I have a Toshiba laptop with the i945 chipset. It uses Windows XP with no problems. Its sound subsystem is seriously distorted with most version of Linux, including the very recent MEPIS 6.5 and Mandrive One 2007.1. Both of those run fine on an AMD desktop with nVidia 6150 chipset.
Oddly, when trying the live CD of MEPIS, and exiting X windows, it got a BSOD! It was apparently in module "vt.c". But this doesn't happen on the nVidia chipset, just the Intel. This makes me suspicous of the i945 graphics drivers. It's a pretty crappy chipest.
Menino has been in office roughly forever, in large part because nobody else really wants the job. That is, nobody who's not far more inflammatory to some major part of the populace. "Mumbles" Menino is everyman's mayor, the none-too-bright neighbor who you know means well, and won't do anything really outrageous, while things basically take care of themselves.
The muni wi-fi network probably has very few users anyway. It's rather new and I don't think it covers the whole city. Cable modems are well established and there's some DSL already. Boing Boing's audience probably isn't the muni's. When I'm in Boston neighborhoods looking for WiFi, I've never seen it, though I've never had trouble finding an open Netgear or Linksys.
You young'uns don't remember exactly how it happened, so let me clarify the history, and how things have gone astray recently.
It 1968, the FCC's Carterfone decision allowed non-Bell equipment to be attached to their phone lines. This led to the adoption of things like answering machines, cordless phones, and modems, all of which were banned by Ma Bell before then (so they could rent 300 bps modems for $25/month to those who really needed them).
In 1969, the FCC's MCI Decision allowed leased lines to be provided by competitive carriers. This made long-haul backbone lines cheaper. Dial-up long distance was supposed to remain a monopoly. But around 1975, MCI figured out a trick, started its Execunet service, and while the FCC opposed it once it figured out what was going on, by 1978 a court held that it was okay. That led to the rules for LD carriers that are still in effect, wherein they pay local phone companies "access" minute of use rates at both ends of a call.
In 1980, the FCC's Computer II Decision held that terminal equipment (what Carterfone permitted to become competitive) should no longer be tariffed at all, so it would become fully competitive and deregulated in 1983. It also held that "enhanced" services could only be provided by phone companies via a "fully separate subsidiary" that purchased "basic" services on the same terms as an unaffiliated party. This is the specific rule that was revoked in 2005, effective 2006, causing the Network Neutrality problem. Under Computer II, any ISP could use the Bells' DSL for a tariffed price. That is no longer the case; ISPs have no right to use Bell wire at all.
In 1982, AT&T and the Department of Justice agreed to the Modified Final Judgement, the Divestiture, which broke AT&T into pieces effective 1/1/84. At the time, long distance was seen as competitive but local phone service was not. So the "Baby Bells" were allowed to remain monopolies, providing "access" to LD companies, and local dialtone, at regulated rates.
In 1996, the Telecom Act opened up local competition in all states. It recognized that the Bells had an advantage of incumbency, a network already in place, so it required them to provide components on an "unbundled" basis, priced based on loaded long run incremental cost, to competitors. The FCC enforced this from 1996 to 2001.
In 2001, a Republican FCC majority began to roll back pro-competition rules, finding or imagining loopholes in the Telecom Act. So now it is very hard or impossible for competitive telcos (who serve ISPs, often affiliates) to get access to Bell wire at all. Again, the idea is to allow the Bells to have total control of the content of their wire -- the opposite of neutrality. FCC chairman Kevin Martin is an unabashed Bell (and rural incumbent telco -- they're even worse) lover and does practically anything to please them. But the new Congress is less impressed with him than the old one.
At one point in time, Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc. had three Class A's and a Class B or two. But that was a long time ago, and had a good reason.
BTW the company changed its name to "BBN Corp." around 1995, at which time its commercial ISP operation took the name BBN Planet. That used Net 4, as well as ASN (autonomous system number, used by BGP) 1. In 1997, GTE bought them. In 2000, Bell Atlantic (l/k/a Verizon) took over, but as terms of the deal, BBN Planet became a separate partially-owned subsidiary called Genuity. It did an IPO and burned through billions in a hurry before tanking. Net 4 went with Genuity, and was acquired as a bankruptcy asset, with the rest of Genuity, by Level 3. But only the lower 1/4 of Net 4 -- the rest was already returned.
The other two Class A's were not for BBN's own use. BBN had run the ARPAnet for the feds, having built the first routers ("IMPs") in 1969. They were BBN's for government contract use only, and were returned to the assignment pool in the late 1990s.
Verizon kept BBN Systems & Technology, the non-ISP side, for a couple of years, but it didn't really fit. Eventually it was spun off to investors and BBN Technologies is again a separate company, mostly doing government research, and not an ISP. BBN's internal network uses a Class B (128.33, IIRC).
CFLs don't take a big kick-start of power, but when they are first turned on cold, they don't put out much light. They have to get warm in order to reach rated output. So if it's only going to be used for a short time, the CFL would need to be rated much higher than the equivalent incandescent. It would still save a little juice, but not what it seems.
For instance, I have a bathroom fixture with four "globe" bulbs. The last time one failed, I replaced it with a same-shape CFL. When I turn it on cold, that bulb looks nearly dead. But after it has been on for a while, like the length of a shower, it's the brightest one.
Most CFLs don't work with dimmers at all; dimmable CFLs exist but are rare and tend to have serious limits. They're also bigger than incandescents and don't fit all fixtures. So a high efficiency incandescent would be quite useful.
The situation in Canada, as in most of the civilized world (which excludes the USofA), is that the Internet is unregulated, but ISPs can buy transport from regulated common carriers. Canadian telephone companies are common carriers. That means they must provide service at a defined price to any willing payer. And the CONTENT of the service is ENTIRELY off limits. The telephone company, in other words, is not even allowed to know what ISPs are doing inside their payloads.
Canada also has a rule that cable companies who offer cable modem services must offer them to unaffiliated ISPs as well. This has NEVER been the rule in the United States. The Supreme Court upheld this in 2005 (the Brand X decision) and the FCC totally misquoted them in saying that telephone companies need no longer provide common carriage to ISPs. So in Canada there are usually two choices, vs. zero in the USA.
