By the time "Wayne's World" made it to Europe (2 weeks after its release in the U.S.), that scene had him play a single note. Even though that note starts off many rock songs, it was enough for the store employee to deny Wayne the pleasure.
I had so much sympathy for the guitar shop employee. Imagine every wanna-be rocker coming in to try to play Stairway, butchering it every single time. The whole idea of a single note being enough to identify the song was at the same time good for a laugh, and scary to think that American copyright law kept the film makers from using more than a one note before violating the law.
Other Europeans have smuggly pointed out how widespread this technology is over here, so I'll fill you in on some of the technical details. Despite the lack of information in the article, this seems to be ADSL2+ technology, which gives a total of 24Mbps, usually divided as ~20Mbps down, 512k-1Mbps up. Loop length cuts down on total bandwidth quite quickly, google around for ADSL2+ and G.992.5 for graphs of bandwidth versus distance.
1) Is the bandwidth dedicated to television progamming separate from your other broadband use?
It depends on which equipment supplier they have gone with. ADSL2+ can be either an "ethernet style", or an "ATM style" service. With ethernet, everything is all in one channel, so all the bandwidth is shared. QoS doesn't help much unless there is a lot of intelligence in the CPE and DSLAM, but ethernet style without any QoS functionality is cheaper. With ATM, specific groups of channels can be reserved and isolated, so internet gets one reserved channel, IPTV gets one or several reserved channels, voice gets one small channel, etc. It all depends on how much the CPE costs, better service costs more up front, and the CPE is almost always matched to the service in the original design (no going out and buying your own CPE and installing/configuring it yourself).
3) Are they using multicast IP or peer-to-peer streaming?
Multicast to the DSLAM/BAS headend, then either unicast or a single multicast to each subscriber. If no subscriber is watching any of the endless shopping/religious channels, then there is no multicast stream from the central location out to the DSLAM. From the DSLAM to the CPE, it is a unicast or single multicast stream. When you change the TV channel on your CPE, it sends a message (typically an XML request) to a server which then reconfigures the DSLAM to switch your downstream IPTV ATM channel to a different mulitcast stream. That is why there is always a slight bit of a delay changing channels. The CPE then takes whatever stream is coming down that ATM channel and shoves it at the codec.
4) capacity...?
The IPTV multicast streams tend to be regional. One beefy video source (typically one server per 20 to 50 channels) only has to source one multicast stream per channel, just as broadcast TV over the airwaves does. For the extremely unpopular channels that license their content for free or even pay a small fee to be distributed, there may only be one or two viewer hours per day. This doesn't count the channel surfers who spend a few seconds per channel hitting the channel-up button.
5) Are there QOS guarantees?
That depends on the budget the network designers were given when they started on the project. Since this is AT&T, the answer is almost certainly "No".
Nope, the ASU dialog is non-modal, just like all other dialogs in OS-X. Modal means the user can do no more work on the computer until they respond. Non-Modal means the user can hide the dialog or application or switch focus and continue working. Dialogs can be modal to their application, but this is strongly discouraged as a design philosophy as well.
Yes, I am a veteran of the Modal Wars. The war is mostly over and we non-modalists and computer users everywhere won. It was a major, well understood design decision from the original OS-X architects that nothing could ever be modal in OS-X. Users who switch away from using OS-X to a system that still permits modal dialogs often comment about how jarring it is to have a modal dialog they don't understand, and being forced to make an uninformed decision before being allowed to continue working or unable even to save their work. It is a subtle but very powerful distinction about who is in control of a session, the user or the OS. Modality is just a power trip for those who hate the idea that a person sitting in front of a machine might actually know what they are doing.
Now you are just trying to be an ignorant troll. Clearly you know nothing of what you type.
There is a cost, but it is minimal compared to the ongoing operation costs of running a network. Maintaining an all IPv4 network requires a certain amount of constant attention to prevent problems. Bogon filters need to be reviewed regularly, firewall rules are constantly tweaked as new problems are discovered, for big sites there is usually someone doing that almost as a full time job. Have you seen how pf works? It deals with v6 traffic with the same rules as v4, except for when you need to call out specific v6 rules for bogon addresses.
Adding IPv6 into a large network requires an hour in front of a whiteboard with the network team to sketch out how to carve up the space just like the IPv4 blocks. A few hours of work if the internal routing protocols don't already support v6, but migrating to OSPFv3 is relatively straight forward for an experienced network engineer. All modern BGP4 implementations are multiprotocol, just add a few extra lines to your config and up comes the new protocol.
After the initial planning, work can be turned over to one of the junior net monkeys to add one or two IPv6 commands to each interface on the network, and document what was done (documentation, we can dream, can't we?:-)
Later on, there needs to be a big meeting to review the completeness of the v6 rollout, and to verify internal routing tables. That's it. Now you've got IPv6, enabled as part of the constant IPv4 maintenance. It takes a while, but really, it's just a few additional lines in each router config.
Of course, once you let the sales weasels know, then you have to support it. But every OS shipping today has IPv6 built in, and most have it enabled by default.
Where the real costs come from is getting services to work correctly on IPv6, but that isn't the networking guys cost centre:-)
I know a few young guys who learned IPv6 in university, and then bet their careers on being an expert. After a while, they have all realised their knowledge of protocols, configuring routers and switches, and all the other network stuff was 99.7% of their knowledge, while adding IPv6 into the mix was at most 0.3%. There really is almost nothing to IPv6 on the networking side, but on the systems admin and development side there is still going to be a huge investment to be made.
Look at AOL
AOL isn't the internet. But if AOL started providing IPv6 along with their NATed IPv4 connection, their users would not even notice when they occasionally connected to a site with v6 when DNS returned an AAAA record. Every one of their users with Vista or a Mac would use v6 without ever knowing, or caring. There wouldn't be any more problems than usual with AOL lusers. I've seen large ISPs turn on v6 to a small number of users to see what would happen. There is no increase in tech support calls, but usually some linux or mac geek notices and posts to some forum about now having native IPv6 connectivity and then a whole bunch of other geeks clamor for a wider rollout.
From a network engineering point of view, IPv6 is not anything special. If you are a CCIE/JNCIE level engineer doing BGP or OSPF, turning up v6 is a minor detail well within the scope of your knowledge. Moving from OSPFv2 to v3 is so minor it should be a snap. All modern BGP implementations are multiprotocol BGP, just add the v6 commands and make sure you talk with your peers as you do it, just like you did for v4. Maybe you spend a whole day learning the few v6 commands, but it becomes just a checkbox item on your CV after that.
On the server engineering side, that is where a programmer can really stand out. Letting a potential employer know you successfully brought up a middleware implementation that correctly dealt with a dual stack shows you have a depth of knowledge beyond most code monkeys. There are some serious problems with web applications when the server is suddenly configured with both v4 and v6 addresses, and connections start coming in from v6 machines. Java needs all kinds of tweaking and code audits, PHP is a mess, and most web programming languages don't have a fully worked out method to deal with non-IPv4 addresses. Many of the libraries have hard coded addresses as 4 octets, and need to be rebuilt to understand colon delimited hex IPv6 addresses as well.
Companies in Europe doing content for 2.5G or 3G phones are now looking for programmers with v6 experience, since all GSM handsets are now v6 capable and all the major carriers have a v6 infrastructure. For all those ringtone or walled garden content services available to subscribers, the servers need to have solid v6 code. The salaries are going way up for programmers with IPv6 as one of the main selling points.
Just give users who post over IPv6 a badge next to their name and and an auto +1 IPv6 mod
I know you came up with this on your own, because great minds think alike. This was my suggestion a few years ago in some other IPv6 thread. It was a good idea then, and still a good idea now. Maybe, once/. has both v4 & v6 access, for a period of one year to increase karma or auto-mod up posts, or some other kind of reward or badge or access to content not available to the dinos^WIPv4 people.
The whole of the OSTG would gain a lot of knowledge in migrating servers to dual stack, which would give the programmers very valuable skills they could exploit for a few years.
the AC
Yes, I've been on IPv6 natively since 2000, isn't it obvious?
Truth is that ARIN does not, and has never, made a best effort at anything except to charge ISPs for address space and let them reap a 500 to 1000% profit reselling it.
ARIN, and the RIRs made one effort back in the 1997-2000 timeframe to reclaim many of the allocations that didn't seem to be in use (i.e. not announced on the internet). I can't find the summary of that, it should be somewhere on the Potaroo site linked in the OP. The results were something like 8/8's were returned, 15 replied with an absolute NO, and none of the other 70 or so companies even bothered to respond. There were a number of attempts to contact the large block holders, but with no success. Search NANOG archives for other details.
