It would be great if they had something like a P2P scheme for patches, and new modules. Imagine if even 25% of Linux users took part in it. Always-available high speed files of any type you need.
Then someone would make a version of a PostFix patch available that allows them to own your machine via SMTP.
I wonder how many people are going to try to plug their phones into the ethernet jacks
When we moved into this office building we had it 'wired' with Cat5 & RJ45.
Its actually very handy. There is a 4 jack RJ45 wall plate every 3 meters in the offices (open plan), and all of these terminate in a comms rack which we patch to the required service. Ie, Jack 103 can be patched to a HUB and Jack 104 can be patched to the PABX system.
The only problem is when I accidently patched a computer into a phone socket, the phone system didn't work anymore!
but I figure it's best to spend the money early on, get a good setup going that can handle high volumes
Throwing money at the problem is exactly the WRONG approch. You need to start by spending time PLANNING and RESEARCHING the best way to do things.
For example, if you are setting up a dynamic site like./, which is serving 100 pages/second. It obviously needs to be dynamic, so you need a database to store all the comments in.
There are two ways to do this, one is to serve content straight out of the database, but this means that for every page you serve up, there needs to be a database query. (the database queries are the expensive part in terms of time it takes to serve a page). The other way would be to serve the articals as static pages which are generated every minute or so by a process on the database and pushed down to the web server, which serves these up as static pages.
The advantage of this is that insted of 100 database queries per minute, you end up with, maybe 10 queries per minute to populate the static pages. Sure, you site is no longer 100% dynamic, but it is a whole lot faster, and you have saved thousands of dollars to boot!
This is just one small off-the-top-of-my-head example of where PLANNING sould become way before spending any money.
Any reasonable system of paying for bandwidth would have to be in the ballpark of $10/GB or less
I know the Aussie dollar is bad, but that bad? At the moment I'm paying $au0.15/mb for every meg over my 500 meg/month ADSL allowance!
That's $au153.60 per gig! (or around $us77 per gig!)
Getting back to the point, the ideal solution is to the billing model that most ISPs in Australia use, $x per month for 500 meg, and $y per meg over that.
This way the ISPs are still making decent money on the mums and dads that are using 90mb/month, and the geeks that use gigs per month are also paying their fair share.
Re:By your silly definition, Mr. Editor,
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 1
. For example I had to buy XP because of my job. I already activated it twice and I am afriad to install anything. If it screws up my system then I have to activate my pc for the last time before forking another 300 BUCKS
If you overhaul your computer by replacing a substantial number of hardware components, it may appear to be a different PC. You may have to reactivate Windows XP. If this should occur, you can call the telephone number displayed on the activation screen to reactivate the software.
could you expand on where these rights come from, and who gave them to you, and why you deserve them? without that, your explanation is weak and meaningless
So what you are saying is that if I spend thousands of hours writing an awsome peice of code that I should have no rights to that code?
That people should just be able to copy if at their own will if they want, without my permission?
Ok what if I'm building a house, should I have no rights to that as well? Should someone just be able to come up and take it?
How do you send over the Ctrl-Alt-Del when you server does the daily BSOD. Do you have a trained monkey that randomly hits the reset button every hour or so?
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but anyway...
In answer to your question, Ctrl-Alt-Home sends Ctrl-Alt-Delete to the remote machine
"Daily BSOD?" - Strange, I've got 5 Win2k servers here and not one has BSODed on me since they were originaly setup (some were setup on RC2, then UGed to the production code)
If your Win2k boxes are BSODing every day, then can I suggest that one of the following are going on:
1.You are using really cheap, shitty hardware, with faulty RAM. 2.You have written your own software for it and you are not much of a programmer 3.You are a really bad at your job as a systems adamin.
There are an execelent range of books for people just like you, its called the 'For Dummies' collection.
It seems that one of the real growing pains for AtheOS is going to be that it's difficult to capture anything but local desktop users. It's not a good model for remote display; just like Windows.
I don't know about that one, I have a few Win2k servers in a rack that I manage with Terminal Services Client. It works extreamly well, there is nothing that I can not do with Terminal Services that I can do with a keyboard/mouse, even over a 56k dialup.
