Gleick knows his technology, but he's spreading a couple of myths in the middle of a really interesting discussion on namespace and trademarks.
"...a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box..."
Paul Vixie posted this message on the IP list a few months ago to dispute that. There are many root nameservers, not just Network Solutions'.
"The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network..."
Actually, the root nameservers communicate their mappings to each other for start of authority (SOA), but they don't propagate address changes.
I've had to explain this to many, many fellow reporters. DNS is a retrieve and cache on demand system. Browser says: what's slashdot.org? Resolver climbs the chain of authority and back down, retrieves the address information, provides it to the browser, and caches it locally for a period of time (or not, depending on the OS).
The next query after the cache expires retrieves fresh information. Updates to DNS records don't propagate: they only take affect on the next query after no cached information is found.
Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
Very likely Twid was the person who asked that question. I've been at several events that Cory has spoken at and know him reasonably well. He always engages, not lectures. He always answers, not hectors. So either it was a rare moment or the question was offensive or stupid. Or I don't know Cory as well as I think I do from my several experiences with seeing him answer dozens of questions from audiences that ranged from sympathetic to vaguely hostile.
As I pointed out in a blog entry today, Real's chairman and CEO (and founder) is also a minority owner of The Seattle Mariners. Thus, by Real suing MLB, Glaser is -- in part -- suing himself. Why are no reporters covering this aspect?
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't let authors add explanatory text and it's hard to get changes made.
An easier example is that some people accuse the book of NOT including things that are in the book -- in some cases covered in 80 pages in the book.
Or one reader wrote to say that 32 pages from the book were missing -- don't buy it! It turned out one carton was faulty and tracked down. If the reader had written Peachpit, us, or Amazon, it would have been instantly replaced without shipping charges.
Should that remain as a review of the book forever?
I used to run the review system at Amazon (96-97) and we did get way too many fake author reviews and interviews, even back in 1997.
I had put in place a system later dropped that had the reviews checked by human beings for sense (not content) before they went live. Of course, with thousands of reviews posted each day, that became untenable.
There's no good way to build a system that can't be gamed.
I'll out myself: I've asked for "bad reviews to be removed from my books -- but we're defining bad differently. I never ask for factually correct critiques of my work to be removed, but I have seen an unfortunate trend to have reviews posted that talk outside of the book, critiquing what the book is not when the book clearly doesn't say it is.
For instance, a book I co-wrote on GoLive was criticized for not explaining at length how to install, configure, and run database systems like MySQL and Microsoft SQL. Beyond the scope of the book, and not fair comment. (We had included 10 pages on the basics, too.)
In other cases, if people don't like my writing or they attack the words, that's what the reviews are far and I don't complain
Very small point, but the text that describes this story is actually from my site, Wi-Fi Networking News. We're not claiming to have written deathless prose, but the text of the submission is from here, where we wrote about this event on Jan. 25.
I'm not asking for traffic, apologies, or whatever, but when you write something and see someone else's name attached to it, it feels strange.
If they buy SCO, then they're using their monopoly power, which could be used against them in a court of law. if they fund SCO's fight, then SCO gets to take the blame.
Space is finite, so reducing your space needs by 2/3rds and reducing your expensive air-conditioning budget by some amount is actually a huge argument in favor of upgrading. The Xserves are cheaper cycle for cycle than the Power Mac G5s, too.
The other issue: with 2/3rds of your space free, you can wait for faster G5s to appear and slot those in with very small amounts of disruption. Or a grant comes through for a $1,000,000 for more computers -- boom, you're done. No lengthy process of finding more space, spending more to build out a/c, etc.
There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent worldwide so far on building out for-fee hotspots that generate relatively small amounts of money (tens of millions a year). However, the commitments by US cellular carriers and overseas are in the $100Ms more, and whether the hotspot market for money fails or succeeds, it's an industry: specialized products, large venture-capital companies, existing companies entering the market. Even if hotspots wind up free, there's a ton of infrastructure and specialization that make it a separate business area.
I assume that this is an attempt to defeat Bayesian filters by filling them with words that would reduce the efficiency of statistical analysis. But it doesn't seem to: the various Bayesian filters that are in spam-matching software I use identify them without fail.
