The "Japanese magazine" as you refer to it is basically the wall street journal of Japan. Its the key daily business newspaper.
They usually report things first. If they report it, its because Sega Japan told them so.
I expect Sega America (run by Americans) are in denial. Sega in Japan is nowhere with the dreamcast. They're turning themselves into a software/games company.
Mphase, stock ticker XDSL.BB, is a company fast running out of friends and money. Hart Telephone is owned by one of the directors of Mphase, and they've been hawking this box around the telcos for over a year, nobody is interested. Its too expensive, its completely non standard, needs the content to be fed to the CO (head-end), but has no idea how to get it there, and the company that produces it, and its affiliates, has a certain air of, well, lets say it doesnt smell right.. they've been sucking up small investors with a promise of IPO, now a promise of just a nasdaq listing, and spending the money on, if I read the accounts correctly, mainly management renumeration..
CNNFN, I think, got suckered by this story.
You can read all the dirty laundry on ragingbull.com, any searches with terms such as confict of interest, fraud, investigation and so on will find old posts that reveal more.. of course, this is just my humble opinion. The people that stuck their money into that stock at $20 (now at $2) are pretty anxious to get their head back above water.
You're mostly wrong.
People already access the "useful" part of the internet over their cellphones. They are not interested in having a huge PC at home and surfing huge american style websites.
The Japanese have skipped a technology here, and are working on the next, because what you think is state of the art isnt attractive enough. Its only dumb dotcom fever advertising in the US that makes people think they're missing out on something insanely great. The reality is its insanely boring.
Buy a PC, spend 20 minutes with the sites you heard about, then use it for GAMES or PORN.
Both of which are far more available and in far more quality in Japan on GAME CONSOLES or ON THE WAY TO AND FROM FROM WORK.
Take a look at any Japanese hobbyist magazine and compare the detail, and sheer quantity of quality information and then compare that to an american website on the same subject, or an american magazine.
Japanese use the Internet now for micro amounts of information exactly where you want them.. in your hand, wherever you are, and just what you want to know, not surrounded by 50 million banner ads on a hulking great monitor sitting next to a 20lb home compaq.
NTT charges a lot for fixed lines, sure, but nobody cares, they buy cellphones for extra lines instead.. for higher speed web access than dialup, Japanese has affordable ISDN at flat rates.. for higher still, 3G wireless is up next for them. Nobody in Japan is moaning about wanting to get onto the net to see whats new on yahoo.
Get the Narita express, and they use this trick to display billboards in the tunnel closer to the airport..
they installed vertical strips of LEDs, of several colors, timed to flash such that at the speed of the train, the illusion is of a 5 foot long, 3 foot deep ANIMATED billboard. The amazing thing is that each trip past the window of one of these strips plays the next frame of the bilboard. The distance between the strips means the frame rate is probably 5-10 per second..
The whole show lasts maybe a minute.
Because my bog standard old Dell 1300 machine is happily churning out 300k PAGES per day at dslreports.com, and taken at peak hour speed, can do 1m PAGES per day no problems at all.. Pages are produced in 20ms to 200ms during this, and they are all dynamic.
Meanwhile, in microsoft MSDN performance document base, they consider an ASP page to be too slow only if it takes 5000ms or more to generate..
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Then there people actually using these things to get work done.
that PC Data Online quote got my attention, so I went looking:
fuckedcompany:
AUGUST: #5013 (overall rank) (vs 6415 in July)
page views: 15m (vs 3.8m in July)
unique users: 199k (vs 184k in July)
slashdot:
AUGUST: #2532 (overall rank) (vs 1912 in July)
page views: 15.9m (vs 11.1m in July)
unique users: 393k (vs 487k in July)
Since we know that slashdot does 30m+ pages, pcdataonline is obviously extrapolating average joe window users over the entire population...
for fuckedcompany.com, things are probably more accurate.
But the rank pcdataonline shows for fuckedcompany does not correspond with the info Pud included on ebay.. although he is right about it rising fast.
I know that pcdataonline can be pretty correct, because they got my little hobby site (dslreports.com) about right, both unique users and pageviews as well.. 9m page views and quarter of a million uniques!
FTTC and FTTH is going to be niche, broadband wireless, cable and DSL will be the vehicles that will carry people off modems.
Having FTTC only means great speed to your telco CO, where things return rapidly to internet speeds (39.95 a month does not pay for your own OC12 to the actual internet, even if the line from your garden to the CO is capable of that): Users of Verizon 7mbit ADSL lines report that they can rarely download at more than a megabit or so.. what a surprise, about what cable modem customers are doing.
See fastest providers chart on my website for some interesting stats on who has the bandwidth.
Most servers do not deliver more than 100k/sec to any one user anyway, even the more famous ones, the internet average is probably more like 50k/sec.
The stuff that will make use of any national high speed to the home (and FTTH/FTTC is far far from national) is going to get pushed to the edge of the network, it isnt economical to have it any other way.. when Blockbuster starts offering movies for rent that can be downloaded into your TIVO, or whatever, they are not going to build a huge plant in exodus somewhere and let the whole of the US fight a path to it, they'll have to make deals with providers to store the content close to the consumer.
Finally, better subscriber management systems will implement quality of service and traffic shaping, and this will simply limit or charge those that want to really suck down (or upload) immense amounts of data. Your office VPN will get priority over someone elses game demo downloads, and if the Bad Guy starts to harness residential bandwidth for evil purposes, equipment will recognize track unusual traffic patterns better, and simply log and shut down ports.
Whose afraid of the big bad fiber user, even with poor security? nobody really..
For geotargetting, where ads are pitched based on your zip code, doubleclick can triple or quadruple the price it charges advertisers. Urban Fetch wants to advertise its NY delivery service? it can spend $20 on a run-of-site banner show to everyone including surfers from singapore, or $80 on doubleclick that can restrict the banners to web site visitors with zips in NY city. Which do you think is more valuable a campaign? That money magnet is what is dragging doubleclick to tear up its privacy agreements, its just too rich a prize, especially with run-of-site CPMs now down at the $5/1000 level and click throughs at the half percent.
