Ricochet announced earnings the other day. In that announcement, they mentioned that they don't have the operating capital to continue indefinitely, and that they're seeking another round of funding.
Just like umpteen other companies out there. Why not a story about the SEC investigation of Lucent? The Congressional hearings on ICANN? The similar situation of any number of other companies (e.g., Tivo, which recently offered preferred stock to prevent a potential hostile takeover?) Why take what these days amounts to boilerplate in an earnings statement for a high-tech company and blow it out of proportion?
Stories like this do more damage to struggling companies than the current market situation...people see the/. story, and refuse to buy the service on the basis of it, without reading any further. The headline, while untrue, becomes a fait accompli.
Me? I'm taking delivery of my 128kbps PCMCIA Ricochet modem this afternoon.
True, it's been less cold and less wet *on average* to date this winter, but for the past week (the period of the current crisis, starting roughly Monday) it's been much more cold and wet than data would predict.
Hence, the shortage. Power companies buy and sell on predictions covering not only seasons, but weeks, days, hours, and even minutes. When you think about it, the fact that they come close to predicting minute-to-minute demand months in advance is rather impressive. And the fact that it's not 100% accurate gets annoying when it leads to possible or actual blackouts.
What you're NOT seeing make national headlines at the moment is the *cost* associated with power in.ca.us. The scarcity is actually normal in adverse weather conditions (the SF Bay area's suffering from colder- and wetter-than-normal weather at the moment, along with much of.ca.us, in a high-usage period).
Deregulation has no effect on energy reserves or availability. What it _does_ affect is the cost per kWhr to the utilities, which is in turn passed along to the consumer.
This is why, for the past few weeks, PG&E has been threatening bankruptcy, succeeded in reciving approval for 9-25% across-the-board rate hikes, preparing to file lawsuits against the local and federal regulators for not giving them *sufficient* rate hike authority, and putting the BofA in a precarious financial position in terms of loans.
Most of the *really* smart geeks live in parts of the Valley that don't charge $2k-$3k for 800 sq. ft. apartments with 3-year waiting lists.
They live in other areas of the valley, where that much money will get you a 1,000 sq. ft. apartment, with only a 1-2 year waiting list.
SF's nothing but web hacks and other New Media types. The engineers, admins, architects, and designers are on the Peninsula and in East and South Bay.
...and when the media says "SF", they mean "SF Bay Area". That includes/. See http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html for details. NANOG-L held that the first would occur in RWC, home of MAPS, @Home, and others. But then, they were scheduled for 4-8pm PST, and it's 9 minutes after that deadline, with no outages.
Rolling blackouts happen. They've happened in Silicon Valley before, they happen in all major metropolitan areas.
I used to be the senior Unix admin for the largest nuclear power company in the US. Here's the abridged version of how these things happen:
1) There's a huge stock-market-like brokerage for energy across the USA.
2) Power companies are basically market players, betting on energy futures. They use data to predict the energy usage for a given day, and buy any they can't produce to cover the overage.
3) Power companies, like any other entity trying to predict a nonlinear chaotic system, fail miserably from time to time, and they end up eating into their reserves.
4) The power companies, in coordination with state and local governments, have contingency plans in place that ensure there's enough energy left in the reserves to maintain critical and emergency services, even though it may mean halting delivery to all other customers.
5) In the meantime, the brokers at the power companies frantically try to buy extra energy from the brokerages. But it's a free market, and last-minute ergs cost much, much more than those bought with foresight. Further, it's a finite resource...if there's bad weather regionally or nationwide, there might not _be_ any excess to buy. So you're stuck depleting your reserves, and hoping the hospitals, police, and other infrastructure components don't go dark longer than their backup systems can cover.
It's common. And it's going to get worse in all major metropolitan areas over the next 10-20 years. Get used to it.
It's proprietary. I almost bought two, until the salesperson informed me I couldn't get it without the WebTV subscription, I couldn't get it without the WebTV hardware, and I couldn't get it with just a normal, flat workspace instead of the dug-out, form-fitting space that holds the WebTV keyboard.
And if it's so WebTV specific, why the hell do you need a phone jack, Ethernet jack, and power outlet in the chair? You *won't* be using a laptop; you've got WebTV! You're FORCED to have it! That's the whole point of the chair!
I think that, at some point, this was going to be a very nice generic chair, and then M$ insisted on the WebTV exclusivity, completely ruining it.
I considered removing the fold-out arm that holds the keyboard and replacing it with something else, but it's a fairly custom job, and you'd end up needing to machine some parts to get a decent quality substitute. Not worth $1,000 a pop for all the trouble. I'll hack hardware, but I don't have a burning desire to redesign furniture.
Well, I've got the Wega in the bedroom, and there I've got my hacked first Tivo (60 hours; long before it was possible to add anything other than a 30GB drive to the unit). Due to my viewing habits, I bought another Tivo (30 hours; unhacked, waiting for a purchase of an 80GB drive, and now waiting for the gold SA 2.0 rollout, so I can take it to 120+ hours). With two Tivos, I could timeshift everything I cared to watch (except for one show, which conflicts with two others on simultaneously).
Last weekend, I bought a 56", 16:9 HDTV for the living room to replace my aging 32" TV, a new progressive-scan DVD player (Toshiba 6200) to replace my perfectly good but nonprogressive Sony 7700 (moving to the bedroom; the old A120 can't play some discs), and am awaiting delivery of my Panasonic TU-HDS20 HD/OTA/DirecTV STB. I moved the non-hacked Tivo into the living room for use with the new set, but realized that as our viewing shifted from the bedroom to the living room (along with the gaming: DC and PS2), we had the same need for a second Tivo.
