative position of a body in relative motion, also means indeterminacy in all precise physical magnitudes, including gravity, this also applies to the very structure of space-time, the dynamic framework in which all intertial, spatial, and temporal judgements of relative position are based."
I am certainly no physicist, but I definitely get the sense he is on to something here. If in fact it is taken for granted that determined physical magnitudes exist, this paper may actually be changing some assumptions we have about the universe we live in.
I was listening to Professor Noel Sharkey on the radio a few minutes ago, he is one of the designers of the robot. Apparently, and unfortunately in my opinion, the flying robot doesn't have its computer connected, so it is flying mindlessly.
I think a large percentage of blacklisted relays are simply off of the radar of the administrators responsible for them, and this is even more true for the growing problem of open proxies. It is no longer my experience that many people will deliberately choose to leave open relays after being clued in.
Blacklisting has proved to be an effective clue-stick for admins who have production email running on the servers in question. I think we currently have a big problem with inadvertent open relays or open proxies on networks with no human beings reading email for the usual suspects - abuse, postmaster, noc, and so on. Language barriers may be an issue too. I doubt I would be very responsive to someone telling me to close my open relay if they wrote me in Chinese.
I think these letters from government agencies may have a positive effect if enough real human beings read them and previously clueless admins suddenly wake up to what is going on with their network. The overall problem is not going to go away any time soon though, and if we don't get a handle on it we are going to have to go to whitelists across the board, which is a serious drag.
In the meantime, I feel very strongly about not exchanging email with servers known to be open relays or open proxies. I don't think it is too much to expect people to play nice, and refuse to play with them if they choose not to. Cheers.
Dozens of network administrators from around the world on the NANOG mailing list, and EFnet #nanog all saw the first packets of Slammer at 05:29:29 and 05:29:45 GMT. That's dozens of very well placed people all seeing the first incident within a 16 second window, and not one administrator saw one earlier. How am I supposed to believe that Symantec knew about this earlier when none of us did?
I would like to see a copy of this so-called alert they sent out before the worm hit, if it exists, and then an explanation of how they knew in advance this worm would hit. Dubious does not even begin to describe it.
The reason I am sad to see Teledesic die is that I live and work in northern Canada, and manage a large network of satellite based services into remote communities. There is a huge expanse of Canada that is still only reachable by satellite, and will remain so, quite possibly for decades. The hope of a high capacity, low latency option for connectivity was quite exciting.
Projects are rapidly moving ahead to bring satellite based Internet services to remote regions of the world - especially in Canada, Australia, South America, Africa, and Russia. All these projects and regions of the world may not pay for a network of this scale, hence Teledesic's perhaps predictable demise, but it shouldn't be difficult to understand why we didn't want it to die.
Yay B5! For sure... great point really. I should have thought about that more before completely embracing the whole banking fighter thing... certainly with some creativity a good sci fi producer can do cool things using sound physics. Though a lot of perfectly good sci fi wouldn't be quite as much fun if it was entirely bound by the laws of physics, but the laws of physics still leave room for fun. My recall is a bit rusty, but I think Space Above and Beyond was fairly true to space physics, or at least was somewhat within the bounds of sanity. I am certainly open to being corrected on that though.
I hear that... in fact I am all down with a certain amount of derision, and I certainly do my fair share of eye rolling in movies. I also have the 13 year old in my that enjoys the pure fantasy element too. I think I was just underwhelmed by the author's "aren't I clever" attitude as though a lot of these things aren't fairly obvious. I think I was hoping it would be more humourous and less self-congratulatory than it was. Ah well.. at least they took the time to do such a site, and for that I commend them.
I was really looking forward to reading this and expected to enjoy a good tongue in cheek look at Hollywood. What a disappointment. It read as though it was written by Rimmer following his mind patch on Red Dwarf. Uninspiring and anal retentive, derisive arrogance without just cause. As much as the author may think himself clever, perhaps he might care to compare his net worth to that of a big budget Hollywood producer and reconsider.
Most sad I thought was the author confusing cinematic technique with scientific ignorance. The reason bullets spark when they hit something in a movie is so you know both that they didn't hit the star of the movie, and you have a sense for how close they came to hitting the star of the movie. Something the sound of ricochets alone does not convey. It's similar to the classic sound of cameras in film, like an old fasioned flash. Almost no cameras make that sound, it's just a technique that cues the audience. A trick so you know without thinking that the flash wasn't lightening, something wrong with the film, or simply something that won't distract people into thinking "what the hell was that?" when they should be paying attention to the story.