No wonder AOL has dragged its feet over DSL, they are about to own a whole lot of cable! AOLanywhere indeed. Sony must be concerned.. this is what they are trying to do: marry technology and content. AOL is marrying software and content. It quite represents the different focus of the US and Japan. But that is by the by. Unfortunately for the geeks, this means the lowest common denominator continues to drive the net. Make it easy to use. Dumb it all down. Consumers consume and AOL is going to spoon feed it to them, $20/month at a time. One thing I hate about AOL, is all AOLers are anonymous -- to the rest of us, but not of course to AOL. AOL knows or is in a position to know everything about their habits, but we (as in the rest of the net), see only proxyXYZ.aol.com, and Joe99@aol.com (probably Joe100 tomorrow). I am not saying that we should get demographics on AOL users, but it is rather chilling that AOL gets ALL the demographics and can do whatever it wants, and the rest of the world gets nothing. Absolutely zero. From the safety of the AOL citadel, they can do practically anything, (spam, insult, abuse) and it is up to the court of AOL to prosecute them or not, usually not. For this reason alone, this merger is a Bad Thing as the government is giving them monopoly powers in dimensions nobody comprehends, except perhaps Mr Case.. instant messenger. Mapquest. Time warner. Email. Online shopping. Demographics. Katz is right, the spectre of a stock with more power than any world government, or even all world governments, is solidifying, and those friendly happy AOL users ("all my friends are on AOL") do not realize it, but facilitate it.
I saw some funny cartoon recently maybe rather prescient.. a rather bent lander, upside down, broadcasting repeatedly and in the wrong direction.. "help, i've fallen over and can't get up.. help, I've...", nearby there is a picnic blanket martian family, and an upset martian dad saying something like "damn you can't get away from cellphones anywhere nowadays..". Ok, well I thought it was funny.
It isnt a rumor, I just watched CNBC Asia coverage while you all slept. They interviewed the local Sun guy about it. He pointed out 90% of software in Asia is pirate, so Linux makes sense. They are not banning win2k in China, just in the Chinese government. It is economically sensible for developing countries to put up with some disadvantages in features to save what for them is a load of cash for an american product. Will be amusing to think of those foreign contractors in china getting "sorry cant read" messages from government departments when they email out ms office 2000 documents complete with kitchen sink window controls buried in them, or send powerpoint presentations off and find nobody looks at them. Rather disingenuously, the Sun guy said Sun thinks operating systems should be free, I'll tell that to the sun rep next time they add solaris licensing charges onto the next sun box we buy.
That is damn right. I remember the same whining from y2k "gurus" or y2k "pioneers" as they were known. They arent spending bazillions, something must be wrong! yeah right. And Japan also has 1/30th the ratio of lawyers.. so by that logic, they have no system of justice as well. Bah. Y2k consultants, I've seen and had to deal with dozens of them over the last year.. words cannot express the frustration felt by reasonable people as these losers, usually failed programmers, project managers or auditors, have tied us up with red tape, placed the fear of god and lawsuits into non-technical upper management. The Japanese were much more sensible.. plus their native systems work with the year of the reigning emporer anyway.. All this whole y2k effort was just a big bug hunt in one small area, in a pathetic attempt to achieve perfection by idiots with no skills wielding CEO authorized get out of jail free cards, completely ignoring all the other bugs that run rampant through all the other systems and software in use out there. Get realistic. If the US had bothered to look at things sanely, they would have figured, sure, we need a bunch of cobol overtime put in.., and test anything that is mission critical, and then forget about it and get back to improving things steadily. But Noooo! we gotta have 6 month development freezes, stockpiled water, and career cry-wolfers running around appearing on TV, writing books and frightening little old ladies into jumping into the basement. Tell you what this is, this is techno religion priests telling the flock they can protect them from techno hell. I tell you what : lets have a Y2k post mortem audit, lets turn the spotlight on every manager that sat in a leather chair opposite the board and asked with a straight face for a budget of $300 million to fix systems. Lets find out how much of this money was wasted, or used as an excuse to upgrade equipment, inflate staff sizes or whatever. You'll now hear the bleats of: but wait! the leap year bug will be next! or the social security overflow bug! or the unix epoch bug! forget it, get those shotguns you thought you needed to save your family and go hunt down some y2k experts and get an explanation of where your dollars have gone, and why the per capita expenditure in the US was so much higher than less consultant and lawyer ridden countries. Sorry I raved didnt I? but really.. now is not the time to shrug and move on.. the y2k bug is more a bug with technology management, laywers, and the media. That is what needs to be fixed!
A magazine is like a consultant, or a prostitute, they feel around looking for the thing that makes you feel best... ooh yeah lower lower, yeah YEAH! that's IT BABY! So it is hardly surprising that according to PC Magazine, the PC made the internet. Ask supporters of Al Gore, and they'll tell you he was behind it, since he promoted the potential of the "information superhighway" (yeah right). Ask the fans of Ted Nelson (I treasure his computer dreams/computer lib book) and we'll say he created the DNA right there. The designers of Plato need to be remembered as well, and what about all those BBS authors? Without unix and university networks, we'd all be still be loading software on CDROMs and grappling in our living room with some horrible video-on-demand home-shopping-network monster dreamt up and forced down our throats by the same people now making money off selling PCs, but without PCs and AOLamers and spam, we'd probably be poking away at message boards, reading netnews, and using a slightly less buggy version of netscape 2 to look at research papers. It all has to come together exactly the way it did to make the internet. I can imagine in a thousand years, people (if deprived of historical records for some reason), look at the 'net and declare it as an argument for God, rather as biologists like to look at an eyeball and say it is too fabulous to have evolved by chance - Maybe a future William Gates XIIII might grab that opportunity (I created the net!) to attempt to deify himself and further increase shareholder return. www.microsoft.com is taking baby steps in that direction already.
