So let's say one of these theatres with RF-shielded walls caught fire. The firefighters rush in, with their VHF two-way radios. But they are now blocked! So if they have to radio warnings, like, "Get out of there, the roof is about to collaps!", they don't hear it, because the wood part of the walls may be on fire, but they are still standing, ferrite intact.
Firefighters died in the World Trade Center *because* the building's construction (the shell had steel vertical beams very close together) blocked the signals from the command on the ground, telling them to evacuate. (This was written up in IEEE Spectrum, I think in April.) Now you want theatres to have this problem, just because some jerks are too tacky to put there phones on "vibrate" or go to the lobby when they get a call?
I'm a parent, and as somebody else noted, we sometimes need to be reached on an emergency basis. I have had to leave a movie because my cell phone *vibrated* and the babysitter told me, while I was standing in the lobby, that there was a problem. I would be hard-pressed to patronize a theater that didn't allow me that luxury.
Back in the sixties, my father was a physician who was often "on call" during his few hours of not actually working. He had an answering service that he checked in with all the time. I think he had occasion to leave them the phone number of the theatre (reserved seat stage, not movie), and his seat, so that an usher could fetch him. We don't do that nowadays; we expect radio waves to do the job. It can be done with minimum annoyance to fellow theatergoers. Blocking is a bad idea.
I worked on the abortive 700 MHz (Ch. 60-69) auction a couple of years ago, on behalf of a potential bidder, before it was "postponed". Wired has a lot of details wrong, though the FCC has screwed up too.
Today's stations above channel 51 are not necessarily going off the air. Almost every station has two channels now, one analog and one digital. If the analog channel is >51, the digital one probably isn't. The plan is to eventually shut down analog and move to all digital, all below channel 52. So most stations will just move.
Analog stations don't have to go dark until 85% of their market can receive digital, so the 2007 deadline is unlikely to be real. I suspect the 2010 deadline (to go all digital ANYWAY) will end up being postponed. TV stations have priority over wireless ops. The wireless licensees can buy off the TV stations, but most stations won't just shut down.
It is possible that the wireless (2-way; TV, after all, is wireless too) ops will pay for a station below 52 to shut down, in order to accommodate a move to their channel from someone now above 52, so that they can use the channel for wireless. Home Shopping channels and the like are candidates for such shutdown. The FCC however did not adopt a proposal to formalize this via an auction process, which had been proposed.
No; since the Telecom Act of 1996, they are not granted legal monopolies. But they still have antitrust-law monopoly power, because competition isn't in place yet. And the Telecom Act specifically says that they're supposed to cooperate with competitors in certain ways, in order to undo the old monopoly.
The lawsuits against the RBOCs are about misbehavior since 1996, under the new rules.
The form factor's perfect for its purpose. It's a regular keyboard, with a small display appended. These are all over the elementary schools. (The old ones, not Dana.) Kids can handle them the way kids do, not the way we gingerly treat laptops or PDAs.
AlphaSmart is how kids learn to type these days. It's also important for kids who have trouble doing handwriting -- it's a great empowerment tool.
BTW, the main competition is probably Calcuscribe, which is like an AlphaSmart with some math abilities. But I think Dana will top it (albeit at a higher price, which will make it more of an adult than K-12 product).
Re:Gentoo is a giant step, too long for mere morta
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You're right about the forums being friendly; I've been there, and they help. But asking a question and waiting a day or two for an answer can keep the pace pretty slow... I guess part of the problem is that Linux doesn't have a single standard for where things go, so whatever I might have learned doing Mandrake or Redhat doesn't necessarily help.
Yeah, I did Slackware and Yggdrasil back in the 1993-1994 timeframe. But at this point I'm not looking for an educationally challenging experience. I'd like to see a Linux distro that, well, kicks Bill's butt. Or at least is an attractive enough alternative, so that commercial developers don't think that computing is a Redmond monoculture. And that isn't here yet. I appreciate how Gentoo's core users, a self-selected group who are a short step away from "Linux from Scratch", don't want easy. But why not build a friendlier system out of portage?
And yes, the real problem is that linux distros don't have standardized places for things, or fully standarized ways of setting things up. And yes, there are at least some standards. And, as usual, the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. (Yes, that's supposed to be a punch line, but it's also true.)
Gentoo is a giant step, too long for mere mortals
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I fully appreciate the author's sympathies. I'm used to replacing RPM-based distros; just last night I burned a new Mandrake Cooker so I could try it. KDE3.01 et al are just too hard to get right using RPM upgrades. But then he mentions gentoo...
...which I have also tried to install. Trouble is, gentoo has *no* installer, past the kernel stage. I can't even get sound to work, becuase my mobo sound chip isn't in their ALSA tree. I'm sure there's a way to do it but they don't tell you. Gentoo users are typically, I suppose, the type of Unix experts who have no trouble figuring out which driver goes where. But gentoo lays things out differently from RedHat (etc.) so I can't just copy their/etc (etc.!) files.
If gentoo had a decent installer, not necessarily as "friendly" as Mandrake (more flexibility is a plus) but which could guide all the files into the right places, then it might be a killer. For now, it's a cult for experts. But I don't see why a binary-based (or at least partially binary-based) distro couldn't use an apt-get or portage-like system when needed, without requiring gentoo's exceptional knowledge (well, that's what it feels like to the "n00b" whose recent Linux experience is mostly RH and Mdk) of the distro's layout.
