I don't think there are, TBH. There are individual archives of various groups at universities in the US (and presumably in Europe) but even now, when many people claim that Usenet is dead, the daily throughput on a fully loaded news server is huge (Colt's peering news server suggests 23Gb since 1am today which translates to between 3 and 7Gb to its downstream feeds in the last 11 hours). Dejanews made the commitment not only to keep a running archive of Usenet but also to collate those archives stored by other agencies. I think the only other near competitor was Remarq and they fell over last year. Deja's store, as Google said the other day, runs to many terabytes of data and must have a pretty solid dedicated feed (the last time I was involved with news server management was about five years ago and the company I was working for recieved its primary news feed from UUNet's satellite delivery service, a dedicated 47Mb downlink), so it was a major investment to keep it going, hence the attempts to leverage the data by turning it into discussion channels for shopiing and whatever, something that was doomed to failure as, as useful as Usenet is, the signal to noise ratio in the most dedicated of groups is sufficient to make searching a frustating process if only for the number of 'me too' noise that most discussions generate. It's good that Google have managed to secure the archive in that respect, but maintaining it and making it usable isn't going to be easy.
Surely the obvious answer to this is to use a dedicated music hoster to host original MP3s. It saves your personal disk space and bandwidth and hooks you into a network of likeminded people. Having to link into a homepage as on MP3.com is a tradeoff for the distribution.
There's no point in competing with the MP3.coms of this world unless you're willing to provide the same service or better. The alternative I've been juggling with is a weblog like Slashdot that points at MP3s but offers them for peer review so that people can say 'yes, we like' or whatever. All you need then is a database and a web server with the requisite application.
Re:Get your mainframe!! Mainframes here!!
on
User Mode Linux
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· Score: 4
There's something similar already: UK company DSVR sell virtual servers that are effectively multiple standalone 300Mb Linux boxen on a 500Mhz PC host. They've also made the technology available through the GPL at www.freevsd.org.
Have a look at consume.net for a similar project that's underway in London, the difference being that it's being designed as a bandwidth sharing scheme so that packets from wireless devices can be forwarded to the general Internet using routers attached to ubiquitous wireless basestations.
2.4GHz is the assigned band for wireless networking in the UK and assumes a mean range per device of about 300 metres. By extension it's probably the same in Australia.
I wouldn't say it's a 'great' history, as it casts Nelson as an out and out eccentric with a drive to an Augean task which has been fraught with more disaster than Apple, which Nelson has refuted himself. Check out this link for a better view, or dig through the Xanadu project site or Ted Nelson's homepage.
Sportal and PSINet developed a system like this for the Euro2000 soccer tournament in June this year. It handled something like 70,000,000 hits a day at peak with a distributed architecture across 10 points of presence in the PSI network worldwide. That made it easy: to do it across multiple providers would be a fair bit more work - even for a single provider the team solution involved getting a dedicated AS number to enable peering into the system.
Yep, right from assuming that Microsoft Technology (sic) has anything to do with the operation of the Internet. It runs servers, sure, but if it runs a measurable percentage of Internet routing I'd be surprised.
...and it would appear that it extends NAT functionality in a (presumably) propietary way, adding security aspects and enabling transparency to DNS and ICMP packets. The embodiment also suggests that it's a way of doing it rather than the actual NAT process.
I would have paid to watch the Patent Officer's eyes glaze over as he read it though.
As long as the price remains right
on
Sun Buys Cobalt
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· Score: 1
As has been said, Sun have practically cornered the high end application level web market in the past couple of years, but their server products still remain out of the reach of the small-midrange service developer. The Netra range, which are excellent pieces of kit, are still far too expensive for the service bracket that they seem to be competing with: the ISP that offers dedicated servers will always go for 40 Cobalts or VA rackservers in a rack rather than 40 Netras as the price difference is roughly three or four-fold. As long as Sun don't start applying Sun prices (an 18Gb SCSI drive is still c £900 from Sun as opposed to £120 from yeraverage mailorder store) the Cobalt range will do fine.