This is why I call myself an "unsolicited pundit." My whole goal in technical writing for print and online is to base what I write on solid facts, experience, and interviews. The "unsolicited" part of my business name is a joke on the fact that most pundits are anointed.
How do you become a Cringely or Dvorak? Relentless self-promotion (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), great charisma, and massive output of writing and other production. Volume + charisma + promotion = pundit. I lack the charisma and the volume, myself, and I'm a little shy.
You're thinking of Sputnik (and Joltage and SOHO Wireless). Boingo has always been a commercial aggregator (reselling other networks, and selling a turnkey hotspot in a box soution).
Sputnik still distributes a free community gateway, but dropped its network plans. Its main product is enterprise/commercial. SOHO disappeared (even though its Web site is still active -- with a 2001 last updated on it). Joltage went out of business publicly (in print, that is).
Cringely is all over the place in the essay. He's proposing a system that's very Wi-Fi like but that won't allow Wi-Fi users in -- except late in the essay, he says that non-WhyFi users would pay.
The whole essay is just all confused about who would fund this, how Wi-Fi works, how the current market works, and how to build infrastructure.
You can't have even 100 users, much less 30,000,000, without an enormous amount of back-end operations. On top of that, he's proposing new firmware (his word), which in turn would require drivers for all operating systems to handle the authentication -- not all OS's include 802.1X or other systems for login.
Anyway, I could go on and on again here, but the clear thing is that Cringely talks about new firmware and a non-intercompatible system with Wi-Fi.
Right on, bgelb! Back when he was claiming the passive repeater impossibility, he promised to provide details. Then his son died of SIDS, and everyone gave him space. It's been two years, and he's still writing every week, and he's never provided more information or answered questions about it. I don't mean to sound callous, but if he can feed the bulldog, he can surely provide some details about his miracle repeater.
I wrote an extensive deconstruction of his WhyFi essay on my Wi-Fi blog -- in short, he gets the terminology and technology wrong, doesn't explain how his free giveaway would be funded or how the infrastructure would work, and suggests essentially tossing Wi-Fi for a non-existent standard he just invented that works more or less the same.
The lead into this article says the groups behind this standard are the Wi-Fi Alliance, Gric Communications, and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. The Wi-Fi Alliance has been unable to get traction under its branded Wi-Fi Zones program from venues that would rather just show the network they're part of; GRIC is the increasingly distant number 2 player in corporate aggregated resale (i.e., no hotspots, just reselling hotspots); and the Canadian group has very very few hotspots in Canada. The leading Canadian WISP, FatPort, isn't part of this proposal.
More likely, the GSM Association's roaming standards group that drafted a long document (referenced here in June 2003) on handling WISP roaming for hotspots (with members on the committee from some of the world's largest cell operators) will become the backend.
Or, iPass, GRIC's rival, which will gross about $200 million in 2003 after a very successful public offering this year, will make its clearinghouse standard, which requires standardized authentication, the de facto method of fee settlement and roaming across networks. iPass has 10,000 hotspots under contract now, including T-Mobile, Wayport, and other major networks worldwide.
I keep giving money to the Perl Foundation among various other charitable donations because a significant minority of the money I earn each year is directly related to my ability to use perl to run the projects. If I hadn't learned perl in 1994 and become better at it over the years, I'd have had to get a real job! Thanks, Larry!
2.4 GHz is not the resonating frequency of water. That's way way up in the GHz chain. 2.4 GHz was chosen because that band is the junk band in which unlicensed users are subject to interference as part of the spec.
Microwaves work by oscillating water molecules, which are dipole. The magnetron cycles 2.45 billions times per second, which twists the water molecules. The interior of a microwave oven is coated with a microwave-reflecting material which allows a single beam to essentially paint the three-dimensional interior.
So many people write that water resonates at 2.4 GHz. It's just not true. Here's a nice explanation of how it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Gleick knows his technology, but he's spreading a couple of myths in the middle of a really interesting discussion on namespace and trademarks.
"...a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box..."
Paul Vixie posted this message on the IP list a few months ago to dispute that. There are many root nameservers, not just Network Solutions'.
"The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network..."
