RTFA: The cable was not cut, it was taken offline due to power problems.
Back-atcha. The article states that the cable may be offline due to power problem, not that it was taken offline. A rather significant difference. If you don't mind, I'm going to privately freak a bit until we find out who or what caused all these outages. If it's just incompetence, I'll be a happy panda. (Not to mention rolling my eyes at the all-to-common situation.) If it's more than just that...
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action. The fourth? The fourth is a testament to the Internet's ability to withstand damage. Even if it is the coincidence out of the bunch, that doesn't preclude enemy action. Quite the contrary, I'm afraid.:-/
I wish the US would stop trying to impose themselves on the rest of the world.
I don't think this is the U.S. The U.S. would make sure to cut all the cables at once, therefore ensuring maximum disruption and surprise at the time of the attack. The way this is being done is slow and relatively uncoordinated. Which suggests either a probing maneuver or a lack of resources.
The U.S. is fairly straightforward with its objectives. The brass doesn't like taking things slowly when it comes to war. The plan is to get in, blow stuff up, rebuild the critical infrastructure, then leave. It doesn't always work that way (e.g. Iraq), but it is the ideal scenario that every General and Admiral desires. Long and protracted wars are far too costly. Not just to the U.S. itself, but also on a personal level for the brass.
Which raises the question: Who would gain from slowly cutting international Internet access in the Middle East? The myriad of plausible answers contrasted with the lack of any solid suspects scares me a hell of a lot more than any U.S. military operations. IMHO, it's in the best interest of the U.S. to find out what is going on NOW. Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.
Suppose they begin to see over 4mbps of that traffic to itunes [...] No[w] suppose you decide to throttle the itunes to no more than 2mbps.
Then iTunes users would see 1/2 the speed they were seeing previously. Unless the routers are extremely poor at traffic management, in which case half of the users would be zipping along while the other half would be dying. Of course, traffic is not constant. So if it was the latter, the speeds would pick up during off peak hours. Thus suddenly "solving" the problem temporarily.
Neither scenario fits. Especially since some of the reports included instances of dropped connections. Which sounds a heck of a lot more like a bad route than a lame attempt at traffic shaping.
Sarcasm aside, it doesn't detract from my point. There was a misconfiguration somewhere in the chain of routers between TWC and Apple's nearest server. Maybe a bad routing table, an incorrect configuration of traffic shaping, or a router on the fritz. Either way, I seriously doubt this outage was intentional. Because if it was, it was possibly the most incompetent attempt at traffic shaping in the history of the Internet.
I'm aware of their capabilities and I can tell you the one I have worked with (Packeteer) can throttle Itunes traffic
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? That doesn't sound like successful traffic shaping to me. That sounds like a misconfiguration somewhere. If it was traffic shaping, I would expect that the speeds would drop to levels to where it would be impossible to watch a movie real-time (for example), yet possible to download it within the time-frame of a few hours. (Say, 4-8 hours as a reasonable range.)
Outright blocking a popular service like iTunes only invites unhappy customers and bad press.
How about in the future when HD movies take off [...] That would eat up huge amounts of bandwidth. Do we want to subsidize the oligarchy of Hollywood movie studios and their distributors?
Seriously... what?
I understand the words individually. But when strung together they don't seem to make any sense. What it sounds like you're saying is that HD movies willingly delivered by content providers to customers who want to pay for them somehow constitutes a greedy misuse of bandwidth by the content producers?
I could follow that argument if you were at least blaming the consumers. But the producers?
...that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Based on all the comments, I have a sneaky suspicion that it's not an attempt at active filtering, but rather a network screwup somewhere in the Texas routers. I imagine that the Apple guys will be talking to every network admin up the line until they find the one who is responsible for maintaining the malfunctioning routers. Should be back up in a few days, unless I miss my guess.
I personally am wondering what business is it of a church to host a Superbowl party?
FWIW, a church tends to be more than just a place of worship. It's also a community center. (A tradition that long predates modern community centers.) While no one is going to watch the game in the service area, churches often have a basement or some other meeting area set aside for community events. Watching the SuperBowl together qualifies as a community event, and gives families a place to watch the game together without having to visit a sports bar. (A rather rowdy place during a game like the Superbowl.)
