This seems to be as good a place as any to ask this: why are providers going with FTTC anyway, rather than FTTH (fibre-to-the-home)? These large cabinets are artifacts of FTTC -- at some point the fibre has to be broken out into bundles of dozens or hundreds of copper (coax or twisted-pair) drops that then need to be driven with enough power to push the signal for the last few hundred metres. Isn't this already a flawed approach? Moreover, this reduces the total bandwidth available between the local exchange carrier and the premises.
As I understand it, FTTC permits the provider to deliver high bandwidth services (at least by today's standards) at lower infrastructure costs then FTTH. However, this seems to be 'kicking the can down the road', to use the prosaic expression.
So, how much are the providers saving? For example, I've read it costs the National Grid on average 13 times more per mile to run 400 kV transmission lines underground as it does via pylons. Is there a similar figure that can be cited for the difference between FTTC and FTTH?
We seem to be living in a golden age of infrastructure underinvestment.
A company I worked at a few years ago used Domino. I thought it was a great proof-of-concept for some future groupware product, but not ready for real-world use. It was broken in so many ways! I saved my list of Domino issues, which I've included below. This is for Domino version 7, so some of these issues may be fixed in subsequent versions. But to be this broken as recently as five years ago (and after 16 years of development, too!) is unforgivable.
So, check out my list of issues, and decide whether this is a product you would want to deploy in your organization!
Domino Issues:
- Slow.
- Spell checker with mailer is lame. Better to have MS Word-style
spell checker.
- When using View -> Find in view, defaults in such a way that
deletes all entries when the user thinks they are deleting a single
entry. Virtually impossible to undo.
- When using View -> Find in view, can't delete individual e-mails.
(see previous). Messages that are de-selected disappear from the view.
- Really crappy mailbox search algorithm
- Very weak mailbox filtering capability (compared with procmail)
- Hard to gauge where to wrap lines when using so-called
`Internet-Style' messages. No automatic line wrap.
- When replying using `Internet-Style History', quotes sender
in message envelope rather than sender in `From:' field.
- "Show source" on e-mail message does not show message envelope.
- Won't display HTML content of messages . . . good that it doesn't
happen by default, but wish it were an option.
- View -> Show -> Source doesn't work for messages with no text in
the message body, so no way to view headers of empty spam messages.
- Message size bears little relationship to actual content.
- Very slow over low-bandwidth connection. Much more overhead than
IMAP.
- No multiple levels of undo -- can only undo last change
- When using find, it checkmarks all found messages. Then if you
highlight one and attempt to delete it, it delete all checked messages
*without prompting*. And no option to undo!
- When clicking on links in e-mail messages, unclear whether browser
has been launched. Mouse cursor doesn't change, as it does with
most other mail clients, unless you move it outside of the Notes window.
- Can't sort by date/title/etc in View -> Search this View in Tech Docs
- No Day of Week in Message. Month is numeric only.
- Mail Search is fucked. Try:
"Author contains Sender/Organization AND outgoing".
- When opening mail attachments, no option to select which application
to use.
- When opening mail attachments, cannot open an attachment with an
unknown extension.
- Crashes when reporting certain messages to Symantec
- Cannot set different chimes for incoming mail. E.g. mail going to
group folder due to mail rule makes same chime as mail going into
mail inbox.
- Can't cut-and-paste into mail rules.
- No log to see when messages are deleted by mail rules.
- Can't respond to a message in a "meeting accepted" / "meeting
declined" without cut-and-paste to a new memo.
- Copying a memo from a folder to a nested folder with the same name
causes a duplicate of the memo to appear in the original folder.
E.g. copy something from "Sent" to "Folders->Temp->Sent".
"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."
ICANN has a history of antipathy toward public participation.
Kieren McCarthy, who has alternately been a journalist covering ICANN and also worked as ICANN's , general manager of public participation, has very good commentary on ICANNs merits (there are a few) and foibles (there are many):
While learning Python isn't the only reasonable option, it's way up there. It has several key advantages:
1. Object oriented
This is one of the key paradigm shifts since you were coding, and Python embodies the principle more cleanly than Perl or C++ . In fact, learning Python will probably make it easier to understand C++, Objective C and Java, which are arguably more awkward embodiments of OO.
2. Interpreted
The rise in interpreted languages is another major development since the 80s. It also helps speed the edit-test-debug cycle, making it faster to learn.
3. Popular
Python is one of the top 10 most popular languages at the moment: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html. It's pretty much eclipsed Perl, which has been on the wane for a while. Interest in Ruby (the other "hot" interpreted language) also seems to be flagging.
"In his view, it looks like the source ports are sufficiently random, even though they are limited to a small range of ports."
The distribution graph appears to show Google resolver using random ports between 32768 and 65535. While that's only half the ports available, it's misleading to characterize it as "a small range of ports".
This is the single most coherent remark I've seen about this story. Unfortunately critical reasoning in the mainstream media doesn't pay the bills, so we'll never see it reported there.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be as good a place as any to ask this: why are providers going with FTTC anyway, rather than FTTH (fibre-to-the-home)? These large cabinets are artifacts of FTTC -- at some point the fibre has to be broken out into bundles of dozens or hundreds of copper (coax or twisted-pair) drops that then need to be driven with enough power to push the signal for the last few hundred metres. Isn't this already a flawed approach? Moreover, this reduces the total bandwidth available between the local exchange carrier and the premises.