PC Mag is not going to be the place to look for a "Charles Darwin" of net evolution theory, that is just silly.
First, the stock split should not by itself cause any change in anyones paper worth. The fact that news of a stock split cause prices to jump just indicates that the market has totally lost its senses.
The few experts in value investing (who actually try to value a company based on profits, growth and dividends) are crying with frustration because the market now trades on press releases, hype, rumors, buzzwords, partnerships, patents on the obvious, promises and hot air. The 1999 nasdaq is indeed the tulip bubble and the south sea bubble all rolled into one.
Second, lets see redhats market cap. What is it now, 15 billion? that is about the market cap of Apple computer, or any other real company that can make a few hundred million a quarter in profits from now to eternity. Dont forget -- redhat stockholders are holding it because they think it will outperform the market, bonds, cash in the bank or equity in their house. It isnt going to outperform a wet paper bag based on dividends for the next 10 years, it can only outperfom based on increasing that market cap further through further stock price rises. The greater fool principal. Motley fool has a large following indeed, but fools with cash are not a limitless commodity.
So the last level of this nasdaq ponzi scheme is going to get burned, when a taxi driver tells you about his portfolio, it is all over. Those who buy Andover.net, RHAT, or any other stock with P but no E take note: when it comes crashing to earth, you will not have a chance to cash out. Those in the know will cash out before you, you will be left with a bunch of pretty certificates entitling you to the A4 tray of the redhat photocopy machine, and the tar from the crash will get pasted over every new and risky stock out there, VCs will retire to their gated communities to count their offshore winnings, and a lot of bright people with good ideas will struggle to scrape together the cash for a security bond on some office space..
3 years ago, this frenzy was in the middle pages of the wall street journal, 2 years ago it was in the NY times, 1 year ago it is discussed in office hallways, now it is in the web pages of "news for NERDS, stuff that MATTERS".. this is way past a time to sell.
Off topic: did anyone else take the time to read the long andover net IPO: do you realize what they have planned for slashdot? "beyond the banner ad". Go check it out.. you are reading a site that is going to cause a collision between those who (mostly) do not accept ads and web commerce, either actively or passively rejecting it, and a company that simply must sell you stuff to pay its investors back. It is going to be an interesting battle.
Well, if dynamic > static, also use squid. Why? whats the point of a cache for dynamic content? well simple.. slow readers keep memory hungry modperl or apache children sitting on the socket dribbling bytes.. Squid, being multithreaded, can take the dynamic content, leaving the children to get on with some other user, and being multithreaded, squid dribble it out at whatever speed the client can cope with without taking all your ram. Its really worth while.
is the way to go, was at least for me, and if you burrow into its pages, you get to see some real nice monitoring going on, including of water levels, IRC users, squid objects.. you name it.
It groks SNMP, but, has a real simple way of running a program to return the critical values for a given thing that doesnt happen to run snmp agents.
It simply handles year/month/week/day graphs without keeping boatloads of data.. the data is simply combined as it gets older, so log files do NOT grow.
It takes very little cpu. A halfway decent box can monitor a hundred routers and create html graph pages for them.
A lot of people have written patches & addons etc for it.
It only costs a CD from cdnow.com to the author. and thats optional.
Check mine out.. i put this up in 30 minutes. It monitors my eth0 interface, and i dont even run snmpd. My sdsl line
You point out the two missing bits of mysql.. inner selects are nice, but you could write a routine that used a temporary table and hid that from you. A key mysql speed advantage, although it screams everywhere really, is the setup and tear down of database connections. Great for web. It has been very stable for me, compared to sybase, no worrys with segments and killing stuck processes and backup servers and asking how full is the database and getting back the answer "it depends"... I would rather be on mysql than anything because of the speed, the runs-everywhere nature (runs quite happily on a little laptop) the regexps, blobs and alter table statement (insert columns and modify data types on the fly in a production running database! hell yeah!), the speed, the documentation, the datatype support, the speed, the mysql command line environment, the stability, the speed and did I mention the speed? they do have some various join options I think that can help with inner selects, did you read their chapter on how to work round the missing features? I thought it was quite good. The AC suggesting DB files as an alternative to mysql is nuts, unless you are storing one huge table of key=value pairs, forget DB files. -Justin
I expect the legal language behind the shrink wrap on your new copy of windows 2000 is getting slowly but surely beefed up as we speak.
The NY times article had the amusing quote about cars: sure they would cost a penny, and do 400 miles an hour etc (the old analogy), but what if every day, someone on the other side of the world caused the car to explode, killing its occupants and several bystanders.
What if when we buy a car, there is this piece of paper stuck behind the drivers glass, saying, "by opening this door, you agree not to hold Ford motor company liable for any drawbacks in the design of this car, and for any damages, monetary or otherwise, that you or your family should suffer through use of this car. We do not warrant this cars fitness for any purpose".
Like it or not, we are moving to a virtual world, our assets are becoming digital not physical, and along with that comes the fruits of bad design: damages, responsibility, lawyers and so on, just like there is in the physical world. Microsoft, and every vendor better grasp that, and either hide behind a barricade of legalese (not a sustainable strategy), or behave as if they were making X-ray machines, cars, industrial saws, and other potentially deadly gadgets.
So I agree. Although picking on microsoft isnt the whole issue, you can equally well pick on ebay, oracle, sun, HP, IBM and all of them. But microsoft does have the most arrogant attitude so by all means lets kick them first.
I have a test page that invites people to queue up their beloved home PC to get checked from "outside", and to have a few pings of death thrown at them. (www.dslreports.com/r3/dsl/secureme).