When there are many ISPs, "neutrality" just happens. ISPs figure out what to carry and what not to, at what price. ISPs determine who's a spammer and who's not. A free market operates. That's why there have been few real violations of neutrality in the US so far -- the FCC revoked common carriage as of August, 2006, and the biggest phone companies are under two-year weak neutrality obligations, as part of merger conditions. Plus IT TAKES TIME to install the deep packet inspection filters that will break neutrality. Verizon and SBC/ATT can work as fast as they know how to (not very) and would still need until, say, the 2008 campaign is under way in earnest before they are technically capable of slanting what you can get over their wires.
Canadian phone companies can muck with their own in-house ISPs (what most DSL subscribers take, to be sure) but if they get bad enough, they have to let other ISPs use their wires. That's why neutrality rules aren't needed. The US should restore common carriage, not regulate every ISP's content.
Verizon does not end up with any shares in the company. The deal is that Verizon's shareholders will get Fairpoint shares. So it's a spinoff more than a sale, with little Fairpoint managing it for the shareholders. And no doubt some clever tax accounting tricks going on. From the press release (read way down, on the Fairpoint web site):
Upon the closing of the transaction, Verizon stockholders will own approximately 60 percent of the new company, and FairPoint stockholders will own approximately 40 percent. In connection with the merger, Verizon stockholders will receive one share of FairPoint stock for approximately every 55 shares of Verizon stock held as of the record date. Both the spin-off and merger are expected to qualify as tax-free transactions, except to the extent that cash is paid to Verizon stockholders in lieu of fractional shares.
Verizon Communications will not own any shares in FairPoint after the merger.
The total value to be received by Verizon and its stockholders in exchange for these operations will be approximately $2.715 billion. Verizon stockholders will receive approximately $1.015 billion of FairPoint common stock in the merger, based upon FairPoint's recent stock price and the terms of the merger agreement. Verizon will receive $1.7 billion in value through a combination of cash distributions to Verizon and debt securities issued to Verizon prior to the spin-off. Verizon may exchange these newly issued debt securities for certain debt that was previously issued by Verizon, which would have the effect of reducing Verizon's then-outstanding debt on its balance sheet.
There's a reason we call it "LookOut!" rather than Outlook. Microsoft's main "innovation" in email was to take the early 1990s' "Good Times" hoax and make it real. Allowing incoming mail to be executed by reading or even previewing it was truly, deeply, incredibly awful.
HTML mail is evil as is. Email as we know it is obsolete -- designed in 1972 for the closed ARPAnet, it is a spam-ridden kludge today -- but the original plain text design remains the safest way to use it. HTML "styled" mail is bad, an unnecessary kludge, but there are occasional reasons to use it, I suppose. Otherwise if a full HTML rendering is needed, better to provide an URL and let the user click on it. But of course Microsoft, using Internet Exploder within its mail readers, went and did the clicking for the reader, allowing easy installation of spyware. Just the mere fact that the message fetched a picture, or an invisible web bug, tells the spammer that the address was valid.
Personally, I usually read email in Eudora, with "use Microsoft viewer" turned OFF and fetching pictures in HTML mail turned OFF. (Sadly, Qualcomm made the defaults the opposite, making it spammer-friendly out of the box, but easy enough to fix.) Kmail is also quite good about using the plain text, and warning about HTML while still allowing it to be read if necessary.
So who loses if HTML rendering is degraded? Hmmm, who was the original post's article written by? Campaignmonitor.com . Who are they? SPAMMERS! They run "email marketing campaigns" for their clients! If they're complaining, then for once Microsoft may, amazingly, be doing the right thing. Campaignmonitor's sample shows the fetched external graphics in Outlook 2000 replaced by a warning box in Outlook 2007. Good! This may almost make Outlook safe to use! Well, I'm sure it has other security problems, but hey...
[setting the wayback machine to the 1990s]...lessee, Microsoft here. What are we going to do next? I see, let's do a web browser. Let's put it into the kernel! Yeah, that'll impress the Department of Justice! And hey, let's move some multimedia stuff into the kernel. And of course the whole graphical subsystem should be in the kernel....
They don't seem to think very highly of userland in their own products, so maybe they see it as useful in Linux?
Canada has stricter common carriage rules, and a stricter divide between ISP and common carrier, than the US.
The article was written by gay activists, not communication lawyers, so the language is imprecise. But it seems to me that the MCI Canada link in question, to the "Internet backbone", is an ISP connection, not a common carrier link. The MCI name was used for both ISP and common carrier services. If it were a common carrier link, it would specify the other end more specifically, like "to Sprint's router in Ottawa" or something. If somebody wants to take down a web site, they go after its upstream ISP, not its telecom provider, so that is what is more likely to have been the case here, trying to read between the lines.
The topic post gets it wrong, because it assumes that Verizon the common carrier has something to do with a decision to block a web site. That's just wrong.
Legally, Verizon Communications Inc. is a corporation that has diverse operations and subsidiaries. Among these subsidiaries are common carriers. Among them are companies that are not common carriers. Both types use the brand name "Verizon".
Verizon Online is an ISP. As such, it is not, and has never been, a common carrier. UUNET, now part of Verizon Business, is also an ISP, and the ISP portion of its operation is not, and has never been, a common carrier. MCI's long distance operations, now part of Verizon Business, are a common carrier, to the extent that they carry telephone calls and leased lines ("special access" is the tariff term), but some parts of it are no longer common carriage.
With regard to the responsibilities and privileges of each (in the US), there are basically three different levels.
-A common carrier bears no responsibility for content, and isn't even supposed to look. Bits is bits. This is what Verizon does when it leases a DS3 between somebody's routers.
-A publisher is responsible for content. In the web world, this is generally the person who puts up the site, not the host.
-An ISP is not a common carrier, but is not a priori responsible for content; in its hosting role, it can be asked to take down objectionable content that they host, once they are made aware of it. An ISP in its transmission role is still an "information" provider, and is permitted to pick and choose what it wants to pass and what it wants to block. It may be asked to block objectionable material, though its not quite clear to me, at least, when it must do so.
So while I am the last person to defend VeriZontal, they did not do anything wrong here, if we're talking about their ISP blocking another. Indeed if an ISP did not block a known spam generator, it would be remiss in its duties. It was probably not the Telephone Company that did the blocking, though the international leased line business is basically deregulated and they probably could choose to deny service to an entity of questionable legality.
