That's exactly my point. UPS can pay its own vehicle and fuel taxes, and I'll be happy to pay for them in my shipping fees. If someone finds a way to deliver goods with less road wear or vehicle costs (such as by bicycle courier) the taxes should be lower, and the shipping charge reduced. Putting a broad tax on internet sales doesn't allow me that economic choice, it's a blank check to politicians to find as many ways as possible to waste the money.
So far no one on this panel has given any justification for why these taxes are needed, or what they will be used for.
Here's a breakdown of what taxes are used for currently in the US:
Sales taxes - supplying motorists with roads, parking lots, and ambulance service so they can get to The Mall.
Property taxes - supplying homeowners with police and fire protection, so no one will steal the cars that people need to get to The Mall.
Income taxes - paying for a huge army to keep gas cheap so people can get to The Mall
Internet taxes - ?
As far as I can tell from reading articles on this panel, the main impetus seems to be to raise taxes so that internet shopping will not be cheaper than going to The Mall.
There ought to be a way to switch the speeds, so the 640k is outbound from the user, and the 90k is inbound. That would be great for home servers, or webcams, etc. In fact I can't see why this couldn't be done dynamically, in response to load.
"Africa ONE will save hundreds of millions of dollars in transit fees now being paid by African carriers to complete calls via Europe."
All this bellyaching about people starving in Africa misses the point. They're already starving, to pay European telcos to complete intra-African long-distance calls.
No, it's a basic layered design which puts block i/o on an open layer underneath the file system. A kludge is when you need a facility like this and have to work around the OS to get it, eg partition magic, Norton utilities, etc.
The logical volume layer is a great thing to work with in normal situations. Mirroring, striping, RAID, backups, and failover all work at this level. To give an example, if you want to do a hot backup of a mirrored filesystem, you can split off one mirror, mount the copy and fsck it, dd it to tape, and then merge the storage back into the mirror, without disturbing the primary FS. That works for oracle instances as well (just substitute some oracle commands for fsck above).
Oracle uses files or logical volumes, which are basically glorified disk partitions. My experience is on HP-UX, but what generally happens is that root creates logical volumes for oracle which are accessed via/dev in the root filesystem. Once the LV's are created and opened, nothing should be able to read/write blocks in them except Oracle, under oracle's own user id. It's a basic device locking process.
Apparently Solaris screwed up this arrangement and wrote some blocks in Oracle's space. It's odd that Oracle was then able to crash the OS - the only reason I can think of is that Solaris put something really critical in those blocks, and Oracle overwrote them for some reason while it was aborting.
The basic idea these days seems to be to build a network of terabit fiber and then go get some customers. Unfortunately, despite deregulation, the only way that these companies can imagine getting customers is to buy local phone companies lock, stock, and barrel, and herd their customers, most of which have never even used the internet, in the general direction of ADSL and cable 'net access.
This seems kind of odd to me, but I guess it's considered normal by phone company executives who have never done it any other way. It's an unfortunate by-product of a process where backbone capacities have improved quickly, but local loop (frontbone?) capacities are lagging - the companies have to get their goods to market, but can only do so by buying into slow-growth, highly regulated local monopolies.
It would be great if some of the independent ADSL providers could get into the local market. My take on the Qwest and Global Crossing efforts is that the leaders of these companies think the independents will be squeezed out by the local telco monopolies. They're probably right, as most people probably have no idea that their phone lines could be piggybacked with another vendor's ADSL, and hooked to an ISP and backbone feed separate from the phone company.
Re:PacBell DSL Home Pack is $198 for the year
on
Feature: Getting DSL
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· Score: 1
That's for the ISP component, which covers routing, DNS, news, email, and possibly some web space. If you want an actual physical DSL connection, that's an additional $39.95 from pac bell (not pacbell.net).
Speaking of Health Alerts, anybody remember the plastic cutting board scam?
Apparently someone decided wooden cutting boards might harbor nasty bacteria, so he published the result without any peer review whatsoever. The plastic people picked up on the factoid and started telling everyone to buy plastic.