This is such classic Slashdot... the O.P. sees the Phoenix name, assumes BIOS, and posts a story to that effect. Lots of comments are based on the same idea, though nobody bothers to click through to the original link.
FirstView Connect 2.0 is not a PC BIOS. It's listed as being for "information appliances" and other semi-computers, like set top boxes. For them, where a hard disk is unusual, a powerful ROM is a good developers' tool. Many developers like the Linux environment, so it's attractive to them. Some of these are a lot like miniature PCs; for instance, the PC/104 form factor is a hand-sized stackable card with an ISA bus, often used for compact embedded systems (it usually costs more than a full-sized motherboard). But FirstView is not aimed at generic PC motherboards.
Thank you for being the first commenter who seems to have actually read the paper! I did too, or more precisely skimmed it looking for him to "cut to the chase". He really didn't -- at the beginning, he cited Guatemala's example, and then he rambled on with a PhD-thesis-length collection of stories about radio regulation. Sometimes seeming a bit drunk in the process.
Guatemala's sale of spectrum rights as a kind of real estate is weird, of course, but then Guatemala's version of democracy is little removed from the Spanish Inqisition Empire that spawned it, a few wealthy families almost literally owning everyone else, with the European minority having the nearly untrammeled right to kill the indigenous majority. So sure, the airwaves should be "owned" by the Spaniards, like the land. Hardly an example for the USA.
But then Galbi contradicts this when he talks about software-defined radios. His absynthe kicks in when he complains that FCC regs for SDRs prohibit users from reprogramming them. The whole idea behind SDRs is to allow one set of hardware to run code that adapts to one or another set of rules, each designed to prevent interference. Homegrown unapproved code as Galbi seems to like it would allow anybody to cause any old interference they wanted. He views this as creativity. Sorry, officer, if your police radio broke. Sorry, neighbor, if your cellphone broke. Software "freedom" trumps your rights, according to Galbi.
Contradictions like that are about all I can glean out of an awfully-long read. This is not the first silly paper Galbi has written. He seems terribly hung up on the right wing ideology-du-jour as applied to communications practice. His research is actually pretty good; he just doesn't know how to synthesize cogent, or sane, conclusions.
DNS is merely a directory that applications consult. There is nothing cast in stone about ICANN's choices, or a government's. Only the users' settings matter. The user selects a server, and the server selects its root server(s). It's a hierarchy of trust up to "."
So if the South African government and ICANN don't agree, then each DNS administrator (at least for the main root nodes that others consider authoritative) around the world, or for that matter each non-root DNS server operator who knows how, can select whichever ".za" TLD server they prefer. The government can run one, and the incumbent can run one. Frankly, it is more important what John Sidgemore thinks, because he runs the largest backbone ISP. ICANN exists because Bernie Ebbers before, and John now, let it. My guess is that ICANN would not advise the server operators to obey a government over itself. Operators within South Africa might have to, but the rest of the world is not subject to that jurisdiction.
Likewise, if users don't like ICANN, they can move to a different DNS for.com,.org, and other TLDs too. The problem is that most end users don't know how to choose anything but what their ISP tells them. And there has been no reason to "fork the root" yet. A few non-ICANN domains exist, but they're not widely accepted yet.
Intuitively, sure, repeating is wasteful. In current practice, sure, repeating is wasteful. In practical use, repeating may or may not end up being wasteful, but Reed's theory does have some validity.
He posits lots of repeaters with small range. Indeed, the reference to Shepard's thesis would only be valid if it is this clue: Shepard showed that UWB signals at 60 GHz would fade out so quickly that a zillion of them would add up to very little, because a zillion minus a very few would be in range of any observer. Shepard did not posit, as some have falsely stated, that wide-range UWB signals can overlap infinitely.
So let's get to Reed's idea. Take a lot of repeaters with low power. You get the signal across the chain of repeaters. Now let's view these as a chain of circles on a map. If the circles are small enough, the chain will look like a narrow line. If the circles are larger, the chain will look like a wide line. The narrower the line, the more lines can exist without overlap, and thus lots of low-powered repeaters (narrow line followed by the signal) provide more net capacity.
This only works if there are no bottlenecks in the topology, if there are adequate repeaters to meet traffic demand, and if the nodes on the network all cooperate. Those conditions are going to be hard to achieve in practice.
Still, he is right to point out how obsolete the existing regulatory framework is. There's no Gilderesque free lunch, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
You're overestimating AX.25. It should have used random waits, but its retransmission is basically a fixed backoff, derived from landline X.25 (LAP-B), which is entirely wrong. Randomness was proposed later and may have been implemented now and then, but the classical TNCs were notoriously prone to congestion collapse.
Indeed the "digipeating" model of AX.25 is perhaps the best example of how easy it is to get exactly the opposite results from what Reed posits. AX.25 digipeating is truly awful. Been there, done that, gave it up in the '80s.
Reed's proposal is a whole lot smarter, but the devil's in the details.
Re:Short term, the radio waves will be *more crowd
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FM stations use most of their bandwidth already, not a "narrow band". Even if they don't run a subcarrier, they're still using most of the 200 kHz channel. Inband On Channel (IBOC) digital FM sticks on subchannels which essentially broaden the shoulders of the frequency pattern, but it doesn't significantly impact how tight the spectrum can be.