Rather than leaving ourselves Tivo-less in the bedroom, we went to Fry's Christmas Eve and picked up a new Sony Tivo (our first; the other two are Philips units) to use as the second living room unit. Both living room units will be getting 80GB drive additions after the 2.0 upgrade.
Just to add insult to injury, I'm expecting FedEx to drop off my Philips Pronto TSU2000 (I bought the H/K Take Control last week, but should have gone with my gut and gotten the Pronto. I guess I'll be using the Take Control in the bedroom) and my Monster Power 3500 power conditioner tomorrow.
Yes, I live and work in Silicon Valley, in the high-tech industry, and I'm in no danger of being laid off.:)
After 2.0's out, I may take this old Libretto CT70, buy another WaveLAN card for it, and run one of the Tivos into it for net updates. Or my old P3-500 (replaced with a Thunderbird Athlon 900MHz a few months back), so I can run both Tivos into it. I've been meaning to play around with digital convergence a bit, and having the P3 in the living room would give me an excuse to do so.
True. But we're still a long way off. Both my digital cable boxes, all 3 of my TiVos, and my HDTV converter/DirecTV tuner all need to connect to a phone outlet. Thankfully, most of them are capable of negotiating shared phoneline use correctly.
Unless and until there's a fundamental shift in thinking, and the default connectivity option in the home is wired or wireless Ethernet (or some similar layer 2 protocol, with either TCP/IP or some form of TCP/IP encapsulation), and until those same homes have adequate home-wide network security coupled with "grandmother-simple" plug-and-play configuration, analog phone connections will continue to reign.
In terms of Joe Sixpack acceptance and preparedness for fully-networked appliances, we're standing in a place similar to the early 1940's with the transition from radio to television -- it's coming, but it's a long way off, and there's going to be a lot of growing pains along the path.
Things like this add-on, and recent work replacing the default TiVo modem dial-in with straight Ethernet access (both by subverting the existing PPP config, and by building an ISA slot onto the unit and adding a regular ISA Ethernet card), demonstrate that there's a small segment of society that wants and is capable of taking advantage of such advances. But right now, that segment is EXTREMELY small.
Speaking as a member of WG-B, that "Sunrise + 20" proposal was most certainly NOT from "WG-B". It was from the Chair of WG-B, and from the TM lobby. WG-B wholeweartedly opposed it. If you look at the next-to-final report (the one that was originally the final report, until Palage decided that the final report should say something other than the final report did), you'll find many comments opposed to the Sunrise+20. You'll find alternatives.
Sunrise+20 was a back-room, outside-the-process idea cooked up to benefit registries and TM holders. Just like the UDRP is, which was a direct product of WG-A, and was achieved in the same manner: backroom deals, pushed through as the product of the WG, but without WG approval, and ratified by the DNSO names council against the loud outcry of the participants.
I want it to be known far and wide that the result of WG-B, and certain "results" of WG-C (to add new TLDs to the roots) are NOT the product of the WG themselves, but are products of several individuals who think the ICANN process exists to serve their specific interests.
Go read the archives, and see for yourselves. Don't sample them; read through them ALL. WG-A is supposed to be here, but mysteriously, all but a few messages have vanished. I've just noticed this, and am prepared to raise hell about it.
WG-B is here. Read through the archives, particularly at the end. Note that those who are not TM attorneys participating to protect their corporate interests are decrying the entire process. Something you'd see in the WG-A archives as well, if they still existed.
Since nobody's mentioned it yet, you might want to check out OmniSky. They just finished their beta program, they're taking orders now, and are shipping in a few weeks. Inexpensive clip-on CDPD wireless 19.2kbps modem for the Palm V, full TCP/IP, unlimited service.
I just ordered mine.
Of course, the Palm V only has 2MB of RAM, unlike the Palm Vx, which can make web browsing, news reading, running a web server, and e-mailing feel a bit cramped. So I'm getting mine upgraded to 8MB next week. There are currently 3 companies who do this, and this one has gotten the best reviews and is also the cheapest. Many of the OmniSky beta testers did this.
The UDRP. The request to WIPO to come up with a list of famous marks that will be a priori excluded from the existing and future namespace. The over-regulation of IPv6space as regards address allocation. The entire constituency model. The introduction of the GAC. The repeated, blatant, and unremorseful overstepping of power and authority boundaries. Top-down rather than bottom-up governance. The "ICANN by-laws of the week" game they play, with retroactive alteration of the by-laws to suit their needs. Their refusal to relinquish power. Their refusal to allow individuals to have any say in the process. Their catering to big corporate and Intellectual Property interests.
Either your statement was meant in jest, or you're not well-informed of ICANN's actions.
Esther Dyson was one of several people hand-picked by an unknown group and handed ICANN by Becky Burr and the US Dept. of Commerce. Nobody knows by what process Dyson was chosen, or who did the choosing.
Dyson and the other initial ICANN Board of Directors have demonstrated a distinct lack of ability to work in the open, to accept input in a bottom-up fashion, and to understand the technical aspects of the entity about which they are supposed to make decisions.
Now, in Cairo, The ICANN Board of Directors, led by Esther Dyson in this matter, decided to scrap the General Assembly process by which 9 new, individual ICANN Directors would be named, and decided to eliminate 4 of them.
Their reasoning? Becuase they're afraid of handing over control to people who "don't understand the Internet". A sad comment indeed, coming from a Board with a vested financial interest in the outcome of decisions related to namespace and IP-space, who do not have even a rudimentary understanding of that which they govern, except perhaps for Vint Cerf.
The ICANN Board of Directors was supposed to be completely elected and the original people, Dyson included, removed by September of 1999. Dyson and her cohorts have repeatedly voted themselves more years as ICANN Directors, and have both refused to relinquish control to any form of elected body, and have refused to run ICANN in the grassroots, bottom-up, narrow technical matter that the contracts with the US Government require.