I got in late on this deal, but I think the end result was that someone did a study and found that wood actually kills bacteria (how many trees do you see dying of salmonella), while plastic forms lots of little cut grooves which hold moisture for bacteria to thrive in.
In any case, it doesn't matter because the factoid had already imprinted itself in the public mind. One charity home I know of spent $2000 replacing their wooden cutting boards. Oh well...
>but add in session management, personalisation, real-time news feed, content archives, commerce, access control, extensible templating and >dynamic page generation and all that other stuff we do in the real world, and your solution starts to look quite naive.
(sounds like our site!)
But add in scalability and fault tolerance, and a single-server solution looks pretty nutty, especially if your traffic is already beyond what a single server can handle.
It's better to have a two-tier architecture, with apaches and template building on one tier, and data on the back end. Decent middleware will handle message passing and failover, load balancing, etc.
And, of course, most load balancers can hash packets based on source IP, so session management can be handled on single boxes (although it's better to be able to switch boxes by passing data around).
Mr. Renn thinks ISP and local loop should be bundlable. I think they should be as unbundled as possible, but the current law doesn't go far enough.
Example: I have a pacbell ADSL line for $40/mo. My ISP is pacbell.net, for $10/mo. If Covad, for instance, gets its ADSL price down to $30/mo., I would like to be able to switch to Covad ADSL + pacbell ISP. However I'm not sure if pacbell.net wants to support Covad. Does this law help me? NO.
Under the law, pacbell.net is still allowed to deny me access from a different ADSL or cable provider, because the law only specifies half of the unbundling - ISP's are still allowed to pick which broadband partners they like. The consumer should be able to say "I have broadband, now I want ISP X" and get connected. The current law doesn't do that.
The bill "unbundles" local loop and ISP services, but in one direction only. It forbids local loop carriers from choosing the ISP's they connect to, but it allows the opposite direction: ISP's can pick their local loop carriers.
So AOL chooses its preferred broadband company, giving them exclusive access if it wants, and other broadband providers are shut out.
Real unbundling would allow the customer to pick any ISP and any broadband. That's what the bill *sounds* like, but you have to watch out.
Re:This is good stuff even if AOL is behind it
on
Internet Freedom Act
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· Score: 2
But if your ISP doesn't choose to support cable, the bill won't help you. See above for my posts on this. The bill is asymmetric; it allows ISP's to choose, but broadband has to service all comers. It's not unbundling in the pure sense.
Re:Why should cable get a monopoly that phones don
on
Internet Freedom Act
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· Score: 2
I'm not sure if I agree with Mr. Renn about all this, but I can see AOL's hand in this law.
Section 102 doesn't *completely* forbid bundling of broadband and ISP. It forbids broadband local loopers from choosing the ISP, but the ISP *can choose its broadband*. So AOL can pick and choose between cable and phone, and if some schmoe comes up with a jazillion megabit, cheap local loop service, AOL can say "sorry, we want TCI to be our local loop" and shut him out. In fact I think AOL could charge the local loop carrier for exclusive rights.
It would be MUCH better if Section 102 made the unbundling complete, so that neither side could choose. For now it just sounds like unbundling.
I think I see the source of the confusion. This bill mixes a bunch of things which are separate, but sound awful if mixed together.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Section 101: Local phone co.'s (only) have to open their local loops to broadband transport providers, even if they don't want to provide broadband themselves. That basically means the public phone lines are available to whoever can deliver ADSL on them.
Section 102: Broadband local loop can't choose your ISP. That's antitrust, but note that there's nothing about whether an ISP can choose which broadband you use - it's asymmetric.
Section 103: An ISP can *sue* a broadband transport provider if it's getting shut out as per Section 101. (HOWEVER there's no reciprocal provision, that a broadband transport provider can sue an ISP for disallowing access. So AOL can pick its broadband transport provider(s), and tell all others to get lost. Hmm...Interesting)
Section 104: Anti-spam having nothing to do with broadband, etc.
I'm not sure if I get you here. If you mean people who invested in backbone, they may face more competition from regional phone companies, but I don't see any rights infringed.
If you mean local loop (which is typically copper, not fiber), the bill opens these to competitive use, which may harm some investments, and forbids bundling of ISP and local loop, which is basic anti-trust.