Here's the sticky part: This system all worked because of the split between the ISP and the common carrier. There might be a monopoly on local telephone lines, or a very few common carriers to choose from, but any number of ISPs could operate using (leasing) their services. Verizon was forced to keep the two sides separate. So Verizon New York leased its raw DSL common carriage to Verizon Online on the same terms that it offered to Earthlink and many other ISPs.
But (based on Verizon and SBC petitions) the FCC dropped that rule in 2005, effective this past August. So now Verizon New York does not have to offer raw DSL to anyone but Verizon Online. So the other ISPs can be cut off. This is why there is a network neutrality debate. With the old rule (which goes back to 1983 and really made the Internet possible), an ISP who blocked too much would lose customers to other DSL ISPs. Now, there's much less competition. So there are calls to legislate the behavior ("neutrality") of ISPs (such as Verizon Online, but this tends to trickle down to mom'n'pop shops too) themselves. This is not trivial, because it would lead to infinite fights over who is or isn't a spammer, what is or isn't objectonable, etc. The FCC screwed the pooch this time. And the beauty of it is that the fight over Network Neutrality stopped Congress from giving Verizon and SBC ("AT&T Inc.") what they really really wanted, national cable TV franchises.
I was working at DEC when those machines came out, and have seen them up close nad personal.
The 750 came out first. It was a classic LSTTL mini design. Very clean compared to the faster, costlier 780 that preceded it. Decent I/O throughput.
The 730 came out a while later. It was a toy. The CPU was microcoded bit slices. There wasn't much I/O capability. It was a real entry-level type machine, for people who wanted to try VMS without really getting something big. And it was physically a lot smaller than a 750.
The VAX 11/725 was the price-reduced 730, but this was no secret. It was bundled with a reallay stupid disk drive. I don't think they even slowed down the CPU; it was more of a crappy packaging issue.
IBM did hide processors, and license turning them on. This was not a standard process at DEC. There may have been some speed hacks in the VAX 8000 series though; I wasn't too familiar with their innards, and by then, the company was getting weird.
I knew Alan personally; he was quite helpful to my own career. He was also a really Nice Guy, a pleasant person to talk to, and always willing to be helpful in explaining things to people who had trouble understanding it. His hobby was telephones, and he was a lead designer of Digital Equipment Corp's internal telephone network, even though it wasn't his real job. He just liked to do it and had the juice to tell the people in charge what to do. He also could help certain famous VPs handle their phones; it's funny how a guy who was a professor and who designed a successful computer family coudln't transfer a call. Alan told me how he was sometimes called upon to help him do that.
His obituaries note his early work with computer games, but that's like noting that George Washington was an important surveyor. Alan's biggest accomplishment was as lead hardware architect of DEC's 36-bit family. It began as the PDP-6, and went into volume production as the PDP-10, which became the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 families. These were incredible machines, too -- with BBN's TENEX operating system, which DEC adapted into TOPS-20, they were efficient, user-friendly timesharing machines. It's miles away from today's style of computing, but we got a lot done on those machines with our VT-52s!
Later, he worked on some big RISC machines that DEC didn't build, and he also designed one of the later large VAX machines. Nowadays, processor design is mostly done inside chip firms. There aren't many people like Alan, and we'll miss him.
I agree with you about Carly. She was a loser, an empty suit who had no idea what she was doing, but tried to fool Wall Street for a while.
Forbes is hardly a good authority. You can believe them if you believe that Bush is an expert on WMDs and democracy. Indeed the two go hand in hand, Forbes and Bush in surreal RightWingWorld.
But Pat Russo probably should not be tarred with the same brush, nor is it fair do tar female executives in general. Russo was brought in to clean up an awful mess left behind by Lucent's former management. She's more their Mark Hurd than their Carly Fiorina. Of course a more accurate description would be that she's their Mike Capellas, cleaning it up a little to sell the whole thing out to a bigger acquirer (Alcatel). That doesn't impress me.
Well, okay, besides all that missing stuff, it also lacks full POP3 support. Maybe it lacks IMAP3 too.
But hey, it looks pretty, as it sits there doing nothing.
And maybe it's got a swell GroupWise client. Now there's a big market. Not.
Oddly enough, there was more POP3 planned originally, but they took it out of the roadmap, since it was focused on being just an enterprise client, where "Enterprise" was defined as a place daft enough to depend on Outlook and Exchange.
The DTE was laughing in the ISPs' faces. Some people I know personally called them... basically, they said that they told Frank months ago that he was in jeopardy of being cut off, and if Frank didn't tell his customers (ISPs), then that was between Frank and his customers.
Or, in the famous words of Michael Quill, The Public Be Damned.
The DTE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Verizon.
The good news is that this might have been a wake-up call for the public and legislators, who might start looking at the DTE's nutty policies.
For the record, I have been involved with some, uh, related cases, and know Virtual NXX backwards and forwards....
Remember the 1988 "modem tax"? That's exactly what this is about. The Massachusetts DTE has called for that exact charge, technically called originating access, to be applied to ISP-bound calls, if the modem is in a central location (as it always is) and the caller is not physically in the modem's local calling area. So the modem tax doesn't apply to callers who are local to Quincy (GNAPs) or another big modem bank, but would apply to most of the state, where the carrier hotels aren't.
Now the sorded history in a nutshell...
Global NAPs set up shop after the Telecom Act when its owners' ISP wanted to expand its local calling area. The normal way to do this was to buy Foreign Exchange lines, which NYNEX sold for about $20/mile/T1 (23-24 channels). The Telecom Act allowed open entry for competitors, and said that for local calls, the calling LEC (local exchange carrier) would pay the called LEC for its half of the call. This is called reciprocal compensation. Bell Atlantic actually asked the FCC for this; in a 1996 filing, they demanded it, and said that if CLECs (competitive LECs, what GNAPs is) didn't like it, they should look for customers who get more incoming calls, like ISPs. Really. So GNAPs took them at their word.
Now Foreign Exchange lines are normally charged based on the distance between switches, not rate centers (billing points), and CLECs have one switch covering a lot of area, so the mileage is zero. That's what GNAPs, not to mention MFS-Worldcom, MCI, AT&T, Level 3, and various other companies, did. They could thus provide "local" dial-in numbers to ISPs. And they billed the incumbent telcos for reciprocal compenastion.