If you have ever seen a talk by Geoff Huston, the man behind Potaroo, he talks in depth about how there has never, to date, been any attempt to take back an allocation through legal action. Should that ever become necessary, it would be costly and require years in the court systems allowing for appeals. He addresses every concern voiced by the ignorant/. masses in this story.
Even if all the large/8 allocations were to be reclaimed voluntarily without any bother, it would push the exhaustion date out by no more than 2-3 years.
This is exactly what Network Solutions/Verisign did with domain names when they had a government-protected monopoly. Have we forgotten so soon, one year domain registration was free (via SRI), and the mext year it was $100 per year per domain (via Verisign), despite actual costs of $7/year.
It wasn't NetSol in 1995, but their predecessor, who charged US$100 for the first year, and $50/year renewal. Within a year NetSol got involved, and the prices came way down. And it wasn't Stanford Research Institute, it was the National Science Foundation who ran the domain allocation for a few years before it was privatised.
ICANN has been putting out feelers, mostly verbal at meetings and careful not to put in writing, the idea of eliminating the IANA and IETF groups in favor of ICANN charging around US$4.00 per year per IPv4 address. So a group like MIT with their/8 would have to pay US$64 Million per year to keep that many addresses. A web hosting company with a few thousand machines on a/20 would need to pay US$17,000 per year to just have routable addresses. The idea is that the RIRs would become private companies who would purchase allocations they could resell on a "free-market". That would earn the US Government a large bundle of money as they still control ICANN through the Department of Commerce. ICANN loathes the RIRs as they are currently organised, too much of the hippy feeling of volunteer effort and consensus in the public good.
Almost everyone I have talked with, especially the most die hard Free Market economists, think this is both a very bad idea, and an eventuality. Whether IPv6 will suffer the same fate remains to be seen, but ICANN wants to make money more than anything else.
Go into any Apple store and fire up your Wifi, and you'll get a non-NATed 17.x.x.x address. There is a firewall, but other than that, its exactly what the internet is supposed to be.
Since Apple has very little of their infrastructure behind NAT, they have very few problems with things like NAT traversal, or buggy VoIP systems.
This has been the way of the BBC for as long as anyone can remember.
There are two sides to every story. Exactly TWO. Two diametrically opposed sides. Never a third. Never just one. Always TWO. No shades of grey permitted. No announcing a discovery without finding a skeptic to denounce it.
If 99 scientists were to state that the sky is blue, the BBC would go out of their way to find some crackpot to claim the sky is actually red. And then give the two sides equal standing.
Worse, Panorama has never been held up even to the standards of the BBC, as they go after the tabloid illiterate crowd.
Not one of MY designs, but you are right about the mistake part. I know of a carrier with CRS-1s struggling with a poor design coupled with an out of control sales force that will not ever say "NO!" to a customer doing bad things to their MPLS service. That's the origin of the idea of a maximum of four instances of 512K routes in 4 separate TCAMs per chassis (or per line card, or per virtual machine, or something). Not really my job any more, so I learn this over beers next to the data centre and extend my sympathies to those stuck in the Cisco world.
hopefully IPv6 might stifle that a bit
Well, the IPv6 table is ~850 routes right now, growing by 10 to 20 new routes per month. Just like the early days of the internet as BGP rolled out. Now I can toss out the obligatory "You kids get off my LAN".
Problems are already starting to be seen by the RIRs, where speculative companies have started grabbing IPv4 allocations with no intention of using them, betting on a market for buying and selling prefixes and forcing the RIRs out of business. Exactly what happened to the DNS market when it became apparent that second level domains could be rented for yearly fees for a large profit.
If companies start buying and selling prefixes in an unregulated free market frenzy, aggregation will become a fond memory and expect every router to need several Gigabytes to hold the 2 million+ routes on the old IPv4 internet. At RIPE meetings, there is a hope that this is a worst case scenario, but it seems to be a business plan for some less altruistic people at ICANN.
Everyone using older (as in two or three years old) Cisco kit has been dumping their Sup720-A or 3B cards on the used market. The price of those cards has completely collapsed. There is the -3BX card, which can handle 393,000 routes in TCAM, but they'll be obsolete by the end of 2008.
If you have a design where a 6500 or 7600 isn't doing core routing, somewhere out on the edge, just buy the chassis and line cards from Cisco, and pick up one of the TCAM-poor routing engines for less than 5% of GPL.
Juniper has no used kit market, because every one of their M or T series routers can handle more and more routes depending on how much high speed RAM you throw in it. M5's put into service years ago can still handle today's internet without the slightest problem.
the AC
Cisco naming of their products may be wrong because I'm far away from where I could look at their product lines and nomenclature.
It appears to be four separate instances of 512K routes, the total is for MPLS customers shoving full BGP tables into their mesh. With more than 8 MPLS customers doing screwy things today, the box starts hitting its CPUs. I haven't received a denial from the CRS-1 guys, just some hand waving and a promise to look into it. Implications that a better config would help hasn't actually produced an example of what to do, and the XR code is just different enough to hide underlying architecture deficiencies. The other problem is that every CRS-1 seems to be put into production before engineering has time to play with them and learn their tricks. Given time, all kinds of clever designs for XR code will spread around, just as there are tricks of the trade the most experienced IOS-based engineers grok.
It should be enough to 2015 or more.
And 640k should be enough for everyone. Seriously, I keep running across 2500s still doing their thing, but not as core BGP routers. So the CRS-1 platforms may quite well be running tucked into edges in 2015. Bean counters love kit that has amortised many times over.
This was certainly a problem with slightly older Cisco kit, such as 6500s with Sup720a cards. Their TCAM memory (that holds prefix+destination tuples in a form of cache) overflowed as the internet approaches 245,000 routes. Once there is no more space in TCAM, many Cisco architectures fall back to processor routing. That means that when traffic that was switched in hardware starts hitting the CPU, the box falls over whimpering for mercy.
If NTT had been following Cisco mailing lists, or keeping up to date on what their salesmen had been telling them for several years, they would have seen this problem looming and changed their routing structure or at least upgraded the processors for something with slightly more TCAM. The size of the internet is not going to stop growing because many companies chose to go with underpowered Cisco kit. The internet will continue to grow by 12,000 to 17,000 routes per month, accelerating over the next few years as IPv4 space becomes exhausted and de-aggregation becomes the norm.
This is one of my long standing grudges about Cisco design. They always are designing their core routers to be just slightly ahead of the size of the internet, forcing people to upgrade within a few years. Designed obsolescence is the term. Even their new CRS1 platform will fail over to CPU near 512,000 routes (0x80000), or sometime around the end of 2008 to mid 2009. By then, they'll probably have an expensive upgrade path for customers that will hold for just another year or two.
It's not just Cisco kit that is going to have problems over the next few months. By the end of June the internet will be at 256,000 routes (really 262,144 or 0x40000), which will be a problem for some other manufacturers. Some are starting to fail at 0x3C000 (245,000) routes, some already failed at 0x30000 last year.
On the plus side, the OpenBGPd crowd doesn't suffer from this, since their code is all CPU switched (but using very clever and efficiently coded routing tables) so their routing table is limited only by memory. But an OpenBGPd machine will never have the raw efficiency of a VLSI based hardware solution.
A quick look at my local looking glass shows 233,979 routes on the internet this morning.
I recently had a client ask about which photo sharing software to build his web site around. He has a his own dedicated server, disk space and memory are not a problem, but I/O bandwidth and CPU are limited (2x 160Gig drives on IDE cables, some 64 bit AMD processor at 2 GHz or so). His special needs are that he has 40,000 photos or more to put up, and needs a flexible password mechanism so various clients can look at only certain parts of the site, and the internet at large can not spider his collection easily.
He has already tried Gallery 1 & 2, but found that both versions collapse under the weight of a hierarchy of 20,000 photos. Even with just one user browsing, it slows to a crawl when it tries to discover photos up or down the hierarchy. There are knobs in G2 to limit the updates to mySql for things like view count or voting, but those are nothing more than taping over the cracks.
I think he said recently he is trying Coppermine, but has similar problems.
I'll certainly be pointing him to this thread, but if any/.ers know of systems that hold up to a massively large photo set, please reply under this post.
My suggestion to him was to cut down the resolution and quality of the photos, so G2 can process them faster, but it didn't work. It seems the problems stem from the sheer numbers of photos, and limits of mySql. Maybe some tuning of mySql is in order.
