being a natural monopoly and a vital service with inelastic demand, communications networks like telecoms/ISPs cannot be boycotted effectively by consumers. so even if you believe in having the invisible hand of the Free Market make everything alright, that will not work in this case. but the social apparatus constituting a democratic government exists precisely for situations like these where it provides the only mechanism for carrying out the will of the people in protecting public interest.
Telecommunications may have been a natural monopoly 100 years ago when Theodore Vale used it to argue that AT&T should be the one American telephone company. It certainly is not one now. Why would a government telco be any better than the heavily regulated monopoly system we tried in the past?
At the last mile level there are many competing technologies (DSL, Cable, EVDO, Fixed-wireless) from completing companies with their own pros and cons. If you are not happy with one provider you are free to switch to another provider.
Indeed, AT&T provides wholesale access to the DSL system through ASI at very reasonable rates. In any area where AT&T DSL is available there are several alternate IP carriers available should you not like AT&T's stance on Network Neutrality, etc.
The real tragedy of access is not that consumer choice is limited, rather its that consumers do not look beyond big Phone and big Cable.
Yes, I know that Sun and HP OEM HDS arrays. I think that many people are more familiar with HP or Sun than they are with HDS, which is why I mentioned them.
In all fairness, I should have mentioned EMC, but I don't really like them. Nasty disk offset performance hacks and such.
For some workloads, many servers with four drives each may work. This is the Petabox/Google model. This works if you have a parallelisable problem and can push most of your computation out to the storage servers. Remember, you don't have a 300Tb drive, you have 300 servers, each with 1Tb of local storage.
For other workloads, you need a big disk aray and SAN, probably from Hitachi, Sun, or HP. This is the traditional model. Use this if you need a really big central storage pool or really high throughput. Many SAN arrays can scale into the PB range without too much trouble.
Nowadays, a PB is enough to arch your eyebrows, but otherwise not that amazing. It seemes that commercial storage leads home storage by 1000. When home users had 1GB drives, 1TB was amazing. Now that some home users have 1TB, many companies have 1PB.
Not even close. With a PetaBox you get a rack filled back-to-back with really low end PC hardware (VIA C3) and a boatload of IDE disk.
With the Eternus you get a disk array that you attach to your SAN.
They are two completely different products for totally different jobs.
You'd run you financial database on a Sun attached to a Eternus.
You'd run your Google clone off of a PetaBox.
Actually, the proxy is used to get you behind China's firewall.
I realize that this is the opposite of how most people use proxies, but it is not all that unusual
You know, I would actually consider running this if the BBC didn't have such a reputation for being nationalistic information hoarders.
Time and again they release something cool, a new media archive for example, and trumpet it far and wide only to say in the fine print that it is only for people who live in the UK.
How do I know that they won't take the work of my processor and only allow people in the UK to view the aggregate results? "I'm sorry, but the final assembly work was paid for by our TV tax, which you don't pay, so go away."
Another technology bubble fueled by small startups with a focus on acquisition. Going public will not be a goal because of Sarbanes-Oxley.
WiMax is a big flop. Implementations do not live up to the hype and "Channel sales" favoring established cell companies over municipalities, ISPs, and individuals will restrict the deployment of WiMax access points.
Broadcast television decline in favor of video podcasts.
Consumer backlash against RIAA due to their heavy-handed legal tactics.
A general collapse of walled garden social networking sites.
First off, some of your canopy info pages have proven helpful to me in the past, thank you.
I've run CNUT on Windows and Ubuntu (they only "support" Windows and RHEL.) I just finished updating a few thousand units using CNUT on Ubuntu. 0 units bricked or requiring end user intervention to recover. Motorola has been very good about replacing the few units that have died on us.
You can still upgrade the units without CNUT, the CNUT.pkg files are just ZIP files with all the firmware images and a manifest. Following the old instructions worked well the one time I tried it for the sake of curiosity.
CNUT is just a Java front-end to a bunch of perl scripts that script the original update process. They even packaged up their perl bits in a tidy little module. You should be able to make CNUT run wherever Java and perl run.