Well, the incumbents were caught off guard. Not only didn't they like the Internet, but they really didn't expect it to catch on, and were blindsided by all of this dial-up traffic going to competitors. So they asked to change the rules, and get rid of reciprocal compensation on ISP-bound calls. Global NAPs was the lightning rod for this in Massachusetts, where it was the biggest modem-serving CLEC and its leadership, frankly, had a rather "in your face" style. The Republican-appointed state Commission (DTE) ruled against them in 1999, saying "no reciprocal comp for ISP-bound calls". (The "telecom commissioner" of that era has left the DTE, and has been spotted consultling for Verizon. Duh.) The Republican-appointed FCC in 2001 adopted that as a national policy, capping ISP-recip at $.0007/minute (about a quarter of the typical voice rate of about.2-.3c/min).
Then around 2003, the Romney DTE pulled a stunt on GNAPs. CLECs and ILECs interconnect via contracts, which are arbitrated by state Commissions. Verizon decided to put in new wording that FX (and Virtual NXX, what GNAPs is -- it's FX when the LEC doesn't have live customers where the number is putatively billed as) calls are "toll" calls subject to "access" charges. GNAPs objected, but the DTE let that language in. And then said that while federal law allows CLECs to adopt other CLECs' contract terms, GNAPs couldn't, because arbitration is unescapable (a rather strange interpretation of the law). GNAPs said, however, that the FCC's assertion of federal authority over ISP-bound calls -- that's how they got rid of recip on a nationwide basis in 2001, over CLEC objections -- meant that the state couldn't declare them to subject to intrastate toll access charges. Most states have held that way, and I think the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld.
So it was rather odd that the First Circuit ruled for Verizon, though it was on some legal technicalities that GNAPs wasn't really prepared for. That left GNAPs with a theoretical $45M or so back bill for this "modem tax" access charge. They wouldn't pay, so Verizon pulled the plug.
He didn't say it was a microprocessor. Actually, it was a small mainframe, in terms of size, or a high-end "supermini". It simply used asynchronous design concepts, when even the other minicomputers and mainframes of the day were synchronously clocked.
The VAX 8600 was produced by a team at DEC that had a heritage doing large computers (PDP-10, DECSYSTEM-20). It was competing, internally, with a different group with a "midrange" (VAX) heritage, who produced the VAX 8800 and some other machines. There was no love lost between the groups. They had very different design philosophies, and the 8600 crowd was rather amazed that the 8800 actually worked.
Intel has rival groups too, of course. ISTM that the ones who produced the NetBurst machines (Pentium IV) had the upper hand for a while, but the Israelis who put out Pentium M proved the value of the older Pentium III base, and that evolved into the new Intel Core. Both are clocked, of course, but Pentium IV was designed to have the highest advertised clock speed, as if it mattered. It was one hot chip, much too literally. Async processors move even farther away from that, of course.
I set up a Gmail account as a place to receive large attachments, because my regular mail forwarding service doesn't like them, and neither do my normal mail hosts. I use Eudora, which handles POP better than anything else. And -- this is critical -- I have two computers, "home" and "office", fetching the mail. On my other accounts, I use Eudora's "leave mail on server, delete after x days" feature, which gives both computers time to fetch all of the mail, so the inboxes are normally in sync.
Well, I needed to get this big pile of attachments forwarded to me, so I gave someone my Gmail account. I fetched them at home. Okay, all there. Then I went to the office and fetched them again. No new mail. Huh? I went in to Gmail and there they were, "read". But Eudora uses UIDL to keep track of the messages that it has read on each machine. That feature works perfectly on a FreeBSD server, where it also knows which messages have already been fetched elsewhere and which haven't. (Kmail, btw, is better than Eudora in that one regard -- it has different colors for "unread anywhere" and "unread on this machine". Eudora has a hidden option to use one or the other as the meaning of its "unread" tag.) On Comcast's big Sun server (inherited from ATTBI), it works badly -- it sync's the mail on both machines, but it's always seen as "unread", even if previously fetched.
But on Gmail, once it has been read by any POP, it's no longer visible to any other POP. It's like they don't even know what UIDL is. It's the kind of behavior I saw a decade ago on VAX/VMS using UCX, DEC's execrable old TCP/IP stack, to fetch messages that it stored in VAXmail. That was a shell-based DECnet-based text mail systesm where reading or fetching the mail moved it from the NEWMAIL folder to the MAIL folder. But on VMS, at least, you could log in and manually move messages back to NEWMAIL, where UXC POP would see them. On Gmail, marking the message "unread" changes the web-based display, but doesn't let POP get it again.
I ended up having to download each attachment, one by one, from all of the Gmail messages. About 20 separate download operations, done one at a time, typing in file names (because removed from the context of the original mail message, they needed new names that wouldn't get lost). What rot.
So be warned; if someone uses Gmail for a regular mail server, it will only work if there is only ONE client that POPs the account. Pathetic.
I believe it has to do with corrosion effects when aluminum touches iron. I saw a memo from Verizon a few years ago when some CLECs tried to sneak aluminum racks into some COs. What a hissy fit! It wasn't about fire, but one of those electrochemical reactions.
Actually, that's the norm across the phone industry. Everything, and I mean everything, runs on -48V DC. Okay, not the fluorescent lights....
This goes back to the telephone talk battery, which is -48 V DC. That powered the phones via old cord switchboards, and was the voltage of electromechanical (stepper, and later crossbar) switches, which basically used relays. Electronic gear was then designed to run on the same power plant. A telephone building has a big bank of batteries, powered by multiple "rectifiers" (DC supplies) which, btw, are normally engineered to not run over 40% of load. (That way they can still run the systems and recharge the batteries when one of them is kaput.)
If you then put anything else into one of their buildings, the Network Equipment Building Standards (NEBS), which are Telcordia documents that practically carry the force of law, dictate that equipment be DC powered. Among other things -- NEBS gear has to meet the brick schytthaus test. (Sun Netras and many Cisco routers meet NEBS. Your basic rack server doesn't. And aluminum racks are STRICTLY forbidden; it has to be steel.)
So because of the talk voltage on analog phones, lots of computing equipment is engineered for -48 V DC power. Sort of like the legend (I know, that one is not really true) about the railroad track gauge being based on Roman chariots. But in this case it's surprisingly effective.
I suspect that Intel's legal status is indeed that of "monopoly". That word has more than one meaning. They are not a literal absolute monopoly, because AMD exists. But they have enough of a market share that they have what is known as monopoly power. And a company with monopoly power is subject to antitrust limits on their behavior.