Amazingly, he missed the most glaring sci fi physics invention - the tendency for space ships in film to bank like an airplane while making turns. Be that as it may, I'll take an X-Wing Fighter style high speed bank over a lumbering, time intensive, retro thruster burn as a "real" spaceship might be forced to make. Here's to invented physics!!
Oh well, cool idea for a website, I am just disappointed with how it turned out. I would love to see more science fiction executed with pendantic formality, but I won't trade my flights of fancy away entirely for it. Cheers.
Full-duplex T1 for $2000/mo? I'll take 20. What satellite provider? I work for a large satellite communications company in Canada, and full duplex T1 is almost 10x that much with any North American provider I've ever talked to. Even at large bulk rates you're looking at US$10,000/mo for 3Mbps.
The economics of satellite communications aren't going to change much over the short to mid term, not until it costs significantly less to launch payloads into space.
I am inclined to think that the media is at least partly responsible for creating the term "globalisation" in its attempt to simplify reality for mass consumption. In time the term has come to be adopted as a sort of catch-all or umbrella concept for a wide variety of groups and organisations, each pursuing their own agenda. So-called anti-globalisation protesters in actuality tend to be activists seeking change in a specific area of world affairs. The issue of "globalisation" merely provides a focal point of solidarity around which different groups can and do unite.
Too often, the labels "anti-trade" and "anti-globalisation" are used to paint a significant cross section of people the colour of irrelevancy. This is a gross over-generalisation. Having been personally involved in activism and protest in this area, I can speak honestly that few, if any, activists are opposed to globalisation in some blind or ignorant stupour.
The issues are simply too complex to paint with one brush. Most people recognise certain aspects of open trade and relationships have wide ranging benefits the world over. The message that most "anti-globalisation" activists are trying to get across is that the globalisation of environmental responsibility, human rights, labour standards, access to health care, indigenous rights, gender equality, and other issues can not take a back seat to the economic priorities of multinational corporations and western economic superpowers. It is a tragic oversimplification to say that the globalisation of the western free market economic system will address these pressing issues as a de facto consequence of the aggressive pursuit of corporate agendas.
The groups that most actively rally around focal points of global trade, such as economic summits, do so in response to the disproportionate mindshare that the pro corporate agenda has in the mass consciousness of western society. When mainstream media fails to adequately address the counter points to unrestricted liberalisation of trade and economics, the dissenting voice is forced on to the street to get their message across.
The dissenting voice has been reduced by the media to sound bytes that say "globalisation is bad, free trade is bad". This has allowed the likes of George W. Bush to condemn the dissenting voice without at all addressing the issues raised by it. As Bush said before the G8 summit in Genoa earlier this year, "For those who kind of use this opportunity to say that the world should become isolationists, they're condemning those who are poor to poverty, and we don't accept it." Reducing the debate in this manner will do nothing to address the root causes of suffering and disparity in this world. It is high time we listened to more voices than those championing the corporate agenda.
Re:The Lexus and the Olive Tree
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Globalization
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it is far too quickly assumed that the centres of cultures are drawing together in the crusade for a one world economy. In developing countries, the people signing binding trade deals with western economic powers are hardly the centre of their culture. I would argue that the peasant and indigenous population in many countries comprise the centre of their cultures, while the well financed and well armed politicians, who sign away their labour and natural resources, are the fringe.
Not every culture holds as its highest ideal the individual pursuit of wealth. The western global free market economy is not the only economic system. Radicalisation comes not only from the fringes, but often right square from the centre, from having an economic system imposed upon you by outside forces. It is important for a people to be able to define their own terms of participation in the global economy. When the terms are dictated by outside forces, and by and large for the sake of corporate profits, there WILL be a radicalised response.
Cheers,
Rev. Hibachi
Re:decommissioning the nuclear fleet?
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Defusing The Kursk
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· Score: 1
I think it's fairly safe conjecture, as indicated by the number of Russian subs simply rotting away at the moment. According to this article, 130 nuclear powered Russian submarines have been taken out of service and are laid up, and fifty-two still carry nuclear fuel in the reactors. In total, 150 are expected to be decommissioned by 2003. Given the nuclear material on board these craft, having a safe, sane, and sensible method for handling decommissioning is a Good Thing(tm).