Actually, the root nameservers communicate their mappings to each other for start of authority (SOA), but they don't propagate address changes.
I've had to explain this to many, many fellow reporters. DNS is a retrieve and cache on demand system. Browser says: what's slashdot.org? Resolver climbs the chain of authority and back down, retrieves the address information, provides it to the browser, and caches it locally for a period of time (or not, depending on the OS).
The next query after the cache expires retrieves fresh information. Updates to DNS records don't propagate: they only take affect on the next query after no cached information is found.
Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this fumbling that's I orig
Follow my link: I'm not Cory. I was actually at that event. I remember Cory's response. I disagree with how you characterize his response.
It's not his site that's being Slashdotted. Cory might have an attitude, but he didn't post his own list of stuff in his pocketses.
Very likely Twid was the person who asked that question. I've been at several events that Cory has spoken at and know him reasonably well. He always engages, not lectures. He always answers, not hectors. So either it was a rare moment or the question was offensive or stupid. Or I don't know Cory as well as I think I do from my several experiences with seeing him answer dozens of questions from audiences that ranged from sympathetic to vaguely hostile.
He's not an employee. He's an owner, thus he's part of the ownership structure that makes of MLB.
As I pointed out in a blog entry today, Real's chairman and CEO (and founder) is also a minority owner of The Seattle Mariners. Thus, by Real suing MLB, Glaser is -- in part -- suing himself. Why are no reporters covering this aspect?
You can just call up old articles by going to archive.org and entering the webmonkey.com URL. It's not efficient, but it seems to be there.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't let authors add explanatory text and it's hard to get changes made.
An easier example is that some people accuse the book of NOT including things that are in the book -- in some cases covered in 80 pages in the book.
Or one reader wrote to say that 32 pages from the book were missing -- don't buy it! It turned out one carton was faulty and tracked down. If the reader had written Peachpit, us, or Amazon, it would have been instantly replaced without shipping charges.
Should that remain as a review of the book forever?
That's already what Amazon does, I believe. Try posting without being logged in as an Amazon user.
I used to run the review system at Amazon (96-97) and we did get way too many fake author reviews and interviews, even back in 1997.
I had put in place a system later dropped that had the reviews checked by human beings for sense (not content) before they went live. Of course, with thousands of reviews posted each day, that became untenable.
There's no good way to build a system that can't be gamed.
I'll out myself: I've asked for "bad reviews to be removed from my books -- but we're defining bad differently. I never ask for factually correct critiques of my work to be removed, but I have seen an unfortunate trend to have reviews posted that talk outside of the book, critiquing what the book is not when the book clearly doesn't say it is.
For instance, a book I co-wrote on GoLive was criticized for not explaining at length how to install, configure, and run database systems like MySQL and Microsoft SQL. Beyond the scope of the book, and not fair comment. (We had included 10 pages on the basics, too.)
In other cases, if people don't like my writing or they attack the words, that's what the reviews are far and I don't complain
Very small point, but the text that describes this story is actually from my site, Wi-Fi Networking News. We're not claiming to have written deathless prose, but the text of the submission is from here, where we wrote about this event on Jan. 25.
I'm not asking for traffic, apologies, or whatever, but when you write something and see someone else's name attached to it, it feels strange.
If they buy SCO, then they're using their monopoly power, which could be used against them in a court of law. if they fund SCO's fight, then SCO gets to take the blame.
Space is finite, so reducing your space needs by 2/3rds and reducing your expensive air-conditioning budget by some amount is actually a huge argument in favor of upgrading. The Xserves are cheaper cycle for cycle than the Power Mac G5s, too.
The other issue: with 2/3rds of your space free, you can wait for faster G5s to appear and slot those in with very small amounts of disruption. Or a grant comes through for a $1,000,000 for more computers -- boom, you're done. No lengthy process of finding more space, spending more to build out a/c, etc.
There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent worldwide so far on building out for-fee hotspots that generate relatively small amounts of money (tens of millions a year). However, the commitments by US cellular carriers and overseas are in the $100Ms more, and whether the hotspot market for money fails or succeeds, it's an industry: specialized products, large venture-capital companies, existing companies entering the market. Even if hotspots wind up free, there's a ton of infrastructure and specialization that make it a separate business area.