I'm aware of that, and that really is the must-have aspect of the device - it is going to revolutionise television watching. However, it's also going to revolutionise television scheduling as the viewer is no longer bound to a schedule. It also provides viewing demographics at a granularity that surpasses street market research or Nielsen boxes, and the per user value will ultimately exceed the $19.99 per unit monthly subscription. Obviously the units themselves are the loss leader, as with digital set top boxes in the UK (they're normally free, or a peppercorn price, plus a subscription) and I could forsee a similar thing happening with TiVo if it doesn't quite make it with the networks. However, a free service in the same way that web services are free isn't unthinkable because if the networks get on board, it will return the initial investment a hundredfold.
The subscription model seems to be a fairly glaring flaw in TiVo's business plan. As the article says, those listings are in your daily paper and on the web. In many places in the world (although still not in the US AIUI) there is Teletext, which does use the vertical blanking interval for TV listings and a lot more besides, and PDC.
Here in the UK, which is the next launch site for TiVo, we also have the first wave digital TV systems. TiVo is a great idea, but in the short term I'm sure I'm not the only one who could do without a third black box under my TV (a fourth, if/when I buy that DVD player). Now, a TiVo that plugged directly into the back of my digibox, or even a TiVo/digibox combination, possibly in association with Sky or onDigital - hmmmm....
You'll pleased to know that I'm switching moderation back on on my account for the sole purpose of moderating your inane crap down as far as I possibly can.
The trend among many young Oz, Kiwi and 'bok IT professionals (in fact among professionals of many disciplines) has been to come over to Britain for a year to take advantage of the strong pound and better pay. Because of the nature of the visas given it's a naturally transient population but I can't help but wonder if it doesn't contribute to a skills shortage in.au,.nz and.za. as the young and talented people move around.
Conversely I've heard of banks who are bypassing the cost of UK IT professionals by recruiting in India, accomodating staff, flying them to India and back once a month and paying them £8.50 an hour, which still amounts to a small fortune for a smart twentysomething from Bangalore.
At the risk of some RIAA maven finding it, very few people seem to have mentioned the Shoutcast DNAS and Icecast. Shoutcast is moving towards generating analysis of listeners including the 'golden number' of listener time. Site/station popularity is already covered by the Shoutcast directory and associated services like Live 365. While low bandwidth continues to be common, 24 or 56k streaming of the traditional one-to-many radio format remains a popular and usable choice for online listening. The majority of servers on the system tend to be hobbyist or vanity shows but I'm sure it wouldn't take much work to integrate a big hard drive full of tunes with some smart database software to create a DARLA-ish server for streaming .
You've hit the nail on the head. Levys on recording media have had a mixed success in various countries, but to my knowledge the question of how such a levy changes the rights of the purchaser has never been addressed. In the UK the BPI almost succeeded in getting a levy on blank tapes in 1981-2 but the amendment was thrown out when the BPI couldn't justify it beyond saying that any blank tape could potentially be used to illegally record music. Fortunately this didn't convince the Exchequer, which was about to reform the Copyright Act anyway. As this seems to extend to hardware, which is, after all a lot more expensive than a blank tape or CD, I suspect that it will only take someone like Compaq or Dell to refuse to pay the levy to make it unworkable.
It's almost happened a couple of times with the Nokia Communicator and the Qualcomm pdQ but not quite: the Communicator's too clunky and the pdQ is currently underpowered compared to the Palmtypes and CE machines of the moment. Personally I can see Sony merging their tiny z5 phone and their Clie Palmtype not that far up the line.
I have to agree, IME it's one of the bigger stumbling blocks to desktop Linux in an NT environment. Samba works reasonably well but seems to be better at making mounts available than connecting to those mounts. I used Mandrake as a desktop exclusively at work for about six months and this was the one shortfall, as even with a properly configured Samba it was hard to maintain mounts on an NT file server and resulted in a lot of semi-broken directories in my ~home directory.
