There is growing competition for last-mile connections in the core of the major cities -- well, there is in Vancouver, I have to assume other large cities in Canada and the US are similar. It's easy. A few miles of cabling can serve tens of thousands of workers (and people, if there are condos downtown). It's possible to see a return on investment.
But in the much less dense areas, no company will ever be able to roll out a last mile wired connection. It just costs too much. We've got cable and phone, that's it. That's probably all that we'll ever have in the wired world. I expect to have wireless options, i.e. WiMax, someday.
What's my point? We're years away from having competive last-mile options - two options are not enough for real competition.
Oh, and yes, the fact that the incumbent phone companies built their network under a regulated monopoly for decades doesn't help Bell's case. Maybe we should force the incumbents to split off their old infrastructure and run those independently, like the way we used to split banking from insurance and home mortgages. Ok, that's not likely.
Yes, I was one of those people who spent 30 minutes puzzling over this today. No, I shouldn't have removed ORDB, it's a relatively small network, I've got a thousand other things to worry about.
Mind you, it was made worse because I happened to be testing greylisting this week.
Couldn't ORDB just not assign an address to relays.ordb.org?
Just use a cable lock... isn't it the company's laptop anyway? What more can you expect?
Failing that, get a normal cabinet, and go at it with a drill. It would be kind of fun, actually. Who cares what it looks like, punch the holes in back.
Nanaimo is not too far from here. Well an hour of road time plus a ferry.
My marketing prof. once told us about Nanaimo. It's a "good" size, about 100K people, and it's relatively isolated geographically. Things like radio ads don't "leak in" as much from other cities.
So, many companies have used Nanaimo for market research. IIRC, my prof mentioned McDonalds and P&G. Google doing some test projects there doesn't surprise me at all.
Too bad I just got home. Wish me luck collecting mod points on this post...
You are definitely not paying $200 for Windows. Visit Dell.com and see the $400 entry level workstation (which, despite popular Slashdot opinion, will run Windows generally well - far better than the three year old laptop that I'm typing on now).
Microsoft gets a fraction of that price, IIRC, around $30. No one pays $200 for a retail copy of XP or Vista.
Yes, my current laptop runs Windows, and my next laptop will too. Though, I'll probably opt to spend a bit more to get encrypting file system (EFS) support next time... familiarity is worth it. Plus, now it's trivial to have a free VMWare Server install with Ubuntu, if I'm really stuck for something from Linux.
I guess you've never had the pleasure of passing a work document around a group of say 5 people. Sooner or later someone will mess up and edit the wrong version of the email attachment and suddenly there's a fork. Never mind the fact that it makes the entire group effort a serial process. It's really tough to effectively get multiple people working on the same document at once in "traditional" office software. Though, I'm not actually sure how well Google Docs handles simultaneous edits, I'm sure that eventually it'll work really well.
Group papers suck in desktop software, but that's all we had when I was going through university.
If I was doing something similar today, all the rough text editing or spreadsheet work would be done online, maybe with Google, maybe with another web site. If it mattered, the final "pretty" edits and formatting could be done in something offline. But for many things, I don't think there would be a need. Google Docs can handle most basic document editing just fine.
I agree, Google apps don't have the full feature set of desktop office software. But it is a way better for shared document editing than MS Office. Granted, I've never really seen Sharepoint used to it's best, so maybe that's not entirely true if you have the full MS kit setup.
If you have a group of people who need to work on a simple spreadsheet together to collect data (e.g. mailing addresses), a Google spreadsheet is perfect. Reasonably easy to learn, and excellent maintainability.
For some tasks, online document editors are going to dominate. For a shrinking portion of tasks, the desktop software will rule. Just like the old days, web mail did not exist. Today, for many (most?) people I would only recommend web mail.
Interesting play by Google. For a token cost, there's one less reason to run non-Linux operating systems. Google probably saves enough from not having to buy OSX or Windows licenses in-house to pay for this!
If a few more applications get ported over, switching to Linux will be that much easier. I'll laugh at the irony when Google finances the perfect WINE of MS Office (particularly Outlook).