For metro fiber networks, I don't think these will be affected. The law specifically targets "incumbent local telephone companies", by which I assume they mean baby bells and other traditional phone monopolies.
The one thing I'd like to see is a prohibition on device-ISP bundling. For instance WebTV uses a proprietary dial-in, which turns a potentially useful device into a slow, expensive, and inflexible mess. This practice may already be illegal under the Sherman Act; does anyone know more about this?
Ditto that. Until DSL rolled out in '99, SF was a broadband desert. No @home, only TCI's crappy cable monopoly. I was considering either satellite or a wireless T1 to Berkeley when ADSL finally arrived.
The article says SF got high scores for the number of net hosts per resident. This score is high due to the large number of commuters, who don't count in the residence figures, but have PC's on their desks which count as SF hosts. Most of these people work in dynamic industries like banking and insurance.
Probably SF is top 5 in toilets per resident too, if that's any consolation.
Not quite. The main idea is to discard small differences in frequency, so that several nearby frequencies will be quantized to one representative tone. Humans don't detect those differences too well, so it sounds like the real thing.
It's analogous to a 256-color display, where each color is selected to represent a number of similar colors in the original 24-bit image. It's not perfect, but it does well with the bits available.
One issue that affects piracy is the monopolistic pricing used by MS. Korean bootleg PC makers had a protest a month or two ago because they were being asked to pay $150 for WinDoze, while a few big OEM's were only paying $70 or so (sound familiar?). The whole anti-piracy thing was being used to decrease competition.
As I recall MS at the same time was giving away MS Word, because a rival Korean product was so much better. MS had tried to buy out the rival company, but failed.
Samsung's new Yepp player will have Secumax installed on it, which is apparently different from Intertrust's stuff. Standards are good, so more standards are better, right?
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That's exactly my point. UPS can pay its own vehicle and fuel taxes, and I'll be happy to pay for them in my shipping fees. If someone finds a way to deliver goods with less road wear or vehicle costs (such as by bicycle courier) the taxes should be lower, and the shipping charge reduced. Putting a broad tax on internet sales doesn't allow me that economic choice, it's a blank check to politicians to find as many ways as possible to waste the money.
So far no one on this panel has given any justification for why these taxes are needed, or what they will be used for.
Here's a breakdown of what taxes are used for currently in the US:
Sales taxes - supplying motorists with roads, parking lots, and ambulance service so they can get to The Mall.
Property taxes - supplying homeowners with police and fire protection, so no one will steal the cars that people need to get to The Mall.
Income taxes - paying for a huge army to keep gas cheap so people can get to The Mall
Internet taxes - ?
As far as I can tell from reading articles on this panel, the main impetus seems to be to raise taxes so that internet shopping will not be cheaper than going to The Mall.
There ought to be a way to switch the speeds, so the 640k is outbound from the user, and the 90k is inbound. That would be great for home servers, or webcams, etc. In fact I can't see why this couldn't be done dynamically, in response to load.
This is from the Global Crossing press release:
"Africa ONE will save hundreds of millions of dollars in transit fees now being paid by African carriers to complete calls via Europe."
All this bellyaching about people starving in Africa misses the point. They're already starving, to pay European telcos to complete intra-African long-distance calls.
Yeah, this came out around the time we were all talking about GBLX buying US West. Wow, that BBC is fast.
The trend lately has been to lay cable across the ocean and back again so as to have a loop, in case one segment gets eaten by a shark.
No, it's a basic layered design which puts block i/o on an open layer underneath the file system. A kludge is when you need a facility like this and have to work around the OS to get it, eg partition magic, Norton utilities, etc.
The logical volume layer is a great thing to work with in normal situations. Mirroring, striping, RAID, backups, and failover all work at this level. To give an example, if you want to do a hot backup of a mirrored filesystem, you can split off one mirror, mount the copy and fsck it, dd it to tape, and then merge the storage back into the mirror, without disturbing the primary FS. That works for oracle instances as well (just substitute some oracle commands for fsck above).
