> Forget DSL, get a cheap T1 from an ILEC,
> they will let you run BGP.
Unfortunately I live in France. You would be surprised how expensive T1 and their equivalents are on our side of the pond. I'm not complaining though : at least wine is not a luxury item and stinking cheese is not illegal here.
Stop dreaming, no consumer ISP is going to let you send BGP annoucements into their network. Can't blame them though : BGP in novice hands is a very convenient way to fuck up spectacularily.
Go for proxy-based load balancing for the HTTP traffic, go for TEQL (loadsharing over multiple interfaces queuing in order to split the rest, use RIP to announce availability of outbound connections. Basically, you can do almost anything you want with outgoing connections, but you're pretty much stuck if you want inbound failover.
Give me a consumer DSL access provider that does BGP and I'll be a happy man ! Right now, no one gets it unless getting access through large-ish leased lines with lavish support and matching price tag.
El lider maximo ! The ressemblance would be striking.
Military solutions don't do well with civilians
on
Peer-to-Peer Cellular
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What the article describes is the old military concept of "mobile mesh network". Highly survivable solutions are a must in a combat environment, but their their characteristics make them completely unmarketable. In our specific example, the reasons are as follow:
Full-mesh wireless networks like JTIDS are inherently inefficient because one cannot make
range (timing) and Doppler corrections at the transmitters, and because there is no frequency
reuse. With a repeater-based architecture, all transmitters can adjust timing and frequency to
correct for their range from the repeater and for relative velocity. In a full-mesh network, all of
the other nodes are potential receivers, but one can make range and Doppler corrections for only
one of them. With multiple repeaters (base stations), two repeaters that are not close to one
another can use the same frequencies without interference; such frequency reuse enables large
increases in system capacity over full-mesh and single-repeater architectures. Decreasing cell size in order to increase frequency reuse reduces the survivability of the network.
A closely related concept is that of the self-organizing hierarchical network. These networks are similar to the homogeneous mobile mesh networks, except that nodes organize themselves into clusters and by some means "elect" a cluster head (see, for example, Alwan et. al, 1996). The cluster head is responsible for keeping track of the membership of the cluster and the locations of nearby cluster heads, and for performing routing, switching, and trunking functions. However, since any node must be able to function as the cluster head, cost and battery life are likely to be problematic. Remember that mobile devices are highly contrained.
The problem with military stuff is that it is grossly overengineered from a civilian point of view. We all would like to carry cutting edge radio hardware with us and be ready for all kinds of emergencies, but there is a price to pay and the civilian market won't bear it, preferring to take long term risks and to get more features and more performance in the short term. If survivability was foremost, everyone would be backing up their data. Field experience shows that it is not he case.
Sources:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:3fDYY36opQQ:w ww.rand.org/publications/MR/MR960/MR960.chap3.pdf+ tactical+network+relay+node++survivability
http://dss.ll.mit.edu/dss.web/98F-SIW-143.html
If you are an independant musician and you are in France, check out Generasound. It is an independant musicians community, and it is very supportive of emerging talents. Both amateurs and professionals are welcome. Community concerts are even organized to promote artists. It's growing !
http://www.nsrc.org/wireless/HF-radio.html You have a remote place without telephone and you want to connect via Internet e-mail. You want to use HF e-mail. You will need a radio transceiver, antenna, modem, as well as a computer, cables and software. You will also need agreed frequencies, probably some kind of license to operate radio equipment and compatible HF modems at each end.
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~radionet/papers/ The experiences of the members of an Italian project in establishing wireless networking using Linux in Africa. This article appeared in Linux Journal #56 Dec 1998 issue.
oggenc makes a perfect drop-in replacement for any mp3 encoder. Now I rip everything to ogg without even thinking about it. And since players such as xmms and Winamp support ogg it's completely transparent from a user point of view, appart from the increased quality off course ! And there is nothing that prevents mp3 and ogg files from cohabitating : my 44 GB of mp3 are still here, but there is a growing minority of ogg that comes on top of it as I rip new CDs.
> Not airline pilots (someone please
> correct me if this is true for
> anything other than Air Zambia)
Airline pilots do use them : it's mandatory to have a set of slide rules in the pilot's bag jsut in case all other equipment cease to function despite the n-levels of redundancy. They are seldom used in actual operation, but from time to time, a simulation scenario requires them to be used just to keep the skill sharp. Also, they are part of authorized tools during exams.