So what you are saying is that Microsoft (and all other software companies) should just Bend Over and take software piracy up the ass because 20% of the community can obtain a cracked copy? What about the other 80%, this still represents millions of dollars in revenue saved.
That's like microsoft with their stupid XP authentification...3months before it was in stores everyone had cracked versions of it
You are missing the point of XPs copy protection. Its NOT so much meant to stop 3l33t pir8 groups from cracking/distributing it as it is to stop casual piracy. IE, Jim buys a copy for $x then gives his copy of Bob & Jane.
This is the area that Microsoft is loosing real revenue. MS dosn't really care if mr 3l33t hacker dude downloads a copy from the net and installs it on his other machine because mr 3l33t hacker dude would never have bought a copy anyway, but Bob & Jane might have.
Because it breaks the rules of normalization(sp?). How much space is being wasted by repeating the CustName,CustNum & ID 3 times? And what if this customer has orders? Under what instance of Bob Smith does the order get associated with?
A better solution is to create two tables. One for customers (id/custnum/custname) and one for contact numbers (id/custid/phonenumber), with custnum being the same number which is stored in the first table.
Everyone seems to say that one of the main problems wiht a National ID card is identity theft.
It is my beleive that if the system was implimented properly it would make identity theft so hard it is almost impossable.
Think about it, when you call a bank to do phone banking or walk into a bank, you are identified by a a serious of numbers and/or signature. If you know the numbers OR you know how to fake the signature then you are who you say you are.
BUT, what if you had to present a ID card which contained a photograph of yourself (hard to fake), and also had biometric ID terminals: present thumb here for thumb scan, etc.
This could be taken to the next level in the future with devices that can plug into your computer or telephone to do the same thing. If you log onto your banks web site, they say "insert your thumb into your thumb print scanner now" - Your thumb print scanner then transfers the encrypted data to the bank for verification against a database.
I don't think there is that much demand for it. In ancient times the Internet served purely academic purposes and was used for sharing of information (in post-military and pre-commercialism days). I believe the same is true for Internet2 now.
Then what is the point of I2? Sure, its a seperate network that is much faster, but won't the end result be better if all of the research money being poured into I2 is concentrated on improving the backbone links in first Internet and implimenting IP6?
It seems to be the people pushing I2 are only in it for their own reasons and not to improve the internet as such
* Lose the lameness filter. It is lame. Why? Because it
a) doesn't deter trolls but
b) does annoy legitimate posters.
There seems to be a fundamental flaw in the troll moderation system.
Consider this: If you create a troll account, you can post around 10 trolls in one 'session' before you get modded down enough to get stopped by the isTroll() check. Then you will not be able to post for 3 days or so.
After this, all of your posts are at -1, and hence will generally never get modded down again. Therefore you are free to post as many trolls as you want, without fear of being modded down again!
What is needed is either a rule that if you post x comments at -1, and none of them get modded up, then you are deemed to be a troll again, and are stopped by the isTroll() check.
OR
For the moderators, if you mod a post that defaulted to -1 down one, making it unreadable you should not loose a mod point. This way there is an incentive for the mods to clean up the trolls.
Is an interface within Google that can "search in" previous results.
search.microsoft.com has this feature and it rocks. I can do a non-spacific search at first, then search within those returned pages for a spacific term.
I already find myself using google to search Microsoft's KB 80% of the time (because it is so much faster) - but if Google had a search in function I'd never go back to search.microsoft.com again!
As this entire thread is about OS X 10.1, it's totally redundant that you bring up the faults of OS9, especially considering that the faults you mention are now non-existant in X.
WRONG, the entire thread is about: . Windows '95 was a direct rip of the current (at the time) version of MacOS. And yet it missed out on the important points.
The artical is about 10.1, the thread is talking about how Microsoft ripped the MacOS and got it wrong, which as you can see from above, they did'nt.
Ease of use people. That's what it's all about. Apple has always had it, Microsoft keeps trying and missing, and Linux is getting there via comapnies like Mandrake and desktops like KDE
Not wanting to start a flame war but...