The FCC's original LPFM rules were realistic. Some IBOC advocates thought that 2-channel spacing *might* be a problem, but Congress really overturned the FCC on behalf of big broadcasters who didn't want the competition. That's the issue in broadcasting now, not technology.
Why do people take Vint Cerf seriously? He is the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet, someone who is not very bright, but thought of highly when his only accomplishment was just Being There.
Vint works for Worldcom, the largest backbone/commercial ISP and second-largest long distance company. He has Worldcom's interests in mind, not the public's. He has learned to say "Internet" all over the place, making his about as "k3wl" as the bozos who were putting "dot com" in company names a few years ago. But he never, ever actually understood the Internet. His most significant early work was TCP, but if you examine the protocol (and compare it to, say, TP4), you notice just how ugly and stupidly written it was. Nice experiment but it should have been thrown out 20+ years ago. Proof that good enough is the enemy of the best.
Vint's the bozo who changed his IAB vote from TUBA to IPv6 about ten years ago. They were ready to move ahead to TUBA as a new IP. It was already implemented in many end systems and most routers. But for political reasons, the grotesquely inferior IPv6, which is a Yugo-quality work, was adopted when Vint put IETF politics above quality.
Now he's flogging ICANN, which is trying to turn the Internet into a private club for copyright holders, leased on a per-use basis to sheepish consumers. Jones & Day, the law firm that created ICANN to enrich its own pockets, uses Vint as window dressing (a Chauncey role) and to keep Bernie Ebbers in line. If Worldcom dissented, ICANN would be toast, and the Internet maybe would have a chance of being for everyone. Vint's vote is with Disney.
I understand the benefit of the microkernel, but have they fixed Mach's performance penalty? Mach was written way back when in the mid-1980s, when networking was not a priority but timesharing a host among multiple users was. So they put in nice task scheduling, but didn't put interprocess communication in the microkernel. So there's substantial overhead in communicating with the network stack. Chorus, I'm told, is a microkernel that works better on the network because of the IPC.
While I haven't use MacOS X (Windows and Linux, basically, on my current machines), I've heard that its performance is a little slow. Could this microkernel penalty be part of the problem? Could it be fixed? (This note is not meant as a dig against MacOX X, which seems like a brilliant concept; it's a serious question.)
Bdale's election was a real blast from the past! In the mid-1980s, a bunch of us ham radio types were trying to get TCP/IP running on packet radio. Phil Karn (KA9Q) wrote a DOS program called "NET" which implemented the stack, a chat-style TELNET, FTP, SMTP and POP. Of course there were many variants and distros. The core maintainer of the code base was Bdale.
It's quite analogous, I think, to what Linus (Phil's role) and the various distro-maintainers (Bdale's role) do today. So Bdale is in that sense uniquely qualified.
And while Russ Nelson didn't say so (and he was another important player in the NOS/NET project), Bdale's real first name is Arthur. But I didn't tell you.;-)
This discovery of hydrogen seems to me to give more weight to Thomas Gold's thesis, that natural gas and oil are not fossil fuels at all but a result of geothermal processes on stored hydrogen.
Gold is a professor emeritus at Cornell; his key works can be found via web searching. Basically, he suggests that the Earth is filled with hydrogen, left over from its creation and perhaps the decay of the uranium core. (I'm a little fuzzy on details. Read him, not me, for details.) The hydrogen percolates outward. Some of it gets cooked into natural gas. Some of that becomes petroleum. Gas accumulates when it hits a geologica formation that keeps it from the surface. Thus natural gas wells are replenished from below.
This fits in well with the recent discovery of life deep underground. The origin of life may be in the crust, not the oceans. These bacteria live on the hydrogen-methane chemistry. Maybe they poop oil.
So the supply of natural gas is probably nearly endless, if not tapped too too quickly; oil is also replenishing. (Coal is indeed a fossil, very finite.) Still, there are costs in extraction and burning (CO2) so you can't treat them as free resources. But you may find them in unexpected places.
A recent PC Magazine article (on line at http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=1739&a=24249 , 0.asp , but note that Slash might mispost the URL so look under "reviews" ) reviewed several Office alteranatives, including Think Free. They didn't love it but did't hate it. Several other options, including Gobe Productive (now available for Windows), are also reviewed.
Oddly, their favorite was Corel Word Perfect Office 2002. They gave it five stars. But of the reader reviewers, one gave it five stars and the rest only ONE star (awful). Reason: Buggy as hell. Plus it took away some user control in favor of MS-like automation, which is not the way WP users like to operate.
The CNET review started with the Outlook model, which means that there's more to mail than mail. Outlook competes with Notes, which is a database-driven application environment that incidentally includes a truly wretched mail client. Let's leave calendaring, napstering, chat and news to specialized clients and focus on mail!
I like Eudora 3 a lot, but of course it doesn't have a Unix/Linux version. A really nice mail program would do better to start there. KMail's not bad either but again missing some things. A simple wish list:
- Fast user interface, with keyboard shortcuts to move to the next message, delete, etc., without touching the mouse. (I often need to filter through a hundred or more messages, many spam.) [Okay, this is common.]
- Filtering. [Okay, this is common.]
- POP3 and IMAP4 support.