Depends. Ever hear of FUSE? It's been showing up in quite a few distros for the capabilities it buys by running outside of kernel space. It's become so important, that it has been ported to BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.
What does it do? Why, it's a monolithic driver that provides an interface to support userspace filesystem drivers. i.e. A microkernel in practice, if not in definition. Ergo, the grandparent's point about a slow migration.
if you have verizon or sprint neither one of them supports GSM cards.
That's because Sprint and Verizon are 3G carriers. Which is much closer to what the Japanese have. (Though as you pointed out, there are portability advantages to the 2G GSM networks.)
If you have orange(UK) you can swap your sim card and use your phone with t-mobile in germany without roaming charges.
I know. T-Mobile is a German company that setup shop here in the US. As a result, they allow international use of their networks when traveling abroad. I'm not an expert or anything, but I believe the only reason for the SIM card change is to tell your phone to shift frequencies into the European range. (Most GSM phones today are Quad Band, meaning that they will work in nearly all GSM countries.)
Getting back to your point... um... I'm not really sure what your point was?
In europe desipte having massive roaming charges everyone uses GSM phones. you can take your phone anywhere, swap out your normal SIM card and put in a local prepaid one and continue on.
Ummm... wtf? We do the exact same thing here in the US. For example, when my wife needed a replacement Razr (something blew internally), I saved the SIM card and stuck it in an old Nokia we had lying around. My wife continued to use the Nokia until her new Razr arrived. I popped the SIM card in the replacement phone, and she was up and running again.
I made sure to store her phone #s to the SIM card as well, so that she would have them on the other two handsets. I backed the other data up using a USB mini cable, which I was then able to plunk into the new Razr when she got it.
We may be lagging with Japan, but I really don't understand your comparison with Europe.
Have we really become such fat lazy luddites that we will reject anything we do not understand, on the basis of an infinitesmally-small risk to our (relatively) decadent and luxurious life?
That's a great plan! What could possibly go wrong?
Now you're just being argumentative. Why not mention the Jaguar CD, the PC-FX, and the never-delivered Laser Disc player for the 7800 while we're at it?
The answer to your question is right in the article you linked to. Commodore went belly up before the CD32 had an opportunity to make a lasting impression on the market.
If you want my opinion, however, the CD32 was doomed from the start. Its basis in Amiga hardware was an excellent start, but it was underpowered for 3D graphics work. Since the market had already rejected the idea of using video as a method of making games more interactive, that only left 3D graphics. When one considers that DOOM and the CD32 were released simultaneously, it becomes easy to see that the CD32 was not going to be able to go the distance in the next generation of console wars.
Which isn't to say that it wasn't a strong competitor as a 2D console of its time. (e.g. It was very popular in Europe.) It simply wasn't what the market was looking for in a CD-ROM based console.:-)
does this explain why I get phantom rings in my leg, even when I left my phone at home?
I don't know about you, but I do occasionally get phantom vibrations. There are times when some other minor vibration being transmitted through the building I'm in causes me to look down at my cell phone to figure out if it just started ringing or not. Drives me nuts. Especially since Razr vibrates are a bit on the chinzey side*.
* I'd get Moss to boost the vibe on the phone, but I'm a bit scared after what he managed to do with Roy's ROKR.:-P
Yes and no. I'm actually referring to the mechanism being used in support of communication. I don't think "move my hands to type h-a-n-d-s". I think "hands" while focused on "communicate with typing" and my body does most of the rest of the work automatically. What this study is showing is that the action of saying "hands", the action of writing "hands", and the action of typing "hands" are all related on a basic command-level. Your brain gives the command with the proper I/O routines selected, and out pop the results.:-)
Competent driving requires time and practice...repetitive situations that are eventually rehearsed subconsciously (to the point of prediction) that make it appear that the driver is adept, when in actuality, there is a specific percentage of basic scenarios that have simply been memorized.
Indeed. Just like competent walking or running requires time and practice. Repetitive situations that are eventually rehearsed subconsciously (to the point of prediction) that make it appear that the individual is adept at locomotion, when in actuality, there is a specific percentage of basic scenarios that have simply been memorized.