If I want to eject my music CD from the CDROM I should be able to press the button labeled EJECT and have it pop out, not have to drag it to the trash! - Ease of use people..
But seriously, ease of use is a matter of perception. On I MAC I find the concept of every app having each window as a floating MDI child without any real parent object frustrating! For example. If I have Mac IE open with 5 windows, to get to the 5th window (which is hidden behind quark) I have to click on the apple menu to activate IE, then minimise 4 windows before I can get to the 5th. On a PC, the 5th window is 1 click on the task bar away!
Point being, I think Microsoft took the MacOS idea and put their own design work behind it, the UI is not better then MacOS, its not worse, it's just different.
Trying to set up truely redundant telco access can be really hard to get in practice.
In theory I don't think it's that hard - at least if it was planned for from the beginning. Maybe this technique can be used for new estates.
One way in the suburbs is to actually set the phone network up like ISPs. That is, every 1000 homes or so is connected via the local loop to what is essentialy a multiplexing box. Every Multiplexing box is connected to two different exchanges via fiber running in two different directions.
This method can actually be cost effective because insted of running 100,000 pairs of cable to the exchange, you are running 1000 pairs to a local box.
Disclamer: I know jack shit about phone network design, the above is just a little logical thinking.
... Just because I have havinging to rego for the NYTimes site.
Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly
By SIMON ROMERO
oseph Pennell, the prolific illustrator who often depicted the cityscape of Lower Manhattan in his prints, called the New York Telephone Building "the most impressive modern building in the world" when it was completed in 1926.
How antiquated it now seems.
The 32-story structure at 140 West Street, one of the city's first Art Deco skyscrapers, is now owned by New York Telephone's descendant, Verizon Communications (news/quote). And the heavy damage the building sustained on Sept. 11 underscores the vulnerability of communications networks operated by Verizon and other telephone companies -- sprawling systems that rely heavily on critical hubs.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it became commonplace to comment on how well the Internet performed because it was designed to route traffic around damage. But the telephone network, including the dedicated data lines that are used by big corporations, financial institutions and others, does not have the Internet's self-detouring abilities.
When they work, the telephone network's voice and data lines can be superior in quality and carrying capacity to the Internet. Yet when the telephone network is damaged, it cannot heal itself.
And while Verizon has worked almost around the clock the last month to restore operations at 140 West Street and service to its customers, the company has indicated that significantly reducing the building's network vulnerabilities would require more time or money than Verizon is willing to expend.
Domingo Mones/Verizon
Falling steel girders pierced the exterior of 140 West Street.
The Security: Rivals Worry About Access as Verizon Seeks Buffer (October 12, 2001)
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Verizon's building was near the north tower of the World Trade Center and next door to 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed several hours after the attacks. Falling rubble and steel girders tore into 140 West Street, which housed one of the nation's busiest telephone central office switching stations. When fully operable, it serves a customer base comparable in number with all the telephone lines in a city the size of Cincinnati.
After electric power for the building was interrupted, service was temporarily disrupted for more than 300,000 telephone lines and 3.6 million high-capacity data circuits, many serving the New York Stock Exchange, large financial institutions and other companies in lower Manhattan. A gaping hole was torn in a seventh-floor exterior wall, exposing and damaging huge communications switches dedicated to the information needs of the banking company J. P. Morgan Chase.
In the last month, Verizon has labored to restore service or provide new service for customers that have moved to other parts of the city or to New Jersey. Virtually all of the fiber optic lines and copper strands that had wound their way under the streets and sidewalks and into 140 West Street are being replaced. Some circuits have been rerouted to other Verizon central offices in Lower Manhattan.
"The ideas we previously had about diversifying our networks have become much more important," Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., Verizon's vice chairman, said in an interview last week as he led a small group of journalists on a tour of 140 West Street.
Until last month, the most obvious reasons for network disruptions were natural disasters like hurricanes or floods. Now, though, Verizon and other telephone companies must worry about the possibility of physical attacks on their installations. Mr. Babbio warned last week that significant harm could be done to the nation's communications system if terrorists destroyed the 50 or 100 most important central offices.