I would not run any Canopy Firmware older than 6.1, and you should have a really good reason to not be running 7.0.7 or 7.2.9.
You should not have the management interface on a routed subnet. If you are that paranoid, turn on VLAN support and change the management VLAN. The management interface and daemons have a number of little quirks. None of them have caused any problems for us since we a) use private IP space for management and b) keep the management interface on a management VLAN.
The AES unit uses a more powerful FPGA which costs a bit more. Granted that is probably not enough to account for the price difference.
You can control some (SNMP) administrative access by subnet. It is
They provide a access control server that is a bit crude, but it has good API docs and does what we want it to, which is control access and limit bandwidth.
I'd like to see a RADIUS client as much as the next guy, but BAM works fine and has a well documented database schema and SOAP interface.
If you are truly paranoid, get the AES unit and use the reset plug to disable the management interface and turn it into a dumb bridge.
It is trivial to access a Canopy network if the network was thrown up in 15 minutes. It can also be virtually impossible to access if the designer has implemented a VLAN and subnet segregated network, is using BAM, turns off AP Eval, etc.
In the end, I agree that their RF side is good and the code side could use some work. In practice, their code quirks are avoided anyway by using good practices elsewhere.
The Canopy radios are neat little software radios (the only difference between them is the size of the onboard antenna and software load.) I can't wait for someone to figure out how to reprogram them for some other purpose (802.11 or TV tuner or something.)
Funny, the ISP where I work sells them for $300 each, no contract. We sell them so fast that we are always running out of stock.
The $300 is high enough that people feel committed to the service (we don't need contract lock-in to keep customers) and is low enough that most of our customers can afford it. They can always take their SM to one of our competitors if they don't like our service.
I disagree.
Space is essentially worthless until it is militarized.
Nothing worthwhile is left unguarded.
A space race would be a good thing, in my opinion, because it focuses the much-maligned military-industrial complex on a worthy goal: human occupancy in space.
It may be more efficient to send up the sleek craft of the X-Prize and other private ventures, but heavy lift will probably only come with military ventures.
Getting to space en mass via the military will doubtless cause distress to many who feel that space should be kept pure, untouched by the dirty and unwholesome aspects of human existence.
Keep in mind that most successful ventures in space (and all the major ones) were driven by a space race with heavy military overtones. Such motivation worked once and will work again.
The definition of intelligence that I was using is described here.
That definition is requires reasoning, problem solving, and self awareness. I should have included this definition in my original post.
Intelligent Design can be proven false by showing that intelligent agents can emerge from unintelligent, randomly combined building blocks.
On the other hand, I think that Intelligent Design can be proven true if it can be shown that intelligent systems require intelligence to design.
The AI research boom (1970-80ish) left behind a ton of material relating to if/how intelligence can emerge. This is an area where Computer Science has as big a stake as Biology and Philosophy.
Religion and belief need not enter the picture. The motivation of ID advocates may have a basis in religion, but that does not mean that the ID concept should be dismissed out of hand.
This is something that has fascinated me for quite some time, but I don't have the time to start a project do build something like this.
I'm interesting in combining tools such as those from Xanalys with ECRI.
I'd like to see geotagged items tossed into a Watsonish tool that then feeds something like Rigel. I'm not especially interested in crime tracking, but building the tracking systems sounds like fun.
Looking for correlation in apparently unrelated facoids combined with geographic representation and pattern finding. Who could ask for a juicier data mining project?
On the IPv6 thing, all they could do is try to exert control by under-providing IPv6 space. There is more than enough IP space to go around, so we won't need fine-grained allocation like what we presently have with Ipv4. In fact, IPv6 netblock allocation is supposed to be given out in overly large blocks so as to avoid IP space fragmentation. HE.net (and nearly any other tunnel broker) is willing to give any random user a/64. They are truly clueless if they think that there is a need to ration out IPv6 addresses.
Toppoint may build custom chips / build clone chips. Any/all numbers on the chip would probably be more useful than the manufacturer's name.