That ICANN continues to exist at all is miracle, and a nightmare. That Dyson was chosen as figurehead for it and continues to lend her name to it says volumes about her character.
Actually, the Apple AirPort ***BASE STATION*** is a repackaged Lucent WaveLAN Silver. The $99 AirPort CARDS are so cheap because they're actually missing hardware. The reason those $99 cards require an iBook or certain models of Powerbook is because those models contain the rest of the hardware necessary for the AirPort card to be functional.
Let me be clear: The AirPort CARD that Apple sells at an MSRP of $99 IS NOT A FUNCTIONING Lucent WaveLAN card!
it uses SNMP though so other software should be usable. The author mentions that the Karlbridge software for Windows does everything right.
Not quite. The Karlbridge firmware is what Apple installed in the AirPort Base Stations. However, the Windows KarlBridge configurator cannot completely provision an AirPort Base Station. You cannot set up NAT or DHCP with it, and you cannot control the encryption modes.
The reason for this is: Apple (and the folks who made the KarlBridge) did some nasty stuff with the configuration. Yes, the base station responds to SNMP. However, the MIB tree via which the BS is configured is a set of 64 256-byte strings with shecksumming. To make matters worse, people are having to reverse-engineer how Apple mapped out those strings, and how the checksumming's being done.
I have been working on this for a while, as has a friend of mine (who I believe was linked to on the MSRL page against his wishes. That info is old and invalid -- people should not use it). There is working code that allows one to change most of the configuration options, but not NAT or DHCP, nor encryption. The reason for the problems with encryption is that Apple didn't follow the WEP standards, and has some unique algorithm for generating the WEP keys. They supposedly corrected this in v1.1 of the Base Station firmware, but I've yet to verify that.
Then you're making the same bad assumption that others who are coming up with these policies are making: The Net is nothing but the Web, and the Web is nothing but companies.
As a trademark (or other intellectual property) owner, you are required by US and International law to protect your TM/IP, or lose it. The law clearly and firmly places the burden of policing possible infringements on the TM owner.
This includes the time, effort, and cost involved.
There are existing services that charge a nominal fee to do domain name/trademark infringement searches. Some registrars have this as part of their business model (e.g., look at the links off of http://www.whois.net).
Now, ICANN, via Working Group B (which is stacked full of TM/IP lawyers), wants to shift that burden to the registrars themselves, eliminating that business model, and superceeding US and International trademark/intellectual property law!
The folks from Working Group B have even invaded Working Group C, the WG for the addition of new Top-Level Domains (such as a.com,.net, or.org), and have ramrodded through what is now being accepted as a legitimate proposal that would eliminate the possibility of new TLDs without this shift of cost and burden from the TM holder to the domain name registrar.
In short, the TM holders don't like US and International law placing the burden and cost of protecting their marks on their shoulders, and have found a political venue in which they can get away with shifting this burden onto someone else.
And every single one of you who isn't in there fighting to prevent this is tacitly allowing this to happen.
If this becomes reality, ICANN will have effectively superceded worldwide laws and treaties.
And since the DNSO leading body, the "Names Council", and the ICANN Board of Directors is full of trademark/intellectual property owners and biased business owners, this stands a very good chance of happening. The only way to prevent this is for each and every one of you to GET INVOLVED.
Every time a DNS/ICANN related story comes up, myself and several others post relevant information about how you can get involved, how you can participate, and what you should be doing if you don't like or don't agree with the way these policies are being developed. Now, here's another story, stating the truth of what I and others have been saying for $DEITY knows how long now. I'll make this very simple: IF YOU DON'T LIKE THIS, GET INVOLVED AND CHANGE IT! And that doesn't mean joining the ICANN At-Large membership. It means getting involved with the Domain name Service Organization, specifically Working Groups B and C, and working to get rid of business-centric, short-sighted policies before they're enacted. In the end, it all comes down to numbers: Right now, the corporate lawyers and the businesspeople have a stronger lobby within ICANN than the individuals and the end-users do. Don't be fooled, you will NOT have any impact on policy from the At-Large Membership. The proper venue for activism is within the DNSO working groups. See this page for the mailing list archives of the working groups, and instructions on how to join. It's as easy as subscribing to a mailing list. Unless and until you actually get off your ass and do something to change things, you're just going to be pissing in the wind. Slashdot is a wonderful forum, but all of you should be voicing your concerns where they matter, in the Working Groups, instead of here.
S'not a rumor. Have a look at my site, which contains APStatus, a Perl script I wrote that will report interface stats on a remote AirPort Base Station via SNMP.
I'm currently working on back-engineering the method used to provision the things so they can be installed without using a Mac.
No later than 10 hours after I submitted it my domain was active.
Then you may be interested to know that it may be possible for domains to go active much more quickly than that, and you should be questioning, not being thankful for, that 10-hour delay.
Register.com is a registrar. In order for a domain name to become active, the registry must be updated. NSI controls that registry, and handles all transactions submitted via the SRS system. Currently, that would include all ICANN-accredited registrars.
There are two reasons for delay in domain names going active: 1) Delays in the registrar submitting registrations to the SRS registry, and 2) Delays in the updating of the registry.
Normally, the delays in #1 are due to the registrar waiting and submitting an entire batch of registrations. The delays in #2 are technical limits on the speed by which changes can be made to the registry.
So, you need to ask yourself: How much of that 10 hours was due to register.com holding your registration until some later time, and how much of it was due to the time it takes for submissions via SRS to be integrated into the registry database?
You may be surprised at the answer.
