Yes... if you need as close to 100% redundancy as possible, the only answer is complete physical resiliency.
Start thinking about the OSI model and it's relevance to this. Yes, you were taught about it for a reason. You can create resiliency at a higher level (e.g. IP) but if you're relying on a single physical or datalink structure the network will always be prone to failure from physical or datalink issues.
I work for an ISP. We would never give an SLA over 99% (e.g. 99.999) unless physical redundancy was included.
The only problem is, it's so expensive it's hard to convince anyone the extra 0.999% is worth it... until they experience what happens when you ignore it.
> I'm in a Computer Science degree program, and I
> keep wondering what "improvements" over the last
> quarter century have actually brought progress to
> the key issue: more quickly and more
> inexpensively developing software that's more
> reliable?"
Sounds to me like someone got an assigment entitled "Discuss improvements to Software Engineering in the last 25 years" handed out at the end of their last lecture.
> I don't see huge amounts of money being given to > individuals who royally fuck their finances and > claim "accounding errors" for huge debts. That's > fraud, my friend. If WorldCom were a person, > they'd be doing time.
You have no idea who the bonuses are being paid to and whether they had anything to do with the past Fraud so don't assume because a company was previusly run by crooks the people left are the same.
The board members responsible are already currently enjoying the hospitality of the FBI... probably with a view to getting some juicy info on Bernie Ebbers himself.
> They should be disbanded with all speed. And if > not, then businesses are liable for less than a > human.
Please... there are 60,000 people left working for WorldCom. All normal people with families, homes and lives they don't want turned upside down. Do you really want to see all those lives ruined because some greedy &*%£ higher up decided to commit fraud and run a company into the ground for their own benefit.
The bankruptcy protection process is designed to weed out the unprofitable parts of a business, re-organise the employees to support the profitable bits thereby protecting the jobs of those who stay and maximizing the return for the previous creditor, which you hope is the best result for all.
> Therefore, if a human is more responsible > for their acts, then a human should therefore > be also offered more protection under the law > against such entities with such limited > liability and unlimited lifespan. My $.02.
Now... this I do agree with. Compare some European countries where governments will pay healthy redundancy money or have very strict workers councils that mean you can only make employees redundant when absolutely necessary.. against the situation in the US where you can be made redundant on some execs whim at a moments notice. That's not good for the poor US employees.
That said, Europe doesn't have a bankruptcy protection process for companies like the US. If you ruin your company in Europe, the bits get sold to the highest bidder and everyone loses their job. Look at poor KPNQwest.
I have to say, in the nicest possible way... you are completely wrong.
The only content based filtering of spam achieved at an ISP are from senders connected to their own network... or via services run by others (e.g. brightmail) and this has to be clearly identified as being used to the consumer in their T's & C's.
ISP's have been having a long legal battle in the US and the EU to obtain common carrier status purely because ISP's are open to this sort of legality right now.
The counter-argument is that global telcos need to be able to respond to local state/country law whatever their global service.
The counter-argument to that is whether telecoms companies can continue to provide service at anything like an affordable price if they have to be responsible for content.
Consider... most people bitch right now about the cost of their service when most ISP's do no pro-active sniffing, censorship or content removal at all. Imagine ISP's now had to sniff and determine content of every packet passing the network. Rather costly.
I've been working as a network engineer in an ISP for 7 years now and I know we don't go anywhere near censorship unless explicitly told to by a court. We just don't want to be setting that kind of pro-active, censoring precedent.
> Well maybe he isn't but I am. When you are the > strongest and most powerful nation on the > planet, you can dictate any policy you want.
"dictate"... so America should be the worlds "Dictator" for our benefit... I like it. Very liberal of you. Thank you for looking after us and listening to our own countries beliefs and ideals (I live in the UK).
> Personally, I'm sick and tired of these little > puke nations telling us what we can and can not > do.
What an idiot.... the US spends all it's time talking about a global economy & politics and it's "responsibility on the world stage" but makes the assumption that the global economy & politics will be made up of western (read US) ideals and that the US is the only one to have a say.
Then when the realisation that through sheer weight of population numbers, land mass & available resources other nations outside of the US are capable of the same achievements (sometimes a lot more effeciently) they get all insular and over-protective (ref: Agricultural, Steel & manufacturing subsidies) to f&ck up those developing nations.
Who says a global community will reflect only US ideals? It's foolish and ultimately dangerous to think like that. Be a bit more open minded about congratulating other countries on their achievements.
> In the history of our planet, how many super > powers were there that didn't seek to expand > their empire. They should be thankful we're > content with what we already have.
What you already have is a highly unbalanced, global, political make up where one nations population is using up far more resources than it has at it's disposal and one nations beliefs over represented to the rest of the world. This is at the cost of the rest of the world and every move the US makes is designed to protect that situation.
You may be content with what you already have but the rest of the world isn't, cos you're f&cking us over to keep it.