- Good use of screen space. Eudora's overlapping windows are wonderful -- the 3-pane model is more common but takes more screen space.
- With POP3 (this is easier with IMAP but lots of POP3 servers are out there), there should be a "delete after x" option. And it needs tokeep track of what it's already seen. All of the Linux clients I can find are "leave mail on server" or "delete". But with more than one computer (home and office), I want to sync the mail by having both copies of the client get the mail, leaving it on the server just long enough for both to have a chance to get it all. Eudora and Outlook Express both do this on Windows, but it's not in KMail, Outlook, Sylpheed, etc. This is a showstopper! I have to boot back to Windows in order to run Eudora just to control the mail (my Linux clients are "leave mail on server").
- Cross-platform Linux/Unix and Windows support using the SAME mail files! (Thus the Linux version has to run against VFAT mail files.) This way the user can boot up either OS and access the same mail, rather than maintain two copies (see above about "leave mail on server" and multiply the problem by different OSs as well as by computers. I keep three copies of most mail because of this, office, home Windows and home Linux.) Yes, I recognize that Windows and Linux disagree on ASCII conventions, but a Windows app *can* be written to use a Linux-standard database.
- Optional display of HTML mail, without making external references (phoning home to spammers) or executing anything (viruses) unless you explicitly say to. Default send should be plain text.
It seems to me that Elitegroup Computer Systems bought PC Chips a while back. PC Chips (aka Eurone, but they had other aliases too) was the undisputed master of really crappy ultra-cheap mobos, with names like "TXPro". PC Chips would take random chipsets, notably ALi's, and relabel them to sound more like Intel's. The board quality was awful -- performance wasn't bad when it worked, but they had no quality control. El cheapo white box dealers moved a lot of them.
ECS, in those days, made a higher quality, if boring, board. Some respectable oems used them. I suspect that some of the ECS boards today are pretty stable, coming out of "old ECS", while others are warmed-over PC Chips (and probably better than the old PC Chips).
It looks like the reviewer was tainting all of ECS with the record of PC Chips.
Just an aside, the term "blue moon" has come to refer to the second full moon in a solar month. But that's a modern distortion of its real meaning. More accurately, a blue moon is the fourth full moon in a season. Thus March 31 couldn't be a blue moon because it was only the second week of the spring season. A full moon on March 19 would probably be "blue"! (Yes, there are web sites that discuss this in detail but I can't remember them and am too lazy to google 'em.)
Philosophically, does common misusage of a word or term create a new "correct" usage? Some of us old sticklers don't like it that way but we recognize that "it" happens.
Musically, bom diddy bom di bang a dang dang a bing a dah bing....
> SBC is required to offer carrier service to Covad at an externally determined price level. If that isn't a subsidy, what is??
A subsidy is when they have to offer it below cost.
SBC has always been subject to price regulation. State government generally set rates of return and went over every price in their tariff, in exquisite detail, for over a century. In the 1990s, with competition on the horizon, the telcos won retail "price caps" and more flexibility. This was a bet on their part that costs would fall quickly as new technology came on line and, frankly, they busted some unions.
But things that remain a monopoly require price regulation. So SBC basically has a choice, facilitate competition (play by the rules) or accept price regulation, to get a rate of return equivalent to a successful company in the market. They want option 3, an unregulated monopoly. Sorry, no dice.
You are fortunate to have Caprock as your local telco, because you're almost certainly not paying for it! Rural telcos are subsidized by urban ones, in the name of "universal service". Not that I begrudge them, but you have to recognize the rules.
Caprock has something like 5000 lines total, spread across several counties, with a density of around one line per square mile! That's expensive! Do you really think 5000 subscribers could finance that whole thing without federal help? Since the money is made available, the rural telcos spend it and often provide good service. Not all do -- as rural telco cooperatives, they're basically exempt from competition, so if the "owners" don't like what they get, they can't turn elsewhere. But then unhappy subscribers can theoretically vote out management, something Bell's victims can't do.
Verbal and handshake agreements are binding here in Massachusetts, but real estate is an exception. The "parol evidence" rule that generally permits oral contracts does not apply to real estate. Where land is concerned, it has to be in writing. I actually had to invoke that once when a seller claimed after the fact that he had intended to change a clause in the purchase and sale agreement, and that I had orally agreed to it. He was lying, but that didn't have to be proved, because that type of contract has to be in writing.
Now Congress has legalized electronic signatures, and doesn't require any specific technology. And the authenticity here was undisputed. So holding that this email is "writing" seems pretty logical.
> Nearly all cable TV providers operate under municipally-granted monopolies
Flat-out wrong. Exclusive (monopoly) cable franchises were banned, federally, in 1992; before that, franchises were often nonexclusive anyway. Many cities granted multiple franchises. Each operator started building at one spot and continued until it met the next operator's system, and stopped. Simple economics dictate that you're better off investing to be the first cable company someplace than the second.
Cablecos are monopolies in most places because nobody in their right mind wants to be the second one. You have the same cost (to build cable past houses) and a lower market share (zero to begin with), which means a higher unit cost, and lower margins. RCN is an "overbuilder". Look at their financials.
Telephone companies on the other hand had state exclusives up until federal law changed in 1996. A few states allowed local telephone competition just before that, but the terms were usually ornery. Telephone companies also benefit from "universal service" programs (taxes).