NOTE:This delay is something about which you should question any prospective registrar. Some will be relatively quick, some may take days or even a week (e.g., bulkregister.com). An honest registrar should be willing to tell you how often they submit data to the registry.
First, a word about register.com. You may want to read through the DNSO archives, the IFWP list, and the DOMAIN-POLICY archives to see what register.com has been up to, particularly regarding the single-letter domains.
You may also want to have a look at their registration agreement, particularly the bit on information ownership. They own all your contact information, and can do whatever they want with it.
Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.
Others aren't any better. BulkRegister has been phone-spamming people with completely automated unsolicited phone calls, in violation of US State and Federal law.
Joker.com and the other current and past CORE registrars have had significant problems in the past, and CORE is losing registrars right and left.
Most of the registrars have had significant and in some cases highly-publicised problems interacting using the SRS -- the Shared Registry System, resulting in things like aol.com's ownership being transferred to an individual (and later changed back), and other domain names not owned by big companies not being so lucky in having their ownership info corrected.
There's a problem with CORE registrars as well...several years ago, when people were once again trying to get new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), CORE managed to have a set of 7 TLD agreed upon. CORE registrars were pre-selling registrations in these 7 TLDs last year. They've now stopped, but should those & go active, it's still unknown whether or not anyone will have a fair shot at registering within them due to these pre-sells.
I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.
If you can't or won't do that, then do the following: Find and take the time to READ each registrar's Domain Dispute Policy and Registration Agreement, and think of what it means to you if your domain name ownership is challenged. The challenges are mushrooming, and all signs point to corporations getting whatever they want. Go see the resolved UDRP cases to get a feeling for how the wind is currently blowing.
1) You've ALWAYS been able to participate in ICANN. Every time someone's posted anything related to domain policy, I've practically begged people to get involved, join working groups, and work to ensure things like the ICANN UDRP were fair to individuals. All you've ever had to do to get involved was to subscribe to a DNSO mailing list. (You can't join the ASO, but don't feel bad -- they're not letting ISPs join either.)
2) You will not legally be a "member" of anything. ICANN has gone to great lengths to ensure there is no such thing as a legal membership. In fact, they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal counsel to ensure that there's little if any accountability within ICANN at all.
3) You will not get to elect board members. You will get to elect a handful of people, who will then CHOOSE the 9 new board members, and only then with the consent of the existing board.
4) Did I mention that you've ALWAYS had the ability to participate in ICANN and have your voice heard?
5) If you join the At Large Membership without informing yourself first, you'll only be harming EVERYONE. Take some time and learn what's been going on before you jump in and implicitly support what ICANN's been up to:
Go read how WIPO is using the ICANN UDRP to enfore implicit beliefs that the Net is nothing but the web, only businesses should own domain names, and only trademark owners should have rights to those names: WIPO dispute decisions
Go read how the UDRP was created in the DNSO WG-A. Go read how corporations want to prohibit you from registering any domain name that contains a trademarked substring (e.g., whereitsatt.com contains ATT) in WG-B. Go read how members of WG-B are trying everything they can to stop the rollout of new top-level domains in WG-C. Go see how the DNSO general assembly deteriorated, destroyed itself and was censored...the GA is the precursor of the ICANN At-Large membership, and should serve as a warning to any considering joining: DNSO Archives
In short, go read up on the history of ICANN and domain name policy before you lend your name to it. Rest assured, Mike Roberts is going to take every opportunity to hold up your membership as implicit support for what ICANN's doing. And you should think long and hard about whether you do support what ICANN's been up to. It may be trendy and cool to bash NSI, but to support ICANN just because they're not NSI may be the poorest decision you've ever made.
Go see for yourself what ICANN is before you lend your name to it.
The article talks about the consumer wanting a system that comes out of the box and "just works". This isn't a bad goal to aim for, but we must ask ourselves, how do we accomplish this without sacrificing security and functionality?
Think about it: Any *NIX, out of the box, needs a root password. Part of this configuration may be what the consumer does not want to deal with. How to avoid it? Do we have distros with default passwords? Instant security hole. Do we randomly generate passwords? No, because random strings are "too hard to remember". This won't make his consumer happy.
What about the peripherals? they should be plugged in and should "just work". Should we now assume defaults for every device config? All printers are local? All modems are accessible by anyone? All monitors have a default resolution and colordepth? How do we handle people who want and/or need the functionality a *NIX provides?
So, what do we do? Perhaps the full-blown *NIX concept is not suitable for end-users. Perhaps what is needed is a very stripped, very featureless kernel, with few if any active services, and a pretty desktop. The only big issues are: Housekeeping and software installation. We create a single-user system with no security model, and try to lock down the network services are strictly as possible, then fill it with as much eye-candy as we can.
I hate for this to sound sarcastic, and I didn't sit down with the intent on writing it in this tone. The questions I ask above are honest ones: How can we satisfy the desires of this segment of the population without completely cannibalizing the entire OS model?
As much as the end-user may hate it, there will ALWAYS be configuration options that must be set, fields to be filled in, and choices to be made before the computer "just works". The question would seem to be "how we can make this exercise as friendly as possible?" while not compromising the OS.
In the end, an OS is not an appliance. At least, not a *NIX, in a multi-user, multipurpose environment. Perhaps the various Linux companies should start differentiating themselves by their ability to cater to this market. But be warned: Do not forsake security for convenience.
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Ricochet announced earnings the other day. In that announcement, they mentioned that they don't have the operating capital to continue indefinitely, and that they're seeking another round of funding.
/. story, and refuse to buy the service on the basis of it, without reading any further. The headline, while untrue, becomes a fait accompli.