You wouldnt believe what I find.. or maybe you would. many PCs have readable netbios usernames, back orifice was found twice out of 100 machines. Cisco 675 home DSL router/modems with NO password and NO enable password, open shares with guest logins, socks servers, firewalls with web configuration ports visible on the wrong side (my side), web servers meant for internal use with convenient displays of the internal network on them, visible from outside. And of course machines that blue screen after they get pinged with one of the many packets that cause Bills code to scribble where it shouldnt, but cant blame people for that. The current incidents reported of breakins to home PCs on fulltime net access, also in the NY times, (with a Linux box partially comprised through imapd I believe), could be reduced with some very basic external checking... Something ISPs should provide as a free service. Right now it would be trivial to construct with a bit of perl and a bad attitude, a sweeper that found enough PCs on DSL or cable to get straight to the top of the seti@home charts, or launch an attack against something harder, all from the bedrooms of guys who uses there PC to balance his checkbook.
The far worse risk here:.. imagine somebody has VPN to their super secure office network, and its via internet DSL, and they are lax in security. How long before somebody writes a VPN scanner that finds insecure fulltime connected PCs and gets onto them to see if there is a VPN to a corporation that can be snooped/cracked/hijacked/watched. Companies think an end-to-end encrypted VPN is secure, but they dont think enough that the end of their tunnel is managed by an employee with little knowledge on security, and on a windows PC with a config that is by default insecure.
Who here as actually used ViaVoice or its larger supposedly even better competitor. they are really terrible.. here I will switch mine on: *click* These is mess peaking user a Boyce recognition systems. *click* thats enough of that. the boxes move off the shelves because the idea is great, but I bet 95% of them are just moving from the shop shelf to gather dust on the home shelf, next to the excercise machine that can slide under your bed, except I bet you didnt spend 5 hours with the excercise machine trying to "train" it to understand your muscles.
Um, Microsoft already sees consoles as a threat. They realized that, when they discovered nobody wanted to develop games for windows with windows UI widgets. So they put together directX, and took about 5 major releases to get it half right, and are trying hard to insert CE into consoles so they can "embrace and enhance" these cancers in the middle of their windows-everywhere strategy. If I was them, I would be most concerned about the playstation II. Sony has shown no interest in playing microsofts game, and why should they? they are at least as big in terms of revenue.. and they know digital is the heart of their future, and they dont want to end up a sub-licensee of microsofts idea of digital. Thank god for Sony then. With the PSII, they have a shot at becoming the Hal9000 of most houses.. with those specs and the peripheral opportunities, the instant game library thanks to putting the whole current PS onto a spare sound chip, and their revenue stream from software and extras, they can afford to almost give away the PSII free like AOL cds. And I for one cant wait... any doubters, go download the demo videos of gran turismo or namco girl, and watch them on your grainy 20fps 100x100 video stream in your PC, then figure out what they look like when they live and on your sony hdtv. Realtime hair for gods sake. motion blue via calculating in-between frames that are not displayed... wowsome..
Yep. wireless was my biggest disappointment of 1999;) I bought proxim symphony, greedily reading and re-reading the 1.6mb/s speed, and dreaming of a cable free den and reading the sunday online papers in bed on sunday morning.. on a laptop. Anyway I digress. It sucked. Even for file transfer, one third to a half of the bandwidth disappeared, and transfer was curiously asymmetric, ie a desktop to a laptop was twice as fast as vice versa. Worse, ping time was terrible, and games unplayable. So in the end you have a wireless network for chugging thru ftps.. I dont see the point. This one will be better, but still I think stay away from it until it really can perform like a 10mbit hub in terms of responsiveness.. and reliability. I dont want to watch connections go down just because someone turns on a coffee grinder in the other room. Anyone want to buy my symphony? or does the damn ISA board thing have linux drivers yet?
The natural progression from code in html.. is, html in code... maybe you think thats even worse, but I think its the way things are going. (of course, store the html in databases and the code runs the website and uses the html bits like lego -- thats the way slashdot does it, with a few caches of pre-built pages for more speed).
CPU is cheap. inflexibility is expensive. Headers and footers, hell, even page templates, are far from enough...
This is actually why I dont much like PHP, because I want a programming language that can talk to everything and is good with strings, not html with codelets inside (be they java, javascript or PHP). I already know a good language.. perl.. and mod perl puts that in the server. So my website doesnt even have any html pages...
On a dual processor 500 box, and mysql, a gig of ram, and some 10k scsi disks, for a measly $3000 total cost with linux, I could flood a T3 with that.. (unfortunately, I dont HAVE a T3... but you get the point).
Like Howard Stern, has Slashdot become totally fascinated with itself? Can we expect to hear rob begging the geek of the day guest to show his transparent pilot case off to the web camera, whilst Hemos giggles insanely in the background? (makes mental picture)
Argh!
I think they should just run a linux phone in problem line..
Rob: "Hi this is Rob and you're On the Air" Caller: "Hi Rob, first, I would just like to say, I really dig your show.." Rob: "Cool thanks, icq9 your friends to recommend us, now whats your problem?" Caller: "Well, Rob, See, this is kinda embarassing..." Rob: "Go ahead, you are amongst friends here" Caller: "Ok... the problem is, i cant hack my own sendmail files, but I cant admit it to my friends.. I wanna know, like, is this normal?" Rob: "Wow what a loser... hey buddy, dont bother us with this stuff, go call up cnet instead.." *click* Rob: "You know.. everymorning, as I get up and turn on the ANDOVER NET TV channel, I think to myself, gee isnt ANDOVER NETWORK a cool thing to have piped to your 3dscope, and for only 9.95 world credits a month... I personally couldnt get through the slashdot day without ANDOVER NET, and i am not just being paid to say that, i really mean it.... and now over to hemos for todays regular tip spot on microsoft ASP-2003 programming" ...
Slashdot Mirror
The "Japanese magazine" as you refer to it is basically the wall street journal of Japan. Its the key daily business newspaper.
