One place to start reading about the discussion of peer review w.r.t. online journals (and a lot of other stuff about the relationship between scholarly writing and publishers) would be Stevan Harnad's e-prints archive:
A critical part of the reliability of a packet network is redundant routes. Anybody who provides an Internet service and has everything running through one pipe, or one upstream provider, needs to rethink his business plan.
Now, the *subscriber's* ISP is another story. The path from the subscriber to the VoIP provider is analogous to the cable between the subscriber's phone and the service entrance, where ownership passes from the subscriber to the telco. The telco is not responsible for interruption of service when my son snips the cable off the back of the phone; that's my problem (and his!) A VoIP provider should be responsible only from the point at which the traffic enters his facilities, but he *should* be responsible for maintaining generally accepted standards for common-carrier voice services from that point until it leaves his facilities, *not excluding* internal connectivity hired out to others. The provider needs to negotiate appropriate service guarantees with any third party that carries the traffic "within" the provider's operations.
That's gonna cost more, and that's likely why the providers don't want to do it. But you know what? An amazing notion will emerge: simulating circuit switching costs roughly as much as actually providing circuit switching, when you have to deliver the same level of service. *That*'s the real killer: when VoIP is built to meet the same standards as circuit switching, most of the cost saving will evaporate. The telcos are already running internally on technology roughly equivalent to IP but designed from the ground up for the peculiar needs of voice traffic. There is very little inefficiency left to squeeze out after 100 years of improvement.
Obviously it's 3,600 seconds, same as everywhere else in the Universe. That is, the amount of time it takes for light to travel (300,000 - epsilon)km, 3600 times. Silly humans.
A more useful question would be, "what is a useful way to divide up the Martian day?" The obvious answer is 10 decads, each composed of 100 centads.:-)
You laugh, but some time ago we actually built a new datacenter which was initially designed with cubicles facing each other across a single terminal on a lazy-Susan tray. When we saw it, the programmers got together and convinced management to order more terminals and wall panels, *that* quickly. We had to install the walls ourselves, but I think that productivity was up that week nevertheless.
Well, it's a case of what the layman means when he says, "I know," being nothing like what the scientist means when he says, "I know." We all "knew" this, but now there are measurements to demonstrate it.
Yeah, until some PHB decides that, if 2 monitors = productivity gain, 4 monitors = 2x productivity gain, and I wind up with more monitors than I can attend to. Like the famous Western Electric study where they kept tinkering with the lights until they discovered that the productivity gain came from workers feeling more appreciated because somebody was always coming 'round to adjust the lights, and was not correlated to the experimental parameter at all.
That said, I'm not surprised at this result. One monitor simply can't have eight or ten pages usefully viewable at the same time, which is the way I work when I'm deep in the coding and a major reason that I still prefer paper documents for serious creative work. I've often said that what I need is not an ugrade from 17" to 19" and 1024x768 to 1280x1024, but one to 4'x3' at 10240x7680. (Or VR goggles and gloves that can simulate a wall-sized display and the keyboard to drive it....:-)
It's not impossible or even unreasonable to require telephone service providers to conform to telephone service standards. It's unsafe to let them crawl out of support for the 911 system, for example. And remember, the Internet exists because DARPA was charged to create a communication network that would be *more* reliable than the existing telephone lines.
Some needs for regulation are already identified: features and guarantees that telephone subscribers have come to believe are basic standards.
We need to disentangle several issues here:
o Standards of service and support.
o Money.
o Fair play.
Once you see them separately, you can decide separately whether and how to regulate them. I'm willing to discuss the latter two, but I will not budge from the first.
I'm sorry to hear that. I like my consistent circuit-switched connection just fine. I don't need SSB-like fades and dropouts, thank you.
BTW you missed one thing you can do when your primary revenue stream evaporates: buy a big chunk of the guys who are evaporating it and live off *their* growing revenue stream.
I'm trying to imagine how the telcos will move their infrastructure to their IP networks, seeing as how their IP networks run on top of the current infrastructure. Voice is *already* data by the time it leaves the line card, and as far as that OC48 is concerned cells is cells.
"My understanding is that there are certain requirements and expectancies from phone companies that aren't expected from ISPs. Services like 911, efforts to maintain uptime and reliability, etc."
Sounds good to me. Why don't we want those things? Why is it bad to regulate a telephone company as if it were a telephone company?
1) There's nothing wrong with SiteFinder. What was wrong was unilaterally changing the meaning of all DNS queries regardless of purpose, in order to force us all to go there whenever we fat-finger a URL, breaking the other 65534 Internet protocols in the process.