I have a lifetime of BRB stories, but my first encounter with noisy machines and a rabid Drill Instructor left me more cautious than most.
When I was 12 or 13 years old I had already earned a reputation for being able to take things apart and on occasion put them back together again. I was into amateur radio, a relative had introduced me to computers using a teletype, and other geeky things from before most/.ers were born.
I was with a group, scouts maybe, in a weather station on top of a mountain. One large room, with two 19 inch racks of equipment in one corner, some teletypes next to that, and the rest of the room had much meteorologic kit scattered around the edges. I was told not to touch anything, stay at the very back of the crowd, not ask any questions, and above all, not to touch anything. So there I was, with a few people between me and the racks of reel to reel tape and punch tape and teletypes, when the automated data collection process started it all up. Massive amounts of noise, as the teletypes spit out the 15 minute reports, punch tape boxes started up, and all the tape recorders did their thing.
All eyes turned on me, and the leader of our group started yelling at me. The leader had been a Drill Instructor at some point, but was probably discharged because he was too psychotic. Role model for the DI in Full Metal Jacket. He ripped me up one side and down the other for touching something, breaking the system, whatever. He yelled for so long that the next 15 minute automated collection process started, which shocked him so much he stopped to draw a breath. With that slight pause, the rangers who ran the weather station managed to tell him that I hadn't touched anything, it was an automated process that ran every 15 minutes, and they had been between me and the machines.
Several people later congratulated me on standing my ground against this asshole for so long.
For my entire career I've always been cautious about touching equipment I know nothing about. Not that it has saved me from recognizing many of the stories in this thread, and I'm certain some of my former colleagues are behind some of these stories.
Obligatory story for the thread, not mine, but from watching my colleague sitting at the desk across from me. A phone company in Africa decides to buy a matching pair of voice compressors to put on a new satellite link they want to light up. The machines finally get delivered to our offices in Europe, where the main telecoms engineer is going to configure them before sending one down to Africa. For an experienced commissioning engineer it takes a full two days to get everything right on these boxes even when they are sitting next to each other. If there were to be 6,000 miles between them, commissioning and tuning is almost impossible. Since the phone company owns these boxes, we pack up everything with the one being shipped to them, manuals, diskettes full of configuring software, all of it. Some weeks later we hear that they have finally received the shipment, but since it is a Thursday afternoon they will be installing it for first tests on Monday. The upper management has been told repeatedly that the system is delivered pre-configured and nothing is to be touched. But what engineer ever listens to their bosses?
Monday comes, and we find that over the weekend the engineers in Africa were so impatient to get started they loaded up the configuration software on a PC and started reading at page one of the commissioning manual, which covered resetting the stored configuration. These systems were so badly engineered there was no concept of backup for the configuration, except to print out the configs screen by screen from the PC. Which my colleague had done, because he knew better. We had to courier a copy to them, but when I left a few months later they still hadn't managed to get much of it working. They were still paying for a mostly unused satellite channel.
I can't be 100% certain that they just read my gmail accounts, but I was in raving paranoid mode soon after the first interview.
First question was from my dim, distant past, close to the dawn of telecommunications. Nothing at all I would list on a CV that only highlights the best of my recent career. Cool, thought I, I know this because I did my thesis research in it. Now, I never finished my thesis, and never published my results because private industry came courting and I haven't mentioned this on a CV in at least 15 years. Some of my closest and geekiest friends understand it, though, so who knows.
Next two questions were about some technology I emailed some/.ers about through my published gmail account. Cool again, for I had recently posted on those topics on/., then received follow up emails from like minded people which led to long email conversations that ranged into other themes. Both questions were almost exactly lifted from those email threads, but not from the/. postings. I had the first indications that my Clark Kent identity and my AntiCypher identity had been compromised. I know of only two close friends who know both, and neither are the types to let on, or really care.
The next question was straight from a forum where I've never used my real name, or any alias except for a gmail account that was linked through an invite at some point. Since I long ago made a conscious decision to never be professionally associated with that forum, and took extreme precautions to avoid posting from traceable IP addresses and the like. I kind of stammered through a half-assed response about knowing very little on the subject. At that point I suddenly realised that something wasn't right.
The rest of the interview alternated between topics on my CV and archaic systems I haven't admitted to knowing in a long time. Clearly the first interviewers from Google had access to information about my early career and life back to childhood. It was exactly like sitting a government security clearance interview, they already had the information, the interview was just to confirm you and your past were in agreement. I knew all the answers, because the first interviews were obviously running from a script that I could have written.
Later interviewers just wanted to know really detailed technical things that ranged all over and some of it I had to admit I didn't know. One interview lasted about 5 minutes, the guy knew I wrote some programs about 20 years ago, so he started asking questions as if I were still actively coding. When I told him I no longer write code, he wondered why I had applied for a job as a programmer, but then figured out I was being recruited for other things and politely ended the interview.
Google's first contact was from one of their recruiters calling my Irish mobile number, which forwards to whichever mobile I'm on at the time. So later they thought I still lived in Ireland, even though I left at an early age, and only have the mobile for when I work projects there. I sent a specially polished CV to them with a white-listed email address for exclusive Google use. I still get the occasional spammy-feeling email from randomly named recruiters on that address.
If I were to believe the word-of-mouth excuse I recently heard from a friend now inside Google, they really thought I lived near their HQ, and my question of "what Google facilities are near my home?" caught them by surprise. I believe I just wasn't technical enough for them, or I post too much on/.
the AC
Over one thousand posts in a decade. I have a social life, I swear
My first interview with Google last year, the interviewer made it perfectly clear that he already knew my/. login, had read personal and highly technical emails in my gmail accounts, had discovered some old technical papers not widely published from more than 20 years ago (hence my login name here), and other widely dispersed private information about me. Just putting my RL name into google, and other attempts to discover how all this information was gleaned showed that his sources were more than just some mad googling skillz.
I was quite paranoid for a while after that interview.
But as I've pointed out elsewhere, they didn't know I didn't live in Ireland, and thought I still lived just up the road from their new European HQ.
Many commodities (oil for example) are traded in USD
This is one reason why gasoline/petrol prices in Europe have remained relatively stable, even as the political situation in oil producing regions has caused crude prices to increase. Most oil producing nations trade in U.S. Dollars, so the price in Euros is now 40% cheaper than 2 years ago. Traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe, it is quite obvious at the price differential of Dollar based international commodities. Gas prices, at least on both coasts of the U.S., are now about equal to what we pay in Europe, where 6 years ago we paid around 4 times what Americans were paying.
There are a few oil producing nations that have switched from petrodollars to petroeuros, which has seen their income stabilise as the dollar slips. What makes currency traders, central bank managers, and others who work with the U.S. Dollar lose sleep is the fear that some day soon, the rest of the OPEC countries will announce a switch from selling crude oil in Dollars to Euros. That would be a major blow to the stability of the Dollar, and if it were to happen, Americans would see gas prices from $10 to $25 per gallon at the pumps. It would also be a bad thing for Europe, because we would see our pump prices jump by at least 40%, and more likely the increase would be close to 100% as the world economies adjusted to the new "base" currency.
If you are ever in a bar in Brussels full of Eurocrats, and you want to completely derail all the conversations along the lines of a "mac vs. pc" flamefest on/., mention PetroEuros, duck, and run far, far away.
the AC
ObOnTopic post I've managed to use an OLPC XO machine for a while, they are truly innovative little wonders. Even at $175 a piece, that means we'll soon be training up a whole new generation of bitter, jaded sysadmins;-)
This may be a new thing in the U.S., but it has been part of the multiplay packages going in all over Europe.
ISPs who lease or just install a CPE box will have multiple WiFi SSIDs running. One for the client, the other advertising their network. So whenever a client roams and finds an access point with the name of their provider, they can use their login credentials and get their own internet connection. This second connection is completely separate from the client's connection, there is no shared IP address or bandwidth.
I think there is a big gap in knowledge of how modern broadband works between those in the U.S. and those in Europe or the Far East. I'm seeing this more and more on american oriented sites like slashdot, "ignorance" is too strong a word, but certainly "lack of understanding" comes close. Internet technologies are pulling way ahead outside of the U.S., where the last mile has seen great advances in both business models and creative uses of technology. When the bandwidth of the last mile (between a head-end and the customer premises) gets sufficient to put multiple channels down the line, the client can get much, much more than just an internet connection. With fibre installations going in, the bandwidth can support multiple HD video channels, multiple internet connections, multiple voice channels, private VPN options, roaming, etc. A client can just choose which bandwidth package they want, e.g. Symmetric or Asymmetric, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or more. A handful of TV channels, or more than you could ever watch. VoIP calling plans, that are so cheap that calling most of Europe or North America is free for the first few thousand minutes.