It's an interesting enemy-of-my-enemy is a friend of mine kind of thing.
What's next? Microsoft releases a free web search engine?:)
No, this was a real offer. They don't care if they "screw" with Yahoo. Yahoo isn't a real threat to Microsoft. The biggest threat to Microsoft is Google. So who in their right mind would mess up Yahoo so that Google slides in and gains another 10% share of search and advertising?
You're right, dedicated graphics cards is what I meant.
Though, integrating mainstream GPU functionality into the CPU core is only a few years away, IMHO. AMD has said about as much with regards to their "Fusion" core plans. Time will tell.
When you can count the number of games that support hardware physics on one hand (actually I made that up, please correct me if I'm wrong), you can be pretty sure that there isn't much volume in the PPU market.
Heck, fewer and fewer PC's come with dedicated GPUs. Integrated video can now handle dual monitor output and HDTV decoding. It's only gamers and graphics designers who need them now.
RAM is tricky, some users need very little, others need a lot (even with the same processor requirements). Plus, there are soooo many transistors that it's cost inefficient to use the top-end manufacturing for bulk jobs like RAM.
GPU's on the other hand are fairly constant in requirements. Once it can handle HDTV, it'll be good for a lot of low and medium end use - more than 90% of users, IMHO.
It's inevitable... when's the last time you bought a Floating Point Processor? Every PC needed to do FP, so it got integrated when technically possible.
Of course gamers and media designers will still be able to get faster add-in boards.
I've met at least a few people in Canada who drove down to the USA to buy an iPhone. They then got it unlocked. And now use it on Rogers, our GSM cellphone carrier - of course, they don't use the data much. But it's still a great phone with WiFi.
I'm sure this happens quite a bit, even in the USA. Not everyone wants to pay $$$ for a monthly plan or wants to be locked in to a multi-year contract.
All the big manufacturers don't really want you to restore from optical drive anymore. Many don't even give restore DVDs, you have to burn your own. I imagine this Shuttle PC would have a recovery partition and a way to boot to it through the BIOS.
Now if the hard drive dies, there's still no problem. It's Linux and I assume it's all OSS - they can post an ISO. Dell can't do that with their Windows distributions. You'll have to find a USB drive, or move the HDD to a separate machine... but that'll be pretty rare. Shuttle can just sell you a preloaded HDD if you're really stuck.
I've had an ancient PC running home server stuff for years. For the operating system, it's SME Server, http://www.smeserver.org/. A Linux distro that does email (and webmail), SMB for file and print, firewall and DNS cache, web and ftp if you're into that.
I think the current machine is a Pentium 166 MMX with 128MB of RAM, the hard drive is too small to hold media, but that could be easily fixed. When routers became cheap, I stopped using it as a firewall and NAT.
That said, I'm planning to replace the box soon and start using a TV Tuner to record some TV shows for the network. The plan is to run the PVR software on Windows, and run the SME Server in a VMWare virtual machine. I might move email to a separate VMWare machine running Scalix - better Outlook support and better webmail.
I'm confident that it'll be fast enough on the cheapest dual-core machine I can find, undervolted if possible.
Along a similar vein, I wrote this web form that uses dig about a year ago when I contemplated buying several domain names. I wanted a tool to minimize the chance of front-running happening to me, which means avoiding WHOIS lookups.
It uses the Linux dig command (man page), which amounts to a DNS lookup, to guess if the domain is registered. It's not bulletproof. There are occasional false-negatives if someone has registered a domain but hasn't set up DNS for it. Someday they'll snoop DNS lookups, but that doesn't seem to be the case just yet - besides DNS lookups don't necessarily go through NSI servers, or do they?
Why should there need to be subsidies for this? Oil is at $100 per barrel. A few years of this expensive oil, plus a couple years of more mass production, and most of this "plan" will happen on it's own.
Solar and wind are much closer to being competitive than even a few years ago. Nuclear power is cool again. And who cares what happens with emissions in the US anyway? The greatest emissions increases are going to be in the world's factory, China.
Find ways to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil fuels and we can forget about this CO2 nonsense and go back to worrying about people starving to death from poverty.