Oracle uses files or logical volumes, which are basically glorified disk partitions. My experience is on HP-UX, but what generally happens is that root creates logical volumes for oracle which are accessed via /dev in the root filesystem. Once the LV's are created and opened, nothing should be able to read/write blocks in them except Oracle, under oracle's own user id. It's a basic device locking process.
Apparently Solaris screwed up this arrangement and wrote some blocks in Oracle's space. It's odd that Oracle was then able to crash the OS - the only reason I can think of is that Solaris put something really critical in those blocks, and Oracle overwrote them for some reason while it was aborting.
The basic idea these days seems to be to build a network of terabit fiber and then go get some customers. Unfortunately, despite deregulation, the only way that these companies can imagine getting customers is to buy local phone companies lock, stock, and barrel, and herd their customers, most of which have never even used the internet, in the general direction of ADSL and cable 'net access.
This seems kind of odd to me, but I guess it's considered normal by phone company executives who have never done it any other way. It's an unfortunate by-product of a process where backbone capacities have improved quickly, but local loop (frontbone?) capacities are lagging - the companies have to get their goods to market, but can only do so by buying into slow-growth, highly regulated local monopolies.
It would be great if some of the independent ADSL providers could get into the local market. My take on the Qwest and Global Crossing efforts is that the leaders of these companies think the independents will be squeezed out by the local telco monopolies. They're probably right, as most people probably have no idea that their phone lines could be piggybacked with another vendor's ADSL, and hooked to an ISP and backbone feed separate from the phone company.
That's for the ISP component, which covers routing, DNS, news, email, and possibly some web space. If you want an actual physical DSL connection, that's an additional $39.95 from pac bell (not pacbell.net).
Presumably all submissions should be based on the 8088 architecture.
So, yes, it would count.
Speaking of Health Alerts, anybody remember the plastic cutting board scam?
Apparently someone decided wooden cutting boards might harbor nasty bacteria, so he published the result without any peer review whatsoever. The plastic people picked up on the factoid and started telling everyone to buy plastic.
I got in late on this deal, but I think the end result was that someone did a study and found that wood actually kills bacteria (how many trees do you see dying of salmonella), while plastic forms lots of little cut grooves which hold moisture for bacteria to thrive in.
In any case, it doesn't matter because the factoid had already imprinted itself in the public mind. One charity home I know of spent $2000 replacing their wooden cutting boards. Oh well...
>but add in session management, personalisation, real-time news feed, content archives, commerce, access control, extensible templating and
>dynamic page generation and all that other stuff we do in the real world, and your solution starts to look quite naive.
(sounds like our site!)
But add in scalability and fault tolerance, and a single-server solution looks pretty nutty, especially if your traffic is already beyond what a single server can handle.
It's better to have a two-tier architecture, with apaches and template building on one tier, and data on the back end. Decent middleware will handle message passing and failover, load balancing, etc.
And, of course, most load balancers can hash packets based on source IP, so session management can be handled on single boxes (although it's better to be able to switch boxes by passing data around).
Mr. Renn thinks ISP and local loop should be bundlable. I think they should be as unbundled as possible, but the current law doesn't go far enough.
Example: I have a pacbell ADSL line for $40/mo. My ISP is pacbell.net, for $10/mo. If Covad, for instance, gets its ADSL price down to $30/mo., I would like to be able to switch to Covad ADSL + pacbell ISP. However I'm not sure if pacbell.net wants to support Covad. Does this law help me? NO.
Under the law, pacbell.net is still allowed to deny me access from a different ADSL or cable provider, because the law only specifies half of the unbundling - ISP's are still allowed to pick which broadband partners they like. The consumer should be able to say "I have broadband, now I want ISP X" and get connected. The current law doesn't do that.
Yes, it took me while, but I figured it out:
The bill "unbundles" local loop and ISP services, but in one direction only. It forbids local loop carriers from choosing the ISP's they connect to, but it allows the opposite direction: ISP's can pick their local loop carriers.
So AOL chooses its preferred broadband company, giving them exclusive access if it wants, and other broadband providers are shut out.
Real unbundling would allow the customer to pick any ISP and any broadband. That's what the bill *sounds* like, but you have to watch out.