From http://www.herley.com/Herley-Metraplex/www/irigpcm.htm :
Early telemetry systems transmitted analog voltages using a commutator (rotary switch) at one end and a synchronized decommutator at the other end. We still use the words commutator and decommutator though most telemetry systems today use electronic switches and send digital data.
We index dozens of gigs of txt, html, pdf, xls, doc and ps. Not 100% of the documents are indexed but it's a parser problem with some of the files (a few pdf, xls doc and ps seem to make their parser choke).
"High-speed cable access is not a telecommunication service -- it is an information service"
What about convergence ? In my opinion, there is no difference between telecom and information. Can anyone defend his point by making the subtlety clearer ?
I've seen quite often big manufacturers of anything from office supplies to lipstick assign salespeople to distributor. The distributor gets one extra salesdrone to push the warez to the consumer and the manufacturer gets a preferred status in exchange. The impact on the consumer is not that much different from the biais of a salesman that pushes products that generate higher margins.
I'm working on GPRS roaming and had a chance to play with those phones. Apart from mediocre latency, it's the future of mobile data and available right now (although not in mobile-challenged USA) : 25-45 kb/s, always on, transparent roaming and an order of magniture cheaper than the equivalent transfer on CSD. PCMCIA and assorted cards are on the way, don't get stuck with CSD !
I'm French, I work in France for a large French telecom operator and I write about everything in English : we have affiliates just short of everywhere and it's the only way to be sure everyone understands, and is capable of truly collaborating. French people seems to be uncomfortable with that, but I believe languages are just tools : use the best for the task.
I've studied in France and Germany, worked in four countries and travelled seven times that, my co-workers are from a dozen different nationalities, and I enjoy speaking French or German as much as English, but if we have just one person in a group that does not speak a language, we won't use that one. And English speakers having the narrowest mind as far as culture is concerned (yeah, flame me !) they seldom have to make any effort.
But in the long term, they lose : the winners are the ones capable of understanding the other cultures in depth, and language is part of it. If you can make your business partners comfortable in conversation, you also win because you establish better relationships and you understand what is going on in his mind whereas he can only speculate about the situation.
And I do not think that speaking foreign languages means surrendering one's culture : I may me multilingual, but that does not precludes me from cultivating my French skills and being a grammar nazi in my own language.
I try to get into people's head that French is an awesome language, especially if you use in the full breadth of it's power, not if you bastardise it ! The same applies to English : international English (I call that "eurospeak") really is a poor substitute for the real thing. Don't give up !
The Inatheque http://inatheque.ina.fr/ (in french) records since 1995 all french radio and TV broadcasts. Everything is stored in a bunker-like complex and they have a high-speed network that the journalists use to access the archives.
I was working at Andersen Consulting when they participated in the specifications for the project, and what I saw was quite impressive, especially the hardware involved.
> Marketers don't care about being intrusive,
> they aren't concerned about privacy or
> convienience.
Wrong ! They are very concerned, at least if they want to build a relationship and not to fuck you just once, in which case not being concerned is understandable. But if they really want to build a mutually beneficial relationship and still be behave like assholes, it means that they are not doing they jobs properly and should learn some marketing basics before somebody finds out.
Good marketing is transparent. But there are not many good marketers !
>One of the biggest problem with company websites,
>IMO, is that they let the marketers run them.
>Which is why you have to wade thru useless
>padlum to get to the product or support info, or
>driver you are looking for. I see this every >day.
One of the biggest problem with company websites is that they let techies run them.
Okay, I admit I'm this one is a bit trollish... But it's just to press the point that bad design is not a prerogative of marketers : techies do it a well.
My job is to try to bridge the gap between both worlds, and I keep hearing each side crapping on the other's culture all day. Stop the war ! You need each other.
And just to help you understand my point of view, I have to say that went to business school studying finance and marketing until a postgraduate degree in organization and information systems, and I also have been administrating a dozen Linux boxes for a few years. I consult for JiPOwww.jipo.com and I mostly do strategy and operational marketing. I presently write mobile Internet product specifications for a major mobile operator.
Distributors serve a purpose : they give the manufacturer access to customers and give the customers service along with the products. Of course, Motorola could do that as well, but specialists usually do things more efficiently. Once Motorola loses the cooperation of specialists, the company will realize that pretending to be good at everything may be overly ambitious, but it will be too late because the distributors will have begun proposing their customers the products from other manufacturers.