Also, and perhaps a red herring, could the device in question be the product found here? It is a GPS tracker with audio recording capability. It also happens to take 20G drives and uses a SOIC for control. It may be a jump, but Toppoint could have been the board builder.
What everyone seems to be missing is that Mozilla does sign their binaries. They provide a GPG signature.
Sure, it is not from Microsoft's preferred partner, Verisign, but that does not change that fact that Moz signs their code with an accepted standard. Not Microsoft's standard of choice to be sure, but still a standard.
First off, Firefox also includes Atom support.
Secondly, Atom is more than a syndication format. Atom also includes a counterpart of the Blogger API for authoring. Thus you only have to deal with one standards group for both authoring and distribution.
Thirdly, Atom is a open standard with an open development and review system, unlike RSS.
Lastly, the RSS which? 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, they are all quite different.
I'd like to comment on this from the other side - as a former homeschool student who is now attending college.
Why would I want to interact with other kids? They had nothing to offer except the latest gossip. It is much easier for me to interact with older people on a meaningful level. They have many experiences that I can learn from. They treat me as a person without regard to my popularity.
As I get older it becomes easier for me to interact with people my own age. I hope that this is due to an increase in maturity among my peers, and not a decrease of my own maturity.
I see many posts about using VNC or storing profiles on a USB key. I think that both those groups are missing the point. This is not about remote access to your system. It is not about taking your data & settings with you. It is about taking your whole abstracted computing platform with you.
We already have a decent virtual machine that is in common use - the JVM. We already have a way to suspend hardware state to disk - laptop hibernation. Combine the two. Create a JVM that stores its memory and virtual CPU state to a file. Then you can put the resulting file on a USB key, or a web server, or whatever.
You don't have to worry about losing connectivity. You do with remote X, VNC, or SunRay. You don't have to worry about having a unix home directory on your USB key when the only computer nearby is running windows.
How important are running shoes? I have yet to find U.S. size 18D running shoes. Good grief, the only shoes I can find are New Balance tennis shoes. Do size 18D running shoes even exist?
Slashdot Mirror
being a natural monopoly and a vital service with inelastic demand, communications networks like telecoms/ISPs cannot be boycotted effectively by consumers. so even if you believe in having the invisible hand of the Free Market make everything alright, that will not work in this case. but the social apparatus constituting a democratic government exists precisely for situations like these where it provides the only mechanism for carrying out the will of the people in protecting public interest.
Telecommunications may have been a natural monopoly 100 years ago when Theodore Vale used it to argue that AT&T should be the one American telephone company. It certainly is not one now. Why would a government telco be any better than the heavily regulated monopoly system we tried in the past?
At the last mile level there are many competing technologies (DSL, Cable, EVDO, Fixed-wireless) from completing companies with their own pros and cons. If you are not happy with one provider you are free to switch to another provider.
Indeed, AT&T provides wholesale access to the DSL system through ASI at very reasonable rates. In any area where AT&T DSL is available there are several alternate IP carriers available should you not like AT&T's stance on Network Neutrality, etc.
The real tragedy of access is not that consumer choice is limited, rather its that consumers do not look beyond big Phone and big Cable.
Yes, I know that Sun and HP OEM HDS arrays.
I think that many people are more familiar with HP or Sun than they are with HDS, which is why I mentioned them.
In all fairness, I should have mentioned EMC, but I don't really like them. Nasty disk offset performance hacks and such.
Actually, the Sun StorageTek 9990 is a HDS array.
I find HDS arrays being sold under the STK name to be slightly funny.
It all depends on what you are trying to do
For some workloads, many servers with four drives each may work. This is the Petabox/Google model. This works if you have a parallelisable problem and can push most of your computation out to the storage servers.
Remember, you don't have a 300Tb drive, you have 300 servers, each with 1Tb of local storage.
For other workloads, you need a big disk aray and SAN, probably from Hitachi, Sun, or HP. This is the traditional model. Use this if you need a really big central storage pool or really high throughput.
Many SAN arrays can scale into the PB range without too much trouble.