In Europe, the standard legal term is clearer: "Significant Market Power" (SMP). If a company has SMP, it has to behave a certain way. SMP is typically found somewhere between a 25% and 50% market share. Intel is way above 50%.
Somebody please up-mod hazah's answer (which this is a reply to), because he knows what he's talking about, said it clearly, and explained it (with the original Hebrew words, both the word for "murder" as in the original Torah and the different word that means "kill").
Of course this being Slashdot, those might not matter too much....
The point is that the front page of Slashdot had an egregious error in the summary. It named the wrong place. It's like saying that Hurricane Katrina destroyed Dallas. What's the point? It's still a city, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Toshiba laptop with the i945 chipset. It uses Windows XP with no problems. Its sound subsystem is seriously distorted with most version of Linux, including the very recent MEPIS 6.5 and Mandrive One 2007.1. Both of those run fine on an AMD desktop with nVidia 6150 chipset.
Oddly, when trying the live CD of MEPIS, and exiting X windows, it got a BSOD! It was apparently in module "vt.c". But this doesn't happen on the nVidia chipset, just the Intel. This makes me suspicous of the i945 graphics drivers. It's a pretty crappy chipest.
No, it won't impact the election.
Menino has been in office roughly forever, in large part because nobody else really wants the job. That is, nobody who's not far more inflammatory to some major part of the populace. "Mumbles" Menino is everyman's mayor, the none-too-bright neighbor who you know means well, and won't do anything really outrageous, while things basically take care of themselves.
The muni wi-fi network probably has very few users anyway. It's rather new and I don't think it covers the whole city. Cable modems are well established and there's some DSL already. Boing Boing's audience probably isn't the muni's. When I'm in Boston neighborhoods looking for WiFi, I've never seen it, though I've never had trouble finding an open Netgear or Linksys.
You young'uns don't remember exactly how it happened, so let me clarify the history, and how things have gone astray recently.
It 1968, the FCC's Carterfone decision allowed non-Bell equipment to be attached to their phone lines. This led to the adoption of things like answering machines, cordless phones, and modems, all of which were banned by Ma Bell before then (so they could rent 300 bps modems for $25/month to those who really needed them).
In 1969, the FCC's MCI Decision allowed leased lines to be provided by competitive carriers. This made long-haul backbone lines cheaper. Dial-up long distance was supposed to remain a monopoly. But around 1975, MCI figured out a trick, started its Execunet service, and while the FCC opposed it once it figured out what was going on, by 1978 a court held that it was okay. That led to the rules for LD carriers that are still in effect, wherein they pay local phone companies "access" minute of use rates at both ends of a call.
In 1980, the FCC's Computer II Decision held that terminal equipment (what Carterfone permitted to become competitive) should no longer be tariffed at all, so it would become fully competitive and deregulated in 1983. It also held that "enhanced" services could only be provided by phone companies via a "fully separate subsidiary" that purchased "basic" services on the same terms as an unaffiliated party. This is the specific rule that was revoked in 2005, effective 2006, causing the Network Neutrality problem. Under Computer II, any ISP could use the Bells' DSL for a tariffed price. That is no longer the case; ISPs have no right to use Bell wire at all.
In 1982, AT&T and the Department of Justice agreed to the Modified Final Judgement, the Divestiture, which broke AT&T into pieces effective 1/1/84. At the time, long distance was seen as competitive but local phone service was not. So the "Baby Bells" were allowed to remain monopolies, providing "access" to LD companies, and local dialtone, at regulated rates.
In 1996, the Telecom Act opened up local competition in all states. It recognized that the Bells had an advantage of incumbency, a network already in place, so it required them to provide components on an "unbundled" basis, priced based on loaded long run incremental cost, to competitors. The FCC enforced this from 1996 to 2001.
In 2001, a Republican FCC majority began to roll back pro-competition rules, finding or imagining loopholes in the Telecom Act. So now it is very hard or impossible for competitive telcos (who serve ISPs, often affiliates) to get access to Bell wire at all. Again, the idea is to allow the Bells to have total control of the content of their wire -- the opposite of neutrality. FCC chairman Kevin Martin is an unabashed Bell (and rural incumbent telco -- they're even worse) lover and does practically anything to please them. But the new Congress is less impressed with him than the old one.
At one point in time, Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc. had three Class A's and a Class B or two. But that was a long time ago, and had a good reason.
BTW the company changed its name to "BBN Corp." around 1995, at which time its commercial ISP operation took the name BBN Planet. That used Net 4, as well as ASN (autonomous system number, used by BGP) 1. In 1997, GTE bought them. In 2000, Bell Atlantic (l/k/a Verizon) took over, but as terms of the deal, BBN Planet became a separate partially-owned subsidiary called Genuity. It did an IPO and burned through billions in a hurry before tanking. Net 4 went with Genuity, and was acquired as a bankruptcy asset, with the rest of Genuity, by Level 3. But only the lower 1/4 of Net 4 -- the rest was already returned.
The other two Class A's were not for BBN's own use. BBN had run the ARPAnet for the feds, having built the first routers ("IMPs") in 1969. They were BBN's for government contract use only, and were returned to the assignment pool in the late 1990s.
Verizon kept BBN Systems & Technology, the non-ISP side, for a couple of years, but it didn't really fit. Eventually it was spun off to investors and BBN Technologies is again a separate company, mostly doing government research, and not an ISP. BBN's internal network uses a Class B (128.33, IIRC).
CFLs don't take a big kick-start of power, but when they are first turned on cold, they don't put out much light. They have to get warm in order to reach rated output. So if it's only going to be used for a short time, the CFL would need to be rated much higher than the equivalent incandescent. It would still save a little juice, but not what it seems.
For instance, I have a bathroom fixture with four "globe" bulbs. The last time one failed, I replaced it with a same-shape CFL. When I turn it on cold, that bulb looks nearly dead. But after it has been on for a while, like the length of a shower, it's the brightest one.
Most CFLs don't work with dimmers at all; dimmable CFLs exist but are rare and tend to have serious limits. They're also bigger than incandescents and don't fit all fixtures. So a high efficiency incandescent would be quite useful.
The situation in Canada, as in most of the civilized world (which excludes the USofA), is that the Internet is unregulated, but ISPs can buy transport from regulated common carriers. Canadian telephone companies are common carriers. That means they must provide service at a defined price to any willing payer. And the CONTENT of the service is ENTIRELY off limits. The telephone company, in other words, is not even allowed to know what ISPs are doing inside their payloads.