Verizon, which is the dominant telephone company on the Eastern seaboard and operates in 30 states overall, is seeking to increase security at its central offices, where it is required by federal law to lease network access to its competitors. After Mr. Babbio issued his warning last week, competitors said they would resist tighter security measures if it made it more difficult for them to conduct operations within Verizon's central offices.
Beyond physically shielding their switching centers, phone companies can protect their communications networks from direct attacks or peripheral damage from nearby attacks by routing voice and data traffic to other parts of their own networks or those of other companies.
But Mr. Babbio said that it would take Verizon five years to build alternate pathways for all the telephone lines that wind their way into and out of the New York Telephone building. And Verizon has no plans to do so.
The reason may be a simple cost- benefit analysis. Despite its primacy to Lower Manhattan's communications network, the central office at 140 West Street accounted for less than 1 percent of the traffic on Verizon's nationwide network.
"So much of the activity on networks takes place at dispersed locations," said Roy A. Maxion, a system scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But the fact remains that we're vulnerable even after putting redundancy systems in place due to the physical nature of connecting to our networks. The issue should be what level of risk you're willing to live with."
Assuming they are willing to spend the money, business customers can achieve redundancy, or surplus and backup capacity, by running cables to several different central offices or, in some cases, by using several different communications carriers. Several of Verizon's competitors, in fact, have benefited from the disruptions by signing up new customers in Lower Manhattan.
"Identifying potential failures in networks is not easy," said Joe Flach, vice president of the Eagle Rock Alliance, a consulting company that provides advice on disaster planning. "The most important thing to avoid is putting all of your eggs in one basket."
Only after Sept. 11 did executives from the financial services industry in Lower Manhattan come to realize just how many of its eggs were in that one 75-year-old building.
Mr. Babbio recalled having to explain the situation at a meeting in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, Sept. 12, at the Park Avenue offices of the investment bank Bear, Stearns. Executives and government officials present included Richard A. Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange; Harvey L. Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Richard S. Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Brothers (news/quote); John A. Thain, a president of Goldman Sachs (news/quote); and Peter R. Fisher, under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department.
The group was not happy when Mr. Babbio said how long it might take to restore basic service. Mr. Grasso had been hoping to reopen the stock exchange on Thursday or Friday. The following Monday now seemed ambitious.
"It was not an easy meeting," recalled Mr. Babbio, who spoke with the group immediately after visiting the disaster site, where his clothes had picked up the odor of smoke and ash. "I smelled awful after coming back from downtown. No one wanted to sit next to me."
At the end of the day, if can happily do everything I need to do with one company, why not stick with them? From Windows on the desk top to Exchange & SQL on the back end.
Where 'Going The Microsoft Way' is a good thing is skill sets. I can have a $65k VB/SQL coder create my corporate order tracking systems in SQL/VB/ASP, delivered over Win32 or IE, then when I want to tightly integrate this system with Exchange to take advantage of Unified Messaging (sending confirmations via SMS, Fax, IM) I can get the same coder, with the same skill set to do it as well. (He can even use ADO to access the exchange mail store!) - Or I can write some funky Digial Dashbord type technology which allows me to embed HTML + COM 'wiegets' into Outlook today
So you can end up running your entier company from within the Outlook Interface, with different web pages hosted within the Outlook UI. Take it off-line, sync to a local MSDE database and everything is available on the road.
Imagine doing this on an Oracle Platform, then having to integrate with Notes.
All.NET really does is take this mentality to the next level.
In my experience, it all comes down to trade offs. Yes I will be locked in to using Microsoft for ever, yes they can jack the price up, but at the end of the day I've probably better off because development has been quicker/easer/less painful.
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It would be great if they had something like a P2P scheme for patches, and new modules. Imagine if even 25% of Linux users took part in it. Always-available high speed files of any type you need.
Then someone would make a version of a PostFix patch available that allows them to own your machine via SMTP.
I wonder how many people are going to try to plug their phones into the ethernet jacks
When we moved into this office building we had it 'wired' with Cat5 & RJ45.
Its actually very handy. There is a 4 jack RJ45 wall plate every 3 meters in the offices (open plan), and all of these terminate in a comms rack which we patch to the required service. Ie, Jack 103 can be patched to a HUB and Jack 104 can be patched to the PABX system.