Nowadays, a PB is enough to arch your eyebrows, but otherwise not that amazing. It seemes that commercial storage leads home storage by 1000. When home users had 1GB drives, 1TB was amazing. Now that some home users have 1TB, many companies have 1PB.
With the Eternus you get a disk array that you attach to your SAN.
They are two completely different products for totally different jobs.
You'd run you financial database on a Sun attached to a Eternus.
You'd run your Google clone off of a PetaBox.
Actually, the proxy is used to get you behind China's firewall.
I realize that this is the opposite of how most people use proxies, but it is not all that unusual
You know, I would actually consider running this if the BBC didn't have such a reputation for being nationalistic information hoarders.
Time and again they release something cool, a new media archive for example, and trumpet it far and wide only to say in the fine print that it is only for people who live in the UK.
How do I know that they won't take the work of my processor and only allow people in the UK to view the aggregate results? "I'm sorry, but the final assembly work was paid for by our TV tax, which you don't pay, so go away."
What, documentation like this? IBM's documentation is available. It is not even that hard to find.
First off, some of your canopy info pages have proven helpful to me in the past, thank you.
.pkg files are just ZIP files with all the firmware images and a manifest. Following the old instructions worked well the one time I tried it for the sake of curiosity.
I've run CNUT on Windows and Ubuntu (they only "support" Windows and RHEL.)
I just finished updating a few thousand units using CNUT on Ubuntu. 0 units bricked or requiring end user intervention to recover. Motorola has been very good about replacing the few units that have died on us.
You can still upgrade the units without CNUT, the CNUT
CNUT is just a Java front-end to a bunch of perl scripts that script the original update process. They even packaged up their perl bits in a tidy little module. You should be able to make CNUT run wherever Java and perl run.
I would not run any Canopy Firmware older than 6.1, and you should have a really good reason to not be running 7.0.7 or 7.2.9.
You should not have the management interface on a routed subnet. If you are that paranoid, turn on VLAN support and change the management VLAN. The management interface and daemons have a number of little quirks. None of them have caused any problems for us since we a) use private IP space for management and b) keep the management interface on a management VLAN.
The AES unit uses a more powerful FPGA which costs a bit more. Granted that is probably not enough to account for the price difference.
You can control some (SNMP) administrative access by subnet. It is
They provide a access control server that is a bit crude, but it has good API docs and does what we want it to, which is control access and limit bandwidth.
I'd like to see a RADIUS client as much as the next guy, but BAM works fine and has a well documented database schema and SOAP interface.
If you are truly paranoid, get the AES unit and use the reset plug to disable the management interface and turn it into a dumb bridge.
It is trivial to access a Canopy network if the network was thrown up in 15 minutes.
It can also be virtually impossible to access if the designer has implemented a VLAN and subnet segregated network, is using BAM, turns off AP Eval, etc.
In the end, I agree that their RF side is good and the code side could use some work. In practice, their code quirks are avoided anyway by using good practices elsewhere.
The Canopy radios are neat little software radios (the only difference between them is the size of the onboard antenna and software load.) I can't wait for someone to figure out how to reprogram them for some other purpose (802.11 or TV tuner or something.)
Funny, the ISP where I work sells them for $300 each, no contract. We sell them so fast that we are always running out of stock.
The $300 is high enough that people feel committed to the service (we don't need contract lock-in to keep customers) and is low enough that most of our customers can afford it. They can always take their SM to one of our competitors if they don't like our service.
I disagree.
Space is essentially worthless until it is militarized.
Nothing worthwhile is left unguarded.
A space race would be a good thing, in my opinion, because it focuses the much-maligned military-industrial complex on a worthy goal: human occupancy in space.
It may be more efficient to send up the sleek craft of the X-Prize and other private ventures, but heavy lift will probably only come with military ventures.
Getting to space en mass via the military will doubtless cause distress to many who feel that space should be kept pure, untouched by the dirty and unwholesome aspects of human existence.