As I understand it, FTTC permits the provider to deliver high bandwidth services (at least by today's standards) at lower infrastructure costs then FTTH. However, this seems to be 'kicking the can down the road', to use the prosaic expression.
So, how much are the providers saving? For example, I've read it costs the National Grid on average 13 times more per mile to run 400 kV transmission lines underground as it does via pylons. Is there a similar figure that can be cited for the difference between FTTC and FTTH?
We seem to be living in a golden age of infrastructure underinvestment.
I would deploy IBM Domino
A company I worked at a few years ago used Domino. I thought it was a great proof-of-concept for some future groupware product, but not ready for real-world use. It was broken in so many ways! I saved my list of Domino issues, which I've included below. This is for Domino version 7, so some of these issues may be fixed in subsequent versions. But to be this broken as recently as five years ago (and after 16 years of development, too!) is unforgivable.
So, check out my list of issues, and decide whether this is a product you would want to deploy in your organization!
Domino Issues:
- Slow.
- Spell checker with mailer is lame. Better to have MS Word-style
spell checker.
- When using View -> Find in view, defaults in such a way that
deletes all entries when the user thinks they are deleting a single
entry. Virtually impossible to undo.
- When using View -> Find in view, can't delete individual e-mails.
(see previous). Messages that are de-selected disappear from the view.
- Really crappy mailbox search algorithm
- Very weak mailbox filtering capability (compared with procmail)
- Hard to gauge where to wrap lines when using so-called
`Internet-Style' messages. No automatic line wrap.
- When replying using `Internet-Style History', quotes sender
in message envelope rather than sender in `From:' field.
- "Show source" on e-mail message does not show message envelope.
- Won't display HTML content of messages . . . good that it doesn't
happen by default, but wish it were an option.
- View -> Show -> Source doesn't work for messages with no text in
the message body, so no way to view headers of empty spam messages.
- Message size bears little relationship to actual content.
- Very slow over low-bandwidth connection. Much more overhead than
IMAP.
- No multiple levels of undo -- can only undo last change
- When using find, it checkmarks all found messages. Then if you
highlight one and attempt to delete it, it delete all checked messages
*without prompting*. And no option to undo!
- When clicking on links in e-mail messages, unclear whether browser
has been launched. Mouse cursor doesn't change, as it does with
most other mail clients, unless you move it outside of the Notes window.
- Can't sort by date/title/etc in View -> Search this View in Tech Docs
- No Day of Week in Message. Month is numeric only.
- Mail Search is fucked. Try:
"Author contains Sender/Organization AND outgoing".
- When opening mail attachments, no option to select which application
to use.
- When opening mail attachments, cannot open an attachment with an
unknown extension.
- Crashes when reporting certain messages to Symantec
- Cannot set different chimes for incoming mail. E.g. mail going to
group folder due to mail rule makes same chime as mail going into
mail inbox.
- Can't cut-and-paste into mail rules.
- No log to see when messages are deleted by mail rules.
- Can't respond to a message in a "meeting accepted" / "meeting
declined" without cut-and-paste to a new memo.
- Copying a memo from a folder to a nested folder with the same name
causes a duplicate of the memo to appear in the original folder.
E.g. copy something from "Sent" to "Folders->Temp->Sent".
Correlation does not imply causation.
Yup. I was going to say it if you hadn't.
I remember this. Quote from that programme:
"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."
Really?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/hendrikshontrans.shtml
ICANN has a history of antipathy toward public participation.
Kieren McCarthy, who has alternately been a journalist covering ICANN and also worked as ICANN's , general manager of public participation, has very good commentary on ICANNs merits (there are a few) and foibles (there are many):
http://kierenmccarthy.com/category/internet-governance/icann/
While learning Python isn't the only reasonable option, it's way up there. It has several key advantages:
1. Object oriented
This is one of the key paradigm shifts since you were coding, and Python embodies the principle more cleanly than Perl or C++ . In fact, learning Python will probably make it easier to understand C++, Objective C and Java, which are arguably more awkward embodiments of OO.
2. Interpreted
The rise in interpreted languages is another major development since the 80s. It also helps speed the edit-test-debug cycle, making it faster to learn.
3. Popular
Python is one of the top 10 most popular languages at the moment: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html. It's pretty much eclipsed Perl, which has been on the wane for a while. Interest in Ruby (the other "hot" interpreted language) also seems to be flagging.
"In his view, it looks like the source ports are sufficiently random,
even though they are limited to a small range of ports."
The distribution graph appears to show Google resolver using random ports
between 32768 and 65535. While that's only half the ports available,
it's misleading to characterize it as "a small range of ports".
This topic has been visited numerous times. A particularly good article on theoretical computational limits appeared in Nature in 2000:
Lloyd, Seth. "Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation". Nature 406, pp. 1047-1053 (31 August 2000)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/full/4061047a0.html
This is the single most coherent remark I've seen about this story. Unfortunately critical reasoning in the mainstream media doesn't pay the bills, so we'll never see it reported there.
The DNS OARC (http://dns-oarc.net) has an improved version:
http://entropy.dns-oarc.net/test/