The only problem is when I accidently patched a computer into a phone socket, the phone system didn't work anymore!
Now THATS a mistake you only make one.
Which provider?
Both Telstra & Connexus - I have an ISDN through Telstra, and a ADSL through Connexus
but I figure it's best to spend the money early on, get a good setup going that can handle high volumes
Throwing money at the problem is exactly the WRONG approch. You need to start by spending time PLANNING and RESEARCHING the best way to do things.
For example, if you are setting up a dynamic site like ./, which is serving 100 pages/second. It obviously needs to be dynamic, so you need a database to store all the comments in.
There are two ways to do this, one is to serve content straight out of the database, but this means that for every page you serve up, there needs to be a database query. (the database queries are the expensive part in terms of time it takes to serve a page). The other way would be to serve the articals as static pages which are generated every minute or so by a process on the database and pushed down to the web server, which serves these up as static pages.
The advantage of this is that insted of 100 database queries per minute, you end up with, maybe 10 queries per minute to populate the static pages. Sure, you site is no longer 100% dynamic, but it is a whole lot faster, and you have saved thousands of dollars to boot!
This is just one small off-the-top-of-my-head example of where PLANNING sould become way before spending any money.
Any reasonable system of paying for bandwidth would have to be in the ballpark of $10/GB or less
I know the Aussie dollar is bad, but that bad? At the moment I'm paying $au0.15/mb for every meg over my 500 meg/month ADSL allowance!
That's $au153.60 per gig! (or around $us77 per gig!)
Getting back to the point, the ideal solution is to the billing model that most ISPs in Australia use, $x per month for 500 meg, and $y per meg over that.
This way the ISPs are still making decent money on the mums and dads that are using 90mb/month, and the geeks that use gigs per month are also paying their fair share.
. For example I had to buy XP because of my job. I already activated it twice and I am afriad to install anything. If it screws up my system then I have to activate my pc for the last time before forking another 300 BUCKS
Are you serious? from installing software will NOT affect your activation code.
If you overhaul your computer by replacing a substantial number of hardware components, it may appear to be a different PC. You may have to reactivate Windows XP. If this should occur, you can call the telephone number displayed on the activation screen to reactivate the software.
could you expand on where these rights come from, and who gave them to you, and why you deserve them? without that, your explanation is weak and meaningless
So what you are saying is that if I spend thousands of hours writing an awsome peice of code that I should have no rights to that code?
That people should just be able to copy if at their own will if they want, without my permission?
Ok what if I'm building a house, should I have no rights to that as well? Should someone just be able to come up and take it?
How do you send over the Ctrl-Alt-Del when you server does the daily BSOD. Do you have a trained monkey that randomly hits the reset button every hour or so?
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but anyway...
In answer to your question, Ctrl-Alt-Home sends Ctrl-Alt-Delete to the remote machine
"Daily BSOD?" - Strange, I've got 5 Win2k servers here and not one has BSODed on me since they were originaly setup (some were setup on RC2, then UGed to the production code)
If your Win2k boxes are BSODing every day, then can I suggest that one of the following are going on:
1.You are using really cheap, shitty hardware, with faulty RAM.
2.You have written your own software for it and you are not much of a programmer
3.You are a really bad at your job as a systems adamin.
There are an execelent range of books for people just like you, its called the 'For Dummies' collection.
It seems that one of the real growing pains for AtheOS is going to be that it's difficult to capture anything but local desktop users. It's not a good model for remote display; just like Windows.
I don't know about that one, I have a few Win2k servers in a rack that I manage with Terminal Services Client. It works extreamly well, there is nothing that I can not do with Terminal Services that I can do with a keyboard/mouse, even over a 56k dialup.
Does someone want to come up with a script to automate this?
So what you are saying is that Microsoft (and all other software companies) should just Bend Over and take software piracy up the ass because 20% of the community can obtain a cracked copy? What about the other 80%, this still represents millions of dollars in revenue saved.