Just like umpteen other companies out there. Why not a story about the SEC investigation of Lucent? The Congressional hearings on ICANN? The similar situation of any number of other companies (e.g., Tivo, which recently offered preferred stock to prevent a potential hostile takeover?) Why take what these days amounts to boilerplate in an earnings statement for a high-tech company and blow it out of proportion?
Stories like this do more damage to struggling companies than the current market situation...people see the
Me? I'm taking delivery of my 128kbps PCMCIA Ricochet modem this afternoon.
Cisco's got it's own substation on Tasman in San Jose, just past Zanker Rd.
But then, Cisco pretty much singlehandedly funded the SJ/Santa Clara/Mt. View lightrail, too.
True, it's been less cold and less wet *on average* to date this winter, but for the past week (the period of the current crisis, starting roughly Monday) it's been much more cold and wet than data would predict.
Hence, the shortage. Power companies buy and sell on predictions covering not only seasons, but weeks, days, hours, and even minutes. When you think about it, the fact that they come close to predicting minute-to-minute demand months in advance is rather impressive. And the fact that it's not 100% accurate gets annoying when it leads to possible or actual blackouts.
What you're NOT seeing make national headlines at the moment is the *cost* associated with power in .ca.us. The scarcity is actually normal in adverse weather conditions (the SF Bay area's suffering from colder- and wetter-than-normal weather at the moment, along with much of .ca.us, in a high-usage period).
Deregulation has no effect on energy reserves or availability. What it _does_ affect is the cost per kWhr to the utilities, which is in turn passed along to the consumer.
This is why, for the past few weeks, PG&E has been threatening bankruptcy, succeeded in reciving approval for 9-25% across-the-board rate hikes, preparing to file lawsuits against the local and federal regulators for not giving them *sufficient* rate hike authority, and putting the BofA in a precarious financial position in terms of loans.
Most of the *really* smart geeks live in parts of the Valley that don't charge $2k-$3k for 800 sq. ft. apartments with 3-year waiting lists.
/. See http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html for details. NANOG-L held that the first would occur in RWC, home of MAPS, @Home, and others. But then, they were scheduled for 4-8pm PST, and it's 9 minutes after that deadline, with no outages.
They live in other areas of the valley, where that much money will get you a 1,000 sq. ft. apartment, with only a 1-2 year waiting list.
SF's nothing but web hacks and other New Media types. The engineers, admins, architects, and designers are on the Peninsula and in East and South Bay.
...and when the media says "SF", they mean "SF Bay Area". That includes
Rolling blackouts happen. They've happened in Silicon Valley before, they happen in all major metropolitan areas.
I used to be the senior Unix admin for the largest nuclear power company in the US. Here's the abridged version of how these things happen:
1) There's a huge stock-market-like brokerage for energy across the USA.
2) Power companies are basically market players, betting on energy futures. They use data to predict the energy usage for a given day, and buy any they can't produce to cover the overage.
3) Power companies, like any other entity trying to predict a nonlinear chaotic system, fail miserably from time to time, and they end up eating into their reserves.
4) The power companies, in coordination with state and local governments, have contingency plans in place that ensure there's enough energy left in the reserves to maintain critical and emergency services, even though it may mean halting delivery to all other customers.
5) In the meantime, the brokers at the power companies frantically try to buy extra energy from the brokerages. But it's a free market, and last-minute ergs cost much, much more than those bought with foresight. Further, it's a finite resource...if there's bad weather regionally or nationwide, there might not _be_ any excess to buy. So you're stuck depleting your reserves, and hoping the hospitals, police, and other infrastructure components don't go dark longer than their backup systems can cover.
It's common. And it's going to get worse in all major metropolitan areas over the next 10-20 years. Get used to it.
It's proprietary. I almost bought two, until the salesperson informed me I couldn't get it without the WebTV subscription, I couldn't get it without the WebTV hardware, and I couldn't get it with just a normal, flat workspace instead of the dug-out, form-fitting space that holds the WebTV keyboard.
And if it's so WebTV specific, why the hell do you need a phone jack, Ethernet jack, and power outlet in the chair? You *won't* be using a laptop; you've got WebTV! You're FORCED to have it! That's the whole point of the chair!
I think that, at some point, this was going to be a very nice generic chair, and then M$ insisted on the WebTV exclusivity, completely ruining it.
I considered removing the fold-out arm that holds the keyboard and replacing it with something else, but it's a fairly custom job, and you'd end up needing to machine some parts to get a decent quality substitute. Not worth $1,000 a pop for all the trouble. I'll hack hardware, but I don't have a burning desire to redesign furniture.
Well, I've got the Wega in the bedroom, and there I've got my hacked first Tivo (60 hours; long before it was possible to add anything other than a 30GB drive to the unit). Due to my viewing habits, I bought another Tivo (30 hours; unhacked, waiting for a purchase of an 80GB drive, and now waiting for the gold SA 2.0 rollout, so I can take it to 120+ hours). With two Tivos, I could timeshift everything I cared to watch (except for one show, which conflicts with two others on simultaneously).
:)
Last weekend, I bought a 56", 16:9 HDTV for the living room to replace my aging 32" TV, a new progressive-scan DVD player (Toshiba 6200) to replace my perfectly good but nonprogressive Sony 7700 (moving to the bedroom; the old A120 can't play some discs), and am awaiting delivery of my Panasonic TU-HDS20 HD/OTA/DirecTV STB. I moved the non-hacked Tivo into the living room for use with the new set, but realized that as our viewing shifted from the bedroom to the living room (along with the gaming: DC and PS2), we had the same need for a second Tivo.
Rather than leaving ourselves Tivo-less in the bedroom, we went to Fry's Christmas Eve and picked up a new Sony Tivo (our first; the other two are Philips units) to use as the second living room unit. Both living room units will be getting 80GB drive additions after the 2.0 upgrade.