My opinion diverges from the EFF's on this point. I would argue that using reputable services that maintain a list of open and abused mail relays to filter incoming mail is a responsible decision. The combined benefits of reduced volume of incoming spam, and the enforcement of responsible mail server configuration benefits not only local users, but the Internet as a whole.
Out of the box, most modern mail servers configure themselves to prevent the relaying of mail. What we are fighting by using services such as MAPS are legacy systems and new servers that come online and are misconfigured. It is simply negligence to be operating an open relay in today's Internet. That negligence needs to be challenged. We can ultimately get the upper hand on the abuse of open relays this way, and I would support Internet wide adoption of the use of such services as a Best Current Practice.
With regards to my users not receiving mail, it is our company policy to individually handle each complaint related to our mail filtering to benefit our customers. We will almost always explicitly permit mail from servers that we know are legitimately trying to reach our users. We will also send a courtesy email to the administrators of the open relay to inform them of the situation. This isn't about maliciously blocking every relay out there, to the detriment of our users, this is about encouraging a trend of improved mail server administration. Responsible implementation of these kinds of controls on unsolicited email benefit everyone.
Cheers
Slashdot Mirror
This company's name is indeed a palindrome - most specifically the entity providing Internet service to the communities is. I work for the company that manages operates the network. We have been doing far north and otherwise remote earth station installation and Internet provision for many years now. Both backhaul and last mile. We've developed a fairly unique skill set around this exact challenge. We are northerners ourselves, and no one else was coming in and bringing Internet to these places for us, so we did it ourselves.
If you have a large enough dish and transmitter, on C-Band, and you have a satellite with the right coverage footprint, it's really no problem at all going beyond 70 degrees. The company I work for provides high speed Internet service into Grise Fiord, Nunavut at 76.4N on Anik F2. There is a limit of course, but 70 degrees is not it. It's really a question of throwing adequate resources at the problem (dish size, and power). It's also possible to get fairly respectable bandwidth out of C-Band if you are able to use higher MODCODs (as a result of having adequate dish size and transmitter power). You can get >90Mbps on a full transponder of C-Band with 16APSK 8/9.
We do have competition, it happens to be the incumbent telco who is also the only transit provider in our region. I could grumble about the frustrations involved when your provider is a regulated monopoly, and also your competition, but that is a discussion for another time.
We charge what the market can bear for our service. We are an old skool ISP from back in the days of yore, well before the world of consumer broadband. We understand our market and its unique nature very well. We can and do make provisions for customers who require or desire guaranteed service at a certain data rate for whatever traffic they want. We are talking huge $$$$$ to do that.
What people do with their connection is, technically speaking, my business. I don't want to be in the business of policing peoples' usage, really I don't. I don't even really see it as policing quite as much as I see it as traffic directing. I understand you see it differently. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I do have to wonder if your idealism is tempered by a technical appreciation of how P2P traffic grows without bounds. Mine is.
We have a choice to make. I can give preferential treatment to protocols I recognise as as being less of the swamp-my-entire-network variety, or I can engineer to an extent where just the capital expenditure alone would increase the cost-per-sub into the hundreds of dollars a month, or I can just let P2P kill my network, piss off all my customers, including the 90% of subs who aren't P2P users, and go out of business. If it were really a black and white world, I would come down unequivocally on the side of information wants to be free. The world isn't black and white, it comes in shades of grey, and when it comes to Internet traffic, information may want to be free, but I can't allow it to be free enough to destroy my network and undermine the viability of our company.
So yes, I get to decide what rogue traffic is on my network. I am not forcing anyone to be a customer, but if you are my customer I promise to do my best to provide you with the best possible service I can. I take a lot of pride in it, and most of our customers are satisfied ones. We do outline that we shape traffic in our ToS, I don't think it is buried on page 4, it is probably buried on page 3 or something.
We try and act in good faith in our traffic shaping policies. If I am informed that I am failing to classify traffic fairly, I approach it with humility, and I rectify it. If someone really wants to get up my nose and down my throat because they see their P2P performance as inadequate on my network, oh well. I might lose some of those customers. Ironically, I actually provide each customer with CIR for their P2P, it is just a really low CIR. I see making most of my customers happy most of the time as my main job. I believe I am mostly successful in that. I have had to make tough choices and compromises to achieve that. Anyone is welcome to come into this market and make different choices, and I will wish them the best of luck in their endeavours. Cheers.