That's like microsoft with their stupid XP authentification...3months before it was in stores everyone had cracked versions of it
You are missing the point of XPs copy protection. Its NOT so much meant to stop 3l33t pir8 groups from cracking/distributing it as it is to stop casual piracy. IE, Jim buys a copy for $x then gives his copy of Bob & Jane.
This is the area that Microsoft is loosing real revenue. MS dosn't really care if mr 3l33t hacker dude downloads a copy from the net and installs it on his other machine because mr 3l33t hacker dude would never have bought a copy anyway, but Bob & Jane might have.
Because it breaks the rules of normalization(sp?). How much space is being wasted by repeating the CustName,CustNum & ID 3 times? And what if this customer has orders? Under what instance of Bob Smith does the order get associated with?
A better solution is to create two tables. One for customers (id/custnum/custname) and one for contact numbers (id/custid/phonenumber), with custnum being the same number which is stored in the first table.
For more info try here
Everyone seems to say that one of the main problems wiht a National ID card is identity theft.
It is my beleive that if the system was implimented properly it would make identity theft so hard it is almost impossable.
Think about it, when you call a bank to do phone banking or walk into a bank, you are identified by a a serious of numbers and/or signature. If you know the numbers OR you know how to fake the signature then you are who you say you are.
BUT, what if you had to present a ID card which contained a photograph of yourself (hard to fake), and also had biometric ID terminals: present thumb here for thumb scan, etc.
This could be taken to the next level in the future with devices that can plug into your computer or telephone to do the same thing. If you log onto your banks web site, they say "insert your thumb into your thumb print scanner now" - Your thumb print scanner then transfers the encrypted data to the bank for verification against a database.
I don't think there is that much demand for it. In ancient times the Internet served purely academic purposes and was used for sharing of information (in post-military and pre-commercialism days). I believe the same is true for Internet2 now.
Then what is the point of I2? Sure, its a seperate network that is much faster, but won't the end result be better if all of the research money being poured into I2 is concentrated on improving the backbone links in first Internet and implimenting IP6?
It seems to be the people pushing I2 are only in it for their own reasons and not to improve the internet as such
* Lose the lameness filter. It is lame. Why? Because it a) doesn't deter trolls but b) does annoy legitimate posters.
There seems to be a fundamental flaw in the troll moderation system.
Consider this:
If you create a troll account, you can post around 10 trolls in one 'session' before you get modded down enough to get stopped by the isTroll() check. Then you will not be able to post for 3 days or so.
After this, all of your posts are at -1, and hence will generally never get modded down again. Therefore you are free to post as many trolls as you want, without fear of being modded down again!
What is needed is either a rule that if you post x comments at -1, and none of them get modded up, then you are deemed to be a troll again, and are stopped by the isTroll() check.
OR
For the moderators, if you mod a post that defaulted to -1 down one, making it unreadable you should not loose a mod point. This way there is an incentive for the mods to clean up the trolls.
Is an interface within Google that can "search in" previous results.
search.microsoft.com has this feature and it rocks. I can do a non-spacific search at first, then search within those returned pages for a spacific term.
I already find myself using google to search Microsoft's KB 80% of the time (because it is so much faster) - but if Google had a search in function I'd never go back to search.microsoft.com again!
Have you ever used OS X?
That is NOT what the thread was about! (the artical maybe, not the thread)
If you look the time you would have seen this thread started as
. Windows '95 was a direct rip of the current (at the time) version of MacOS. And yet it missed out on the important points.
Meaning comparing Win95 to the then current version of MACOS
As this entire thread is about OS X 10.1, it's totally redundant that you bring up the faults of OS9, especially considering that the faults you mention are now non-existant in X.
WRONG, the entire thread is about:
. Windows '95 was a direct rip of the current (at the time) version of MacOS. And yet it missed out on the important points.
The artical is about 10.1, the thread is talking about how Microsoft ripped the MacOS and got it wrong, which as you can see from above, they did'nt.
Considering the MAC is primeraly used in the DTP/Graphics area, does anyone know when the real graphic apps (native mode) will start flowing.
If I could get a OSX native copy of Quark, Photoshop & Illustrator we would switch all of our OS9 desktops to OSX immediatly.