Motorola looks like the big baddie in this story, but whoever knows the customer intimately and serves him well packs a lot of power too. What we have here may look like one sided bullying, but the distributors are armed for bargaining.
If they feel weak, it means that their knowledge of their market segments and the service they offer is not sufficient to add value, which means that they serve no purpose to manufacturers and they better learn new tricks before everybody realizes that.
Ask it for totals according to address, port or protocol. Very simple to install : one package and one kernel compile option. The Debian package installs the couple of IPchains rules needed to make it work. No noticeable overhead on a DSL connection.
And the new version even seems to build graphs !
It does not do user related accounting, but if your addressing policy links IPs to persons, the problem is solved !
IPac's homepage : http://www.comlink.apc.org/~moritz/ipac.html
France Telecom delayed launch, played every dirty trick in the book to keep its grip on the POTS and ISDN time billed traffic from Internet access, only now accepted to open the local exchanges to competitors installing DSLAMS, the beginning of ADSL were horrendous with a critically underengineered access network and voluntarily artificially created bottlenecks to the access providers on the other side of the core network... It was truly hopeless and they were getting flamed to smoldering ashes on every forums known to man.
But now, it seems that everyone is slowly getting over that. The residential access rocks : it is beyond my wildest dreams of a few months ago. I download hundreds of megabytes daily and even tried successfully to stream MP3 from the net. I love it ! And the professional access is not bad either : on top of the public subnet you really get superior performance and responsive and goodwilling if not competent support.
On the downside, the early Alcatel 1000 pptp servers/ADSL modems are broken, pptp itself sucks, the authentification server is touchy and France Telecom's engineers are still as disorganized as usual, except that the newbies there are now barely competent : if you have a problem, you better have all your logs and a good scenario handy to support your case and make them understand the nature of the problem !
But still, I now have an awesome access, and so does my company. I am now only 100ms away from my company's net and 50 ms away from my provider, and hundreds of kilobytes a second flow to me for about USD 70 a month all included (line rental, modem rental, DSL access, Internet access). More than in the US, but fuck it feels great to be permanently connected after ten years of dreaming of it !
Slashdot Mirror
> Forget DSL, get a cheap T1 from an ILEC, > they will let you run BGP.
Unfortunately I live in France. You would be surprised how expensive T1 and their equivalents are on our side of the pond. I'm not complaining though : at least wine is not a luxury item and stinking cheese is not illegal here.
Stop dreaming, no consumer ISP is going to let you send BGP annoucements into their network. Can't blame them though : BGP in novice hands is a very convenient way to fuck up spectacularily.
Go for proxy-based load balancing for the HTTP traffic, go for TEQL (loadsharing over multiple interfaces queuing in order to split the rest, use RIP to announce availability of outbound connections. Basically, you can do almost anything you want with outgoing connections, but you're pretty much stuck if you want inbound failover.
Give me a consumer DSL access provider that does BGP and I'll be a happy man ! Right now, no one gets it unless getting access through large-ish leased lines with lavish support and matching price tag.
Am I dreaming or a story appeared on the front page and had disappeared a few seconds later when I reloaded ?
> I can just picture RMS in military fatigues ...
El lider maximo ! The ressemblance would be striking.
What the article describes is the old military concept of "mobile mesh network". Highly survivable solutions are a must in a combat environment, but their their characteristics make them completely unmarketable. In our specific example, the reasons are as follow :
Full-mesh wireless networks like JTIDS are inherently inefficient because one cannot make
range (timing) and Doppler corrections at the transmitters, and because there is no frequency
reuse. With a repeater-based architecture, all transmitters can adjust timing and frequency to
correct for their range from the repeater and for relative velocity. In a full-mesh network, all of
the other nodes are potential receivers, but one can make range and Doppler corrections for only
one of them. With multiple repeaters (base stations), two repeaters that are not close to one
another can use the same frequencies without interference; such frequency reuse enables large
increases in system capacity over full-mesh and single-repeater architectures. Decreasing cell size in order to increase frequency reuse reduces the survivability of the network.
A closely related concept is that of the self-organizing hierarchical network. These networks are similar to the homogeneous mobile mesh networks, except that nodes organize themselves into clusters and by some means "elect" a cluster head (see, for example, Alwan et. al, 1996). The cluster head is responsible for keeping track of the membership of the cluster and the locations of nearby cluster heads, and for performing routing, switching, and trunking functions. However, since any node must be able to function as the cluster head, cost and battery life are likely to be problematic. Remember that mobile devices are highly contrained.