That's not normally the FCC's bailiwick, which is to deal with more industry-specific and technical issues. If they bill you wrong, or screw up the address, then there is plenty of other recourse. Forget that they are a cableco. They are somebody to whom you owe money. State laws generally apply, and whether they're a cableco or a bakery or a lawn service, payment issues are covered by consumer protection. Your state Attorney General's office might help.
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So let's say one of these theatres with RF-shielded walls caught fire. The firefighters rush in, with their VHF two-way radios. But they are now blocked! So if they have to radio warnings, like, "Get out of there, the roof is about to collaps!", they don't hear it, because the wood part of the walls may be on fire, but they are still standing, ferrite intact.
Firefighters died in the World Trade Center *because* the building's construction (the shell had steel vertical beams very close together) blocked the signals from the command on the ground, telling them to evacuate. (This was written up in IEEE Spectrum, I think in April.) Now you want theatres to have this problem, just because some jerks are too tacky to put there phones on "vibrate" or go to the lobby when they get a call?
I'm a parent, and as somebody else noted, we sometimes need to be reached on an emergency basis. I have had to leave a movie because my cell phone *vibrated* and the babysitter told me, while I was standing in the lobby, that there was a problem. I would be hard-pressed to patronize a theater that didn't allow me that luxury.
Back in the sixties, my father was a physician who was often "on call" during his few hours of not actually working. He had an answering service that he checked in with all the time. I think he had occasion to leave them the phone number of the theatre (reserved seat stage, not movie), and his seat, so that an usher could fetch him. We don't do that nowadays; we expect radio waves to do the job. It can be done with minimum annoyance to fellow theatergoers. Blocking is a bad idea.
I worked on the abortive 700 MHz (Ch. 60-69) auction a couple of years ago, on behalf of a potential bidder, before it was "postponed". Wired has a lot of details wrong, though the FCC has screwed up too.
Today's stations above channel 51 are not necessarily going off the air. Almost every station has two channels now, one analog and one digital. If the analog channel is >51, the digital one probably isn't. The plan is to eventually shut down analog and move to all digital, all below channel 52. So most stations will just move.
Analog stations don't have to go dark until 85% of their market can receive digital, so the 2007 deadline is unlikely to be real. I suspect the 2010 deadline (to go all digital ANYWAY) will end up being postponed. TV stations have priority over wireless ops. The wireless licensees can buy off the TV stations, but most stations won't just shut down.
It is possible that the wireless (2-way; TV, after all, is wireless too) ops will pay for a station below 52 to shut down, in order to accommodate a move to their channel from someone now above 52, so that they can use the channel for wireless. Home Shopping channels and the like are candidates for such shutdown. The FCC however did not adopt a proposal to formalize this via an auction process, which had been proposed.
No; since the Telecom Act of 1996, they are not granted legal monopolies. But they still have antitrust-law monopoly power, because competition isn't in place yet. And the Telecom Act specifically says that they're supposed to cooperate with competitors in certain ways, in order to undo the old monopoly.
The lawsuits against the RBOCs are about misbehavior since 1996, under the new rules.
The form factor's perfect for its purpose. It's a regular keyboard, with a small display appended. These are all over the elementary schools. (The old ones, not Dana.) Kids can handle them the way kids do, not the way we gingerly treat laptops or PDAs.
AlphaSmart is how kids learn to type these days. It's also important for kids who have trouble doing handwriting -- it's a great empowerment tool.
BTW, the main competition is probably Calcuscribe, which is like an AlphaSmart with some math abilities. But I think Dana will top it (albeit at a higher price, which will make it more of an adult than K-12 product).
You're right about the forums being friendly; I've been there, and they help. But asking a question and waiting a day or two for an answer can keep the pace pretty slow... I guess part of the problem is that Linux doesn't have a single standard for where things go, so whatever I might have learned doing Mandrake or Redhat doesn't necessarily help.
Yeah, I did Slackware and Yggdrasil back in the 1993-1994 timeframe. But at this point I'm not looking for an educationally challenging experience. I'd like to see a Linux distro that, well, kicks Bill's butt. Or at least is an attractive enough alternative, so that commercial developers don't think that computing is a Redmond monoculture. And that isn't here yet. I appreciate how Gentoo's core users, a self-selected group who are a short step away from "Linux from Scratch", don't want easy. But why not build a friendlier system out of portage?
And yes, the real problem is that linux distros don't have standardized places for things, or fully standarized ways of setting things up. And yes, there are at least some standards. And, as usual, the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. (Yes, that's supposed to be a punch line, but it's also true.)
I fully appreciate the author's sympathies. I'm used to replacing RPM-based distros; just last night I burned a new Mandrake Cooker so I could try it. KDE3.01 et al are just too hard to get right using RPM upgrades. But then he mentions gentoo...
/etc (etc.!) files.
...which I have also tried to install. Trouble is, gentoo has *no* installer, past the kernel stage. I can't even get sound to work, becuase my mobo sound chip isn't in their ALSA tree. I'm sure there's a way to do it but they don't tell you. Gentoo users are typically, I suppose, the type of Unix experts who have no trouble figuring out which driver goes where. But gentoo lays things out differently from RedHat (etc.) so I can't just copy their
If gentoo had a decent installer, not necessarily as "friendly" as Mandrake (more flexibility is a plus) but which could guide all the files into the right places, then it might be a killer. For now, it's a cult for experts. But I don't see why a binary-based (or at least partially binary-based) distro couldn't use an apt-get or portage-like system when needed, without requiring gentoo's exceptional knowledge (well, that's what it feels like to the "n00b" whose recent Linux experience is mostly RH and Mdk) of the distro's layout.