Just to add insult to injury, I'm expecting FedEx to drop off my Philips Pronto TSU2000 (I bought the H/K Take Control last week, but should have gone with my gut and gotten the Pronto. I guess I'll be using the Take Control in the bedroom) and my Monster Power 3500 power conditioner tomorrow.
Yes, I live and work in Silicon Valley, in the high-tech industry, and I'm in no danger of being laid off.
After 2.0's out, I may take this old Libretto CT70, buy another WaveLAN card for it, and run one of the Tivos into it for net updates. Or my old P3-500 (replaced with a Thunderbird Athlon 900MHz a few months back), so I can run both Tivos into it. I've been meaning to play around with digital convergence a bit, and having the P3 in the living room would give me an excuse to do so.
True. But we're still a long way off. Both my digital cable boxes, all 3 of my TiVos, and my HDTV converter/DirecTV tuner all need to connect to a phone outlet. Thankfully, most of them are capable of negotiating shared phoneline use correctly.
Unless and until there's a fundamental shift in thinking, and the default connectivity option in the home is wired or wireless Ethernet (or some similar layer 2 protocol, with either TCP/IP or some form of TCP/IP encapsulation), and until those same homes have adequate home-wide network security coupled with "grandmother-simple" plug-and-play configuration, analog phone connections will continue to reign.
In terms of Joe Sixpack acceptance and preparedness for fully-networked appliances, we're standing in a place similar to the early 1940's with the transition from radio to television -- it's coming, but it's a long way off, and there's going to be a lot of growing pains along the path.
Things like this add-on, and recent work replacing the default TiVo modem dial-in with straight Ethernet access (both by subverting the existing PPP config, and by building an ISA slot onto the unit and adding a regular ISA Ethernet card), demonstrate that there's a small segment of society that wants and is capable of taking advantage of such advances. But right now, that segment is EXTREMELY small.
"...but no Linux"
Errr...you're trolling. You must be. The archive's from 19_eighty_1.
Speaking as a member of WG-B, that "Sunrise + 20" proposal was most certainly NOT from "WG-B". It was from the Chair of WG-B, and from the TM lobby. WG-B wholeweartedly opposed it. If you look at the next-to-final report (the one that was originally the final report, until Palage decided that the final report should say something other than the final report did), you'll find many comments opposed to the Sunrise+20. You'll find alternatives.
Sunrise+20 was a back-room, outside-the-process idea cooked up to benefit registries and TM holders. Just like the UDRP is, which was a direct product of WG-A, and was achieved in the same manner: backroom deals, pushed through as the product of the WG, but without WG approval, and ratified by the DNSO names council against the loud outcry of the participants.
I want it to be known far and wide that the result of WG-B, and certain "results" of WG-C (to add new TLDs to the roots) are NOT the product of the WG themselves, but are products of several individuals who think the ICANN process exists to serve their specific interests.
Go read the archives, and see for yourselves. Don't sample them; read through them ALL. WG-A is supposed to be here, but mysteriously, all but a few messages have vanished. I've just noticed this, and am prepared to raise hell about it.
WG-B is here. Read through the archives, particularly at the end. Note that those who are not TM attorneys participating to protect their corporate interests are decrying the entire process. Something you'd see in the WG-A archives as well, if they still existed.
WG-C from Nov. 1999 to present.
Go. Read. Educate yourself. Make up your own mind. And if you think there's something wrong going on here, for crying out loud, GET INVOLVED!
Most of this crap has occurred because of the corporate dominance within ICANN.
Since nobody's mentioned it yet, you might want to check out OmniSky. They just finished their beta program, they're taking orders now, and are shipping in a few weeks. Inexpensive clip-on CDPD wireless 19.2kbps modem for the Palm V, full TCP/IP, unlimited service.
I just ordered mine.
Of course, the Palm V only has 2MB of RAM, unlike the Palm Vx, which can make web browsing, news reading, running a web server, and e-mailing feel a bit cramped. So I'm getting mine upgraded to 8MB next week. There are currently 3 companies who do this, and this one has gotten the best reviews and is also the cheapest. Many of the OmniSky beta testers did this.
you're kidding, right? "isn't screwing anyone over".
The UDRP. The request to WIPO to come up with a list of famous marks that will be a priori excluded from the existing and future namespace. The over-regulation of IPv6space as regards address allocation. The entire constituency model. The introduction of the GAC. The repeated, blatant, and unremorseful overstepping of power and authority boundaries. Top-down rather than bottom-up governance. The "ICANN by-laws of the week" game they play, with retroactive alteration of the by-laws to suit their needs. Their refusal to relinquish power. Their refusal to allow individuals to have any say in the process. Their catering to big corporate and Intellectual Property interests.
Either your statement was meant in jest, or you're not well-informed of ICANN's actions.
Esther Dyson was one of several people hand-picked by an unknown group and handed ICANN by Becky Burr and the US Dept. of Commerce. Nobody knows by what process Dyson was chosen, or who did the choosing.
Dyson and the other initial ICANN Board of Directors have demonstrated a distinct lack of ability to work in the open, to accept input in a bottom-up fashion, and to understand the technical aspects of the entity about which they are supposed to make decisions.
Now, in Cairo, The ICANN Board of Directors, led by Esther Dyson in this matter, decided to scrap the General Assembly process by which 9 new, individual ICANN Directors would be named, and decided to eliminate 4 of them.
Their reasoning? Becuase they're afraid of handing over control to people who "don't understand the Internet". A sad comment indeed, coming from a Board with a vested financial interest in the outcome of decisions related to namespace and IP-space, who do not have even a rudimentary understanding of that which they govern, except perhaps for Vint Cerf.