2) Oh, boy, let's also stop requiring manufacturers to make screws with standardized threads-per-inch and pipes in standard sizes. We've been crushing innovation. Let gas stations sell 30-octane fuel if they like -- shoot, don't even require it to be gasoline. Throw out those anti-business laws that forbid the "extension" of flour with sawdust. Eliminate the unnecessary burden that shoes must be manufactured in some specific size. Who cares if nothing fits or works, so long as we have Shiny New Products introduced every 28 nanoseconds?
Unfortunately, believing in a specific vision was what made so many tech companies great to begin with. Change the vision, and maybe your company makes more business sense but now the customers feel you don't care anymore. I lost interest in DEC when the new management made it plain that what they believed in most strongly was money, and apparently a lot of other people did the same. (Then again, DG's very first ad. said, "we intend to make a lot of money." Go figure.)
Maybe to be a great tech company, it's necessary to openly declare that "we're gonna push this vision to the limit, then cash out and try something else." Many visions have limited lifetimes.
The support package that came with the VAX 9000 included Symptom Directed Diagnosis daemons that would automatically call Field Service when a component was about to blow. You might not know anything was amiss until FS called to schedule installation of the replacement. Now, this was automatic failure reporting for hardware, rather than software, but I don't see any essential difference in the phone-home idea. (Mmmm, VAXsim, SPEAR, it all comes back to me now....)
And then there's the TalkBack stuff that's been in Netscape/Mozilla for aeons....
People have been doing that with audio tape for decades. There are audio players which even transpose the pitch back down to nearly normal. There's a fair body of research on time-compressed audio comprehension, and it should be applicable to video since maybe 90% of a video lecture is just a talking head with no real visual content anyway.
Unfortunately for me, my learning style would work much better with a book than with either electronic medium.:-/
*sigh* Now they'll have to put APA displays on microwaves so they can bluescreen.:-{
Microcontrollers? We don't need no stinkin' microcontrollers! An oven is simple enough to just work out the logic and wire it up. These days I suppose you'd use a PLA or something, but back when all we had was stone knives and bearskins nobody thought it was hard to design logic for something that simple.
Sorry, but you can't get less CO(2) from fuel cell consumption of methane than is produced by ordinary combustion, unless there is something else to take the carbon away. In fact, you ought to get *more* CO(2) from the fuel cell than from a piston engine, since the carbon can't deposit on the underside of the cylinder head or make soot. OTOH nearly none of it escapes as CO, which is better I suppose.:-)
Combustion *does* produce NO(x) that you don't get from H(2) fuel cells, so the total pollutant mass emitted by fuel cells is probably less. But don't take your methane-powered fuel cells to a conference on greenhouse gas reduction and expect to be praised.
Open Source to the rescue! Require that construction and operating plans be, not only reviewed by licensing boards, but *published* throughout the affected area. "With a million eyeballs all problems are shallow."
I dunno, I think the answer is to place a wind turbine in front of each and every pundit who makes a living by predicting doom from a new cause every day. Trouble is, we'd have to build giant resistor farms to soak up the leftover power!
Seriously I'd take hydrogen quite seriously if they gave up the dumb idea of making it from fossil fuel by removing the carbon as CO2. Forget that "independent of the power grid", though; instead we'll be dependent on the pipeline grid. And the operators will try to run it on the cheap, and it'll wear out and break down for lack of maintenance or robust design, and we'll be having this same conversation in another 20 years over how civilization could be destroyed by a few pipeline failures. We still need to work out a way to expose weaknesses in the design of public utilities *before* they explode.
"You can't ban free speech, even if 50 million want it to be banned."
This has no connection with free speech. Advertisers are still free to buy time on TV and radio, or space in newspapers and on billboards, to say exactly the same thing they want to tell me by telephone.
What they are *not* free to do is to invade my home without my permission. If they showed up physically and refused to leave, I could call the police and have them removed. An enforceable do-not-call list is the equivalent of laws against trespass, and it's all we've got.
Slashdot Mirror
One place to start reading about the discussion of peer review w.r.t. online journals (and a lot of other stuff about the relationship between scholarly writing and publishers) would be Stevan Harnad's e-prints archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html
...they could always try offering better service and better prices.
Naaah.
"A DDoS can knock down entire ISPs."
[Mama Mousekewitz voice] You have only *one* ISP?
A critical part of the reliability of a packet network is redundant routes. Anybody who provides an Internet service and has everything running through one pipe, or one upstream provider, needs to rethink his business plan.