They've already done this. Anyone else remember the hoo-ha early last year when the passport T&C's quoted that M$ had rights to any data passed across passport based services (Register Article)
They got a lot of stick then, but with the EULA creep we're getting now (think about the win2k SP3 EULA) it can't be too long before it's tried again.
Yes... but good websites back up their funky flash features via normal text links, which is a trivial process. Even though I have flash installed, I still use text links if they're there because they're faster to navigate and easier to understand.
If it's about getting the most users able to use your site and therefore getting more business, why not consider everyone not just the IE majority.
By continuing to focus on only one platform you continue to force yourself down the MS path. If you're OK with that as a designer, fine... but don't expect that decision to not come back and bite you in future. History of MS has taught us this.
1) If an ISP connected to Ebone you would hope that had an alternative connection to another backbone provider otherwise they were a naff ISP and deserve everything they get. Same goes if you were a customer and running your essential business services over one provider... tut tut.
2) There is massive overcapacity in most telcos networks as they all bought into the hype 2 years ago and have too much fibre. If it's built into the networks and routed... no problems.
3) Who cares whether your traffic from UK to Germany or whatever goes the the states first and is 18 hops instead of 6... how quick is it?... is it lagging?... or is it actually still a useable network.
Worse failures on the net have happened before... that said, I suspect the time when they actually turn it off will be a bit shaky. Expect things to calm down over the next day or so. Nice of them to do it friday so everything should be fine monday for all those business users.
This map is not a real reflection of what would happen should KPNQwest cease functioning.
I think what the KPN noc guys are doing is great and it says a lot about their service... but being more ruthless and thinking about it in terms of business, there is a huge glut of fibre at the moment (as all telcos bought into the extravagent growth predictions being touted at the time of the internet boom) therefore bandwidth is cheap and most ISP's & telcos are selling their services around cost or even at a loss at the moment just trying to compete with each other (i.e. price war). This means current business models aren't sustainable and we're seeing lots of telcos & ISP's go bust, including KPNQwest & remember...
... when they do, the fibre is still in the ground waiting to be used by someone else. KPNQwest going bust doesn't mean their network disappears forever. It only disappears for as long as it takes the customer's to shift to alternate providers and the alternate providers to increase bandwidth to cope (if they even have to), including buying up portions of KPNQwest's network.
Serious customers would already have alternate providers... people running their business off their internet connection who don't have an alternate provider... well, that's just plain dumb.
Sure networks go down for no reason. You get bugs in router code, power outages, machinery digging up bits of ground they shouldn't, trains / trucks / whatever crashing into things.
A big network will suffer outages on a pretty regular basis, hopefully your provider is running it's network properly and has the capacity to cope.
Slashdot Mirror
As per the comment only a few entries above the directive states it's unsolicted email "for the purposes of direct marketing" that is affected.
Pipsqueak
Yes... if you need as close to 100% redundancy as possible, the only answer is complete physical resiliency.
Start thinking about the OSI model and it's relevance to this. Yes, you were taught about it for a reason. You can create resiliency at a higher level (e.g. IP) but if you're relying on a single physical or datalink structure the network will always be prone to failure from physical or datalink issues.
I work for an ISP. We would never give an SLA over 99% (e.g. 99.999) unless physical redundancy was included.
The only problem is, it's so expensive it's hard to convince anyone the extra 0.999% is worth it... until they experience what happens when you ignore it.
> I'm in a Computer Science degree program, and I > keep wondering what "improvements" over the last > quarter century have actually brought progress to > the key issue: more quickly and more > inexpensively developing software that's more > reliable?" Sounds to me like someone got an assigment entitled "Discuss improvements to Software Engineering in the last 25 years" handed out at the end of their last lecture.
> I don't see huge amounts of money being given to
> individuals who royally fuck their finances and
> claim "accounding errors" for huge debts. That's
> fraud, my friend. If WorldCom were a person,
> they'd be doing time.
You have no idea who the bonuses are being paid to and whether they had anything to do with the past Fraud so don't assume because a company was previusly run by crooks the people left are the same.
The board members responsible are already currently enjoying the hospitality of the FBI... probably with a view to getting some juicy info on Bernie Ebbers himself.
> They should be disbanded with all speed. And if
> not, then businesses are liable for less than a
> human.
Please... there are 60,000 people left working for WorldCom. All normal people with families, homes and lives they don't want turned upside down. Do you really want to see all those lives ruined because some greedy &*%£ higher up decided to commit fraud and run a company into the ground for their own benefit.
The bankruptcy protection process is designed to weed out the unprofitable parts of a business, re-organise the employees to support the profitable bits thereby protecting the jobs of those who stay and maximizing the return for the previous creditor, which you hope is the best result for all.
> Therefore, if a human is more responsible
> for their acts, then a human should therefore
> be also offered more protection under the law
> against such entities with such limited
> liability and unlimited lifespan. My $.02.
Now... this I do agree with. Compare some European countries where governments will pay healthy redundancy money or have very strict workers councils that mean you can only make employees redundant when absolutely necessary.. against the situation in the US where you can be made redundant on some execs whim at a moments notice. That's not good for the poor US employees.