See Nocat and Austin's Less Networks.
I assume that this is an attempt to defeat Bayesian filters by filling them with words that would reduce the efficiency of statistical analysis. But it doesn't seem to: the various Bayesian filters that are in spam-matching software I use identify them without fail.
This is why I call myself an "unsolicited pundit." My whole goal in technical writing for print and online is to base what I write on solid facts, experience, and interviews. The "unsolicited" part of my business name is a joke on the fact that most pundits are anointed.
How do you become a Cringely or Dvorak? Relentless self-promotion (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), great charisma, and massive output of writing and other production. Volume + charisma + promotion = pundit. I lack the charisma and the volume, myself, and I'm a little shy.
You're thinking of Sputnik (and Joltage and SOHO Wireless). Boingo has always been a commercial aggregator (reselling other networks, and selling a turnkey hotspot in a box soution).
Sputnik still distributes a free community gateway, but dropped its network plans. Its main product is enterprise/commercial. SOHO disappeared (even though its Web site is still active -- with a 2001 last updated on it). Joltage went out of business publicly (in print, that is).
Yeah, basically that's what I was saying.
Cringely is all over the place in the essay. He's proposing a system that's very Wi-Fi like but that won't allow Wi-Fi users in -- except late in the essay, he says that non-WhyFi users would pay.
The whole essay is just all confused about who would fund this, how Wi-Fi works, how the current market works, and how to build infrastructure.
You can't have even 100 users, much less 30,000,000, without an enormous amount of back-end operations. On top of that, he's proposing new firmware (his word), which in turn would require drivers for all operating systems to handle the authentication -- not all OS's include 802.1X or other systems for login.
Anyway, I could go on and on again here, but the clear thing is that Cringely talks about new firmware and a non-intercompatible system with Wi-Fi.
Right on, bgelb! Back when he was claiming the passive repeater impossibility, he promised to provide details. Then his son died of SIDS, and everyone gave him space. It's been two years, and he's still writing every week, and he's never provided more information or answered questions about it. I don't mean to sound callous, but if he can feed the bulldog, he can surely provide some details about his miracle repeater.
I wrote an extensive deconstruction of his WhyFi essay on my Wi-Fi blog -- in short, he gets the terminology and technology wrong, doesn't explain how his free giveaway would be funded or how the infrastructure would work, and suggests essentially tossing Wi-Fi for a non-existent standard he just invented that works more or less the same.
The lead into this article says the groups behind this standard are the Wi-Fi Alliance, Gric Communications, and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. The Wi-Fi Alliance has been unable to get traction under its branded Wi-Fi Zones program from venues that would rather just show the network they're part of; GRIC is the increasingly distant number 2 player in corporate aggregated resale (i.e., no hotspots, just reselling hotspots); and the Canadian group has very very few hotspots in Canada. The leading Canadian WISP, FatPort, isn't part of this proposal.
More likely, the GSM Association's roaming standards group that drafted a long document (referenced here in June 2003) on handling WISP roaming for hotspots (with members on the committee from some of the world's largest cell operators) will become the backend.
Or, iPass, GRIC's rival, which will gross about $200 million in 2003 after a very successful public offering this year, will make its clearinghouse standard, which requires standardized authentication, the de facto method of fee settlement and roaming across networks. iPass has 10,000 hotspots under contract now, including T-Mobile, Wayport, and other major networks worldwide.
I keep giving money to the Perl Foundation among various other charitable donations because a significant minority of the money I earn each year is directly related to my ability to use perl to run the projects. If I hadn't learned perl in 1994 and become better at it over the years, I'd have had to get a real job! Thanks, Larry!
2.4 GHz is not the resonating frequency of water. That's way way up in the GHz chain. 2.4 GHz was chosen because that band is the junk band in which unlicensed users are subject to interference as part of the spec.
Microwaves work by oscillating water molecules, which are dipole. The magnetron cycles 2.45 billions times per second, which twists the water molecules. The interior of a microwave oven is coated with a microwave-reflecting material which allows a single beam to essentially paint the three-dimensional interior.
So many people write that water resonates at 2.4 GHz. It's just not true. Here's a nice explanation of how it works.