Canada also has a rule that cable companies who offer cable modem services must offer them to unaffiliated ISPs as well. This has NEVER been the rule in the United States. The Supreme Court upheld this in 2005 (the Brand X decision) and the FCC totally misquoted them in saying that telephone companies need no longer provide common carriage to ISPs. So in Canada there are usually two choices, vs. zero in the USA.
When there are many ISPs, "neutrality" just happens. ISPs figure out what to carry and what not to, at what price. ISPs determine who's a spammer and who's not. A free market operates. That's why there have been few real violations of neutrality in the US so far -- the FCC revoked common carriage as of August, 2006, and the biggest phone companies are under two-year weak neutrality obligations, as part of merger conditions. Plus IT TAKES TIME to install the deep packet inspection filters that will break neutrality. Verizon and SBC/ATT can work as fast as they know how to (not very) and would still need until, say, the 2008 campaign is under way in earnest before they are technically capable of slanting what you can get over their wires.
Canadian phone companies can muck with their own in-house ISPs (what most DSL subscribers take, to be sure) but if they get bad enough, they have to let other ISPs use their wires. That's why neutrality rules aren't needed. The US should restore common carriage, not regulate every ISP's content.
Boston.com does not belong to the Herald, but to its bigger arch-rival, the Boston Globe. Actually they're part of the New York Times Company.
There's a reason we call it "LookOut!" rather than Outlook. Microsoft's main "innovation" in email was to take the early 1990s' "Good Times" hoax and make it real. Allowing incoming mail to be executed by reading or even previewing it was truly, deeply, incredibly awful.
HTML mail is evil as is. Email as we know it is obsolete -- designed in 1972 for the closed ARPAnet, it is a spam-ridden kludge today -- but the original plain text design remains the safest way to use it. HTML "styled" mail is bad, an unnecessary kludge, but there are occasional reasons to use it, I suppose. Otherwise if a full HTML rendering is needed, better to provide an URL and let the user click on it. But of course Microsoft, using Internet Exploder within its mail readers, went and did the clicking for the reader, allowing easy installation of spyware. Just the mere fact that the message fetched a picture, or an invisible web bug, tells the spammer that the address was valid.
Personally, I usually read email in Eudora, with "use Microsoft viewer" turned OFF and fetching pictures in HTML mail turned OFF. (Sadly, Qualcomm made the defaults the opposite, making it spammer-friendly out of the box, but easy enough to fix.) Kmail is also quite good about using the plain text, and warning about HTML while still allowing it to be read if necessary.
So who loses if HTML rendering is degraded? Hmmm, who was the original post's article written by? Campaignmonitor.com . Who are they? SPAMMERS! They run "email marketing campaigns" for their clients! If they're complaining, then for once Microsoft may, amazingly, be doing the right thing. Campaignmonitor's sample shows the fetched external graphics in Outlook 2000 replaced by a warning box in Outlook 2007. Good! This may almost make Outlook safe to use! Well, I'm sure it has other security problems, but hey...
Userland? What a concept...
...lessee, Microsoft here. What are we going to do next? I see, let's do a web browser. Let's put it into the kernel! Yeah, that'll impress the Department of Justice! And hey, let's move some multimedia stuff into the kernel. And of course the whole graphical subsystem should be in the kernel....
[setting the wayback machine to the 1990s]
They don't seem to think very highly of userland in their own products, so maybe they see it as useful in Linux?
Canada has stricter common carriage rules, and a stricter divide between ISP and common carrier, than the US.
The article was written by gay activists, not communication lawyers, so the language is imprecise. But it seems to me that the MCI Canada link in question, to the "Internet backbone", is an ISP connection, not a common carrier link. The MCI name was used for both ISP and common carrier services. If it were a common carrier link, it would specify the other end more specifically, like "to Sprint's router in Ottawa" or something. If somebody wants to take down a web site, they go after its upstream ISP, not its telecom provider, so that is what is more likely to have been the case here, trying to read between the lines.
Legally, Verizon Communications Inc. is a corporation that has diverse operations and subsidiaries. Among these subsidiaries are common carriers. Among them are companies that are not common carriers. Both types use the brand name "Verizon".
Verizon Online is an ISP. As such, it is not, and has never been, a common carrier. UUNET, now part of Verizon Business, is also an ISP, and the ISP portion of its operation is not, and has never been, a common carrier. MCI's long distance operations, now part of Verizon Business, are a common carrier, to the extent that they carry telephone calls and leased lines ("special access" is the tariff term), but some parts of it are no longer common carriage.
With regard to the responsibilities and privileges of each (in the US), there are basically three different levels.
-A common carrier bears no responsibility for content, and isn't even supposed to look. Bits is bits. This is what Verizon does when it leases a DS3 between somebody's routers.
-A publisher is responsible for content. In the web world, this is generally the person who puts up the site, not the host.
-An ISP is not a common carrier, but is not a priori responsible for content; in its hosting role, it can be asked to take down objectionable content that they host, once they are made aware of it. An ISP in its transmission role is still an "information" provider, and is permitted to pick and choose what it wants to pass and what it wants to block. It may be asked to block objectionable material, though its not quite clear to me, at least, when it must do so.
So while I am the last person to defend VeriZontal, they did not do anything wrong here, if we're talking about their ISP blocking another. Indeed if an ISP did not block a known spam generator, it would be remiss in its duties. It was probably not the Telephone Company that did the blocking, though the international leased line business is basically deregulated and they probably could choose to deny service to an entity of questionable legality.
Here's the sticky part: This system all worked because of the split between the ISP and the common carrier. There might be a monopoly on local telephone lines, or a very few common carriers to choose from, but any number of ISPs could operate using (leasing) their services. Verizon was forced to keep the two sides separate. So Verizon New York leased its raw DSL common carriage to Verizon Online on the same terms that it offered to Earthlink and many other ISPs.
But (based on Verizon and SBC petitions) the FCC dropped that rule in 2005, effective this past August. So now Verizon New York does not have to offer raw DSL to anyone but Verizon Online. So the other ISPs can be cut off. This is why there is a network neutrality debate. With the old rule (which goes back to 1983 and really made the Internet possible), an ISP who blocked too much would lose customers to other DSL ISPs. Now, there's much less competition. So there are calls to legislate the behavior ("neutrality") of ISPs (such as Verizon Online, but this tends to trickle down to mom'n'pop shops too) themselves. This is not trivial, because it would lead to infinite fights over who is or isn't a spammer, what is or isn't objectonable, etc. The FCC screwed the pooch this time. And the beauty of it is that the fight over Network Neutrality stopped Congress from giving Verizon and SBC ("AT&T Inc.") what they really really wanted, national cable TV franchises.