They usually report things first. If they report it, its because Sega Japan told them so.
I expect Sega America (run by Americans) are in denial. Sega in Japan is nowhere with the dreamcast. They're turning themselves into a software/games company.
Mphase, stock ticker XDSL.BB, is a company fast running out of friends and money. Hart Telephone is owned by one of the directors of Mphase, and they've been hawking this box around the telcos for over a year, nobody is interested. Its too expensive, its completely non standard, needs the content to be fed to the CO (head-end), but has no idea how to get it there, and the company that produces it, and its affiliates, has a certain air of, well, lets say it doesnt smell right.. they've been sucking up small investors with a promise of IPO, now a promise of just a nasdaq listing, and spending the money on, if I read the accounts correctly, mainly management renumeration..
CNNFN, I think, got suckered by this story.
You can read all the dirty laundry on ragingbull.com, any searches with terms such as confict of interest, fraud, investigation and so on will find old posts that reveal more.. of course, this is just my humble opinion. The people that stuck their money into that stock at $20 (now at $2) are pretty anxious to get their head back above water.
You're mostly wrong. .. in your hand, wherever you are, and just what you want to know, not surrounded by 50 million banner ads on a hulking great monitor sitting next to a 20lb home compaq.
People already access the "useful" part of the internet over their cellphones. They are not interested in having a huge PC at home and surfing huge american style websites.
The Japanese have skipped a technology here, and are working on the next, because what you think is state of the art isnt attractive enough. Its only dumb dotcom fever advertising in the US that makes people think they're missing out on something insanely great. The reality is its insanely boring.
Buy a PC, spend 20 minutes with the sites you heard about, then use it for GAMES or PORN.
Both of which are far more available and in far more quality in Japan on GAME CONSOLES or ON THE WAY TO AND FROM FROM WORK.
Take a look at any Japanese hobbyist magazine and compare the detail, and sheer quantity of quality information and then compare that to an american website on the same subject, or an american magazine.
Japanese use the Internet now for micro amounts of information exactly where you want them
NTT charges a lot for fixed lines, sure, but nobody cares, they buy cellphones for extra lines instead.. for higher speed web access than dialup, Japanese has affordable ISDN at flat rates.. for higher still, 3G wireless is up next for them. Nobody in Japan is moaning about wanting to get onto the net to see whats new on yahoo.
Get the Narita express, and they use this trick to display billboards in the tunnel closer to the airport..
they installed vertical strips of LEDs, of several colors, timed to flash such that at the speed of the train, the illusion is of a 5 foot long, 3 foot deep ANIMATED billboard. The amazing thing is that each trip past the window of one of these strips plays the next frame of the bilboard. The distance between the strips means the frame rate is probably 5-10 per second..
The whole show lasts maybe a minute.
Because my bog standard old Dell 1300 machine is happily churning out 300k PAGES per day at dslreports.com, and taken at peak hour speed, can do 1m PAGES per day no problems at all.. Pages are produced in 20ms to 200ms during this, and they are all dynamic.
Meanwhile, in microsoft MSDN performance document base, they consider an ASP page to be too slow only if it takes 5000ms or more to generate..
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Then there people actually using these things to get work done.
that PC Data Online quote got my attention, so I went looking:
fuckedcompany:
AUGUST: #5013 (overall rank) (vs 6415 in July)
page views: 15m (vs 3.8m in July)
unique users: 199k (vs 184k in July)
slashdot:
AUGUST: #2532 (overall rank) (vs 1912 in July)
page views: 15.9m (vs 11.1m in July)
unique users: 393k (vs 487k in July)
Since we know that slashdot does 30m+ pages, pcdataonline is obviously extrapolating average joe window users over the entire population...
for fuckedcompany.com, things are probably more accurate.
But the rank pcdataonline shows for fuckedcompany does not correspond with the info Pud included on ebay.. although he is right about it rising fast.
I know that pcdataonline can be pretty correct, because they got my little hobby site (dslreports.com) about right, both unique users and pageviews as well.. 9m page views and quarter of a million uniques!
FTTC and FTTH is going to be niche, broadband wireless, cable and DSL will be the vehicles that will carry people off modems.
Having FTTC only means great speed to your telco CO, where things return rapidly to internet speeds (39.95 a month does not pay for your own OC12 to the actual internet, even if the line from your garden to the CO is capable of that): Users of Verizon 7mbit ADSL lines report that they can rarely download at more than a megabit or so.. what a surprise, about what cable modem customers are doing.
See fastest providers chart on my website for some interesting stats on who has the bandwidth.
Most servers do not deliver more than 100k/sec to any one user anyway, even the more famous ones, the internet average is probably more like 50k/sec.
The stuff that will make use of any national high speed to the home (and FTTH/FTTC is far far from national) is going to get pushed to the edge of the network, it isnt economical to have it any other way.. when Blockbuster starts offering movies for rent that can be downloaded into your TIVO, or whatever, they are not going to build a huge plant in exodus somewhere and let the whole of the US fight a path to it, they'll have to make deals with providers to store the content close to the consumer.
Finally, better subscriber management systems will implement quality of service and traffic shaping, and this will simply limit or charge those that want to really suck down (or upload) immense amounts of data. Your office VPN will get priority over someone elses game demo downloads, and if the Bad Guy starts to harness residential bandwidth for evil purposes, equipment will recognize track unusual traffic patterns better, and simply log and shut down ports.
Whose afraid of the big bad fiber user, even with poor security? nobody really..
For geotargetting, where ads are pitched based on your zip code, doubleclick can triple or quadruple the price it charges advertisers. Urban Fetch wants to advertise its NY delivery service? it can spend $20 on a run-of-site banner show to everyone including surfers from singapore, or $80 on doubleclick that can restrict the banners to web site visitors with zips in NY city. Which do you think is more valuable a campaign?