This is such classic Slashdot... the O.P. sees the Phoenix name, assumes BIOS, and posts a story to that effect. Lots of comments are based on the same idea, though nobody bothers to click through to the original link.
FirstView Connect 2.0 is not a PC BIOS. It's listed as being for "information appliances" and other semi-computers, like set top boxes. For them, where a hard disk is unusual, a powerful ROM is a good developers' tool. Many developers like the Linux environment, so it's attractive to them. Some of these are a lot like miniature PCs; for instance, the PC/104 form factor is a hand-sized stackable card with an ISA bus, often used for compact embedded systems (it usually costs more than a full-sized motherboard). But FirstView is not aimed at generic PC motherboards.
Thank you for being the first commenter who seems to have actually read the paper! I did too, or more precisely skimmed it looking for him to "cut to the chase". He really didn't -- at the beginning, he cited Guatemala's example, and then he rambled on with a PhD-thesis-length collection of stories about radio regulation. Sometimes seeming a bit drunk in the process.
Guatemala's sale of spectrum rights as a kind of real estate is weird, of course, but then Guatemala's version of democracy is little removed from the Spanish Inqisition Empire that spawned it, a few wealthy families almost literally owning everyone else, with the European minority having the nearly untrammeled right to kill the indigenous majority. So sure, the airwaves should be "owned" by the Spaniards, like the land. Hardly an example for the USA.
But then Galbi contradicts this when he talks about software-defined radios. His absynthe kicks in when he complains that FCC regs for SDRs prohibit users from reprogramming them. The whole idea behind SDRs is to allow one set of hardware to run code that adapts to one or another set of rules, each designed to prevent interference. Homegrown unapproved code as Galbi seems to like it would allow anybody to cause any old interference they wanted. He views this as creativity. Sorry, officer, if your police radio broke. Sorry, neighbor, if your cellphone broke. Software "freedom" trumps your rights, according to Galbi.
Contradictions like that are about all I can glean out of an awfully-long read. This is not the first silly paper Galbi has written. He seems terribly hung up on the right wing ideology-du-jour as applied to communications practice. His research is actually pretty good; he just doesn't know how to synthesize cogent, or sane, conclusions.
DNS is merely a directory that applications consult. There is nothing cast in stone about ICANN's choices, or a government's. Only the users' settings matter. The user selects a server, and the server selects its root server(s). It's a hierarchy of trust up to "."
.com, .org, and other TLDs too. The problem is that most end users don't know how to choose anything but what their ISP tells them. And there has been no reason to "fork the root" yet. A few non-ICANN domains exist, but they're not widely accepted yet.
So if the South African government and ICANN don't agree, then each DNS administrator (at least for the main root nodes that others consider authoritative) around the world, or for that matter each non-root DNS server operator who knows how, can select whichever ".za" TLD server they prefer. The government can run one, and the incumbent can run one. Frankly, it is more important what John Sidgemore thinks, because he runs the largest backbone ISP. ICANN exists because Bernie Ebbers before, and John now, let it. My guess is that ICANN would not advise the server operators to obey a government over itself. Operators within South Africa might have to, but the rest of the world is not subject to that jurisdiction.
Likewise, if users don't like ICANN, they can move to a different DNS for
Intuitively, sure, repeating is wasteful. In current practice, sure, repeating is wasteful. In practical use, repeating may or may not end up being wasteful, but Reed's theory does have some validity.
He posits lots of repeaters with small range. Indeed, the reference to Shepard's thesis would only be valid if it is this clue: Shepard showed that UWB signals at 60 GHz would fade out so quickly that a zillion of them would add up to very little, because a zillion minus a very few would be in range of any observer. Shepard did not posit, as some have falsely stated, that wide-range UWB signals can overlap infinitely.
So let's get to Reed's idea. Take a lot of repeaters with low power. You get the signal across the chain of repeaters. Now let's view these as a chain of circles on a map. If the circles are small enough, the chain will look like a narrow line. If the circles are larger, the chain will look like a wide line. The narrower the line, the more lines can exist without overlap, and thus lots of low-powered repeaters (narrow line followed by the signal) provide more net capacity.
This only works if there are no bottlenecks in the topology, if there are adequate repeaters to meet traffic demand, and if the nodes on the network all cooperate. Those conditions are going to be hard to achieve in practice.
Still, he is right to point out how obsolete the existing regulatory framework is. There's no Gilderesque free lunch, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Indeed the "digipeating" model of AX.25 is perhaps the best example of how easy it is to get exactly the opposite results from what Reed posits. AX.25 digipeating is truly awful. Been there, done that, gave it up in the '80s.
Reed's proposal is a whole lot smarter, but the devil's in the details.
FM stations use most of their bandwidth already, not a "narrow band". Even if they don't run a subcarrier, they're still using most of the 200 kHz channel. Inband On Channel (IBOC) digital FM sticks on subchannels which essentially broaden the shoulders of the frequency pattern, but it doesn't significantly impact how tight the spectrum can be.