Where the hell do you get your information?
I was working at DEC when those machines came out, and have seen them up close nad personal.
The 750 came out first. It was a classic LSTTL mini design. Very clean compared to the faster, costlier 780 that preceded it. Decent I/O throughput.
The 730 came out a while later. It was a toy. The CPU was microcoded bit slices. There wasn't much I/O capability. It was a real entry-level type machine, for people who wanted to try VMS without really getting something big. And it was physically a lot smaller than a 750.
The VAX 11/725 was the price-reduced 730, but this was no secret. It was bundled with a reallay stupid disk drive. I don't think they even slowed down the CPU; it was more of a crappy packaging issue.
IBM did hide processors, and license turning them on. This was not a standard process at DEC. There may have been some speed hacks in the VAX 8000 series though; I wasn't too familiar with their innards, and by then, the company was getting weird.
I knew Alan personally; he was quite helpful to my own career. He was also a really Nice Guy, a pleasant person to talk to, and always willing to be helpful in explaining things to people who had trouble understanding it. His hobby was telephones, and he was a lead designer of Digital Equipment Corp's internal telephone network, even though it wasn't his real job. He just liked to do it and had the juice to tell the people in charge what to do. He also could help certain famous VPs handle their phones; it's funny how a guy who was a professor and who designed a successful computer family coudln't transfer a call. Alan told me how he was sometimes called upon to help him do that.
His obituaries note his early work with computer games, but that's like noting that George Washington was an important surveyor. Alan's biggest accomplishment was as lead hardware architect of DEC's 36-bit family. It began as the PDP-6, and went into volume production as the PDP-10, which became the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 families. These were incredible machines, too -- with BBN's TENEX operating system, which DEC adapted into TOPS-20, they were efficient, user-friendly timesharing machines. It's miles away from today's style of computing, but we got a lot done on those machines with our VT-52s!
Later, he worked on some big RISC machines that DEC didn't build, and he also designed one of the later large VAX machines. Nowadays, processor design is mostly done inside chip firms. There aren't many people like Alan, and we'll miss him.
I agree with you about Carly. She was a loser, an empty suit who had no idea what she was doing, but tried to fool Wall Street for a while.
Forbes is hardly a good authority. You can believe them if you believe that Bush is an expert on WMDs and democracy. Indeed the two go hand in hand, Forbes and Bush in surreal RightWingWorld.
But Pat Russo probably should not be tarred with the same brush, nor is it fair do tar female executives in general. Russo was brought in to clean up an awful mess left behind by Lucent's former management. She's more their Mark Hurd than their Carly Fiorina. Of course a more accurate description would be that she's their Mike Capellas, cleaning it up a little to sell the whole thing out to a bigger acquirer (Alcatel). That doesn't impress me.
Well, okay, besides all that missing stuff, it also lacks full POP3 support. Maybe it lacks IMAP3 too.
But hey, it looks pretty, as it sits there doing nothing.
And maybe it's got a swell GroupWise client. Now there's a big market. Not.
Oddly enough, there was more POP3 planned originally, but they took it out of the roadmap, since it was focused on being just an enterprise client, where "Enterprise" was defined as a place daft enough to depend on Outlook and Exchange.
The DTE was laughing in the ISPs' faces. Some people I know personally called them... basically, they said that they told Frank months ago that he was in jeopardy of being cut off, and if Frank didn't tell his customers (ISPs), then that was between Frank and his customers.
Or, in the famous words of Michael Quill, The Public Be Damned.
The DTE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Verizon.
The good news is that this might have been a wake-up call for the public and legislators, who might start looking at the DTE's nutty policies.
For the record, I have been involved with some, uh, related cases, and know Virtual NXX backwards and forwards....
.2-.3c/min).
Remember the 1988 "modem tax"? That's exactly what this is about. The Massachusetts DTE has called for that exact charge, technically called originating access, to be applied to ISP-bound calls, if the modem is in a central location (as it always is) and the caller is not physically in the modem's local calling area. So the modem tax doesn't apply to callers who are local to Quincy (GNAPs) or another big modem bank, but would apply to most of the state, where the carrier hotels aren't.
Now the sorded history in a nutshell...
Global NAPs set up shop after the Telecom Act when its owners' ISP wanted to expand its local calling area. The normal way to do this was to buy Foreign Exchange lines, which NYNEX sold for about $20/mile/T1 (23-24 channels). The Telecom Act allowed open entry for competitors, and said that for local calls, the calling LEC (local exchange carrier) would pay the called LEC for its half of the call. This is called reciprocal compensation. Bell Atlantic actually asked the FCC for this; in a 1996 filing, they demanded it, and said that if CLECs (competitive LECs, what GNAPs is) didn't like it, they should look for customers who get more incoming calls, like ISPs. Really. So GNAPs took them at their word.
Now Foreign Exchange lines are normally charged based on the distance between switches, not rate centers (billing points), and CLECs have one switch covering a lot of area, so the mileage is zero. That's what GNAPs, not to mention MFS-Worldcom, MCI, AT&T, Level 3, and various other companies, did. They could thus provide "local" dial-in numbers to ISPs. And they billed the incumbent telcos for reciprocal compenastion.
Well, the incumbents were caught off guard. Not only didn't they like the Internet, but they really didn't expect it to catch on, and were blindsided by all of this dial-up traffic going to competitors. So they asked to change the rules, and get rid of reciprocal compensation on ISP-bound calls. Global NAPs was the lightning rod for this in Massachusetts, where it was the biggest modem-serving CLEC and its leadership, frankly, had a rather "in your face" style. The Republican-appointed state Commission (DTE) ruled against them in 1999, saying "no reciprocal comp for ISP-bound calls". (The "telecom commissioner" of that era has left the DTE, and has been spotted consultling for Verizon. Duh.) The Republican-appointed FCC in 2001 adopted that as a national policy, capping ISP-recip at $.0007/minute (about a quarter of the typical voice rate of about
Then around 2003, the Romney DTE pulled a stunt on GNAPs. CLECs and ILECs interconnect via contracts, which are arbitrated by state Commissions. Verizon decided to put in new wording that FX (and Virtual NXX, what GNAPs is -- it's FX when the LEC doesn't have live customers where the number is putatively billed as) calls are "toll" calls subject to "access" charges. GNAPs objected, but the DTE let that language in. And then said that while federal law allows CLECs to adopt other CLECs' contract terms, GNAPs couldn't, because arbitration is unescapable (a rather strange interpretation of the law). GNAPs said, however, that the FCC's assertion of federal authority over ISP-bound calls -- that's how they got rid of recip on a nationwide basis in 2001, over CLEC objections -- meant that the state couldn't declare them to subject to intrastate toll access charges. Most states have held that way, and I think the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld.