That money magnet is what is dragging doubleclick to tear up its privacy agreements, its just too rich a prize, especially with run-of-site CPMs now down at the $5/1000 level and click throughs at the half percent.
No wonder AOL has dragged its feet over DSL, they are about to own a whole lot of cable!
AOLanywhere indeed.
Sony must be concerned.. this is what they are trying to do: marry technology and content. AOL is marrying software and content. It quite represents the different focus of the US and Japan. But that is by the by.
Unfortunately for the geeks, this means the lowest common denominator continues to drive the net. Make it easy to use. Dumb it all down. Consumers consume and AOL is going to spoon feed it to them, $20/month at a time.
One thing I hate about AOL, is all AOLers are anonymous -- to the rest of us, but not of course to AOL. AOL knows or is in a position to know everything about their habits, but we (as in the rest of the net), see only proxyXYZ.aol.com, and Joe99@aol.com (probably Joe100 tomorrow). I am not saying that we should get demographics on AOL users, but it is rather chilling that AOL gets ALL the demographics and can do whatever it wants, and the rest of the world gets nothing. Absolutely zero. From the safety of the AOL citadel, they can do practically anything, (spam, insult, abuse) and it is up to the court of AOL to prosecute them or not, usually not.
For this reason alone, this merger is a Bad Thing as the government is giving them monopoly powers in dimensions nobody comprehends, except perhaps Mr Case.. instant messenger. Mapquest. Time warner. Email. Online shopping. Demographics. Katz is right, the spectre of a stock with more power than any world government, or even all world governments, is solidifying, and those friendly happy AOL users ("all my friends are on AOL") do not realize it, but facilitate it.
I saw some funny cartoon recently maybe rather prescient.. a rather bent lander, upside down, broadcasting repeatedly and in the wrong direction .. "help, i've fallen over and can't get up.. help, I've...", nearby there is a picnic blanket martian family, and an upset martian dad saying something like "damn you can't get away from cellphones anywhere nowadays..".
Ok, well I thought it was funny.
It isnt a rumor, I just watched CNBC Asia coverage while you all slept. They interviewed the local Sun guy about it. He pointed out 90% of software in Asia is pirate, so Linux makes sense. They are not banning win2k in China, just in the Chinese government. It is economically sensible for developing countries to put up with some disadvantages in features to save what for them is a load of cash for an american product. Will be amusing to think of those foreign contractors in china getting "sorry cant read" messages from government departments when they email out ms office 2000 documents complete with kitchen sink window controls buried in them, or send powerpoint presentations off and find nobody looks at them. Rather disingenuously, the Sun guy said Sun thinks operating systems should be free, I'll tell that to the sun rep next time they add solaris licensing charges onto the next sun box we buy.
That is damn right. I remember the same whining from y2k "gurus" or y2k "pioneers" as they were known. They arent spending bazillions, something must be wrong! yeah right. And Japan also has 1/30th the ratio of lawyers .. so by that logic, they have no system of justice as well. Bah. Y2k consultants, I've seen and had to deal with dozens of them over the last year .. words cannot express the frustration felt by reasonable people as these losers, usually failed programmers, project managers or auditors, have tied us up with red tape, placed the fear of god and lawsuits into non-technical upper management. The Japanese were much more sensible.. plus their native systems work with the year of the reigning emporer anyway.. All this whole y2k effort was just a big bug hunt in one small area, in a pathetic attempt to achieve perfection by idiots with no skills wielding CEO authorized get out of jail free cards, completely ignoring all the other bugs that run rampant through all the other systems and software in use out there. Get realistic. If the US had bothered to look at things sanely, they would have figured, sure, we need a bunch of cobol overtime put in.., and test anything that is mission critical, and then forget about it and get back to improving things steadily. But Noooo! we gotta have 6 month development freezes, stockpiled water, and career cry-wolfers running around appearing on TV, writing books and frightening little old ladies into jumping into the basement. Tell you what this is, this is techno religion priests telling the flock they can protect them from techno hell. I tell you what : lets have a Y2k post mortem audit, lets turn the spotlight on every manager that sat in a leather chair opposite the board and asked with a straight face for a budget of $300 million to fix systems. Lets find out how much of this money was wasted, or used as an excuse to upgrade equipment, inflate staff sizes or whatever. You'll now hear the bleats of: but wait! the leap year bug will be next! or the social security overflow bug! or the unix epoch bug! forget it, get those shotguns you thought you needed to save your family and go hunt down some y2k experts and get an explanation of where your dollars have gone, and why the per capita expenditure in the US was so much higher than less consultant and lawyer ridden countries. Sorry I raved didnt I? but really.. now is not the time to shrug and move on.. the y2k bug is more a bug with technology management, laywers, and the media. That is what needs to be fixed!
A magazine is like a consultant, or a prostitute, they feel around looking for the thing that makes you feel best... ooh yeah lower lower, yeah YEAH! that's IT BABY! So it is hardly surprising that according to PC Magazine, the PC made the internet. Ask supporters of Al Gore, and they'll tell you he was behind it, since he promoted the potential of the "information superhighway" (yeah right). Ask the fans of Ted Nelson (I treasure his computer dreams/computer lib book) and we'll say he created the DNA right there. The designers of Plato need to be remembered as well, and what about all those BBS authors? Without unix and university networks, we'd all be still be loading software on CDROMs and grappling in our living room with some horrible video-on-demand home-shopping-network monster dreamt up and forced down our throats by the same people now making money off selling PCs, but without PCs and AOLamers and spam, we'd probably be poking away at message boards, reading netnews, and using a slightly less buggy version of netscape 2 to look at research papers. It all has to come together exactly the way it did to make the internet. I can imagine in a thousand years, people (if deprived of historical records for some reason), look at the 'net and declare it as an argument for God, rather as biologists like to look at an eyeball and say it is too fabulous to have evolved by chance - Maybe a future William Gates XIIII might grab that opportunity (I created the net!) to attempt to deify himself and further increase shareholder return. www.microsoft.com is taking baby steps in that direction already.