The FCC's original LPFM rules were realistic. Some IBOC advocates thought that 2-channel spacing *might* be a problem, but Congress really overturned the FCC on behalf of big broadcasters who didn't want the competition. That's the issue in broadcasting now, not technology.
Why do people take Vint Cerf seriously? He is the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet, someone who is not very bright, but thought of highly when his only accomplishment was just Being There.
Vint works for Worldcom, the largest backbone/commercial ISP and second-largest long distance company. He has Worldcom's interests in mind, not the public's. He has learned to say "Internet" all over the place, making his about as "k3wl" as the bozos who were putting "dot com" in company names a few years ago. But he never, ever actually understood the Internet. His most significant early work was TCP, but if you examine the protocol (and compare it to, say, TP4), you notice just how ugly and stupidly written it was. Nice experiment but it should have been thrown out 20+ years ago. Proof that good enough is the enemy of the best.
Vint's the bozo who changed his IAB vote from TUBA to IPv6 about ten years ago. They were ready to move ahead to TUBA as a new IP. It was already implemented in many end systems and most routers. But for political reasons, the grotesquely inferior IPv6, which is a Yugo-quality work, was adopted when Vint put IETF politics above quality.
Now he's flogging ICANN, which is trying to turn the Internet into a private club for copyright holders, leased on a per-use basis to sheepish consumers. Jones & Day, the law firm that created ICANN to enrich its own pockets, uses Vint as window dressing (a Chauncey role) and to keep Bernie Ebbers in line. If Worldcom dissented, ICANN would be toast, and the Internet maybe would have a chance of being for everyone. Vint's vote is with Disney.
I understand the benefit of the microkernel, but have they fixed Mach's performance penalty? Mach was written way back when in the mid-1980s, when networking was not a priority but timesharing a host among multiple users was. So they put in nice task scheduling, but didn't put interprocess communication in the microkernel. So there's substantial overhead in communicating with the network stack. Chorus, I'm told, is a microkernel that works better on the network because of the IPC.
While I haven't use MacOS X (Windows and Linux, basically, on my current machines), I've heard that its performance is a little slow. Could this microkernel penalty be part of the problem? Could it be fixed? (This note is not meant as a dig against MacOX X, which seems like a brilliant concept; it's a serious question.)
Bdale's election was a real blast from the past! In the mid-1980s, a bunch of us ham radio types were trying to get TCP/IP running on packet radio. Phil Karn (KA9Q) wrote a DOS program called "NET" which implemented the stack, a chat-style TELNET, FTP, SMTP and POP. Of course there were many variants and distros. The core maintainer of the code base was Bdale.
;-)
It's quite analogous, I think, to what Linus (Phil's role) and the various distro-maintainers (Bdale's role) do today. So Bdale is in that sense uniquely qualified.
And while Russ Nelson didn't say so (and he was another important player in the NOS/NET project), Bdale's real first name is Arthur. But I didn't tell you.
This discovery of hydrogen seems to me to give more weight to Thomas Gold's thesis, that natural gas and oil are not fossil fuels at all but a result of geothermal processes on stored hydrogen.
Gold is a professor emeritus at Cornell; his key works can be found via web searching. Basically, he suggests that the Earth is filled with hydrogen, left over from its creation and perhaps the decay of the uranium core. (I'm a little fuzzy on details. Read him, not me, for details.) The hydrogen percolates outward. Some of it gets cooked into natural gas. Some of that becomes petroleum. Gas accumulates when it hits a geologica formation that keeps it from the surface. Thus natural gas wells are replenished from below.
This fits in well with the recent discovery of life deep underground. The origin of life may be in the crust, not the oceans. These bacteria live on the hydrogen-methane chemistry. Maybe they poop oil.
So the supply of natural gas is probably nearly endless, if not tapped too too quickly; oil is also replenishing. (Coal is indeed a fossil, very finite.) Still, there are costs in extraction and burning (CO2) so you can't treat them as free resources. But you may find them in unexpected places.
Oddly, their favorite was Corel Word Perfect Office 2002. They gave it five stars. But of the reader reviewers, one gave it five stars and the rest only ONE star (awful). Reason: Buggy as hell. Plus it took away some user control in favor of MS-like automation, which is not the way WP users like to operate.
The CNET review started with the Outlook model, which means that there's more to mail than mail. Outlook competes with Notes, which is a database-driven application environment that incidentally includes a truly wretched mail client. Let's leave calendaring, napstering, chat and news to specialized clients and focus on mail!
I like Eudora 3 a lot, but of course it doesn't have a Unix/Linux version. A really nice mail program would do better to start there. KMail's not bad either but again missing some things. A simple wish list:
- Fast user interface, with keyboard shortcuts to move to the next message, delete, etc., without touching the mouse. (I often need to filter through a hundred or more messages, many spam.) [Okay, this is common.]
- Filtering. [Okay, this is common.]
- POP3 and IMAP4 support.
- Good use of screen space. Eudora's overlapping windows are wonderful -- the 3-pane model is more common but takes more screen space.