Yet I can still attempt a long jump or attempt to skid my car in the snow without the memorized steps. I won't be very good at either one my first time out, but I'll "get the hang of it" after a while.
You can't take a driver used to a sub-compact and expect them to apply their familiarity with a small sedan to a large tractor-trailer, as an example.
Hey, you try waking up the next morning a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier, and lets see how well you take your first steps, Mister!;-)
So, essentially, a computer is an extension of my body?
Sure, why not? For a trained operator, the keyboard and mouse become second nature. Staring at the monitor, the operator learns to block out visual information outside of the screen. Many users even use headphones, further tying them to the machine.
I can tell you that when my fingers dance across the keyboard, I'm not really putting a whole lot of thought into the keyboard. Instead, I'm putting thought into the words I'm attempting to type, or the command I'm attempting to communicate with the combination of keys.
It's interesting to have scientific confirmation of this. I've often considered how it is that humans are so well adapted to controlling vehicles. (e.g. driving a car, flying a plane, etc.) It didn't take much consideration to come to the conclusion that the vehicle becomes an extension of the driver. You stop thinking in terms of your physical body's size and start thinking in terms of your vehicle's size. You stop paying attention to the sensations on your skin and start paying attention to the vibrations and force feedback that are transmitted through the vehicle. Even your visual patterns change as you begin checking various mirrors, gauges, windows, and other situational monitoring devices.
Perhaps nothing is more telling than the data published on crashes. I don't have the figures in front of me right now, but I recall that you're significantly more likely to survive a crash if you're sitting on the driver's side (either the driver himself or the passenger in the back) than if you're sitting in the passenger seat. When this was investigated, it was found that the natural (and often unconcious) reaction in a crash situation is for the driver to turn his side of the vehicle away from the situation in an attempt to protect himself. Sort of the vehicular equivalent of throwing up your arms to stop a blow to the face.
1. The automation of a catapult launch is a bit different from an autopilot. The pilot (AFAIK) still controls the plane once it leaves the deck. The computers just control the various factors of the plane's configuration necessary for a successful catapult. Once it's off the deck, it's still up to the pilot to keep it in the air and make the necessary clearing turns. Think of it more as a safety feature built into the fly-by-wire.
You can read one of the patents for such a system here:
Even during the Playstation's worst days they couldn't match the NES for the complete mass of shitty games foisted on the public.
You obviously don't remember the Playstation's worst days then.
Rayman Rush? Bubsy 3D? Spawn: The Eternal? KISS Pinball? Mortal Kombat: Special Forces? Ugh.
NES games usually had some sort of redeeming qualities. Even the horrendous Action 52 is remembered in the way one might remember a B-Movie. The Playstation library? It seems so good because most of it was forgotten.
Slashdot Mirror
I presume you're unfamiliar with political casualties known as "scapegoats"?
Operation Just Cause
Operation Desert Storm
Operation Urgent Fury
History rarely remembers the successful campaigns. Mostly, we remember the screw-ups. Unfortunately, the brass remembers it the other way around.
Back-atcha. The article states that the cable may be offline due to power problem, not that it was taken offline. A rather significant difference. If you don't mind, I'm going to privately freak a bit until we find out who or what caused all these outages. If it's just incompetence, I'll be a happy panda. (Not to mention rolling my eyes at the all-to-common situation.) If it's more than just that...
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action. The fourth? The fourth is a testament to the Internet's ability to withstand damage. Even if it is the coincidence out of the bunch, that doesn't preclude enemy action. Quite the contrary, I'm afraid.
I don't think this is the U.S. The U.S. would make sure to cut all the cables at once, therefore ensuring maximum disruption and surprise at the time of the attack. The way this is being done is slow and relatively uncoordinated. Which suggests either a probing maneuver or a lack of resources.
The U.S. is fairly straightforward with its objectives. The brass doesn't like taking things slowly when it comes to war. The plan is to get in, blow stuff up, rebuild the critical infrastructure, then leave. It doesn't always work that way (e.g. Iraq), but it is the ideal scenario that every General and Admiral desires. Long and protracted wars are far too costly. Not just to the U.S. itself, but also on a personal level for the brass.