So one of the providers in the U.S. had an executive who took a vacation in Europe, saw the amazing new multiplay boxes, and decided it was a good idea to beat their few oligarchic non-rivals to the punch. I'm glad it's News for Nerds in the U.S., things are looking up over there.
the AC
this post needs some emoticons for slight amounts of sarcasm, some humour, and kind of a tsk-tsk sideways look indicating a mix of sympathy and pity, good luck finding/. moderations for that
I'm going to reply to you again, because I've had a few hours to play with the new version, and I'm not at all impressed.
So spotlight is broken, but that's been a feature request with much finger pointing for quite a while now. The built in search function is still pretty useless. No way to search all headers, or the entire mailbox including both headers and bodies, or to search multiple or all mail boxes in the same search. With 9 separate inboxes, it takes a while to find some poorly remembered email. Granted, I can always open a terminal, navigate to the directory, and perform some unix majic with grep and find, but that's a major blow to usability for their interface. It's not like people haven't been asking for a better search function since early days, but the developers have decided that people just shouldn't be searching their email. Eudora does it correctly, so my standards are not going to come down, maybe all the good TB developers will go over to Penelope.
There appear to still be bugs with the IPv6 implementation, both on the OSX and Linux versions. At least, there is still a config setting to disable IPv6 lookups.
Without too much regression testing, the old LDAP incompatibilities are still there. TB is pretty much useless in corporate settings using AD or other LDAP directory services.
The old indexing bugs haven't been addressed at all. After leaving TB running for a while, various inboxes highlight in blue to show new mail, but there isn't any. Sometimes a mailbox shows unread messages, but searching around doesn't turn up any. New messages sorted by procmail on the server aren't indexed properly if not seen first in an inbox.
The anti-phishing feature has always highlighted quite a few auto-generated emails and some client monthly mailings as suspect. I wish they would integrate some kind of baysian or learning or white-list features on that.
The completely separate address books, with no concept of either hierarchy or being attached to individual accounts (think friends&family, business contacts) is pretty 1993 in its thinking.
One of my biggest problems, is the inability to choose which outgoing SMTP service at the time of sending a message. Once again, Eudora got this right. Since I work in many locations, the ability to quickly change the outgoing SMTP setting without having to go to every account setting and changing it manually would be expected of a real email application.
The UI hasn't really improved at all over the 1.5 version. Sure, they've now hidden several spam controls in new places, and made a few other cosmetic improvements, but TB is still mostly unusable by ordinary users. There is still no way to make some commonly used functions into buttons on the main interface. That is the most asked for feature when I show people TB, how do they do their most common command with just a single button click.
Version 1.5 was really the first usable release, it should have been called 1.0. This is a minor bug fix release, count it as version 1.1, but there is NO major overhaul of either the functionality or usability.
1) How's the Mail.app importing? 2) Does it work with Spotlight
1) there doesn't seem to be any mail.app import function, maybe it will be included in an extension, but this feature really has been ignored for too long
2) my first tests indicate it still isn't indexed by Spotlight, which is a big shame because I'm now totally hooked on spotlight. Do any/.ers know how to hack spotlight to index other areas of the user's file system?
the AC
Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.
on
IPv6 Tested in Space
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· Score: 1
Start an open site dedicated to CONTENT providers who have made their content available for IPv6 and give blue ribbon graphics to IPv6
There are plenty of badges and code snippets available to websites who have IPv6 connectivity, with various dancing penguins or turtles to show when a browser has connected with IPv6. It wouldn't be that hard to make it into a dancing blue ribbon.
to IPv6 only sites
I've been looking at the viability of v6 only sites, its not going to happen any time soon. Dual stack, no problem, but there just isn't any reason for a site to cut off most of it's traffic. There are already a few IPv6 information sites that have a complete version on an IPv6 only machine, but its more for geek style points than anything else.
Going back to the subject You want IPv6 adoption?
When slashdot's (or digg's or myspace's) management goes to their upstream provider and demands IPv6 connectivity, and tweaks the site to support it (no small task, really), then we'll see a major shift in the U.S. to IPv6. Until then, Asia and Europe are leaving the U.S. behind. In 1997, slashdot was a site by nerds, for nerds. Since/. was bought by OSTG, it has been a site by PHBs for page impressions and slashvertisements.
Make getting address space cheap and easy
I keep hearing this, and I can't figure out where it comes from. I already posted prices in another thread, but v6 netblocks are the same price as v4 addresses, or even cheaper depending on how much you want. The only places where money flows for address space are when LIRs pay their annual fee to the RIRs, and the RIRs give money to support IANA (and grudgingly, if ever, to ICANN). Any LIR that wants to get a/32 v6 block just fills out a form, and gets the allocation, its part of their annual fee (1300 Euros/year in Europe). Beyond that, its pretty much free market forces for what an LIR or ISP can charge for v4 or v6 addresses. For a while, there was a policy in place to force aggregation by giving only LIRs PA blocks, but enough people living in the real world have forced the existence of PI blocks. With only minor justification, I'll get you a nice big PI block you can play with for 3 years, I only charge administrative overhead (which is still going to be a few hundred Euros if its the only thing you want). If you hire me for other work, I tend to throw in the v4 and v6 blocks and AS# for free, if that is what the project needs.
I've also been coming to/. since the early days, and the saving factor was the karma/moderation/metamod system put in place. There are still people with knowledge who post on/., whereas digg is a cesspit of childish flamefests. All the other technical sites, blogs, confederators, and 2.0 stuff hasn't developed a system as well thought out as slashdots.
I like contributing to/., although I limit myself now to just IPv6 threads and the occasional funny posting. Since my time of keeping track of much information on the internet is precious, I've been able to downgrade funny posts, and upgrade insightful, informative, and interesting posts so they are most of what I see. This means I can get into an article, see what a few other experts have posted about a subject, and get out quickly. In this age of information overload, the/. moderation system is one of the few that makes my life easier.
French telecoms have it France: Great way to get govt. funding for R&D and keep a telecom business alive while you develop
You don't seem to know anything about this. Are you trolling, or just an ignorant american?
France Telecom, at least the major parts of it such as OpenTransit and Orange, are junking all of their old Alcatel kit (which was never that predominant) for Cisco and Juniper. They are doing this because they have so many customers, and so much equipment, they have been specifying IPv6 for years now, and rolling out IPv6 internally for the last year. All of their major competitors (there are 5 major broadband providers in France) are readying IPv6 to the end user, and many smaller broadband providers already offer it.
Alcatel, while it was once a subsidised French company, hasn't received any handouts or tax breaks from the French government in quite a few years. Mostly this was due to pressure from Brussels to play fair in the European market. Since the merger with Lucent, the new company is considered a pariah by just about every major telecoms and datacoms player. The merger was so badly bungled, that if Scott Adams were to try and put some of the major fuckups into Dilbert strips, nobody would believe that such idiocy could exist.
Apple: What happens upstream, on one side of an ISP is one thing. Still lots of activity happening downstream, inside private IP address space, away from the ISPs
While others have pointed out your ignorance of how ZeroConf/Bonjour works, on this point you are certainly correct. Only it isn't just Apple, Microsoft has also realised the same thing. There are lots of nifty little services that can do cool things with the features of IPv6. For those of us who have had IPv6 around for a while now, it is just so much easier to administrate and maintain, and many of the kludgy hacks to IPv4 are just part of the v6 spec and mostly just work.
Many forward looking companies are turning on IPv6 on their internal routers, just waiting for the day when their ISP finally gets a clue. With IPv6 addressing, all kinds of autodiscovery happens, and all kinds of useful tools are being built on top of that. People who install the new Apple 802.11n Airport Base Station can get IPv6 connectivity just by clicking a checkbox, and it automatically finds a nearby 6-in-4 tunnel broker. So just by installing one of these boxes, not just Macs get IPv6, but Vista users as well. At CeBit this year, almost every Chinese and Taiwanese maker of consumer grade DSL/Cable/WiFi router boxes were showing off automatic 6-in-4 tunnels, expect them to hit the American market within the next year unless the Chinese authorities decide that such advanced technology has to be kept out of the hands of the new axis of evil.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time "Wayne's World" made it to Europe (2 weeks after its release in the U.S.), that scene had him play a single note. Even though that note starts off many rock songs, it was enough for the store employee to deny Wayne the pleasure.