The ICANN Board of Directors was supposed to be completely elected and the original people, Dyson included, removed by September of 1999. Dyson and her cohorts have repeatedly voted themselves more years as ICANN Directors, and have both refused to relinquish control to any form of elected body, and have refused to run ICANN in the grassroots, bottom-up, narrow technical matter that the contracts with the US Government require.
That ICANN continues to exist at all is miracle, and a nightmare. That Dyson was chosen as figurehead for it and continues to lend her name to it says volumes about her character.
Actually, the Apple AirPort ***BASE STATION*** is a repackaged Lucent WaveLAN Silver. The $99 AirPort CARDS are so cheap because they're actually missing hardware. The reason those $99 cards require an iBook or certain models of Powerbook is because those models contain the rest of the hardware necessary for the AirPort card to be functional.
Let me be clear: The AirPort CARD that Apple sells at an MSRP of $99 IS NOT A FUNCTIONING Lucent WaveLAN card!
it uses SNMP though so other software should be usable. The author mentions that the Karlbridge software for Windows does everything right.
Not quite. The Karlbridge firmware is what Apple installed in the AirPort Base Stations. However, the Windows KarlBridge configurator cannot completely provision an AirPort Base Station. You cannot set up NAT or DHCP with it, and you cannot control the encryption modes.
The reason for this is: Apple (and the folks who made the KarlBridge) did some nasty stuff with the configuration. Yes, the base station responds to SNMP. However, the MIB tree via which the BS is configured is a set of 64 256-byte strings with shecksumming. To make matters worse, people are having to reverse-engineer how Apple mapped out those strings, and how the checksumming's being done.
I have been working on this for a while, as has a friend of mine (who I believe was linked to on the MSRL page against his wishes. That info is old and invalid -- people should not use it). There is working code that allows one to change most of the configuration options, but not NAT or DHCP, nor encryption. The reason for the problems with encryption is that Apple didn't follow the WEP standards, and has some unique algorithm for generating the WEP keys. They supposedly corrected this in v1.1 of the Base Station firmware, but I've yet to verify that.
Then you're making the same bad assumption that others who are coming up with these policies are making: The Net is nothing but the Web, and the Web is nothing but companies.
Here's the deal:
.com, .net, or .org), and have ramrodded through what is now being accepted as a legitimate proposal that would eliminate the possibility of new TLDs without this shift of cost and burden from the TM holder to the domain name registrar.
As a trademark (or other intellectual property) owner, you are required by US and International law to protect your TM/IP, or lose it. The law clearly and firmly places the burden of policing possible infringements on the TM owner.
This includes the time, effort, and cost involved.
There are existing services that charge a nominal fee to do domain name/trademark infringement searches. Some registrars have this as part of their business model (e.g., look at the links off of http://www.whois.net).
Now, ICANN, via Working Group B (which is stacked full of TM/IP lawyers), wants to shift that burden to the registrars themselves, eliminating that business model, and superceeding US and International trademark/intellectual property law!
The folks from Working Group B have even invaded Working Group C, the WG for the addition of new Top-Level Domains (such as a
In short, the TM holders don't like US and International law placing the burden and cost of protecting their marks on their shoulders, and have found a political venue in which they can get away with shifting this burden onto someone else.
And every single one of you who isn't in there fighting to prevent this is tacitly allowing this to happen.
If this becomes reality, ICANN will have effectively superceded worldwide laws and treaties.
And since the DNSO leading body, the "Names Council", and the ICANN Board of Directors is full of trademark/intellectual property owners and biased business owners, this stands a very good chance of happening. The only way to prevent this is for each and every one of you to GET INVOLVED.
Every time a DNS/ICANN related story comes up, myself and several others post relevant information about how you can get involved, how you can participate, and what you should be doing if you don't like or don't agree with the way these policies are being developed.
Now, here's another story, stating the truth of what I and others have been saying for $DEITY knows how long now.
I'll make this very simple:
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THIS, GET INVOLVED AND CHANGE IT!
And that doesn't mean joining the ICANN At-Large membership. It means getting involved with the Domain name Service Organization, specifically Working Groups B and C, and working to get rid of business-centric, short-sighted policies before they're enacted. In the end, it all comes down to numbers: Right now, the corporate lawyers and the businesspeople have a stronger lobby within ICANN than the individuals and the end-users do.
Don't be fooled, you will NOT have any impact on policy from the At-Large Membership. The proper venue for activism is within the DNSO working groups.
See this page for the mailing list archives of the working groups, and instructions on how to join. It's as easy as subscribing to a mailing list.
Unless and until you actually get off your ass and do something to change things, you're just going to be pissing in the wind. Slashdot is a wonderful forum, but all of you should be voicing your concerns where they matter, in the Working Groups, instead of here.
S'not a rumor. Have a look at my site, which contains APStatus, a Perl script I wrote that will report interface stats on a remote AirPort Base Station via SNMP.
I'm currently working on back-engineering the method used to provision the things so they can be installed without using a Mac.
No later than 10 hours after I submitted it my domain was active.
Then you may be interested to know that it may be possible for domains to go active much more quickly than that, and you should be questioning, not being thankful for, that 10-hour delay.
Register.com is a registrar. In order for a domain name to become active, the registry must be updated. NSI controls that registry, and handles all transactions submitted via the SRS system. Currently, that would include all ICANN-accredited registrars.
There are two reasons for delay in domain names going active:
1) Delays in the registrar submitting registrations to the SRS registry, and
2) Delays in the updating of the registry.
Normally, the delays in #1 are due to the registrar waiting and submitting an entire batch of registrations. The delays in #2 are technical limits on the speed by which changes can be made to the registry.