Which raises the question: Who would gain from slowly cutting international Internet access in the Middle East? The myriad of plausible answers contrasted with the lack of any solid suspects scares me a hell of a lot more than any U.S. military operations. IMHO, it's in the best interest of the U.S. to find out what is going on NOW. Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.
Then iTunes users would see 1/2 the speed they were seeing previously. Unless the routers are extremely poor at traffic management, in which case half of the users would be zipping along while the other half would be dying. Of course, traffic is not constant. So if it was the latter, the speeds would pick up during off peak hours. Thus suddenly "solving" the problem temporarily.
Neither scenario fits. Especially since some of the reports included instances of dropped connections. Which sounds a heck of a lot more like a bad route than a lame attempt at traffic shaping.
You don't say. Why, I never even noticed.
Sarcasm aside, it doesn't detract from my point. There was a misconfiguration somewhere in the chain of routers between TWC and Apple's nearest server. Maybe a bad routing table, an incorrect configuration of traffic shaping, or a router on the fritz. Either way, I seriously doubt this outage was intentional. Because if it was, it was possibly the most incompetent attempt at traffic shaping in the history of the Internet.
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? That doesn't sound like successful traffic shaping to me. That sounds like a misconfiguration somewhere. If it was traffic shaping, I would expect that the speeds would drop to levels to where it would be impossible to watch a movie real-time (for example), yet possible to download it within the time-frame of a few hours. (Say, 4-8 hours as a reasonable range.)
Outright blocking a popular service like iTunes only invites unhappy customers and bad press.
Seriously... what?
I understand the words individually. But when strung together they don't seem to make any sense. What it sounds like you're saying is that HD movies willingly delivered by content providers to customers who want to pay for them somehow constitutes a greedy misuse of bandwidth by the content producers?
I could follow that argument if you were at least blaming the consumers. But the producers?
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.
Maybe I'm missing something here?
I suppose I should have read the last few comments. It sounds like the crisis is already over and that people are getting back through.
...that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Based on all the comments, I have a sneaky suspicion that it's not an attempt at active filtering, but rather a network screwup somewhere in the Texas routers. I imagine that the Apple guys will be talking to every network admin up the line until they find the one who is responsible for maintaining the malfunctioning routers. Should be back up in a few days, unless I miss my guess.
FWIW, a church tends to be more than just a place of worship. It's also a community center. (A tradition that long predates modern community centers.) While no one is going to watch the game in the service area, churches often have a basement or some other meeting area set aside for community events. Watching the SuperBowl together qualifies as a community event, and gives families a place to watch the game together without having to visit a sports bar. (A rather rowdy place during a game like the Superbowl.)
Depends. Ever hear of FUSE? It's been showing up in quite a few distros for the capabilities it buys by running outside of kernel space. It's become so important, that it has been ported to BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.
What does it do? Why, it's a monolithic driver that provides an interface to support userspace filesystem drivers. i.e. A microkernel in practice, if not in definition. Ergo, the grandparent's point about a slow migration.
That's because Sprint and Verizon are 3G carriers. Which is much closer to what the Japanese have. (Though as you pointed out, there are portability advantages to the 2G GSM networks.)
I know. T-Mobile is a German company that setup shop here in the US. As a result, they allow international use of their networks when traveling abroad. I'm not an expert or anything, but I believe the only reason for the SIM card change is to tell your phone to shift frequencies into the European range. (Most GSM phones today are Quad Band, meaning that they will work in nearly all GSM countries.)
Getting back to your point... um... I'm not really sure what your point was?
Ummm... wtf? We do the exact same thing here in the US. For example, when my wife needed a replacement Razr (something blew internally), I saved the SIM card and stuck it in an old Nokia we had lying around. My wife continued to use the Nokia until her new Razr arrived. I popped the SIM card in the replacement phone, and she was up and running again.
I made sure to store her phone #s to the SIM card as well, so that she would have them on the other two handsets. I backed the other data up using a USB mini cable, which I was then able to plunk into the new Razr when she got it.
We may be lagging with Japan, but I really don't understand your comparison with Europe.
That's a great plan! What could possibly go wrong?
(Ow! Ow! Ow! I'm just kidding! Ow!)
Now you're just being argumentative. Why not mention the Jaguar CD, the PC-FX, and the never-delivered Laser Disc player for the 7800 while we're at it?