Ease of use people. That's what it's all about. Apple has always had it, Microsoft keeps trying and missing, and Linux is getting there via comapnies like Mandrake and desktops like KDE
Not wanting to start a flame war but...
If I want to eject my music CD from the CDROM I should be able to press the button labeled EJECT and have it pop out, not have to drag it to the trash! - Ease of use people..
But seriously, ease of use is a matter of perception. On I MAC I find the concept of every app having each window as a floating MDI child without any real parent object frustrating! For example. If I have Mac IE open with 5 windows, to get to the 5th window (which is hidden behind quark) I have to click on the apple menu to activate IE, then minimise 4 windows before I can get to the 5th. On a PC, the 5th window is 1 click on the task bar away!
Point being, I think Microsoft took the MacOS idea and put their own design work behind it, the UI is not better then MacOS, its not worse, it's just different.
Trying to set up truely redundant telco access can be really hard to get in practice.
In theory I don't think it's that hard - at least if it was planned for from the beginning. Maybe this technique can be used for new estates.
One way in the suburbs is to actually set the phone network up like ISPs. That is, every 1000 homes or so is connected via the local loop to what is essentialy a multiplexing box. Every Multiplexing box is connected to two different exchanges via fiber running in two different directions.
This method can actually be cost effective because insted of running 100,000 pairs of cable to the exchange, you are running 1000 pairs to a local box.
Disclamer: I know jack shit about phone network design, the above is just a little logical thinking.
... Just because I have havinging to rego for the NYTimes site.
Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly
By SIMON ROMERO
oseph Pennell, the prolific illustrator who often depicted the cityscape of Lower Manhattan in his prints, called the New York Telephone Building "the most impressive modern building in the world" when it was completed in 1926.
How antiquated it now seems.
The 32-story structure at 140 West Street, one of the city's first Art Deco skyscrapers, is now owned by New York Telephone's descendant, Verizon Communications (news/quote). And the heavy damage the building sustained on Sept. 11 underscores the vulnerability of communications networks operated by Verizon and other telephone companies -- sprawling systems that rely heavily on critical hubs.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it became commonplace to comment on how well the Internet performed because it was designed to route traffic around damage. But the telephone network, including the dedicated data lines that are used by big corporations, financial institutions and others, does not have the Internet's self-detouring abilities.
When they work, the telephone network's voice and data lines can be superior in quality and carrying capacity to the Internet. Yet when the telephone network is damaged, it cannot heal itself.
And while Verizon has worked almost around the clock the last month to restore operations at 140 West Street and service to its customers, the company has indicated that significantly reducing the building's network vulnerabilities would require more time or money than Verizon is willing to expend.
Domingo Mones/Verizon
Falling steel girders pierced the exterior of 140 West Street.
The Security: Rivals Worry About Access as Verizon Seeks Buffer (October 12, 2001)
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Verizon's building was near the north tower of the World Trade Center and next door to 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed several hours after the attacks. Falling rubble and steel girders tore into 140 West Street, which housed one of the nation's busiest telephone central office switching stations. When fully operable, it serves a customer base comparable in number with all the telephone lines in a city the size of Cincinnati.
After electric power for the building was interrupted, service was temporarily disrupted for more than 300,000 telephone lines and 3.6 million high-capacity data circuits, many serving the New York Stock Exchange, large financial institutions and other companies in lower Manhattan. A gaping hole was torn in a seventh-floor exterior wall, exposing and damaging huge communications switches dedicated to the information needs of the banking company J. P. Morgan Chase.
In the last month, Verizon has labored to restore service or provide new service for customers that have moved to other parts of the city or to New Jersey. Virtually all of the fiber optic lines and copper strands that had wound their way under the streets and sidewalks and into 140 West Street are being replaced. Some circuits have been rerouted to other Verizon central offices in Lower Manhattan.
"The ideas we previously had about diversifying our networks have become much more important," Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., Verizon's vice chairman, said in an interview last week as he led a small group of journalists on a tour of 140 West Street.