PC Mag is not going to be the place to look for a "Charles Darwin" of net evolution theory, that is just silly.
I think a little bit more than zero disclosure might be right for those "buy the book" links.
First, the stock split should not by itself cause any change in anyones paper worth. The fact that news of a stock split cause prices to jump just indicates that the market has totally lost its senses.
The few experts in value investing (who actually try to value a company based on profits, growth and dividends) are crying with frustration because the market now trades on press releases, hype, rumors, buzzwords, partnerships, patents on the obvious, promises and hot air. The 1999 nasdaq is indeed the tulip bubble and the south sea bubble all rolled into one.
Second, lets see redhats market cap. What is it now, 15 billion? that is about the market cap of Apple computer, or any other real company that can make a few hundred million a quarter in profits from now to eternity. Dont forget -- redhat stockholders are holding it because they think it will outperform the market, bonds, cash in the bank or equity in their house. It isnt going to outperform a wet paper bag based on dividends for the next 10 years, it can only outperfom based on increasing that market cap further through further stock price rises. The greater fool principal. Motley fool has a large following indeed, but fools with cash are not a limitless commodity.
So the last level of this nasdaq ponzi scheme is going to get burned, when a taxi driver tells you about his portfolio, it is all over. Those who buy Andover.net, RHAT, or any other stock with P but no E take note: when it comes crashing to earth, you will not have a chance to cash out. Those in the know will cash out before you, you will be left with a bunch of pretty certificates entitling you to the A4 tray of the redhat photocopy machine, and the tar from the crash will get pasted over every new and risky stock out there, VCs will retire to their gated communities to count their offshore winnings, and a lot of bright people with good ideas will struggle to scrape together the cash for a security bond on some office space..
3 years ago, this frenzy was in the middle pages of the wall street journal, 2 years ago it was in the NY times, 1 year ago it is discussed in office hallways, now it is in the web pages of "news for NERDS, stuff that MATTERS".. this is way past a time to sell.
Off topic: did anyone else take the time to read the long andover net IPO: do you realize what they have planned for slashdot? "beyond the banner ad". Go check it out.. you are reading a site that is going to cause a collision between those who (mostly) do not accept ads and web commerce, either actively or passively rejecting it, and a company that simply must sell you stuff to pay its investors back. It is going to be an interesting battle.
Well, if dynamic > static, also use squid. Why? whats the point of a cache for dynamic content? well simple.. slow readers keep memory hungry modperl or apache children sitting on the socket dribbling bytes.. Squid, being multithreaded, can take the dynamic content, leaving the children to get on with some other user, and being multithreaded, squid dribble it out at whatever speed the client can cope with without taking all your ram. Its really worth while.
is the way to go, was at least for me, and if you burrow into its pages, you get to see some real nice monitoring going on, including of water levels, IRC users, squid objects.. you name it.
It groks SNMP, but, has a real simple way of running a program to return the critical values for a given thing that doesnt happen to run snmp agents.
It simply handles year/month/week/day graphs without keeping boatloads of data.. the data is simply combined as it gets older, so log files do NOT grow.
It takes very little cpu. A halfway decent box can monitor a hundred routers and create html graph pages for them.
A lot of people have written patches & addons etc for it.
It only costs a CD from cdnow.com to the author. and thats optional.
Check mine out.. i put this up in 30 minutes. It monitors my eth0 interface, and i dont even run snmpd. My sdsl line
You point out the two missing bits of mysql.. inner selects are nice, but you could write a routine that used a temporary table and hid that from you. A key mysql speed advantage, although it screams everywhere really, is the setup and tear down of database connections. Great for web. It has been very stable for me, compared to sybase, no worrys with segments and killing stuck processes and backup servers and asking how full is the database and getting back the answer "it depends"... I would rather be on mysql than anything because of the speed, the runs-everywhere nature (runs quite happily on a little laptop) the regexps, blobs and alter table statement (insert columns and modify data types on the fly in a production running database! hell yeah!), the speed, the documentation, the datatype support, the speed, the mysql command line environment, the stability, the speed and did I mention the speed? they do have some various join options I think that can help with inner selects, did you read their chapter on how to work round the missing features? I thought it was quite good. The AC suggesting DB files as an alternative to mysql is nuts, unless you are storing one huge table of key=value pairs, forget DB files. -Justin
I expect the legal language behind the shrink wrap on your new copy of windows 2000 is getting slowly but surely beefed up as we speak.
The NY times article had the amusing quote about cars: sure they would cost a penny, and do 400 miles an hour etc (the old analogy), but what if every day, someone on the other side of the world caused the car to explode, killing its occupants and several bystanders.
What if when we buy a car, there is this piece of paper stuck behind the drivers glass, saying, "by opening this door, you agree not to hold Ford motor company liable for any drawbacks in the design of this car, and for any damages, monetary or otherwise, that you or your family should suffer through use of this car. We do not warrant this cars fitness for any purpose".
Like it or not, we are moving to a virtual world, our assets are becoming digital not physical, and along with that comes the fruits of bad design: damages, responsibility, lawyers and so on, just like there is in the physical world. Microsoft, and every vendor better grasp that, and either hide behind a barricade of legalese (not a sustainable strategy), or behave as if they were making X-ray machines, cars, industrial saws, and other potentially deadly gadgets.
So I agree. Although picking on microsoft isnt the whole issue, you can equally well pick on ebay, oracle, sun, HP, IBM and all of them. But microsoft does have the most arrogant attitude so by all means lets kick them first.
I have a test page that invites people to queue up their beloved home PC to get checked from "outside", and to have a few pings of death thrown at them. (www.dslreports.com/r3/dsl/secureme).