:-)
The answer to your question is right in the article you linked to. Commodore went belly up before the CD32 had an opportunity to make a lasting impression on the market.
If you want my opinion, however, the CD32 was doomed from the start. Its basis in Amiga hardware was an excellent start, but it was underpowered for 3D graphics work. Since the market had already rejected the idea of using video as a method of making games more interactive, that only left 3D graphics. When one considers that DOOM and the CD32 were released simultaneously, it becomes easy to see that the CD32 was not going to be able to go the distance in the next generation of console wars.
Which isn't to say that it wasn't a strong competitor as a 2D console of its time. (e.g. It was very popular in Europe.) It simply wasn't what the market was looking for in a CD-ROM based console.
Romanes Eunt Domus :-P
I don't know about you, but I do occasionally get phantom vibrations. There are times when some other minor vibration being transmitted through the building I'm in causes me to look down at my cell phone to figure out if it just started ringing or not. Drives me nuts. Especially since Razr vibrates are a bit on the chinzey side*.
* I'd get Moss to boost the vibe on the phone, but I'm a bit scared after what he managed to do with Roy's ROKR.
Yes and no. I'm actually referring to the mechanism being used in support of communication. I don't think "move my hands to type h-a-n-d-s". I think "hands" while focused on "communicate with typing" and my body does most of the rest of the work automatically. What this study is showing is that the action of saying "hands", the action of writing "hands", and the action of typing "hands" are all related on a basic command-level. Your brain gives the command with the proper I/O routines selected, and out pop the results. :-)
Yet I can still attempt a long jump or attempt to skid my car in the snow without the memorized steps. I won't be very good at either one my first time out, but I'll "get the hang of it" after a while.Hey, you try waking up the next morning a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier, and lets see how well you take your first steps, Mister!
Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Sure, why not? For a trained operator, the keyboard and mouse become second nature. Staring at the monitor, the operator learns to block out visual information outside of the screen. Many users even use headphones, further tying them to the machine.
I can tell you that when my fingers dance across the keyboard, I'm not really putting a whole lot of thought into the keyboard. Instead, I'm putting thought into the words I'm attempting to type, or the command I'm attempting to communicate with the combination of keys.
It's interesting to have scientific confirmation of this. I've often considered how it is that humans are so well adapted to controlling vehicles. (e.g. driving a car, flying a plane, etc.) It didn't take much consideration to come to the conclusion that the vehicle becomes an extension of the driver. You stop thinking in terms of your physical body's size and start thinking in terms of your vehicle's size. You stop paying attention to the sensations on your skin and start paying attention to the vibrations and force feedback that are transmitted through the vehicle. Even your visual patterns change as you begin checking various mirrors, gauges, windows, and other situational monitoring devices.
Perhaps nothing is more telling than the data published on crashes. I don't have the figures in front of me right now, but I recall that you're significantly more likely to survive a crash if you're sitting on the driver's side (either the driver himself or the passenger in the back) than if you're sitting in the passenger seat. When this was investigated, it was found that the natural (and often unconcious) reaction in a crash situation is for the driver to turn his side of the vehicle away from the situation in an attempt to protect himself. Sort of the vehicular equivalent of throwing up your arms to stop a blow to the face.
Couple of things:
:-)
1. The automation of a catapult launch is a bit different from an autopilot. The pilot (AFAIK) still controls the plane once it leaves the deck. The computers just control the various factors of the plane's configuration necessary for a successful catapult. Once it's off the deck, it's still up to the pilot to keep it in the air and make the necessary clearing turns. Think of it more as a safety feature built into the fly-by-wire.
You can read one of the patents for such a system here:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6793176.html
2. On the subject of magnesium, I think you might find the NeXT Cube burning story interesting. Linky:
http://www.simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html
In particular, you'll note how amazingly difficult it was to get the blasted thing ignited.
You obviously don't remember the Playstation's worst days then.
Rayman Rush? Bubsy 3D? Spawn: The Eternal? KISS Pinball? Mortal Kombat: Special Forces? Ugh.
NES games usually had some sort of redeeming qualities. Even the horrendous Action 52 is remembered in the way one might remember a B-Movie. The Playstation library? It seems so good because most of it was forgotten.