Haha, it's 2.4Ghz. It's a free for all... so, what's the story? The Xbox can spit out all the interference it wants there, within some power envelope.
My WiFi will get wonky once in a while when the neighbours use their microwave. Fortunately, the cordless phone is on the 900Mhz frequency.
The other option, is to get licensed spectrum... but if Microsoft had done that (which is totally unrealistic for the application)... we'd get 10 posts from people saying that "the FCC should be dissolved" because the airwaves are a public resource. Go figure.
Personally, I have to agree with the forced reopening of the reactor. It sounds terrifying, and it's a disgrace that we're in this situation, but the risk is very minimal. The story has been playing in the media here in Canada for a few days now.
This is not a large-scale power generating reactor. It's a relatively small "research" reactor and it is more or less middle
of nowhere.
From what I recall from the news stories, the current hold up is the backup power to the second pump is offline. The backup power to the first pump is online, and only one pump needs to be operating at any one time. The truly disgraceful thing is that the plant has been improperly operating without any proper backup power lines for months and months. The current unexpectedly long shut-down occurred because the improper backup systems were discovered by the regulators during a shorter planned down time.
On the flip side, critical medical scans are being canceled by the thousands across North and South America. You can't point at any specific case, but given the large number of procedures being delayed, I'd bet that someone out there is going to die on a daily basis because a scan is postponed.
"The ability of the V2G car's battery to act like a sponge provides a solution for utilities, which pay millions to generating stations that help balance the grid."
Yeah, it costs millions with whatever system they currently use (I'm guessing shipping the power to neighbouring power grids). How much will configuring tens of thousands of (currently non-existent) electric cars to take and feed the grid cost? How much is fixing all the meters so that they read properly in "generator" mode? Who wants to validate all the electrical systems involved?
To me, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Ship the power next door, that system has worked for decades. Let the guys who have hydro dams handle the spikes and valleys.
The "neat" thing about voice traffic is that it's highly dependent on a steady flow of packets.
I'm going to guess that the latency on the aircraft internet is going to be quite high. If latency is not large enough to make voice unusable, they can randomly slow outbound packets, just enough to make calls unusable. A little extra latency here and there won't hurt web browsing, email, or most other things...
Canada didn't use to have 3 national wireless carriers. It was only a few years ago, that Rogers bought out Fido. A few years prior, Clearnet was purchased by Telus. The consolidation was great for the wireless providers...
Fido* was the price leader. They started billing by the second, unlimited voice plans, etc. Except they didn't make much money (actually they went bankrupt once). When Fido got purchased by Rogers, the competitive pricing pressure was taken off of everyone. Rogers got the best of it, since they became the only choice for those who need GSM (and those international users who end up roaming on Rogers). So prices have stalled, and in many cases edged up.
Naturally, we scream for more competition. I'm sure some company will win the frequencies, but I wouldn't bet on them succeeding.
Networks are bloody expensive to build. And, since Canada's land mass is larger than the US, with only 30M potential customers, it's more expensive to build on a per-capita basis. Granted, you don't need to provide service to the bulk of the unpopulated land, but still, a town in Canada is a whole lot smaller than a town in the USA.
Even today, Telus and Bell share their "home" networks with each other in the West and East respectively to provide national coverage while they complete their build-outs.
So, yay for more competition. Whoever it ends up being, I wish them well, and luck... they'll need it.
* Fido is operated as a distinct brand on the Rogers network, but a lot has changed - lots of nickel and dimeing.
There is literally a 1 page website setup for the company at HyperionPowerGeneration.com.
"Invented at Los Alamos: Patent Pending".
Uh huh. I'm totally looking forward to placing my order.
BTW: I see no mention of hot-tub sizes on the website... though, I didn't read too carefully. They claim to be about 30% cheaper than current liquid moderated reactors.
Slashdot Mirror
There is growing competition for last-mile connections in the core of the major cities -- well, there is in Vancouver, I have to assume other large cities in Canada and the US are similar. It's easy. A few miles of cabling can serve tens of thousands of workers (and people, if there are condos downtown). It's possible to see a return on investment.