You wouldnt believe what I find.. or maybe you would. many PCs have readable netbios usernames, back orifice was found twice out of 100 machines. Cisco 675 home DSL router/modems with NO password and NO enable password, open shares with guest logins, socks servers, firewalls with web configuration ports visible on the wrong side (my side), web servers meant for internal use with convenient displays of the internal network on them, visible from outside.
And of course machines that blue screen after they get pinged with one of the many packets that cause Bills code to scribble where it shouldnt, but cant blame people for that.
The current incidents reported of breakins to home PCs on fulltime net access, also in the NY times, (with a Linux box partially comprised through imapd I believe), could be reduced with some very basic external checking... Something ISPs should provide as a free service.
Right now it would be trivial to construct with a bit of perl and a bad attitude, a sweeper that found enough PCs on DSL or cable to get straight to the top of the seti@home charts, or launch an attack against something harder, all from the bedrooms of guys who uses there PC to balance his checkbook.
The far worse risk here:.. imagine somebody has VPN to their super secure office network, and its via internet DSL, and they are lax in security. How long before somebody writes a VPN scanner that finds insecure fulltime connected PCs and gets onto them to see if there is a VPN to a corporation that can be snooped/cracked/hijacked/watched. Companies think an end-to-end encrypted VPN is secure, but they dont think enough that the end of their tunnel is managed by an employee with little knowledge on security, and on a windows PC with a config that is by default insecure.
-Justin
Who here as actually used ViaVoice or its larger supposedly even better competitor. they are really terrible.. here I will switch mine on: *click* These is mess peaking user a Boyce recognition systems. *click* thats enough of that. the boxes move off the shelves because the idea is great, but I bet 95% of them are just moving from the shop shelf to gather dust on the home shelf, next to the excercise machine that can slide under your bed, except I bet you didnt spend 5 hours with the excercise machine trying to "train" it to understand your muscles.
Um, Microsoft already sees consoles as a threat. They realized that, when they discovered nobody wanted to develop games for windows with windows UI widgets. So they put together directX, and took about 5 major releases to get it half right, and are trying hard to insert CE into consoles so they can "embrace and enhance" these cancers in the middle of their windows-everywhere strategy. If I was them, I would be most concerned about the playstation II. Sony has shown no interest in playing microsofts game, and why should they? they are at least as big in terms of revenue.. and they know digital is the heart of their future, and they dont want to end up a sub-licensee of microsofts idea of digital. Thank god for Sony then. With the PSII, they have a shot at becoming the Hal9000 of most houses.. with those specs and the peripheral opportunities, the instant game library thanks to putting the whole current PS onto a spare sound chip, and their revenue stream from software and extras, they can afford to almost give away the PSII free like AOL cds. And I for one cant wait... any doubters, go download the demo videos of gran turismo or namco girl, and watch them on your grainy 20fps 100x100 video stream in your PC, then figure out what they look like when they live and on your sony hdtv. Realtime hair for gods sake. motion blue via calculating in-between frames that are not displayed... wowsome..
Yep. wireless was my biggest disappointment of 1999 ;) I bought proxim symphony, greedily reading and re-reading the 1.6mb/s speed, and dreaming of a cable free den and reading the sunday online papers in bed on sunday morning.. on a laptop.
Anyway I digress. It sucked. Even for file transfer, one third to a half of the bandwidth disappeared, and transfer was curiously asymmetric, ie a desktop to a laptop was twice as fast as vice versa. Worse, ping time was terrible, and games unplayable. So in the end you have a wireless network for chugging thru ftps.. I dont see the point.
This one will be better, but still I think stay away from it until it really can perform like a 10mbit hub in terms of responsiveness.. and reliability. I dont want to watch connections go down just because someone turns on a coffee grinder in the other room.
Anyone want to buy my symphony? or does the damn ISA board thing have linux drivers yet?
-Justin
The natural progression from code in html.. is, html in code... maybe you think thats even worse, but I think its the way things are going. (of course, store the html in databases and the code runs the website and uses the html bits like lego -- thats the way slashdot does it, with a few caches of pre-built pages for more speed).
CPU is cheap. inflexibility is expensive. Headers and footers, hell, even page templates, are far from enough...
This is actually why I dont much like PHP, because I want a programming language that can talk to everything and is good with strings, not html with codelets inside (be they java, javascript or PHP). I already know a good language.. perl.. and mod perl puts that in the server. So my website doesnt even have any html pages...
On a dual processor 500 box, and mysql, a gig of ram, and some 10k scsi disks, for a measly $3000 total cost with linux, I could flood a T3 with that.. (unfortunately, I dont HAVE a T3... but you get the point).
-Justin
Like Howard Stern, has Slashdot become totally fascinated with itself? Can we expect to hear rob begging the geek of the day guest to show his transparent pilot case off to the web camera, whilst Hemos giggles insanely in the background?
...
(makes mental picture)
Argh!
I think they should just run a linux phone in problem line..
Rob: "Hi this is Rob and you're On the Air"
Caller: "Hi Rob, first, I would just like to say, I really dig your show.."
Rob: "Cool thanks, icq9 your friends to recommend us, now whats your problem?"
Caller: "Well, Rob, See, this is kinda embarassing..."
Rob: "Go ahead, you are amongst friends here"
Caller: "Ok... the problem is, i cant hack my own sendmail files, but I cant admit it to my friends.. I wanna know, like, is this normal?"
Rob: "Wow what a loser... hey buddy, dont bother us with this stuff, go call up cnet instead.."
*click*
Rob: "You know.. everymorning, as I get up and turn on the ANDOVER NET TV channel, I think to myself, gee isnt ANDOVER NETWORK a cool thing to have piped to your 3dscope, and for only 9.95 world credits a month... I personally couldnt get through the slashdot day without ANDOVER NET, and i am not just being paid to say that, i really mean it.... and now over to hemos for todays regular tip spot on microsoft ASP-2003 programming"