Now, the *subscriber's* ISP is another story. The path from the subscriber to the VoIP provider is analogous to the cable between the subscriber's phone and the service entrance, where ownership passes from the subscriber to the telco. The telco is not responsible for interruption of service when my son snips the cable off the back of the phone; that's my problem (and his!) A VoIP provider should be responsible only from the point at which the traffic enters his facilities, but he *should* be responsible for maintaining generally accepted standards for common-carrier voice services from that point until it leaves his facilities, *not excluding* internal connectivity hired out to others. The provider needs to negotiate appropriate service guarantees with any third party that carries the traffic "within" the provider's operations.
That's gonna cost more, and that's likely why the providers don't want to do it. But you know what? An amazing notion will emerge: simulating circuit switching costs roughly as much as actually providing circuit switching, when you have to deliver the same level of service. *That*'s the real killer: when VoIP is built to meet the same standards as circuit switching, most of the cost saving will evaporate. The telcos are already running internally on technology roughly equivalent to IP but designed from the ground up for the peculiar needs of voice traffic. There is very little inefficiency left to squeeze out after 100 years of improvement.
Obviously it's 3,600 seconds, same as everywhere else in the Universe. That is, the amount of time it takes for light to travel (300,000 - epsilon)km, 3600 times. Silly humans.
:-)
A more useful question would be, "what is a useful way to divide up the Martian day?" The obvious answer is 10 decads, each composed of 100 centads.
"...Rosetta stone."
Didn't you read "Omnilingual"? Send them an elementary math textbook, dude!
You laugh, but some time ago we actually built a new datacenter which was initially designed with cubicles facing each other across a single terminal on a lazy-Susan tray. When we saw it, the programmers got together and convinced management to order more terminals and wall panels, *that* quickly. We had to install the walls ourselves, but I think that productivity was up that week nevertheless.
Well, it's a case of what the layman means when he says, "I know," being nothing like what the scientist means when he says, "I know." We all "knew" this, but now there are measurements to demonstrate it.
Yeah, until some PHB decides that, if 2 monitors = productivity gain, 4 monitors = 2x productivity gain, and I wind up with more monitors than I can attend to. Like the famous Western Electric study where they kept tinkering with the lights until they discovered that the productivity gain came from workers feeling more appreciated because somebody was always coming 'round to adjust the lights, and was not correlated to the experimental parameter at all.
:-)
That said, I'm not surprised at this result. One monitor simply can't have eight or ten pages usefully viewable at the same time, which is the way I work when I'm deep in the coding and a major reason that I still prefer paper documents for serious creative work. I've often said that what I need is not an ugrade from 17" to 19" and 1024x768 to 1280x1024, but one to 4'x3' at 10240x7680. (Or VR goggles and gloves that can simulate a wall-sized display and the keyboard to drive it....
It's not impossible or even unreasonable to require telephone service providers to conform to telephone service standards. It's unsafe to let them crawl out of support for the 911 system, for example. And remember, the Internet exists because DARPA was charged to create a communication network that would be *more* reliable than the existing telephone lines.
Some needs for regulation are already identified: features and guarantees that telephone subscribers have come to believe are basic standards.
We need to disentangle several issues here:
o Standards of service and support.
o Money.
o Fair play.
Once you see them separately, you can decide separately whether and how to regulate them. I'm willing to discuss the latter two, but I will not budge from the first.
I'm sorry to hear that. I like my consistent circuit-switched connection just fine. I don't need SSB-like fades and dropouts, thank you.
BTW you missed one thing you can do when your primary revenue stream evaporates: buy a big chunk of the guys who are evaporating it and live off *their* growing revenue stream.
I'm trying to imagine how the telcos will move their infrastructure to their IP networks, seeing as how their IP networks run on top of the current infrastructure. Voice is *already* data by the time it leaves the line card, and as far as that OC48 is concerned cells is cells.
"My understanding is that there are certain requirements and expectancies from phone companies that aren't expected from ISPs. Services like 911, efforts to maintain uptime and reliability, etc."
Sounds good to me. Why don't we want those things? Why is it bad to regulate a telephone company as if it were a telephone company?
"The only people claiming that their "innovation" is at risk are those who *aren't* innovating."
Ha, there's even a proverb: "those who talk about it the most, do it the least."
I dunno, if I wanted the reference on makefiles I'd enter 'man make'.