But in the much less dense areas, no company will ever be able to roll out a last mile wired connection. It just costs too much. We've got cable and phone, that's it. That's probably all that we'll ever have in the wired world. I expect to have wireless options, i.e. WiMax, someday.
What's my point? We're years away from having competive last-mile options - two options are not enough for real competition.
Oh, and yes, the fact that the incumbent phone companies built their network under a regulated monopoly for decades doesn't help Bell's case. Maybe we should force the incumbents to split off their old infrastructure and run those independently, like the way we used to split banking from insurance and home mortgages. Ok, that's not likely.
ARRGH.
Yes, I was one of those people who spent 30 minutes puzzling over this today. No, I shouldn't have removed ORDB, it's a relatively small network, I've got a thousand other things to worry about.
Mind you, it was made worse because I happened to be testing greylisting this week.
Couldn't ORDB just not assign an address to relays.ordb.org?
Ah well... I guess you get what you pay for.
Like others, this seems like an odd topic.
Just use a cable lock... isn't it the company's laptop anyway? What more can you expect?
Failing that, get a normal cabinet, and go at it with a drill. It would be kind of fun, actually. Who cares what it looks like, punch the holes in back.
The good old coral cache seems to fallen out of favour around Slashdot... but it still works, about as well as it ever did:
http://www.digitalhome.ca.nyud.net:8090/ota/superantenna/
Nanaimo is not too far from here. Well an hour of road time plus a ferry.
My marketing prof. once told us about Nanaimo. It's a "good" size, about 100K people, and it's relatively isolated geographically. Things like radio ads don't "leak in" as much from other cities.
So, many companies have used Nanaimo for market research. IIRC, my prof mentioned McDonalds and P&G. Google doing some test projects there doesn't surprise me at all.
Too bad I just got home. Wish me luck collecting mod points on this post...
You are definitely not paying $200 for Windows. Visit Dell.com and see the $400 entry level workstation (which, despite popular Slashdot opinion, will run Windows generally well - far better than the three year old laptop that I'm typing on now).
Microsoft gets a fraction of that price, IIRC, around $30. No one pays $200 for a retail copy of XP or Vista.
Yes, my current laptop runs Windows, and my next laptop will too. Though, I'll probably opt to spend a bit more to get encrypting file system (EFS) support next time... familiarity is worth it. Plus, now it's trivial to have a free VMWare Server install with Ubuntu, if I'm really stuck for something from Linux.
I guess you've never had the pleasure of passing a work document around a group of say 5 people. Sooner or later someone will mess up and edit the wrong version of the email attachment and suddenly there's a fork. Never mind the fact that it makes the entire group effort a serial process. It's really tough to effectively get multiple people working on the same document at once in "traditional" office software. Though, I'm not actually sure how well Google Docs handles simultaneous edits, I'm sure that eventually it'll work really well.
Group papers suck in desktop software, but that's all we had when I was going through university.
If I was doing something similar today, all the rough text editing or spreadsheet work would be done online, maybe with Google, maybe with another web site. If it mattered, the final "pretty" edits and formatting could be done in something offline. But for many things, I don't think there would be a need. Google Docs can handle most basic document editing just fine.
I agree, Google apps don't have the full feature set of desktop office software. But it is a way better for shared document editing than MS Office. Granted, I've never really seen Sharepoint used to it's best, so maybe that's not entirely true if you have the full MS kit setup.
If you have a group of people who need to work on a simple spreadsheet together to collect data (e.g. mailing addresses), a Google spreadsheet is perfect. Reasonably easy to learn, and excellent maintainability.
For some tasks, online document editors are going to dominate. For a shrinking portion of tasks, the desktop software will rule. Just like the old days, web mail did not exist. Today, for many (most?) people I would only recommend web mail.
Not everyone is a Slashdot level computer user...
Interesting play by Google. For a token cost, there's one less reason to run non-Linux operating systems. Google probably saves enough from not having to buy OSX or Windows licenses in-house to pay for this!