That said, Europe doesn't have a bankruptcy protection process for companies like the US. If you ruin your company in Europe, the bits get sold to the highest bidder and everyone loses their job. Look at poor KPNQwest.
I have to say, in the nicest possible way... you are completely wrong.
The only content based filtering of spam achieved at an ISP are from senders connected to their own network... or via services run by others (e.g. brightmail) and this has to be clearly identified as being used to the consumer in their T's & C's.
ISP's have been having a long legal battle in the US and the EU to obtain common carrier status purely because ISP's are open to this sort of legality right now.
The counter-argument is that global telcos need to be able to respond to local state/country law whatever their global service.
The counter-argument to that is whether telecoms companies can continue to provide service at anything like an affordable price if they have to be responsible for content.
Consider... most people bitch right now about the cost of their service when most ISP's do no pro-active sniffing, censorship or content removal at all. Imagine ISP's now had to sniff and determine content of every packet passing the network. Rather costly.
I've been working as a network engineer in an ISP for 7 years now and I know we don't go anywhere near censorship unless explicitly told to by a court. We just don't want to be setting that kind of pro-active, censoring precedent.
> Well maybe he isn't but I am. When you are the
> strongest and most powerful nation on the
> planet, you can dictate any policy you want.
"dictate"... so America should be the worlds "Dictator" for our benefit... I like it. Very liberal of you. Thank you for looking after us and listening to our own countries beliefs and ideals (I live in the UK).
> Personally, I'm sick and tired of these little
> puke nations telling us what we can and can not
> do.
What an idiot.... the US spends all it's time talking about a global economy & politics and it's "responsibility on the world stage" but makes the assumption that the global economy & politics will be made up of western (read US) ideals and that the US is the only one to have a say.
Then when the realisation that through sheer weight of population numbers, land mass & available resources other nations outside of the US are capable of the same achievements (sometimes a lot more effeciently) they get all insular and over-protective (ref: Agricultural, Steel & manufacturing subsidies) to f&ck up those developing nations.
Who says a global community will reflect only US ideals? It's foolish and ultimately dangerous to think like that. Be a bit more open minded about congratulating other countries on their achievements.
> In the history of our planet, how many super
> powers were there that didn't seek to expand
> their empire. They should be thankful we're
> content with what we already have.
What you already have is a highly unbalanced, global, political make up where one nations population is using up far more resources than it has at it's disposal and one nations beliefs over represented to the rest of the world. This is at the cost of the rest of the world and every move the US makes is designed to protect that situation.
You may be content with what you already have but the rest of the world isn't, cos you're f&cking us over to keep it.
They've already done this. Anyone else remember the hoo-ha early last year when the passport T&C's quoted that M$ had rights to any data passed across passport based services (Register Article)
They got a lot of stick then, but with the EULA creep we're getting now (think about the win2k SP3 EULA) it can't be too long before it's tried again.
Pipsqueak
Yes... but good websites back up their funky flash features via normal text links, which is a trivial process. Even though I have flash installed, I still use text links if they're there because they're faster to navigate and easier to understand.
If it's about getting the most users able to use your site and therefore getting more business, why not consider everyone not just the IE majority.
By continuing to focus on only one platform you continue to force yourself down the MS path. If you're OK with that as a designer, fine... but don't expect that decision to not come back and bite you in future. History of MS has taught us this.
1) If an ISP connected to Ebone you would hope that had an alternative connection to another backbone provider otherwise they were a naff ISP and deserve everything they get. Same goes if you were a customer and running your essential business services over one provider... tut tut.
2) There is massive overcapacity in most telcos networks as they all bought into the hype 2 years ago and have too much fibre. If it's built into the networks and routed... no problems.
3) Who cares whether your traffic from UK to Germany or whatever goes the the states first and is 18 hops instead of 6... how quick is it?... is it lagging?... or is it actually still a useable network.
Worse failures on the net have happened before... that said, I suspect the time when they actually turn it off will be a bit shaky. Expect things to calm down over the next day or so. Nice of them to do it friday so everything should be fine monday for all those business users.
This map is not a real reflection of what would happen should KPNQwest cease functioning.
I think what the KPN noc guys are doing is great and it says a lot about their service... but being more ruthless and thinking about it in terms of business, there is a huge glut of fibre at the moment (as all telcos bought into the extravagent growth predictions being touted at the time of the internet boom) therefore bandwidth is cheap and most ISP's & telcos are selling their services around cost or even at a loss at the moment just trying to compete with each other (i.e. price war). This means current business models aren't sustainable and we're seeing lots of telcos & ISP's go bust, including KPNQwest & remember...
Serious customers would already have alternate providers... people running their business off their internet connection who don't have an alternate provider... well, that's just plain dumb.
Sure networks go down for no reason. You get bugs in router code, power outages, machinery digging up bits of ground they shouldn't, trains / trucks / whatever crashing into things.
A big network will suffer outages on a pretty regular basis, hopefully your provider is running it's network properly and has the capacity to cope.