I assume the National Library of Australia is a copyright library like most other national libraries in the world, so it should receive a copy of every publication of any size produced in Australia.
Think about it - how many of us would pay for a lottery ticket for the chance to press the button to fire one of those babies out of orbit? I know I would.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there are, TBH. There are individual archives of various groups at universities in the US (and presumably in Europe) but even now, when many people claim that Usenet is dead, the daily throughput on a fully loaded news server is huge (Colt's peering news server suggests 23Gb since 1am today which translates to between 3 and 7Gb to its downstream feeds in the last 11 hours). Dejanews made the commitment not only to keep a running archive of Usenet but also to collate those archives stored by other agencies. I think the only other near competitor was Remarq and they fell over last year. Deja's store, as Google said the other day, runs to many terabytes of data and must have a pretty solid dedicated feed (the last time I was involved with news server management was about five years ago and the company I was working for recieved its primary news feed from UUNet's satellite delivery service, a dedicated 47Mb downlink), so it was a major investment to keep it going, hence the attempts to leverage the data by turning it into discussion channels for shopiing and whatever, something that was doomed to failure as, as useful as Usenet is, the signal to noise ratio in the most dedicated of groups is sufficient to make searching a frustating process if only for the number of 'me too' noise that most discussions generate. It's good that Google have managed to secure the archive in that respect, but maintaining it and making it usable isn't going to be easy.
But they have a tiny logo on the front for that all important calm authority :)
As long as it's not being run by Kevin Warwick...
Surely the obvious answer to this is to use a dedicated music hoster to host original MP3s. It saves your personal disk space and bandwidth and hooks you into a network of likeminded people. Having to link into a homepage as on MP3.com is a tradeoff for the distribution.
There's no point in competing with the MP3.coms of this world unless you're willing to provide the same service or better. The alternative I've been juggling with is a weblog like Slashdot that points at MP3s but offers them for peer review so that people can say 'yes, we like' or whatever. All you need then is a database and a web server with the requisite application.
There's something similar already: UK company DSVR sell virtual servers that are effectively multiple standalone 300Mb Linux boxen on a 500Mhz PC host. They've also made the technology available through the GPL at www.freevsd.org.
Have a look at consume.net for a similar project that's underway in London, the difference being that it's being designed as a bandwidth sharing scheme so that packets from wireless devices can be forwarded to the general Internet using routers attached to ubiquitous wireless basestations.
2.4GHz is the assigned band for wireless networking in the UK and assumes a mean range per device of about 300 metres. By extension it's probably the same in Australia.
I wouldn't say it's a 'great' history, as it casts Nelson as an out and out eccentric with a drive to an Augean task which has been fraught with more disaster than Apple, which Nelson has refuted himself. Check out this link for a better view, or dig through the Xanadu project site or Ted Nelson's homepage.
Sportal and PSINet developed a system like this for the Euro2000 soccer tournament in June this year. It handled something like 70,000,000 hits a day at peak with a distributed architecture across 10 points of presence in the PSI network worldwide. That made it easy: to do it across multiple providers would be a fair bit more work - even for a single provider the team solution involved getting a dedicated AS number to enable peering into the system.
Yep, right from assuming that Microsoft Technology (sic) has anything to do with the operation of the Internet. It runs servers, sure, but if it runs a measurable percentage of Internet routing I'd be surprised.
...and it would appear that it extends NAT functionality in a (presumably) propietary way, adding security aspects and enabling transparency to DNS and ICMP packets. The embodiment also suggests that it's a way of doing it rather than the actual NAT process.
I would have paid to watch the Patent Officer's eyes glaze over as he read it though.
http://www.arancidamoeba.com /mrr/problemwithmusic.html.