:)
If a few more applications get ported over, switching to Linux will be that much easier. I'll laugh at the irony when Google finances the perfect WINE of MS Office (particularly Outlook).
It's an interesting enemy-of-my-enemy is a friend of mine kind of thing.
What's next? Microsoft releases a free web search engine?
No, this was a real offer. They don't care if they "screw" with Yahoo. Yahoo isn't a real threat to Microsoft. The biggest threat to Microsoft is Google. So who in their right mind would mess up Yahoo so that Google slides in and gains another 10% share of search and advertising?
You're right, dedicated graphics cards is what I meant.
Though, integrating mainstream GPU functionality into the CPU core is only a few years away, IMHO. AMD has said about as much with regards to their "Fusion" core plans. Time will tell.
When you can count the number of games that support hardware physics on one hand (actually I made that up, please correct me if I'm wrong), you can be pretty sure that there isn't much volume in the PPU market.
Heck, fewer and fewer PC's come with dedicated GPUs. Integrated video can now handle dual monitor output and HDTV decoding. It's only gamers and graphics designers who need them now.
RAM is tricky, some users need very little, others need a lot (even with the same processor requirements). Plus, there are soooo many transistors that it's cost inefficient to use the top-end manufacturing for bulk jobs like RAM.
GPU's on the other hand are fairly constant in requirements. Once it can handle HDTV, it'll be good for a lot of low and medium end use - more than 90% of users, IMHO.
It's inevitable... when's the last time you bought a Floating Point Processor? Every PC needed to do FP, so it got integrated when technically possible.
Of course gamers and media designers will still be able to get faster add-in boards.
I've met at least a few people in Canada who drove down to the USA to buy an iPhone. They then got it unlocked. And now use it on Rogers, our GSM cellphone carrier - of course, they don't use the data much. But it's still a great phone with WiFi.
I'm sure this happens quite a bit, even in the USA. Not everyone wants to pay $$$ for a monthly plan or wants to be locked in to a multi-year contract.
All the big manufacturers don't really want you to restore from optical drive anymore. Many don't even give restore DVDs, you have to burn your own. I imagine this Shuttle PC would have a recovery partition and a way to boot to it through the BIOS.
Now if the hard drive dies, there's still no problem. It's Linux and I assume it's all OSS - they can post an ISO. Dell can't do that with their Windows distributions. You'll have to find a USB drive, or move the HDD to a separate machine... but that'll be pretty rare. Shuttle can just sell you a preloaded HDD if you're really stuck.
I've had an ancient PC running home server stuff for years. For the operating system, it's SME Server, http://www.smeserver.org/. A Linux distro that does email (and webmail), SMB for file and print, firewall and DNS cache, web and ftp if you're into that.
I think the current machine is a Pentium 166 MMX with 128MB of RAM, the hard drive is too small to hold media, but that could be easily fixed. When routers became cheap, I stopped using it as a firewall and NAT.
That said, I'm planning to replace the box soon and start using a TV Tuner to record some TV shows for the network. The plan is to run the PVR software on Windows, and run the SME Server in a VMWare virtual machine. I might move email to a separate VMWare machine running Scalix - better Outlook support and better webmail.
I'm confident that it'll be fast enough on the cheapest dual-core machine I can find, undervolted if possible.
Along a similar vein, I wrote this web form that uses dig about a year ago when I contemplated buying several domain names. I wanted a tool to minimize the chance of front-running happening to me, which means avoiding WHOIS lookups.
It uses the Linux dig command (man page), which amounts to a DNS lookup, to guess if the domain is registered. It's not bulletproof. There are occasional false-negatives if someone has registered a domain but hasn't set up DNS for it. Someday they'll snoop DNS lookups, but that doesn't seem to be the case just yet - besides DNS lookups don't necessarily go through NSI servers, or do they?
Why should there need to be subsidies for this? Oil is at $100 per barrel. A few years of this expensive oil, plus a couple years of more mass production, and most of this "plan" will happen on it's own.
Solar and wind are much closer to being competitive than even a few years ago. Nuclear power is cool again. And who cares what happens with emissions in the US anyway? The greatest emissions increases are going to be in the world's factory, China.