I had so much sympathy for the guitar shop employee. Imagine every wanna-be rocker coming in to try to play Stairway, butchering it every single time. The whole idea of a single note being enough to identify the song was at the same time good for a laugh, and scary to think that American copyright law kept the film makers from using more than a one note before violating the law.
the AC
Other Europeans have smuggly pointed out how widespread this technology is over here, so I'll fill you in on some of the technical details. Despite the lack of information in the article, this seems to be ADSL2+ technology, which gives a total of 24Mbps, usually divided as ~20Mbps down, 512k-1Mbps up. Loop length cuts down on total bandwidth quite quickly, google around for ADSL2+ and G.992.5 for graphs of bandwidth versus distance.
1) Is the bandwidth dedicated to television progamming separate from your other broadband use?
It depends on which equipment supplier they have gone with. ADSL2+ can be either an "ethernet style", or an "ATM style" service. With ethernet, everything is all in one channel, so all the bandwidth is shared. QoS doesn't help much unless there is a lot of intelligence in the CPE and DSLAM, but ethernet style without any QoS functionality is cheaper. With ATM, specific groups of channels can be reserved and isolated, so internet gets one reserved channel, IPTV gets one or several reserved channels, voice gets one small channel, etc. It all depends on how much the CPE costs, better service costs more up front, and the CPE is almost always matched to the service in the original design (no going out and buying your own CPE and installing/configuring it yourself).
3) Are they using multicast IP or peer-to-peer streaming?
Multicast to the DSLAM/BAS headend, then either unicast or a single multicast to each subscriber. If no subscriber is watching any of the endless shopping/religious channels, then there is no multicast stream from the central location out to the DSLAM. From the DSLAM to the CPE, it is a unicast or single multicast stream. When you change the TV channel on your CPE, it sends a message (typically an XML request) to a server which then reconfigures the DSLAM to switch your downstream IPTV ATM channel to a different mulitcast stream. That is why there is always a slight bit of a delay changing channels. The CPE then takes whatever stream is coming down that ATM channel and shoves it at the codec.
4) capacity...?
The IPTV multicast streams tend to be regional. One beefy video source (typically one server per 20 to 50 channels) only has to source one multicast stream per channel, just as broadcast TV over the airwaves does. For the extremely unpopular channels that license their content for free or even pay a small fee to be distributed, there may only be one or two viewer hours per day. This doesn't count the channel surfers who spend a few seconds per channel hitting the channel-up button.
5) Are there QOS guarantees?
That depends on the budget the network designers were given when they started on the project. Since this is AT&T, the answer is almost certainly "No".
the AC
a modal dialog
Nope, the ASU dialog is non-modal, just like all other dialogs in OS-X. Modal means the user can do no more work on the computer until they respond. Non-Modal means the user can hide the dialog or application or switch focus and continue working. Dialogs can be modal to their application, but this is strongly discouraged as a design philosophy as well.
Yes, I am a veteran of the Modal Wars. The war is mostly over and we non-modalists and computer users everywhere won. It was a major, well understood design decision from the original OS-X architects that nothing could ever be modal in OS-X. Users who switch away from using OS-X to a system that still permits modal dialogs often comment about how jarring it is to have a modal dialog they don't understand, and being forced to make an uninformed decision before being allowed to continue working or unable even to save their work. It is a subtle but very powerful distinction about who is in control of a session, the user or the OS. Modality is just a power trip for those who hate the idea that a person sitting in front of a machine might actually know what they are doing.
the AC
Now you are just trying to be an ignorant troll. Clearly you know nothing of what you type.
:-)
:-)
There is a cost, but it is minimal compared to the ongoing operation costs of running a network. Maintaining an all IPv4 network requires a certain amount of constant attention to prevent problems. Bogon filters need to be reviewed regularly, firewall rules are constantly tweaked as new problems are discovered, for big sites there is usually someone doing that almost as a full time job. Have you seen how pf works? It deals with v6 traffic with the same rules as v4, except for when you need to call out specific v6 rules for bogon addresses.
Adding IPv6 into a large network requires an hour in front of a whiteboard with the network team to sketch out how to carve up the space just like the IPv4 blocks. A few hours of work if the internal routing protocols don't already support v6, but migrating to OSPFv3 is relatively straight forward for an experienced network engineer. All modern BGP4 implementations are multiprotocol, just add a few extra lines to your config and up comes the new protocol.
After the initial planning, work can be turned over to one of the junior net monkeys to add one or two IPv6 commands to each interface on the network, and document what was done (documentation, we can dream, can't we?
Later on, there needs to be a big meeting to review the completeness of the v6 rollout, and to verify internal routing tables. That's it. Now you've got IPv6, enabled as part of the constant IPv4 maintenance. It takes a while, but really, it's just a few additional lines in each router config.
Of course, once you let the sales weasels know, then you have to support it. But every OS shipping today has IPv6 built in, and most have it enabled by default.
Where the real costs come from is getting services to work correctly on IPv6, but that isn't the networking guys cost centre
I know a few young guys who learned IPv6 in university, and then bet their careers on being an expert. After a while, they have all realised their knowledge of protocols, configuring routers and switches, and all the other network stuff was 99.7% of their knowledge, while adding IPv6 into the mix was at most 0.3%. There really is almost nothing to IPv6 on the networking side, but on the systems admin and development side there is still going to be a huge investment to be made.
Look at AOL
AOL isn't the internet. But if AOL started providing IPv6 along with their NATed IPv4 connection, their users would not even notice when they occasionally connected to a site with v6 when DNS returned an AAAA record. Every one of their users with Vista or a Mac would use v6 without ever knowing, or caring. There wouldn't be any more problems than usual with AOL lusers. I've seen large ISPs turn on v6 to a small number of users to see what would happen. There is no increase in tech support calls, but usually some linux or mac geek notices and posts to some forum about now having native IPv6 connectivity and then a whole bunch of other geeks clamor for a wider rollout.
the AC
From a network engineering point of view, IPv6 is not anything special. If you are a CCIE/JNCIE level engineer doing BGP or OSPF, turning up v6 is a minor detail well within the scope of your knowledge. Moving from OSPFv2 to v3 is so minor it should be a snap. All modern BGP implementations are multiprotocol BGP, just add the v6 commands and make sure you talk with your peers as you do it, just like you did for v4. Maybe you spend a whole day learning the few v6 commands, but it becomes just a checkbox item on your CV after that.
On the server engineering side, that is where a programmer can really stand out. Letting a potential employer know you successfully brought up a middleware implementation that correctly dealt with a dual stack shows you have a depth of knowledge beyond most code monkeys. There are some serious problems with web applications when the server is suddenly configured with both v4 and v6 addresses, and connections start coming in from v6 machines. Java needs all kinds of tweaking and code audits, PHP is a mess, and most web programming languages don't have a fully worked out method to deal with non-IPv4 addresses. Many of the libraries have hard coded addresses as 4 octets, and need to be rebuilt to understand colon delimited hex IPv6 addresses as well.
Companies in Europe doing content for 2.5G or 3G phones are now looking for programmers with v6 experience, since all GSM handsets are now v6 capable and all the major carriers have a v6 infrastructure. For all those ringtone or walled garden content services available to subscribers, the servers need to have solid v6 code. The salaries are going way up for programmers with IPv6 as one of the main selling points.
the AC
Just give users who post over IPv6 a badge next to their name and and an auto +1 IPv6 mod
/. has both v4 & v6 access, for a period of one year to increase karma or auto-mod up posts, or some other kind of reward or badge or access to content not available to the dinos^WIPv4 people.
I know you came up with this on your own, because great minds think alike. This was my suggestion a few years ago in some other IPv6 thread. It was a good idea then, and still a good idea now. Maybe, once
The whole of the OSTG would gain a lot of knowledge in migrating servers to dual stack, which would give the programmers very valuable skills they could exploit for a few years.
the AC
Yes, I've been on IPv6 natively since 2000, isn't it obvious?
Truth is that ARIN does not, and has never, made a best effort at anything except to charge ISPs for address space and let them reap a 500 to 1000% profit reselling it.
/8's were returned, 15 replied with an absolute NO, and none of the other 70 or so companies even bothered to respond. There were a number of attempts to contact the large block holders, but with no success. Search NANOG archives for other details.
/. masses in this story.
/8 allocations were to be reclaimed voluntarily without any bother, it would push the exhaustion date out by no more than 2-3 years.