So it was rather odd that the First Circuit ruled for Verizon, though it was on some legal technicalities that GNAPs wasn't really prepared for. That left GNAPs with a theoretical $45M or so back bill for this "modem tax" access charge. They wouldn't pay, so Verizon pulled the plug.
Level 3 and some other CLECs still have different
He didn't say it was a microprocessor. Actually, it was a small mainframe, in terms of size, or a high-end "supermini". It simply used asynchronous design concepts, when even the other minicomputers and mainframes of the day were synchronously clocked.
The VAX 8600 was produced by a team at DEC that had a heritage doing large computers (PDP-10, DECSYSTEM-20). It was competing, internally, with a different group with a "midrange" (VAX) heritage, who produced the VAX 8800 and some other machines. There was no love lost between the groups. They had very different design philosophies, and the 8600 crowd was rather amazed that the 8800 actually worked.
Intel has rival groups too, of course. ISTM that the ones who produced the NetBurst machines (Pentium IV) had the upper hand for a while, but the Israelis who put out Pentium M proved the value of the older Pentium III base, and that evolved into the new Intel Core. Both are clocked, of course, but Pentium IV was designed to have the highest advertised clock speed, as if it mattered. It was one hot chip, much too literally. Async processors move even farther away from that, of course.
I set up a Gmail account as a place to receive large attachments, because my regular mail forwarding service doesn't like them, and neither do my normal mail hosts. I use Eudora, which handles POP better than anything else. And -- this is critical -- I have two computers, "home" and "office", fetching the mail. On my other accounts, I use Eudora's "leave mail on server, delete after x days" feature, which gives both computers time to fetch all of the mail, so the inboxes are normally in sync.
Well, I needed to get this big pile of attachments forwarded to me, so I gave someone my Gmail account. I fetched them at home. Okay, all there. Then I went to the office and fetched them again. No new mail. Huh? I went in to Gmail and there they were, "read". But Eudora uses UIDL to keep track of the messages that it has read on each machine. That feature works perfectly on a FreeBSD server, where it also knows which messages have already been fetched elsewhere and which haven't. (Kmail, btw, is better than Eudora in that one regard -- it has different colors for "unread anywhere" and "unread on this machine". Eudora has a hidden option to use one or the other as the meaning of its "unread" tag.) On Comcast's big Sun server (inherited from ATTBI), it works badly -- it sync's the mail on both machines, but it's always seen as "unread", even if previously fetched.
But on Gmail, once it has been read by any POP, it's no longer visible to any other POP. It's like they don't even know what UIDL is. It's the kind of behavior I saw a decade ago on VAX/VMS using UCX, DEC's execrable old TCP/IP stack, to fetch messages that it stored in VAXmail. That was a shell-based DECnet-based text mail systesm where reading or fetching the mail moved it from the NEWMAIL folder to the MAIL folder. But on VMS, at least, you could log in and manually move messages back to NEWMAIL, where UXC POP would see them. On Gmail, marking the message "unread" changes the web-based display, but doesn't let POP get it again.
I ended up having to download each attachment, one by one, from all of the Gmail messages. About 20 separate download operations, done one at a time, typing in file names (because removed from the context of the original mail message, they needed new names that wouldn't get lost). What rot.
So be warned; if someone uses Gmail for a regular mail server, it will only work if there is only ONE client that POPs the account. Pathetic.
I believe it has to do with corrosion effects when aluminum touches iron. I saw a memo from Verizon a few years ago when some CLECs tried to sneak aluminum racks into some COs. What a hissy fit! It wasn't about fire, but one of those electrochemical reactions.
Actually, that's the norm across the phone industry. Everything, and I mean everything, runs on -48V DC. Okay, not the fluorescent lights....
This goes back to the telephone talk battery, which is -48 V DC. That powered the phones via old cord switchboards, and was the voltage of electromechanical (stepper, and later crossbar) switches, which basically used relays. Electronic gear was then designed to run on the same power plant. A telephone building has a big bank of batteries, powered by multiple "rectifiers" (DC supplies) which, btw, are normally engineered to not run over 40% of load. (That way they can still run the systems and recharge the batteries when one of them is kaput.)
If you then put anything else into one of their buildings, the Network Equipment Building Standards (NEBS), which are Telcordia documents that practically carry the force of law, dictate that equipment be DC powered. Among other things -- NEBS gear has to meet the brick schytthaus test. (Sun Netras and many Cisco routers meet NEBS. Your basic rack server doesn't. And aluminum racks are STRICTLY forbidden; it has to be steel.)
So because of the talk voltage on analog phones, lots of computing equipment is engineered for -48 V DC power. Sort of like the legend (I know, that one is not really true) about the railroad track gauge being based on Roman chariots. But in this case it's surprisingly effective.
I suspect that Intel's legal status is indeed that of "monopoly". That word has more than one meaning. They are not a literal absolute monopoly, because AMD exists. But they have enough of a market share that they have what is known as monopoly power. And a company with monopoly power is subject to antitrust limits on their behavior.
In Europe, the standard legal term is clearer: "Significant Market Power" (SMP). If a company has SMP, it has to behave a certain way. SMP is typically found somewhere between a 25% and 50% market share. Intel is way above 50%.
Somebody please up-mod hazah's answer (which this is a reply to), because he knows what he's talking about, said it clearly, and explained it (with the original Hebrew words, both the word for "murder" as in the original Torah and the different word that means "kill").
Of course this being Slashdot, those might not matter too much....
The point is that the front page of Slashdot had an egregious error in the summary. It named the wrong place. It's like saying that Hurricane Katrina destroyed Dallas. What's the point? It's still a city, after all.
Slashdot is just very sloppy these days.