I can't speak to the specific networks involved, and what their real capacity issues may or may not be, but P2P tends to expand to fill available capacity. I operate a broadband Internet service in northern Canada where bandwidth is more than 10x the cost of transit services in the south. Obviously we can not charge people 10x southern rates for our service, so we have to manage our capacity very carefully, and that includes traffic shaping that deprioritises traffic that can not be identified as a common protocol. It is an ugly solution, I hate having to do it, but it is a necessary evil. The circumvention measures P2P applications use to avoid detection are the principal reason that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater in these cases. It is either that or allow all traffic for all customers to suffer.
That being said, all is not lost. I have no idea if you will have any luck contacting someone clueful at Rogers to help you out, but on my network I am more than happy to ensure that VPN traffic, and previously unrecognised game traffic - and so on - gets proper quality of service. It is not uncommon for one of our customers to call and say their application performance is poor, and I am able to confirm that their traffic is mistakenly being considered rogue, and I will ensure thereafter their application data is recognised as non-evil. It might be worth contacting Rogers if you think your non-evil traffic is being shaped down incorrectly.
Same as Clearwire, we are using the Motorola (Formerly NextNet) Expedience OFDM system. http://www.nextnetwireless.com/products.asp
I manage network operations for a large ISP in northern Canada and we use the same technology as Clearwire (not WiMAX - it is sort of a proto-WiMAX) for providing high speed Internet service. This technology is non-line-of-sight. I am not talking pseudo, I am talking the full meal deal. The technology actually depends on multipath reflection off of various surfaces, and this is what allows it to be NLOS. The fact that the frequency used is licensed means that they can be given additional power, which enhances signal reflectivity, and NLOS reception.
We are in a fairly large city in northern Canada, and there is nowhere in town we fail to receive a signal, from a fairly small number of cells located around town. As an old-school dial-up ISP without access to cable or copper infrastructure, NLOS high speed wireless was our holy grail, and this technology delivered. The stuff is black magic, it is something to behold.
Love the show, I have serious job envy.
Over here in computerland, we have a concept known as full disclosure, regarding computer security vulnerabilities. The idea is that full disclosure benefits all users of computers better than concealment, as disclosure creates the impetus to have those vulnerabilities fixed. Full disclosure works great in the realm of computer and network security, but maybe not so well in broadcast television with materials that go *boom*.
In Mythbusters you are testing conventional wisdom, and this could potentially lead to discovering serious flaws in household items, unintended dangerous uses of common materials, or means of circumventing the law. A couple of obvious myths that potentially fall into the latter category are the attempts to circumvent radar guns and the breathalyzer. I wonder what the show's philosophy is around disclosure of controversial information. Had you discovered a way of circumventing the breathalyzer, would it have made it to air, or would that have been kept off broadcast? As a corollary, have there been any myths that failed to make it to air because your discovery was too controversial or too great a liability if the information "fell into the wrong hands"?
My immediate thought on seeing this posting was, "oh man, did *no one* see ReGenesis?"
One of the great things about this show was that they did not dumb down advanced microbiology concepts for the "comfort" of the viewing audience. Undoubtedly some of the science was make-believe, as they danced that line between science and science fiction, but much of it was drawn from well researched advanced science. I would love to see how this show might do on HBO - it's got that same sort of edge as, and much of the production values of, HBO original programming - I would like to see more of this show. Can't recommend it too much for hard science nerds.
The company I work for, SSI Micro, has provided full-mesh frame relay and Internet services over satellite throughout northern Canada, well into the high arctic, since early 2000. We continue to expand the number of communities we service across the north all the time. The Outback almost sounds like a walk in the park by comparison - assuming you don't mind snakes. We also recently deployed a six site satellite network in Zambia to provide Internet services to an international development organisation there. Certainly each of these remote regions provide their own set of challenges.
In addition to dial-up, we have always used wireless technologies as a last mile solution. We used 802.11 for many years in those applications, and continue to do so. Currently we are also working with Inukshuk to roll out MCS wireless services, as mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story, and it is simply an amazing technology. The broadband picture keeps getting better and better up here all the time.
Satellite is definitely here to stay. It is going to be a long time before every nook and cranny of this world is wired, and frankly, I hope it never is.
No, hadn't seen part-15.org before now. I would be happy to answer any questions about our roll-out of the service. Feel free to email me at grahamb"at"ssimicro.com.