/8 would have to pay US$64 Million per year to keep that many addresses. A web hosting company with a few thousand machines on a /20 would need to pay US$17,000 per year to just have routable addresses. The idea is that the RIRs would become private companies who would purchase allocations they could resell on a "free-market". That would earn the US Government a large bundle of money as they still control ICANN through the Department of Commerce. ICANN loathes the RIRs as they are currently organised, too much of the hippy feeling of volunteer effort and consensus in the public good.
ARIN, and the RIRs made one effort back in the 1997-2000 timeframe to reclaim many of the allocations that didn't seem to be in use (i.e. not announced on the internet). I can't find the summary of that, it should be somewhere on the Potaroo site linked in the OP. The results were something like 8
If you have ever seen a talk by Geoff Huston, the man behind Potaroo, he talks in depth about how there has never, to date, been any attempt to take back an allocation through legal action. Should that ever become necessary, it would be costly and require years in the court systems allowing for appeals. He addresses every concern voiced by the ignorant
Even if all the large
This is exactly what Network Solutions/Verisign did with domain names when they had a government-protected monopoly. Have we forgotten so soon, one year domain registration was free (via SRI), and the mext year it was $100 per year per domain (via Verisign), despite actual costs of $7/year.
It wasn't NetSol in 1995, but their predecessor, who charged US$100 for the first year, and $50/year renewal. Within a year NetSol got involved, and the prices came way down. And it wasn't Stanford Research Institute, it was the National Science Foundation who ran the domain allocation for a few years before it was privatised.
ICANN has been putting out feelers, mostly verbal at meetings and careful not to put in writing, the idea of eliminating the IANA and IETF groups in favor of ICANN charging around US$4.00 per year per IPv4 address. So a group like MIT with their
Almost everyone I have talked with, especially the most die hard Free Market economists, think this is both a very bad idea, and an eventuality. Whether IPv6 will suffer the same fate remains to be seen, but ICANN wants to make money more than anything else.
the AC
But Apple is using much of their /8 allocation.
Go into any Apple store and fire up your Wifi, and you'll get a non-NATed 17.x.x.x address. There is a firewall, but other than that, its exactly what the internet is supposed to be.
Since Apple has very little of their infrastructure behind NAT, they have very few problems with things like NAT traversal, or buggy VoIP systems.
the AC
This has been the way of the BBC for as long as anyone can remember.
There are two sides to every story. Exactly TWO. Two diametrically opposed sides. Never a third. Never just one. Always TWO. No shades of grey permitted. No announcing a discovery without finding a skeptic to denounce it.
If 99 scientists were to state that the sky is blue, the BBC would go out of their way to find some crackpot to claim the sky is actually red. And then give the two sides equal standing.
Worse, Panorama has never been held up even to the standards of the BBC, as they go after the tabloid illiterate crowd.
the AC
you've done a major design mistake
Not one of MY designs, but you are right about the mistake part. I know of a carrier with CRS-1s struggling with a poor design coupled with an out of control sales force that will not ever say "NO!" to a customer doing bad things to their MPLS service. That's the origin of the idea of a maximum of four instances of 512K routes in 4 separate TCAMs per chassis (or per line card, or per virtual machine, or something). Not really my job any more, so I learn this over beers next to the data centre and extend my sympathies to those stuck in the Cisco world.
hopefully IPv6 might stifle that a bit
Well, the IPv6 table is ~850 routes right now, growing by 10 to 20 new routes per month. Just like the early days of the internet as BGP rolled out. Now I can toss out the obligatory "You kids get off my LAN".
Problems are already starting to be seen by the RIRs, where speculative companies have started grabbing IPv4 allocations with no intention of using them, betting on a market for buying and selling prefixes and forcing the RIRs out of business. Exactly what happened to the DNS market when it became apparent that second level domains could be rented for yearly fees for a large profit.
If companies start buying and selling prefixes in an unregulated free market frenzy, aggregation will become a fond memory and expect every router to need several Gigabytes to hold the 2 million+ routes on the old IPv4 internet. At RIPE meetings, there is a hope that this is a worst case scenario, but it seems to be a business plan for some less altruistic people at ICANN.
the AC
Everyone using older (as in two or three years old) Cisco kit has been dumping their Sup720-A or 3B cards on the used market. The price of those cards has completely collapsed. There is the -3BX card, which can handle 393,000 routes in TCAM, but they'll be obsolete by the end of 2008.
If you have a design where a 6500 or 7600 isn't doing core routing, somewhere out on the edge, just buy the chassis and line cards from Cisco, and pick up one of the TCAM-poor routing engines for less than 5% of GPL.
Juniper has no used kit market, because every one of their M or T series routers can handle more and more routes depending on how much high speed RAM you throw in it. M5's put into service years ago can still handle today's internet without the slightest problem.
the AC
Cisco naming of their products may be wrong because I'm far away from where I could look at their product lines and nomenclature.
The CRS-1 is tested with at least 2M IPv4 routes.
It appears to be four separate instances of 512K routes, the total is for MPLS customers shoving full BGP tables into their mesh. With more than 8 MPLS customers doing screwy things today, the box starts hitting its CPUs. I haven't received a denial from the CRS-1 guys, just some hand waving and a promise to look into it. Implications that a better config would help hasn't actually produced an example of what to do, and the XR code is just different enough to hide underlying architecture deficiencies. The other problem is that every CRS-1 seems to be put into production before engineering has time to play with them and learn their tricks. Given time, all kinds of clever designs for XR code will spread around, just as there are tricks of the trade the most experienced IOS-based engineers grok.
It should be enough to 2015 or more.
And 640k should be enough for everyone. Seriously, I keep running across 2500s still doing their thing, but not as core BGP routers. So the CRS-1 platforms may quite well be running tucked into edges in 2015. Bean counters love kit that has amortised many times over.
the AC
This was certainly a problem with slightly older Cisco kit, such as 6500s with Sup720a cards. Their TCAM memory (that holds prefix+destination tuples in a form of cache) overflowed as the internet approaches 245,000 routes. Once there is no more space in TCAM, many Cisco architectures fall back to processor routing. That means that when traffic that was switched in hardware starts hitting the CPU, the box falls over whimpering for mercy.
If NTT had been following Cisco mailing lists, or keeping up to date on what their salesmen had been telling them for several years, they would have seen this problem looming and changed their routing structure or at least upgraded the processors for something with slightly more TCAM. The size of the internet is not going to stop growing because many companies chose to go with underpowered Cisco kit. The internet will continue to grow by 12,000 to 17,000 routes per month, accelerating over the next few years as IPv4 space becomes exhausted and de-aggregation becomes the norm.
This is one of my long standing grudges about Cisco design. They always are designing their core routers to be just slightly ahead of the size of the internet, forcing people to upgrade within a few years. Designed obsolescence is the term. Even their new CRS1 platform will fail over to CPU near 512,000 routes (0x80000), or sometime around the end of 2008 to mid 2009. By then, they'll probably have an expensive upgrade path for customers that will hold for just another year or two.
It's not just Cisco kit that is going to have problems over the next few months. By the end of June the internet will be at 256,000 routes (really 262,144 or 0x40000), which will be a problem for some other manufacturers. Some are starting to fail at 0x3C000 (245,000) routes, some already failed at 0x30000 last year.
On the plus side, the OpenBGPd crowd doesn't suffer from this, since their code is all CPU switched (but using very clever and efficiently coded routing tables) so their routing table is limited only by memory. But an OpenBGPd machine will never have the raw efficiency of a VLSI based hardware solution.
A quick look at my local looking glass shows 233,979 routes on the internet this morning.
the AC
I recently had a client ask about which photo sharing software to build his web site around. He has a his own dedicated server, disk space and memory are not a problem, but I/O bandwidth and CPU are limited (2x 160Gig drives on IDE cables, some 64 bit AMD processor at 2 GHz or so). His special needs are that he has 40,000 photos or more to put up, and needs a flexible password mechanism so various clients can look at only certain parts of the site, and the internet at large can not spider his collection easily.
/.ers know of systems that hold up to a massively large photo set, please reply under this post.
He has already tried Gallery 1 & 2, but found that both versions collapse under the weight of a hierarchy of 20,000 photos. Even with just one user browsing, it slows to a crawl when it tries to discover photos up or down the hierarchy. There are knobs in G2 to limit the updates to mySql for things like view count or voting, but those are nothing more than taping over the cracks.
I think he said recently he is trying Coppermine, but has similar problems.