As has been said, Sun have practically cornered the high end application level web market in the past couple of years, but their server products still remain out of the reach of the small-midrange service developer. The Netra range, which are excellent pieces of kit, are still far too expensive for the service bracket that they seem to be competing with: the ISP that offers dedicated servers will always go for 40 Cobalts or VA rackservers in a rack rather than 40 Netras as the price difference is roughly three or four-fold. As long as Sun don't start applying Sun prices (an 18Gb SCSI drive is still c £900 from Sun as opposed to £120 from yeraverage mailorder store) the Cobalt range will do fine.
I'm aware of that, and that really is the must-have aspect of the device - it is going to revolutionise television watching. However, it's also going to revolutionise television scheduling as the viewer is no longer bound to a schedule. It also provides viewing demographics at a granularity that surpasses street market research or Nielsen boxes, and the per user value will ultimately exceed the $19.99 per unit monthly subscription. Obviously the units themselves are the loss leader, as with digital set top boxes in the UK (they're normally free, or a peppercorn price, plus a subscription) and I could forsee a similar thing happening with TiVo if it doesn't quite make it with the networks. However, a free service in the same way that web services are free isn't unthinkable because if the networks get on board, it will return the initial investment a hundredfold.
Next month, according to TiVo's website.
Here in the UK, which is the next launch site for TiVo, we also have the first wave digital TV systems. TiVo is a great idea, but in the short term I'm sure I'm not the only one who could do without a third black box under my TV (a fourth, if/when I buy that DVD player). Now, a TiVo that plugged directly into the back of my digibox, or even a TiVo/digibox combination, possibly in association with Sky or onDigital - hmmmm....
You'll pleased to know that I'm switching moderation back on on my account for the sole purpose of moderating your inane crap down as far as I possibly can.
Conversely I've heard of banks who are bypassing the cost of UK IT professionals by recruiting in India, accomodating staff, flying them to India and back once a month and paying them £8.50 an hour, which still amounts to a small fortune for a smart twentysomething from Bangalore.
At the risk of some RIAA maven finding it, very few people seem to have mentioned the Shoutcast DNAS and Icecast. Shoutcast is moving towards generating analysis of listeners including the 'golden number' of listener time. Site/station popularity is already covered by the Shoutcast directory and associated services like Live 365. While low bandwidth continues to be common, 24 or 56k streaming of the traditional one-to-many radio format remains a popular and usable choice for online listening. The majority of servers on the system tend to be hobbyist or vanity shows but I'm sure it wouldn't take much work to integrate a big hard drive full of tunes with some smart database software to create a DARLA-ish server for streaming .
You've hit the nail on the head. Levys on recording media have had a mixed success in various countries, but to my knowledge the question of how such a levy changes the rights of the purchaser has never been addressed. In the UK the BPI almost succeeded in getting a levy on blank tapes in 1981-2 but the amendment was thrown out when the BPI couldn't justify it beyond saying that any blank tape could potentially be used to illegally record music. Fortunately this didn't convince the Exchequer, which was about to reform the Copyright Act anyway. As this seems to extend to hardware, which is, after all a lot more expensive than a blank tape or CD, I suspect that it will only take someone like Compaq or Dell to refuse to pay the levy to make it unworkable.
It's almost happened a couple of times with the Nokia Communicator and the Qualcomm pdQ but not quite: the Communicator's too clunky and the pdQ is currently underpowered compared to the Palmtypes and CE machines of the moment. Personally I can see Sony merging their tiny z5 phone and their Clie Palmtype not that far up the line.
I have to agree, IME it's one of the bigger stumbling blocks to desktop Linux in an NT environment. Samba works reasonably well but seems to be better at making mounts available than connecting to those mounts. I used Mandrake as a desktop exclusively at work for about six months and this was the one shortfall, as even with a properly configured Samba it was hard to maintain mounts on an NT file server and resulted in a lot of semi-broken directories in my ~home directory.
I assume the National Library of Australia is a copyright library like most other national libraries in the world, so it should receive a copy of every publication of any size produced in Australia.
Think about it - how many of us would pay for a lottery ticket for the chance to press the button to fire one of those babies out of orbit? I know I would.