So, you need to ask yourself: How much of that 10 hours was due to register.com holding your registration until some later time, and how much of it was due to the time it takes for submissions via SRS to be integrated into the registry database?
You may be surprised at the answer.
NOTE:This delay is something about which you should question any prospective registrar. Some will be relatively quick, some may take days or even a week (e.g., bulkregister.com). An honest registrar should be willing to tell you how often they submit data to the registry.
First, a word about register.com. You may want to read through the DNSO archives, the IFWP list, and the DOMAIN-POLICY archives to see what register.com has been up to, particularly regarding the single-letter domains.
You may also want to have a look at their registration agreement, particularly the bit on information ownership. They own all your contact information, and can do whatever they want with it.
Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.
Others aren't any better. BulkRegister has been phone-spamming people with completely automated unsolicited phone calls, in violation of US State and Federal law.
Joker.com and the other current and past CORE registrars have had significant problems in the past, and CORE is losing registrars right and left.
Most of the registrars have had significant and in some cases highly-publicised problems interacting using the SRS -- the Shared Registry System, resulting in things like aol.com's ownership being transferred to an individual (and later changed back), and other domain names not owned by big companies not being so lucky in having their ownership info corrected.
There's a problem with CORE registrars as well...several years ago, when people were once again trying to get new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), CORE managed to have a set of 7 TLD agreed upon. CORE registrars were pre-selling registrations in these 7 TLDs last year. They've now stopped, but should those & go active, it's still unknown whether or not anyone will have a fair shot at registering within them due to these pre-sells.
I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.
If you can't or won't do that, then do the following: Find and take the time to READ each registrar's Domain Dispute Policy and Registration Agreement, and think of what it means to you if your domain name ownership is challenged. The challenges are mushrooming, and all signs point to corporations getting whatever they want. Go see the resolved UDRP cases to get a feeling for how the wind is currently blowing.
1) You've ALWAYS been able to participate in ICANN. Every time someone's posted anything related to domain policy, I've practically begged people to get involved, join working groups, and work to ensure things like the ICANN UDRP were fair to individuals. All you've ever had to do to get involved was to subscribe to a DNSO mailing list. (You can't join the ASO, but don't feel bad -- they're not letting ISPs join either.)
2) You will not legally be a "member" of anything. ICANN has gone to great lengths to ensure there is no such thing as a legal membership. In fact, they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal counsel to ensure that there's little if any accountability within ICANN at all.
3) You will not get to elect board members. You will get to elect a handful of people, who will then CHOOSE the 9 new board members, and only then with the consent of the existing board.
4) Did I mention that you've ALWAYS had the ability to participate in ICANN and have your voice heard?
5) If you join the At Large Membership without informing yourself first, you'll only be harming EVERYONE. Take some time and learn what's been going on before you jump in and implicitly support what ICANN's been up to:
Go read how WIPO is using the ICANN UDRP to enfore implicit beliefs that the Net is nothing but the web, only businesses should own domain names, and only trademark owners should have rights to those names: WIPO dispute decisions
Go read how the UDRP was created in the DNSO WG-A. Go read how corporations want to prohibit you from registering any domain name that contains a trademarked substring (e.g., whereitsatt.com contains ATT) in WG-B. Go read how members of WG-B are trying everything they can to stop the rollout of new top-level domains in WG-C. Go see how the DNSO general assembly deteriorated, destroyed itself and was censored...the GA is the precursor of the ICANN At-Large membership, and should serve as a warning to any considering joining: DNSO Archives
In short, go read up on the history of ICANN and domain name policy before you lend your name to it. Rest assured, Mike Roberts is going to take every opportunity to hold up your membership as implicit support for what ICANN's doing. And you should think long and hard about whether you do support what ICANN's been up to. It may be trendy and cool to bash NSI, but to support ICANN just because they're not NSI may be the poorest decision you've ever made.
Go see for yourself what ICANN is before you lend your name to it.
The article talks about the consumer wanting a system that comes out of the box and "just works". This isn't a bad goal to aim for, but we must ask ourselves, how do we accomplish this without sacrificing security and functionality?
Think about it: Any *NIX, out of the box, needs a root password. Part of this configuration may be what the consumer does not want to deal with. How to avoid it? Do we have distros with default passwords? Instant security hole. Do we randomly generate passwords? No, because random strings are "too hard to remember". This won't make his consumer happy.
What about the peripherals? they should be plugged in and should "just work". Should we now assume defaults for every device config? All printers are local? All modems are accessible by anyone? All monitors have a default resolution and colordepth? How do we handle people who want and/or need the functionality a *NIX provides?
So, what do we do? Perhaps the full-blown *NIX concept is not suitable for end-users. Perhaps what is needed is a very stripped, very featureless kernel, with few if any active services, and a pretty desktop. The only big issues are: Housekeeping and software installation. We create a single-user system with no security model, and try to lock down the network services are strictly as possible, then fill it with as much eye-candy as we can.
I hate for this to sound sarcastic, and I didn't sit down with the intent on writing it in this tone. The questions I ask above are honest ones: How can we satisfy the desires of this segment of the population without completely cannibalizing the entire OS model?
As much as the end-user may hate it, there will ALWAYS be configuration options that must be set, fields to be filled in, and choices to be made before the computer "just works". The question would seem to be "how we can make this exercise as friendly as possible?" while not compromising the OS.
In the end, an OS is not an appliance. At least, not a *NIX, in a multi-user, multipurpose environment. Perhaps the various Linux companies should start differentiating themselves by their ability to cater to this market. But be warned: Do not forsake security for convenience.
"Apple has already released version 1.1 of their AirPost software."
Where? It's not showing up on the TechInfo Library. A URL would be most appreciated.