I'll certainly be pointing him to this thread, but if any
My suggestion to him was to cut down the resolution and quality of the photos, so G2 can process them faster, but it didn't work. It seems the problems stem from the sheer numbers of photos, and limits of mySql. Maybe some tuning of mySql is in order.
the AC
I have a lifetime of BRB stories, but my first encounter with noisy machines and a rabid Drill Instructor left me more cautious than most.
/.ers were born.
When I was 12 or 13 years old I had already earned a reputation for being able to take things apart and on occasion put them back together again. I was into amateur radio, a relative had introduced me to computers using a teletype, and other geeky things from before most
I was with a group, scouts maybe, in a weather station on top of a mountain. One large room, with two 19 inch racks of equipment in one corner, some teletypes next to that, and the rest of the room had much meteorologic kit scattered around the edges. I was told not to touch anything, stay at the very back of the crowd, not ask any questions, and above all, not to touch anything. So there I was, with a few people between me and the racks of reel to reel tape and punch tape and teletypes, when the automated data collection process started it all up. Massive amounts of noise, as the teletypes spit out the 15 minute reports, punch tape boxes started up, and all the tape recorders did their thing.
All eyes turned on me, and the leader of our group started yelling at me. The leader had been a Drill Instructor at some point, but was probably discharged because he was too psychotic. Role model for the DI in Full Metal Jacket. He ripped me up one side and down the other for touching something, breaking the system, whatever. He yelled for so long that the next 15 minute automated collection process started, which shocked him so much he stopped to draw a breath. With that slight pause, the rangers who ran the weather station managed to tell him that I hadn't touched anything, it was an automated process that ran every 15 minutes, and they had been between me and the machines.
Several people later congratulated me on standing my ground against this asshole for so long.
For my entire career I've always been cautious about touching equipment I know nothing about. Not that it has saved me from recognizing many of the stories in this thread, and I'm certain some of my former colleagues are behind some of these stories.
Obligatory story for the thread, not mine, but from watching my colleague sitting at the desk across from me.
A phone company in Africa decides to buy a matching pair of voice compressors to put on a new satellite link they want to light up. The machines finally get delivered to our offices in Europe, where the main telecoms engineer is going to configure them before sending one down to Africa. For an experienced commissioning engineer it takes a full two days to get everything right on these boxes even when they are sitting next to each other. If there were to be 6,000 miles between them, commissioning and tuning is almost impossible. Since the phone company owns these boxes, we pack up everything with the one being shipped to them, manuals, diskettes full of configuring software, all of it. Some weeks later we hear that they have finally received the shipment, but since it is a Thursday afternoon they will be installing it for first tests on Monday. The upper management has been told repeatedly that the system is delivered pre-configured and nothing is to be touched. But what engineer ever listens to their bosses?
Monday comes, and we find that over the weekend the engineers in Africa were so impatient to get started they loaded up the configuration software on a PC and started reading at page one of the commissioning manual, which covered resetting the stored configuration. These systems were so badly engineered there was no concept of backup for the configuration, except to print out the configs screen by screen from the PC. Which my colleague had done, because he knew better. We had to courier a copy to them, but when I left a few months later they still hadn't managed to get much of it working. They were still paying for a mostly unused satellite channel.
the AC
I can't be 100% certain that they just read my gmail accounts, but I was in raving paranoid mode soon after the first interview.
/.ers about through my published gmail account. Cool again, for I had recently posted on those topics on /., then received follow up emails from like minded people which led to long email conversations that ranged into other themes. Both questions were almost exactly lifted from those email threads, but not from the /. postings. I had the first indications that my Clark Kent identity and my AntiCypher identity had been compromised. I know of only two close friends who know both, and neither are the types to let on, or really care.
First question was from my dim, distant past, close to the dawn of telecommunications. Nothing at all I would list on a CV that only highlights the best of my recent career. Cool, thought I, I know this because I did my thesis research in it. Now, I never finished my thesis, and never published my results because private industry came courting and I haven't mentioned this on a CV in at least 15 years. Some of my closest and geekiest friends understand it, though, so who knows.
Next two questions were about some technology I emailed some
The next question was straight from a forum where I've never used my real name, or any alias except for a gmail account that was linked through an invite at some point. Since I long ago made a conscious decision to never be professionally associated with that forum, and took extreme precautions to avoid posting from traceable IP addresses and the like. I kind of stammered through a half-assed response about knowing very little on the subject. At that point I suddenly realised that something wasn't right.
The rest of the interview alternated between topics on my CV and archaic systems I haven't admitted to knowing in a long time. Clearly the first interviewers from Google had access to information about my early career and life back to childhood. It was exactly like sitting a government security clearance interview, they already had the information, the interview was just to confirm you and your past were in agreement. I knew all the answers, because the first interviews were obviously running from a script that I could have written.
Later interviewers just wanted to know really detailed technical things that ranged all over and some of it I had to admit I didn't know. One interview lasted about 5 minutes, the guy knew I wrote some programs about 20 years ago, so he started asking questions as if I were still actively coding. When I told him I no longer write code, he wondered why I had applied for a job as a programmer, but then figured out I was being recruited for other things and politely ended the interview.
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Google's first contact was from one of their recruiters calling my Irish mobile number, which forwards to whichever mobile I'm on at the time. So later they thought I still lived in Ireland, even though I left at an early age, and only have the mobile for when I work projects there. I sent a specially polished CV to them with a white-listed email address for exclusive Google use. I still get the occasional spammy-feeling email from randomly named recruiters on that address.
/.
If I were to believe the word-of-mouth excuse I recently heard from a friend now inside Google, they really thought I lived near their HQ, and my question of "what Google facilities are near my home?" caught them by surprise. I believe I just wasn't technical enough for them, or I post too much on
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Over one thousand posts in a decade. I have a social life, I swear
My first interview with Google last year, the interviewer made it perfectly clear that he already knew my /. login, had read personal and highly technical emails in my gmail accounts, had discovered some old technical papers not widely published from more than 20 years ago (hence my login name here), and other widely dispersed private information about me. Just putting my RL name into google, and other attempts to discover how all this information was gleaned showed that his sources were more than just some mad googling skillz.
I was quite paranoid for a while after that interview.
But as I've pointed out elsewhere, they didn't know I didn't live in Ireland, and thought I still lived just up the road from their new European HQ.
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Many commodities (oil for example) are traded in USD
/., mention PetroEuros, duck, and run far, far away.
;-)
This is one reason why gasoline/petrol prices in Europe have remained relatively stable, even as the political situation in oil producing regions has caused crude prices to increase. Most oil producing nations trade in U.S. Dollars, so the price in Euros is now 40% cheaper than 2 years ago. Traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe, it is quite obvious at the price differential of Dollar based international commodities. Gas prices, at least on both coasts of the U.S., are now about equal to what we pay in Europe, where 6 years ago we paid around 4 times what Americans were paying.
There are a few oil producing nations that have switched from petrodollars to petroeuros, which has seen their income stabilise as the dollar slips. What makes currency traders, central bank managers, and others who work with the U.S. Dollar lose sleep is the fear that some day soon, the rest of the OPEC countries will announce a switch from selling crude oil in Dollars to Euros. That would be a major blow to the stability of the Dollar, and if it were to happen, Americans would see gas prices from $10 to $25 per gallon at the pumps. It would also be a bad thing for Europe, because we would see our pump prices jump by at least 40%, and more likely the increase would be close to 100% as the world economies adjusted to the new "base" currency.
If you are ever in a bar in Brussels full of Eurocrats, and you want to completely derail all the conversations along the lines of a "mac vs. pc" flamefest on
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ObOnTopic post I've managed to use an OLPC XO machine for a while, they are truly innovative little wonders. Even at $175 a piece, that means we'll soon be training up a whole new generation of bitter, jaded sysadmins
This may be a new thing in the U.S., but it has been part of the multiplay packages going in all over Europe.
/. moderations for that
ISPs who lease or just install a CPE box will have multiple WiFi SSIDs running. One for the client, the other advertising their network. So whenever a client roams and finds an access point with the name of their provider, they can use their login credentials and get their own internet connection. This second connection is completely separate from the client's connection, there is no shared IP address or bandwidth.