Anyone who has ever dreamed of true NLOS, this is it. Believe me, we are an extremely cynical group of techs, and we wouldn't have believed this kind of coverage was possible if it weren't staring us in the face. We've been looking for this very kind of solution for a long time, and have repeatedly been disappointed by bullshit marketing.
I can't say how ideal of a solution this will be in true urban environments. We will have to see how this Fido service turns out. In small markets, with inadequate cable or DSL service, this could be exactly what the small provider could be looking for to get back into the game.
We watched our dial-up service erode away while customers migrated over to the cable and DSL services we are excluded from. We have been going crazy for years wanting to compete in the broadband market, and this is the first product that has enabled us to do it. We repeatedly hear from people how dissatisfied they are with cable in our market. I would say approximately 75% of our wireless sign-ups have been migrations from cable to us. We have heard of *line-ups* of people at the local cable provider returning their cable modems. That's fun!
The near complete lack of technical support new customers require is truly astonishing. This gear requires no truck roll, and almost everyone has been able to immediately lock on to a strong enough signal for a perfect data link. The NextNet gear uses 1/2 FEC, which some might consider a waste of bandwidth, but it means an essentially rock solid connection for everyone. Generally, this gear either works perfectly, or it doesn't work at all - and that has been a dramatic exception to the norm.
Anyhow, yeah... obviously I am enthusiastic about this gear, and I could go on and on. We take a lot of pride in being an old-school, small scale ISP that busts our ass to be the best at what we do. I have watched blood, sweat, and tears go to waste as our customer base dwindled these past few years. Now our customer base is growing again, and I couldn't be more stoked.
Cheers.
We have done far more than 50 installs with the NextNet wireless system, and it works, for lack of a better word, perfectly.
Cheers,
Graham
[Disclaimer: Our company was the first to roll out MMDS based service in Canada, back on February 11, and we are partners with Inukshuk.]
We have been working with wireless technology for years, and until a few months ago I would have agreed 100% that non-line of sight was snake oil, a holy grail, and called it a few other things inappropriate for mixed company.
OFDM is simply black freaking magic. We have had somewhere in the order of 95% penetration in a 4km radius of our primary base station. (Fido's distance estimate is highly conservative.) We have a second base station online now, and it is almost impossible to find places in this town where you can not find a hot signal. As someone who never would have believed it possible, it blew me away completely, and continues to do so.
Frankly, we never would have launched the service if it wasn't true non-line of sight. This product is true multi-path, and is transmitting at high power. There is a 200' hill of ROCK between my house and our base station, and in my basement, facing away from the base, I get a perfect signal. Any suggestion that it is remotely similar to or even resembles 802.11 is completely off base.
We have rolled quite a few CPEs out the door now. Pretty much without exception every single customer has gone home, plugged it in, and it has worked. I am not lying when I say literally not more than 1% of end users have had a problems getting a signal. Of the 99% who had no problem, there are a good handful who are in marginal areas and it has fully tripped me out that they found signal.
Anyhow, this stuff is seriously cool technology that has a real chance to compete with cable and DSL.
Cheers,
Graham Blake
Manager, Network Operations
SSI Micro Internet Services
Yellowknife, NWT
As I read it, this is exactly what he is trying to get across.
Another paper of note, also written by Peter Lynds, is Zeno's Paradoxes - A Timely Solution (PDF - Google HTML Cache) where some of these of these issues are discussed in further detail.
What is being contradicted is the notion of there being certainty with regards to an object's position in time. In fact, he goes further to suggest there is no certainty with regards to any instantaneous physical values or magnitudes. To quote, "..once granted indeterminacy in precise relative position of a body in relative motion, also means indeterminacy in all precise physical magnitudes, including gravity, this also applies to the very structure of space-time, the dynamic framework in which all intertial, spatial, and temporal judgements of relative position are based."
I am certainly no physicist, but I definitely get the sense he is on to something here. If in fact it is taken for granted that determined physical magnitudes exist, this paper may actually be changing some assumptions we have about the universe we live in.
I was listening to Professor Noel Sharkey on the radio a few minutes ago, he is one of the designers of the robot. Apparently, and unfortunately in my opinion, the flying robot doesn't have its computer connected, so it is flying mindlessly.
I think a large percentage of blacklisted relays are simply off of the radar of the administrators responsible for them, and this is even more true for the growing problem of open proxies. It is no longer my experience that many people will deliberately choose to leave open relays after being clued in.