Until last month, the most obvious reasons for network disruptions were natural disasters like hurricanes or floods. Now, though, Verizon and other telephone companies must worry about the possibility of physical attacks on their installations. Mr. Babbio warned last week that significant harm could be done to the nation's communications system if terrorists destroyed the 50 or 100 most important central offices.
Verizon, which is the dominant telephone company on the Eastern seaboard and operates in 30 states overall, is seeking to increase security at its central offices, where it is required by federal law to lease network access to its competitors. After Mr. Babbio issued his warning last week, competitors said they would resist tighter security measures if it made it more difficult for them to conduct operations within Verizon's central offices.
Beyond physically shielding their switching centers, phone companies can protect their communications networks from direct attacks or peripheral damage from nearby attacks by routing voice and data traffic to other parts of their own networks or those of other companies.
But Mr. Babbio said that it would take Verizon five years to build alternate pathways for all the telephone lines that wind their way into and out of the New York Telephone building. And Verizon has no plans to do so.
The reason may be a simple cost- benefit analysis. Despite its primacy to Lower Manhattan's communications network, the central office at 140 West Street accounted for less than 1 percent of the traffic on Verizon's nationwide network.
"So much of the activity on networks takes place at dispersed locations," said Roy A. Maxion, a system scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But the fact remains that we're vulnerable even after putting redundancy systems in place due to the physical nature of connecting to our networks. The issue should be what level of risk you're willing to live with."
Assuming they are willing to spend the money, business customers can achieve redundancy, or surplus and backup capacity, by running cables to several different central offices or, in some cases, by using several different communications carriers. Several of Verizon's competitors, in fact, have benefited from the disruptions by signing up new customers in Lower Manhattan.
"Identifying potential failures in networks is not easy," said Joe Flach, vice president of the Eagle Rock Alliance, a consulting company that provides advice on disaster planning. "The most important thing to avoid is putting all of your eggs in one basket."
Only after Sept. 11 did executives from the financial services industry in Lower Manhattan come to realize just how many of its eggs were in that one 75-year-old building.
Mr. Babbio recalled having to explain the situation at a meeting in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, Sept. 12, at the Park Avenue offices of the investment bank Bear, Stearns. Executives and government officials present included Richard A. Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange; Harvey L. Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Richard S. Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Brothers (news/quote); John A. Thain, a president of Goldman Sachs (news/quote); and Peter R. Fisher, under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department.
The group was not happy when Mr. Babbio said how long it might take to restore basic service. Mr. Grasso had been hoping to reopen the stock exchange on Thursday or Friday. The following Monday now seemed ambitious.
"It was not an easy meeting," recalled Mr. Babbio, who spoke with the group immediately after visiting the disaster site, where his clothes had picked up the odor of smoke and ash. "I smelled awful after coming back from downtown. No one wanted to sit next to me."
I offer 10$ canadian (or 0.10$ US if you will) to anyone who can infect my box, 24.112.8.23
ping 24.112.8.23 Pinging 24.112.8.23 with 32 bytes of data: Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Ping statistics for 24.112.8.23: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms
Is vendor lock-in such a bad thing tho?
At the end of the day, if can happily do everything I need to do with one company, why not stick with them? From Windows on the desk top to Exchange & SQL on the back end.
Where 'Going The Microsoft Way' is a good thing is skill sets. I can have a $65k VB/SQL coder create my corporate order tracking systems in SQL/VB/ASP, delivered over Win32 or IE, then when I want to tightly integrate this system with Exchange to take advantage of Unified Messaging (sending confirmations via SMS, Fax, IM) I can get the same coder, with the same skill set to do it as well. (He can even use ADO to access the exchange mail store!) - Or I can write some funky Digial Dashbord type technology which allows me to embed HTML + COM 'wiegets' into Outlook today
So you can end up running your entier company from within the Outlook Interface, with different web pages hosted within the Outlook UI. Take it off-line, sync to a local MSDE database and everything is available on the road.
Imagine doing this on an Oracle Platform, then having to integrate with Notes.
All .NET really does is take this mentality to the next level.
In my experience, it all comes down to trade offs. Yes I will be locked in to using Microsoft for ever, yes they can jack the price up, but at the end of the day I've probably better off because development has been quicker/easer/less painful.