Keep in mind that most successful ventures in space (and all the major ones) were driven by a space race with heavy military overtones. Such motivation worked once and will work again.
The definition of intelligence that I was using is described here.
That definition is requires reasoning, problem solving, and self awareness. I should have included this definition in my original post.
Intelligent Design can be proven false by showing that intelligent agents can emerge from unintelligent, randomly combined building blocks.
On the other hand, I think that Intelligent Design can be proven true if it can be shown that intelligent systems require intelligence to design.
The AI research boom (1970-80ish) left behind a ton of material relating to if/how intelligence can emerge. This is an area where Computer Science has as big a stake as Biology and Philosophy.
Religion and belief need not enter the picture. The motivation of ID advocates may have a basis in religion, but that does not mean that the ID concept should be dismissed out of hand.
This is something that has fascinated me for quite some time, but I don't have the time to start a project do build something like this. I'm interesting in combining tools such as those from Xanalys with ECRI.
I'd like to see geotagged items tossed into a Watsonish tool that then feeds something like Rigel. I'm not especially interested in crime tracking, but building the tracking systems sounds like fun.
Looking for correlation in apparently unrelated facoids combined with geographic representation and pattern finding. Who could ask for a juicier data mining project?
Antartica looks funny
On the IPv6 thing, all they could do is try to exert control by under-providing IPv6 space. /64.
There is more than enough IP space to go around, so we won't need fine-grained allocation like what we presently have with Ipv4.
In fact, IPv6 netblock allocation is supposed to be given out in overly large blocks so as to avoid IP space fragmentation.
HE.net (and nearly any other tunnel broker) is willing to give any random user a
They are truly clueless if they think that there is a need to ration out IPv6 addresses.
Toppoint may build custom chips / build clone chips.
Any/all numbers on the chip would probably be more useful than the manufacturer's name.
Also, and perhaps a red herring, could the device in question be the product found here?
It is a GPS tracker with audio recording capability. It also happens to take 20G drives and uses a SOIC for control.
It may be a jump, but Toppoint could have been the board builder.
What everyone seems to be missing is that Mozilla does sign their binaries. .
They provide a GPG signature
Sure, it is not from Microsoft's preferred partner, Verisign, but that does not change that fact that Moz signs their code with an accepted standard.
Not Microsoft's standard of choice to be sure, but still a standard.
Hey, even NT4.0 supported disk striping (as well as other types of software RAID.)
First off, Firefox also includes Atom support.
Secondly, Atom is more than a syndication format. Atom also includes a counterpart of the Blogger API for authoring. Thus you only have to deal with one standards group for both authoring and distribution.
Thirdly, Atom is a open standard with an open development and review system, unlike RSS.
Lastly, the RSS which? 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, they are all quite different.
I'd like to comment on this from the other side - as a former homeschool student who is now attending college.
Why would I want to interact with other kids? They had nothing to offer except the latest gossip.
It is much easier for me to interact with older people on a meaningful level. They have many experiences that I can learn from. They treat me as a person without regard to my popularity.
As I get older it becomes easier for me to interact with people my own age. I hope that this is due to an increase in maturity among my peers, and not a decrease of my own maturity.
I see many posts about using VNC or storing profiles on a USB key. I think that both those groups are missing the point. This is not about remote access to your system. It is not about taking your data & settings with you. It is about taking your whole abstracted computing platform with you.
We already have a decent virtual machine that is in common use - the JVM. We already have a way to suspend hardware state to disk - laptop hibernation. Combine the two. Create a JVM that stores its memory and virtual CPU state to a file. Then you can put the resulting file on a USB key, or a web server, or whatever.
You don't have to worry about losing connectivity. You do with remote X, VNC, or SunRay.
You don't have to worry about having a unix home directory on your USB key when the only computer nearby is running windows.
How important are running shoes?
I have yet to find U.S. size 18D running shoes.
Good grief, the only shoes I can find are New Balance tennis shoes.
Do size 18D running shoes even exist?
The Air Force appears to use FreeBSD.
Take a look here. Top row, middle picture. Get the full sized picture and read the label.