Blacklisting has proved to be an effective clue-stick for admins who have production email running on the servers in question. I think we currently have a big problem with inadvertent open relays or open proxies on networks with no human beings reading email for the usual suspects - abuse, postmaster, noc, and so on. Language barriers may be an issue too. I doubt I would be very responsive to someone telling me to close my open relay if they wrote me in Chinese.
I think these letters from government agencies may have a positive effect if enough real human beings read them and previously clueless admins suddenly wake up to what is going on with their network. The overall problem is not going to go away any time soon though, and if we don't get a handle on it we are going to have to go to whitelists across the board, which is a serious drag.
In the meantime, I feel very strongly about not exchanging email with servers known to be open relays or open proxies. I don't think it is too much to expect people to play nice, and refuse to play with them if they choose not to.
Cheers.
Dozens of network administrators from around the world on the NANOG mailing list, and EFnet #nanog all saw the first packets of Slammer at 05:29:29 and 05:29:45 GMT. That's dozens of very well placed people all seeing the first incident within a 16 second window, and not one administrator saw one earlier. How am I supposed to believe that Symantec knew about this earlier when none of us did?
I would like to see a copy of this so-called alert they sent out before the worm hit, if it exists, and then an explanation of how they knew in advance this worm would hit. Dubious does not even begin to describe it.
The reason I am sad to see Teledesic die is that I live and work in northern Canada, and manage a large network of satellite based services into remote communities. There is a huge expanse of Canada that is still only reachable by satellite, and will remain so, quite possibly for decades. The hope of a high capacity, low latency option for connectivity was quite exciting.
Projects are rapidly moving ahead to bring satellite based Internet services to remote regions of the world - especially in Canada, Australia, South America, Africa, and Russia. All these projects and regions of the world may not pay for a network of this scale, hence Teledesic's perhaps predictable demise, but it shouldn't be difficult to understand why we didn't want it to die.
Yay B5! For sure... great point really. I should have thought about that more before completely embracing the whole banking fighter thing... certainly with some creativity a good sci fi producer can do cool things using sound physics. Though a lot of perfectly good sci fi wouldn't be quite as much fun if it was entirely bound by the laws of physics, but the laws of physics still leave room for fun. My recall is a bit rusty, but I think Space Above and Beyond was fairly true to space physics, or at least was somewhat within the bounds of sanity. I am certainly open to being corrected on that though.
I hear that... in fact I am all down with a certain amount of derision, and I certainly do my fair share of eye rolling in movies. I also have the 13 year old in my that enjoys the pure fantasy element too. I think I was just underwhelmed by the author's "aren't I clever" attitude as though a lot of these things aren't fairly obvious. I think I was hoping it would be more humourous and less self-congratulatory than it was. Ah well.. at least they took the time to do such a site, and for that I commend them.
I was really looking forward to reading this and expected to enjoy a good tongue in cheek look at Hollywood. What a disappointment. It read as though it was written by Rimmer following his mind patch on Red Dwarf. Uninspiring and anal retentive, derisive arrogance without just cause. As much as the author may think himself clever, perhaps he might care to compare his net worth to that of a big budget Hollywood producer and reconsider.
Most sad I thought was the author confusing cinematic technique with scientific ignorance. The reason bullets spark when they hit something in a movie is so you know both that they didn't hit the star of the movie, and you have a sense for how close they came to hitting the star of the movie. Something the sound of ricochets alone does not convey. It's similar to the classic sound of cameras in film, like an old fasioned flash. Almost no cameras make that sound, it's just a technique that cues the audience. A trick so you know without thinking that the flash wasn't lightening, something wrong with the film, or simply something that won't distract people into thinking "what the hell was that?" when they should be paying attention to the story.
Amazingly, he missed the most glaring sci fi physics invention - the tendency for space ships in film to bank like an airplane while making turns. Be that as it may, I'll take an X-Wing Fighter style high speed bank over a lumbering, time intensive, retro thruster burn as a "real" spaceship might be forced to make. Here's to invented physics!!
Oh well, cool idea for a website, I am just disappointed with how it turned out. I would love to see more science fiction executed with pendantic formality, but I won't trade my flights of fancy away entirely for it.
Cheers.
Full-duplex T1 for $2000/mo? I'll take 20. What satellite provider? I work for a large satellite communications company in Canada, and full duplex T1 is almost 10x that much with any North American provider I've ever talked to. Even at large bulk rates you're looking at US$10,000/mo for 3Mbps.
The economics of satellite communications aren't going to change much over the short to mid term, not until it costs significantly less to launch payloads into space.