I think there is a big gap in knowledge of how modern broadband works between those in the U.S. and those in Europe or the Far East. I'm seeing this more and more on american oriented sites like slashdot, "ignorance" is too strong a word, but certainly "lack of understanding" comes close. Internet technologies are pulling way ahead outside of the U.S., where the last mile has seen great advances in both business models and creative uses of technology. When the bandwidth of the last mile (between a head-end and the customer premises) gets sufficient to put multiple channels down the line, the client can get much, much more than just an internet connection. With fibre installations going in, the bandwidth can support multiple HD video channels, multiple internet connections, multiple voice channels, private VPN options, roaming, etc. A client can just choose which bandwidth package they want, e.g. Symmetric or Asymmetric, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or more. A handful of TV channels, or more than you could ever watch. VoIP calling plans, that are so cheap that calling most of Europe or North America is free for the first few thousand minutes.
So one of the providers in the U.S. had an executive who took a vacation in Europe, saw the amazing new multiplay boxes, and decided it was a good idea to beat their few oligarchic non-rivals to the punch. I'm glad it's News for Nerds in the U.S., things are looking up over there.
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this post needs some emoticons for slight amounts of sarcasm, some humour, and kind of a tsk-tsk sideways look indicating a mix of sympathy and pity, good luck finding
I'm going to reply to you again, because I've had a few hours to play with the new version, and I'm not at all impressed.
So spotlight is broken, but that's been a feature request with much finger pointing for quite a while now. The built in search function is still pretty useless. No way to search all headers, or the entire mailbox including both headers and bodies, or to search multiple or all mail boxes in the same search. With 9 separate inboxes, it takes a while to find some poorly remembered email. Granted, I can always open a terminal, navigate to the directory, and perform some unix majic with grep and find, but that's a major blow to usability for their interface. It's not like people haven't been asking for a better search function since early days, but the developers have decided that people just shouldn't be searching their email. Eudora does it correctly, so my standards are not going to come down, maybe all the good TB developers will go over to Penelope.
There appear to still be bugs with the IPv6 implementation, both on the OSX and Linux versions. At least, there is still a config setting to disable IPv6 lookups.
Without too much regression testing, the old LDAP incompatibilities are still there. TB is pretty much useless in corporate settings using AD or other LDAP directory services.
The old indexing bugs haven't been addressed at all. After leaving TB running for a while, various inboxes highlight in blue to show new mail, but there isn't any. Sometimes a mailbox shows unread messages, but searching around doesn't turn up any. New messages sorted by procmail on the server aren't indexed properly if not seen first in an inbox.
The anti-phishing feature has always highlighted quite a few auto-generated emails and some client monthly mailings as suspect. I wish they would integrate some kind of baysian or learning or white-list features on that.
The completely separate address books, with no concept of either hierarchy or being attached to individual accounts (think friends&family, business contacts) is pretty 1993 in its thinking.
One of my biggest problems, is the inability to choose which outgoing SMTP service at the time of sending a message. Once again, Eudora got this right. Since I work in many locations, the ability to quickly change the outgoing SMTP setting without having to go to every account setting and changing it manually would be expected of a real email application.
The UI hasn't really improved at all over the 1.5 version. Sure, they've now hidden several spam controls in new places, and made a few other cosmetic improvements, but TB is still mostly unusable by ordinary users. There is still no way to make some commonly used functions into buttons on the main interface. That is the most asked for feature when I show people TB, how do they do their most common command with just a single button click.
Version 1.5 was really the first usable release, it should have been called 1.0. This is a minor bug fix release, count it as version 1.1, but there is NO major overhaul of either the functionality or usability.
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1) How's the Mail.app importing?
/.ers know how to hack spotlight to index other areas of the user's file system?
2) Does it work with Spotlight
1) there doesn't seem to be any mail.app import function, maybe it will be included in an extension, but this feature really has been ignored for too long
2) my first tests indicate it still isn't indexed by Spotlight, which is a big shame because I'm now totally hooked on spotlight. Do any
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Start an open site dedicated to CONTENT providers who have made their content available for IPv6 and give blue ribbon graphics to IPv6
/. was bought by OSTG, it has been a site by PHBs for page impressions and slashvertisements.
/32 v6 block just fills out a form, and gets the allocation, its part of their annual fee (1300 Euros/year in Europe). Beyond that, its pretty much free market forces for what an LIR or ISP can charge for v4 or v6 addresses. For a while, there was a policy in place to force aggregation by giving only LIRs PA blocks, but enough people living in the real world have forced the existence of PI blocks. With only minor justification, I'll get you a nice big PI block you can play with for 3 years, I only charge administrative overhead (which is still going to be a few hundred Euros if its the only thing you want). If you hire me for other work, I tend to throw in the v4 and v6 blocks and AS# for free, if that is what the project needs.
There are plenty of badges and code snippets available to websites who have IPv6 connectivity, with various dancing penguins or turtles to show when a browser has connected with IPv6. It wouldn't be that hard to make it into a dancing blue ribbon.
to IPv6 only sites
I've been looking at the viability of v6 only sites, its not going to happen any time soon. Dual stack, no problem, but there just isn't any reason for a site to cut off most of it's traffic. There are already a few IPv6 information sites that have a complete version on an IPv6 only machine, but its more for geek style points than anything else.
Going back to the subject You want IPv6 adoption?
When slashdot's (or digg's or myspace's) management goes to their upstream provider and demands IPv6 connectivity, and tweaks the site to support it (no small task, really), then we'll see a major shift in the U.S. to IPv6. Until then, Asia and Europe are leaving the U.S. behind. In 1997, slashdot was a site by nerds, for nerds. Since
Make getting address space cheap and easy
I keep hearing this, and I can't figure out where it comes from. I already posted prices in another thread, but v6 netblocks are the same price as v4 addresses, or even cheaper depending on how much you want. The only places where money flows for address space are when LIRs pay their annual fee to the RIRs, and the RIRs give money to support IANA (and grudgingly, if ever, to ICANN). Any LIR that wants to get a
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I've also been coming to /. since the early days, and the saving factor was the karma/moderation/metamod system put in place. There are still people with knowledge who post on /., whereas digg is a cesspit of childish flamefests. All the other technical sites, blogs, confederators, and 2.0 stuff hasn't developed a system as well thought out as slashdots.
/., although I limit myself now to just IPv6 threads and the occasional funny posting. Since my time of keeping track of much information on the internet is precious, I've been able to downgrade funny posts, and upgrade insightful, informative, and interesting posts so they are most of what I see. This means I can get into an article, see what a few other experts have posted about a subject, and get out quickly. In this age of information overload, the /. moderation system is one of the few that makes my life easier.
I like contributing to
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French telecoms have it
France: Great way to get govt. funding for R&D and keep a telecom business alive while you develop
You don't seem to know anything about this. Are you trolling, or just an ignorant american?
France Telecom, at least the major parts of it such as OpenTransit and Orange, are junking all of their old Alcatel kit (which was never that predominant) for Cisco and Juniper. They are doing this because they have so many customers, and so much equipment, they have been specifying IPv6 for years now, and rolling out IPv6 internally for the last year. All of their major competitors (there are 5 major broadband providers in France) are readying IPv6 to the end user, and many smaller broadband providers already offer it.
Alcatel, while it was once a subsidised French company, hasn't received any handouts or tax breaks from the French government in quite a few years. Mostly this was due to pressure from Brussels to play fair in the European market. Since the merger with Lucent, the new company is considered a pariah by just about every major telecoms and datacoms player. The merger was so badly bungled, that if Scott Adams were to try and put some of the major fuckups into Dilbert strips, nobody would believe that such idiocy could exist.
Apple: What happens upstream, on one side of an ISP is one thing. Still lots of activity happening downstream, inside private IP address space, away from the ISPs
While others have pointed out your ignorance of how ZeroConf/Bonjour works, on this point you are certainly correct. Only it isn't just Apple, Microsoft has also realised the same thing. There are lots of nifty little services that can do cool things with the features of IPv6. For those of us who have had IPv6 around for a while now, it is just so much easier to administrate and maintain, and many of the kludgy hacks to IPv4 are just part of the v6 spec and mostly just work.
Many forward looking companies are turning on IPv6 on their internal routers, just waiting for the day when their ISP finally gets a clue. With IPv6 addressing, all kinds of autodiscovery happens, and all kinds of useful tools are being built on top of that. People who install the new Apple 802.11n Airport Base Station can get IPv6 connectivity just by clicking a checkbox, and it automatically finds a nearby 6-in-4 tunnel broker. So just by installing one of these boxes, not just Macs get IPv6, but Vista users as well. At CeBit this year, almost every Chinese and Taiwanese maker of consumer grade DSL/Cable/WiFi router boxes were showing off automatic 6-in-4 tunnels, expect them to hit the American market within the next year unless the Chinese authorities decide that such advanced technology has to be kept out of the hands of the new axis of evil.
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