Find ways to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil fuels and we can forget about this CO2 nonsense and go back to worrying about people starving to death from poverty.
Haha, it's 2.4Ghz. It's a free for all... so, what's the story? The Xbox can spit out all the interference it wants there, within some power envelope.
My WiFi will get wonky once in a while when the neighbours use their microwave. Fortunately, the cordless phone is on the 900Mhz frequency.
The other option, is to get licensed spectrum... but if Microsoft had done that (which is totally unrealistic for the application)... we'd get 10 posts from people saying that "the FCC should be dissolved" because the airwaves are a public resource. Go figure.
Personally, I have to agree with the forced reopening of the reactor. It sounds terrifying, and it's a disgrace that we're in this situation, but the risk is very minimal. The story has been playing in the media here in Canada for a few days now.
This is not a large-scale power generating reactor. It's a relatively small "research" reactor and it is more or less middle of nowhere.
From what I recall from the news stories, the current hold up is the backup power to the second pump is offline. The backup power to the first pump is online, and only one pump needs to be operating at any one time. The truly disgraceful thing is that the plant has been improperly operating without any proper backup power lines for months and months. The current unexpectedly long shut-down occurred because the improper backup systems were discovered by the regulators during a shorter planned down time.
On the flip side, critical medical scans are being canceled by the thousands across North and South America. You can't point at any specific case, but given the large number of procedures being delayed, I'd bet that someone out there is going to die on a daily basis because a scan is postponed.
"The ability of the V2G car's battery to act like a sponge provides a solution for utilities, which pay millions to generating stations that help balance the grid."
Yeah, it costs millions with whatever system they currently use (I'm guessing shipping the power to neighbouring power grids). How much will configuring tens of thousands of (currently non-existent) electric cars to take and feed the grid cost? How much is fixing all the meters so that they read properly in "generator" mode? Who wants to validate all the electrical systems involved?
To me, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Ship the power next door, that system has worked for decades. Let the guys who have hydro dams handle the spikes and valleys.
The "neat" thing about voice traffic is that it's highly dependent on a steady flow of packets.
I'm going to guess that the latency on the aircraft internet is going to be quite high. If latency is not large enough to make voice unusable, they can randomly slow outbound packets, just enough to make calls unusable. A little extra latency here and there won't hurt web browsing, email, or most other things...
Hmm... point taken. I guess I've always been using the land + water area amount, where Canada is indeed #2 in the world, behind Russia.
A lot of the Canadian territory up north is mostly water...
Canada didn't use to have 3 national wireless carriers. It was only a few years ago, that Rogers bought out Fido. A few years prior, Clearnet was purchased by Telus. The consolidation was great for the wireless providers...
Fido* was the price leader. They started billing by the second, unlimited voice plans, etc. Except they didn't make much money (actually they went bankrupt once). When Fido got purchased by Rogers, the competitive pricing pressure was taken off of everyone. Rogers got the best of it, since they became the only choice for those who need GSM (and those international users who end up roaming on Rogers). So prices have stalled, and in many cases edged up.
Naturally, we scream for more competition. I'm sure some company will win the frequencies, but I wouldn't bet on them succeeding.
Networks are bloody expensive to build. And, since Canada's land mass is larger than the US, with only 30M potential customers, it's more expensive to build on a per-capita basis. Granted, you don't need to provide service to the bulk of the unpopulated land, but still, a town in Canada is a whole lot smaller than a town in the USA.
Even today, Telus and Bell share their "home" networks with each other in the West and East respectively to provide national coverage while they complete their build-outs.
So, yay for more competition. Whoever it ends up being, I wish them well, and luck... they'll need it.
* Fido is operated as a distinct brand on the Rogers network, but a lot has changed - lots of nickel and dimeing.
There is literally a 1 page website setup for the company at HyperionPowerGeneration.com.
"Invented at Los Alamos: Patent Pending".
Uh huh. I'm totally looking forward to placing my order.
BTW: I see no mention of hot-tub sizes on the website... though, I didn't read too carefully. They claim to be about 30% cheaper than current liquid moderated reactors.