Two thoughts:
1) There's nothing wrong with SiteFinder. What was wrong was unilaterally changing the meaning of all DNS queries regardless of purpose, in order to force us all to go there whenever we fat-finger a URL, breaking the other 65534 Internet protocols in the process.
2) Oh, boy, let's also stop requiring manufacturers to make screws with standardized threads-per-inch and pipes in standard sizes. We've been crushing innovation. Let gas stations sell 30-octane fuel if they like -- shoot, don't even require it to be gasoline. Throw out those anti-business laws that forbid the "extension" of flour with sawdust. Eliminate the unnecessary burden that shoes must be manufactured in some specific size. Who cares if nothing fits or works, so long as we have Shiny New Products introduced every 28 nanoseconds?
Unfortunately, believing in a specific vision was what made so many tech companies great to begin with. Change the vision, and maybe your company makes more business sense but now the customers feel you don't care anymore. I lost interest in DEC when the new management made it plain that what they believed in most strongly was money, and apparently a lot of other people did the same. (Then again, DG's very first ad. said, "we intend to make a lot of money." Go figure.)
Maybe to be a great tech company, it's necessary to openly declare that "we're gonna push this vision to the limit, then cash out and try something else." Many visions have limited lifetimes.
The support package that came with the VAX 9000 included Symptom Directed Diagnosis daemons that would automatically call Field Service when a component was about to blow. You might not know anything was amiss until FS called to schedule installation of the replacement. Now, this was automatic failure reporting for hardware, rather than software, but I don't see any essential difference in the phone-home idea. (Mmmm, VAXsim, SPEAR, it all comes back to me now....)
And then there's the TalkBack stuff that's been in Netscape/Mozilla for aeons....
People have been doing that with audio tape for decades. There are audio players which even transpose the pitch back down to nearly normal. There's a fair body of research on time-compressed audio comprehension, and it should be applicable to video since maybe 90% of a video lecture is just a talking head with no real visual content anyway.
:-/
Unfortunately for me, my learning style would work much better with a book than with either electronic medium.
*sigh* Now they'll have to put APA displays on microwaves so they can bluescreen. :-{
Microcontrollers? We don't need no stinkin' microcontrollers! An oven is simple enough to just work out the logic and wire it up. These days I suppose you'd use a PLA or something, but back when all we had was stone knives and bearskins nobody thought it was hard to design logic for something that simple.
Sorry, but you can't get less CO(2) from fuel cell consumption of methane than is produced by ordinary combustion, unless there is something else to take the carbon away. In fact, you ought to get *more* CO(2) from the fuel cell than from a piston engine, since the carbon can't deposit on the underside of the cylinder head or make soot. OTOH nearly none of it escapes as CO, which is better I suppose. :-)
Combustion *does* produce NO(x) that you don't get from H(2) fuel cells, so the total pollutant mass emitted by fuel cells is probably less. But don't take your methane-powered fuel cells to a conference on greenhouse gas reduction and expect to be praised.
Open Source to the rescue! Require that construction and operating plans be, not only reviewed by licensing boards, but *published* throughout the affected area. "With a million eyeballs all problems are shallow."
:-)
1/2
"use natural gas in a pollution free process"
Read that again. Natural gas is mainly methane. Where does the carbon go?
I dunno, I think the answer is to place a wind turbine in front of each and every pundit who makes a living by predicting doom from a new cause every day. Trouble is, we'd have to build giant resistor farms to soak up the leftover power!
Seriously I'd take hydrogen quite seriously if they gave up the dumb idea of making it from fossil fuel by removing the carbon as CO2. Forget that "independent of the power grid", though; instead we'll be dependent on the pipeline grid. And the operators will try to run it on the cheap, and it'll wear out and break down for lack of maintenance or robust design, and we'll be having this same conversation in another 20 years over how civilization could be destroyed by a few pipeline failures. We still need to work out a way to expose weaknesses in the design of public utilities *before* they explode.
" Of course, you always have the right to leave your phone off the hook when you're eating dinner."
Yes, I just love listening to the off-hook screamer for minutes on end before the sneak-current interrupter disables my line.
"You can't ban free speech, even if 50 million want it to be banned."
This has no connection with free speech. Advertisers are still free to buy time on TV and radio, or space in newspapers and on billboards, to say exactly the same thing they want to tell me by telephone.
What they are *not* free to do is to invade my home without my permission. If they showed up physically and refused to leave, I could call the police and have them removed. An enforceable do-not-call list is the equivalent of laws against trespass, and it's all we've got.
Hear, hear. Clearly pointing out a problem is always useful. My thanks, Mr. Gutmann.