- With POP3 (this is easier with IMAP but lots of POP3 servers are out there), there should be a "delete after x" option. And it needs tokeep track of what it's already seen. All of the Linux clients I can find are "leave mail on server" or "delete". But with more than one computer (home and office), I want to sync the mail by having both copies of the client get the mail, leaving it on the server just long enough for both to have a chance to get it all. Eudora and Outlook Express both do this on Windows, but it's not in KMail, Outlook, Sylpheed, etc. This is a showstopper! I have to boot back to Windows in order to run Eudora just to control the mail (my Linux clients are "leave mail on server").
- Cross-platform Linux/Unix and Windows support using the SAME mail files! (Thus the Linux version has to run against VFAT mail files.) This way the user can boot up either OS and access the same mail, rather than maintain two copies (see above about "leave mail on server" and multiply the problem by different OSs as well as by computers. I keep three copies of most mail because of this, office, home Windows and home Linux.) Yes, I recognize that Windows and Linux disagree on ASCII conventions, but a Windows app *can* be written to use a Linux-standard database.
- Optional display of HTML mail, without making external references (phoning home to spammers) or executing anything (viruses) unless you explicitly say to. Default send should be plain text.
It seems to me that Elitegroup Computer Systems bought PC Chips a while back. PC Chips (aka Eurone, but they had other aliases too) was the undisputed master of really crappy ultra-cheap mobos, with names like "TXPro". PC Chips would take random chipsets, notably ALi's, and relabel them to sound more like Intel's. The board quality was awful -- performance wasn't bad when it worked, but they had no quality control. El cheapo white box dealers moved a lot of them.
ECS, in those days, made a higher quality, if boring, board. Some respectable oems used them. I suspect that some of the ECS boards today are pretty stable, coming out of "old ECS", while others are warmed-over PC Chips (and probably better than the old PC Chips).
It looks like the reviewer was tainting all of ECS with the record of PC Chips.
Just an aside, the term "blue moon" has come to refer to the second full moon in a solar month. But that's a modern distortion of its real meaning. More accurately, a blue moon is the fourth full moon in a season. Thus March 31 couldn't be a blue moon because it was only the second week of the spring season. A full moon on March 19 would probably be "blue"! (Yes, there are web sites that discuss this in detail but I can't remember them and am too lazy to google 'em.)
....
Philosophically, does common misusage of a word or term create a new "correct" usage? Some of us old sticklers don't like it that way but we recognize that "it" happens.
Musically, bom diddy bom di bang a dang dang a bing a dah bing
> SBC is required to offer carrier service to Covad at an externally determined price level. If that isn't a subsidy, what is??
A subsidy is when they have to offer it below cost.
SBC has always been subject to price regulation. State government generally set rates of return and went over every price in their tariff, in exquisite detail, for over a century. In the 1990s, with competition on the horizon, the telcos won retail "price caps" and more flexibility. This was a bet on their part that costs would fall quickly as new technology came on line and, frankly, they busted some unions.
But things that remain a monopoly require price regulation. So SBC basically has a choice, facilitate competition (play by the rules) or accept price regulation, to get a rate of return equivalent to a successful company in the market. They want option 3, an unregulated monopoly. Sorry, no dice.
You are fortunate to have Caprock as your local telco, because you're almost certainly not paying for it! Rural telcos are subsidized by urban ones, in the name of "universal service". Not that I begrudge them, but you have to recognize the rules.
Caprock has something like 5000 lines total, spread across several counties, with a density of around one line per square mile! That's expensive! Do you really think 5000 subscribers could finance that whole thing without federal help? Since the money is made available, the rural telcos spend it and often provide good service. Not all do -- as rural telco cooperatives, they're basically exempt from competition, so if the "owners" don't like what they get, they can't turn elsewhere. But then unhappy subscribers can theoretically vote out management, something Bell's victims can't do.
Verbal and handshake agreements are binding here in Massachusetts, but real estate is an exception. The "parol evidence" rule that generally permits oral contracts does not apply to real estate. Where land is concerned, it has to be in writing. I actually had to invoke that once when a seller claimed after the fact that he had intended to change a clause in the purchase and sale agreement, and that I had orally agreed to it. He was lying, but that didn't have to be proved, because that type of contract has to be in writing.
Now Congress has legalized electronic signatures, and doesn't require any specific technology. And the authenticity here was undisputed. So holding that this email is "writing" seems pretty logical.
> Nearly all cable TV providers operate under municipally-granted monopolies
Flat-out wrong. Exclusive (monopoly) cable franchises were banned, federally, in 1992; before that, franchises were often nonexclusive anyway. Many cities granted multiple franchises. Each operator started building at one spot and continued until it met the next operator's system, and stopped. Simple economics dictate that you're better off investing to be the first cable company someplace than the second.
Cablecos are monopolies in most places because nobody in their right mind wants to be the second one. You have the same cost (to build cable past houses) and a lower market share (zero to begin with), which means a higher unit cost, and lower margins. RCN is an "overbuilder". Look at their financials.
Telephone companies on the other hand had state exclusives up until federal law changed in 1996. A few states allowed local telephone competition just before that, but the terms were usually ornery. Telephone companies also benefit from "universal service" programs (taxes).
That's not normally the FCC's bailiwick, which is to deal with more industry-specific and technical issues. If they bill you wrong, or screw up the address, then there is plenty of other recourse. Forget that they are a cableco. They are somebody to whom you owe money. State laws generally apply, and whether they're a cableco or a bakery or a lawn service, payment issues are covered by consumer protection. Your state Attorney General's office might help.