But if your ISP doesn't choose to support cable, the bill won't help you. See above for my posts on this. The bill is asymmetric; it allows ISP's to choose, but broadband has to service all comers. It's not unbundling in the pure sense.
I'm not sure if I agree with Mr. Renn about all this, but I can see AOL's hand in this law.
Section 102 doesn't *completely* forbid bundling of broadband and ISP. It forbids broadband local loopers from choosing the ISP, but the ISP *can choose its broadband*. So AOL can pick and choose between cable and phone, and if some schmoe comes up with a jazillion megabit, cheap local loop service, AOL can say "sorry, we want TCI to be our local loop" and shut him out. In fact I think AOL could charge the local loop carrier for exclusive rights.
It would be MUCH better if Section 102 made the unbundling complete, so that neither side could choose. For now it just sounds like unbundling.
I think I see the source of the confusion. This bill mixes a bunch of things which are separate, but sound awful if mixed together.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Section 101: Local phone co.'s (only) have to open their local loops to broadband transport providers, even if they don't want to provide broadband themselves. That basically means the public phone lines are available to whoever can deliver ADSL on them.
Section 102: Broadband local loop can't choose your ISP. That's antitrust, but note that there's nothing about whether an ISP can choose which broadband you use - it's asymmetric.
Section 103: An ISP can *sue* a broadband transport provider if it's getting shut out as per Section 101. (HOWEVER there's no reciprocal provision, that a broadband transport provider can sue an ISP for disallowing access. So AOL can pick its broadband transport provider(s), and tell all others to get lost. Hmm...Interesting)
Section 104: Anti-spam having nothing to do with broadband, etc.
I'm not sure if I get you here. If you mean people who invested in backbone, they may face more competition from regional phone companies, but I don't see any rights infringed.
If you mean local loop (which is typically copper, not fiber), the bill opens these to competitive use, which may harm some investments, and forbids bundling of ISP and local loop, which is basic anti-trust.
For metro fiber networks, I don't think these will be affected. The law specifically targets "incumbent local telephone companies", by which I assume they mean baby bells and other traditional phone monopolies.
The one thing I'd like to see is a prohibition on device-ISP bundling. For instance WebTV uses a proprietary dial-in, which turns a potentially useful device into a slow, expensive, and inflexible mess. This practice may already be illegal under the Sherman Act; does anyone know more about this?
In Korea, some highways are closed once a year for landing practice. They're similar to US interstates, but they have movable median dividers.
I don't think the US system is much use as a landing zone. Landing is easy - it's finding gas, ammunition, and rental cars that's difficult.
Ditto that. Until DSL rolled out in '99, SF was a broadband desert. No @home, only TCI's crappy cable monopoly. I was considering either satellite or a wireless T1 to Berkeley when ADSL finally arrived.
The article says SF got high scores for the number of net hosts per resident. This score is high due to the large number of commuters, who don't count in the residence figures, but have PC's on their desks which count as SF hosts. Most of these people work in dynamic industries like banking and insurance.
Probably SF is top 5 in toilets per resident too, if that's any consolation.
Not quite. The main idea is to discard small differences in frequency, so that several nearby frequencies will be quantized to one representative tone. Humans don't detect those differences too well, so it sounds like the real thing.
It's analogous to a 256-color display, where each color is selected to represent a number of similar colors in the original 24-bit image. It's not perfect, but it does well with the bits available.
One issue that affects piracy is the monopolistic pricing used by MS. Korean bootleg PC makers had a protest a month or two ago because they were being asked to pay $150 for WinDoze, while a few big OEM's were only paying $70 or so (sound familiar?). The whole anti-piracy thing was being used to decrease competition.
As I recall MS at the same time was giving away MS Word, because a rival Korean product was so much better. MS had tried to buy out the rival company, but failed.
Don't know why nobody found this one on Wired News:
Thomson is investing in MP3. Thomson owns several of the patents on MP3 technology, so it looks like they're going in the right direction.
Samsung's new Yepp player will have Secumax installed on it, which is apparently different from Intertrust's stuff. Standards are good, so more standards are better, right?