I am inclined to think that the media is at least partly responsible for creating the term "globalisation" in its attempt to simplify reality for mass consumption. In time the term has come to be adopted as a sort of catch-all or umbrella concept for a wide variety of groups and organisations, each pursuing their own agenda. So-called anti-globalisation protesters in actuality tend to be activists seeking change in a specific area of world affairs. The issue of "globalisation" merely provides a focal point of solidarity around which different groups can and do unite.
Too often, the labels "anti-trade" and "anti-globalisation" are used to paint a significant cross section of people the colour of irrelevancy. This is a gross over-generalisation. Having been personally involved in activism and protest in this area, I can speak honestly that few, if any, activists are opposed to globalisation in some blind or ignorant stupour.
The issues are simply too complex to paint with one brush. Most people recognise certain aspects of open trade and relationships have wide ranging benefits the world over. The message that most "anti-globalisation" activists are trying to get across is that the globalisation of environmental responsibility, human rights, labour standards, access to health care, indigenous rights, gender equality, and other issues can not take a back seat to the economic priorities of multinational corporations and western economic superpowers. It is a tragic oversimplification to say that the globalisation of the western free market economic system will address these pressing issues as a de facto consequence of the aggressive pursuit of corporate agendas.
The groups that most actively rally around focal points of global trade, such as economic summits, do so in response to the disproportionate mindshare that the pro corporate agenda has in the mass consciousness of western society. When mainstream media fails to adequately address the counter points to unrestricted liberalisation of trade and economics, the dissenting voice is forced on to the street to get their message across.
The dissenting voice has been reduced by the media to sound bytes that say "globalisation is bad, free trade is bad". This has allowed the likes of George W. Bush to condemn the dissenting voice without at all addressing the issues raised by it. As Bush said before the G8 summit in Genoa earlier this year, "For those who kind of use this opportunity to say that the world should become isolationists, they're condemning those who are poor to poverty, and we don't accept it." Reducing the debate in this manner will do nothing to address the root causes of suffering and disparity in this world. It is high time we listened to more voices than those championing the corporate agenda.
I think it is far too quickly assumed that the centres of cultures are drawing together in the crusade for a one world economy. In developing countries, the people signing binding trade deals with western economic powers are hardly the centre of their culture. I would argue that the peasant and indigenous population in many countries comprise the centre of their cultures, while the well financed and well armed politicians, who sign away their labour and natural resources, are the fringe.
Not every culture holds as its highest ideal the individual pursuit of wealth. The western global free market economy is not the only economic system. Radicalisation comes not only from the fringes, but often right square from the centre, from having an economic system imposed upon you by outside forces. It is important for a people to be able to define their own terms of participation in the global economy. When the terms are dictated by outside forces, and by and large for the sake of corporate profits, there WILL be a radicalised response.
Cheers,
Rev. Hibachi
I think it's fairly safe conjecture, as indicated by the number of Russian subs simply rotting away at the moment. According to this article, 130 nuclear powered Russian submarines have been taken out of service and are laid up, and fifty-two still carry nuclear fuel in the reactors. In total, 150 are expected to be decommissioned by 2003. Given the nuclear material on board these craft, having a safe, sane, and sensible method for handling decommissioning is a Good Thing(tm).
My opinion diverges from the EFF's on this point. I would argue that using reputable services that maintain a list of open and abused mail relays to filter incoming mail is a responsible decision. The combined benefits of reduced volume of incoming spam, and the enforcement of responsible mail server configuration benefits not only local users, but the Internet as a whole.
Out of the box, most modern mail servers configure themselves to prevent the relaying of mail. What we are fighting by using services such as MAPS are legacy systems and new servers that come online and are misconfigured. It is simply negligence to be operating an open relay in today's Internet. That negligence needs to be challenged. We can ultimately get the upper hand on the abuse of open relays this way, and I would support Internet wide adoption of the use of such services as a Best Current Practice.
With regards to my users not receiving mail, it is our company policy to individually handle each complaint related to our mail filtering to benefit our customers. We will almost always explicitly permit mail from servers that we know are legitimately trying to reach our users. We will also send a courtesy email to the administrators of the open relay to inform them of the situation. This isn't about maliciously blocking every relay out there, to the detriment of our users, this is about encouraging a trend of improved mail server administration. Responsible implementation of these kinds of controls on unsolicited email benefit everyone.
Cheers