The problem with military stuff is that it is grossly overengineered from a civilian point of view. We all would like to carry cutting edge radio hardware with us and be ready for all kinds of emergencies, but there is a price to pay and the civilian market won't bear it, preferring to take long term risks and to get more features and more performance in the short term. If survivability was foremost, everyone would be backing up their data. Field experience shows that it is not he case.
Sources :
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:3fDYY36opQQ:w ww.rand.org/publications/MR/MR960/MR960.chap3.pdf+ tactical+network+relay+node++survivability
http://dss.ll.mit.edu/dss.web/98F-SIW-143.html
If you are an independant musician and you are in France, check out Generasound. It is an independant musicians community, and it is very supportive of emerging talents. Both amateurs and professionals are welcome. Community concerts are even organized to promote artists. It's growing !
Utter bollocks ! A GPS receiver is precisely that : a receiver. No information whatsoever is emitted.
http://www.nsrc.org/wireless/HF-radio.html
You have a remote place without telephone and you want to connect via Internet e-mail. You want to use HF e-mail. You will need a radio transceiver, antenna, modem, as well as a computer, cables and software. You will also need agreed frequencies, probably some kind of license to operate radio equipment and compatible HF modems at each end.
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~radionet/papers/
The experiences of the members of an Italian project in establishing wireless networking using Linux in Africa. This article appeared in Linux Journal #56 Dec 1998 issue.
oggenc makes a perfect drop-in replacement for any mp3 encoder. Now I rip everything to ogg without even thinking about it. And since players such as xmms and Winamp support ogg it's completely transparent from a user point of view, appart from the increased quality off course ! And there is nothing that prevents mp3 and ogg files from cohabitating : my 44 GB of mp3 are still here, but there is a growing minority of ogg that comes on top of it as I rip new CDs.
> Not airline pilots (someone please
> correct me if this is true for
> anything other than Air Zambia)
Airline pilots do use them : it's mandatory to have a set of slide rules in the pilot's bag jsut in case all other equipment cease to function despite the n-levels of redundancy. They are seldom used in actual operation, but from time to time, a simulation scenario requires them to be used just to keep the skill sharp. Also, they are part of authorized tools during exams.
From http://www.herley.com/Herley-Metraplex/www/irigpcm .htm :
Early telemetry systems transmitted analog voltages using a commutator (rotary switch) at one end and a synchronized decommutator at the other end. We still use the words commutator and decommutator though most telemetry systems today use electronic switches and send digital data.
We index dozens of gigs of txt, html, pdf, xls, doc and ps. Not 100% of the documents are indexed but it's a parser problem with some of the files (a few pdf, xls doc and ps seem to make their parser choke).
And beside being flexible, ht:/Dig is fast.
4.9. How do I index PDF files?
http://www.htdig.org/FAQ.html#q4.9
If I remember well, the logs mentioned Solaris.
"High-speed cable access is not a telecommunication service -- it is an information service"
What about convergence ? In my opinion, there is no difference between telecom and information. Can anyone defend his point by making the subtlety clearer ?
I've seen quite often big manufacturers of anything from office supplies to lipstick assign salespeople to distributor. The distributor gets one extra salesdrone to push the warez to the consumer and the manufacturer gets a preferred status in exchange. The impact on the consumer is not that much different from the biais of a salesman that pushes products that generate higher margins.
I'm working on GPRS roaming and had a chance to play with those phones. Apart from mediocre latency, it's the future of mobile data and available right now (although not in mobile-challenged USA) : 25-45 kb/s, always on, transparent roaming and an order of magniture cheaper than the equivalent transfer on CSD. PCMCIA and assorted cards are on the way, don't get stuck with CSD !
Troooolllllll !
I'm French, I work in France for a large French telecom operator and I write about everything in English : we have affiliates just short of everywhere and it's the only way to be sure everyone understands, and is capable of truly collaborating. French people seems to be uncomfortable with that, but I believe languages are just tools : use the best for the task.
I've studied in France and Germany, worked in four countries and travelled seven times that, my co-workers are from a dozen different nationalities, and I enjoy speaking French or German as much as English, but if we have just one person in a group that does not speak a language, we won't use that one. And English speakers having the narrowest mind as far as culture is concerned (yeah, flame me !) they seldom have to make any effort.
But in the long term, they lose : the winners are the ones capable of understanding the other cultures in depth, and language is part of it. If you can make your business partners comfortable in conversation, you also win because you establish better relationships and you understand what is going on in his mind whereas he can only speculate about the situation.
And I do not think that speaking foreign languages means surrendering one's culture : I may me multilingual, but that does not precludes me from cultivating my French skills and being a grammar nazi in my own language.
I try to get into people's head that French is an awesome language, especially if you use in the full breadth of it's power, not if you bastardise it ! The same applies to English : international English (I call that "eurospeak") really is a poor substitute for the real thing. Don't give up !
The Inatheque http://inatheque.ina.fr/ (in french) records since 1995 all french radio and TV broadcasts. Everything is stored in a bunker-like complex and they have a high-speed network that the journalists use to access the archives. I was working at Andersen Consulting when they participated in the specifications for the project, and what I saw was quite impressive, especially the hardware involved.
Is that a troll or what ?
> Marketers don't care about being intrusive, > they aren't concerned about privacy or > convienience. Wrong ! They are very concerned, at least if they want to build a relationship and not to fuck you just once, in which case not being concerned is understandable. But if they really want to build a mutually beneficial relationship and still be behave like assholes, it means that they are not doing they jobs properly and should learn some marketing basics before somebody finds out. Good marketing is transparent. But there are not many good marketers ! >One of the biggest problem with company websites, >IMO, is that they let the marketers run them. >Which is why you have to wade thru useless >padlum to get to the product or support info, or >driver you are looking for. I see this every >day. One of the biggest problem with company websites is that they let techies run them. Okay, I admit I'm this one is a bit trollish... But it's just to press the point that bad design is not a prerogative of marketers : techies do it a well. My job is to try to bridge the gap between both worlds, and I keep hearing each side crapping on the other's culture all day. Stop the war ! You need each other. And just to help you understand my point of view, I have to say that went to business school studying finance and marketing until a postgraduate degree in organization and information systems, and I also have been administrating a dozen Linux boxes for a few years. I consult for JiPO www.jipo.com and I mostly do strategy and operational marketing. I presently write mobile Internet product specifications for a major mobile operator.
Distributors serve a purpose : they give the manufacturer access to customers and give the customers service along with the products. Of course, Motorola could do that as well, but specialists usually do things more efficiently. Once Motorola loses the cooperation of specialists, the company will realize that pretending to be good at everything may be overly ambitious, but it will be too late because the distributors will have begun proposing their customers the products from other manufacturers.
Motorola looks like the big baddie in this story, but whoever knows the customer intimately and serves him well packs a lot of power too. What we have here may look like one sided bullying, but the distributors are armed for bargaining.
If they feel weak, it means that their knowledge of their market segments and the service they offer is not sufficient to add value, which means that they serve no purpose to manufacturers and they better learn new tricks before everybody realizes that.
Ask it for totals according to address, port or protocol. Very simple to install : one package and one kernel compile option. The Debian package installs the couple of IPchains rules needed to make it work. No noticeable overhead on a DSL connection. And the new version even seems to build graphs ! It does not do user related accounting, but if your addressing policy links IPs to persons, the problem is solved ! IPac's homepage : http://www.comlink.apc.org/~moritz/ipac.html
France Telecom delayed launch, played every dirty trick in the book to keep its grip on the POTS and ISDN time billed traffic from Internet access, only now accepted to open the local exchanges to competitors installing DSLAMS, the beginning of ADSL were horrendous with a critically underengineered access network and voluntarily artificially created bottlenecks to the access providers on the other side of the core network... It was truly hopeless and they were getting flamed to smoldering ashes on every forums known to man.
But now, it seems that everyone is slowly getting over that. The residential access rocks : it is beyond my wildest dreams of a few months ago. I download hundreds of megabytes daily and even tried successfully to stream MP3 from the net. I love it ! And the professional access is not bad either : on top of the public subnet you really get superior performance and responsive and goodwilling if not competent support.
On the downside, the early Alcatel 1000 pptp servers/ADSL modems are broken, pptp itself sucks, the authentification server is touchy and France Telecom's engineers are still as disorganized as usual, except that the newbies there are now barely competent : if you have a problem, you better have all your logs and a good scenario handy to support your case and make them understand the nature of the problem !
But still, I now have an awesome access, and so does my company. I am now only 100ms away from my company's net and 50 ms away from my provider, and hundreds of kilobytes a second flow to me for about USD 70 a month all included (line rental, modem rental, DSL access, Internet access). More than in the US, but fuck it feels great to be permanently connected after ten years of dreaming of it !