I once heard it comes originally from a Yiddish term for a person who makes furniture with an axe. B-)
My own preferred definition of (computer {software}) hacker has been "A person who is able to achieve exceptional (programming) results using skill, tenacity, and intelligence, if necessary substituting those personal characteristics for lack of (software development) tools."
Similarly for computer hardware hacker. Also for some other skill sets (typically engineering-related) that don't already have some other definition for "hack(er)". (I.e. not writing, golf,...)
Just as being a (sea) pirate implied being a sailor and being a cattle rustler implied being a cowboy (but not the other way around), being a (computer) cracker once implied being a (computer) hacker (but not the other way around). That changed with the distribution of cracking tools which allowed the unskilled to play. So now a small subset of crackers are also hackers (just as the crackers among hackers has always been a subset).
The dollar has been dropping, yes, but we hardly have the hyperinflation that actually results in worthless currency. The Duetchmark in the 1920's was worthless. The dollar is just dropping a bit compared to other currencies.
The Deutschmark was never worthless. It just diluted at an accelerating rate - eventually getting to the point that checkout counters listened to the radio to get the current adjustment and people fought for places in line so they could buy food before the next step.
You think it's dropped now? Just wait until the IRS starts mailing out those "economic stimulus payments": Printed paper diluting the value of every dollar-denominated asset, to fool people into spending the value of the money they'd decided to save (like in their retirement accounts).
Or perhaps the value of somebody ELSE's savings, since the payments aren't necessarily in proportion to the payee's holdings - thus resulting in some wealth-transfer as well.
No, the government really isn't afraid of terrorists, but making sure the citizens are allows them to expand their budgets, clamp down harder on John Q Citizen's movements and basic Constitutionally-recognised freedoms,...
Too true.
If the government were REALLY afraid of terrorists the southern (and northern) borders would look like the old Berlin Wall.
If they REALLY want to go after internet sources of funding for terrorists they should start with the spam / phishing/identity theft gangs.
That's, what? Hundreds of billions a year in direct theft and extortion of people's and companies' hard-earned cash, plus more multibillions in anti-malware products, damage to data, equipment, and network infrastructure, costs to overbuild the net to handle the bogus traffic, lost revenue due to DDoSing, etc. Not to mention the ongoing construction and debugging of a technology that can be used for even more nefarious purposes - including espionage and sabotage.
I'll take the glasses that let me see computer annotations on the world around me, while leaving everybody else unaware of them.
I don't recall the name of the company. But they're being made in Israel. For a couple years the FAA has working with prototypes for air traffic ground controllers - so they can look out of the tower at the planes and see the annotations - and images of the planes and runways themselves in a solid fog.
The lens has near-planes (slightly curved) of refractive-index discontinuities and works by multiple total-internal-reflection until the light hits the desired discontinuity and is deflected. The projectors are in a thickening in the frame at each side.
A projector for a flat surface in that size is easy. The high-tech is creating the 3-D screen in midair and only illuminating the selected parts.
(Holograms won't do it: You can only see the floating image if the hologram, a mirror giving you an image of the hologram, or a diffuser that is already encoded into the hologram, is in the line-of-sight to every pixel.)
What happened to typical slashdot April Fool's Day?
The Department of Homeland Security realized that April Fools jokes make it possible for terrorists to stage attacks and have the response delayed and disrupted by people who think the reports are pranks. So April Fools pranks are now considered to be acts of terrorism.
The historic worst offenders are already at Gitmo (due to a preemptive strike). Teams are rounding up additional pranksters as they commit their terrorim and cleaning out their postings from forums such as Slashdot.
If you've already pulled something today and haven't met them yet, it was either too small to be worth their immediate attention or they haven't found out and traced you down yet.
With a feedback video camera to detect the "screen"'s location, position, and shape-distortion, plus some serious processor power, you could texture map any costume (or lack thereof) on a moving body (with sufficiently light-colored clothing). Cancel out the existing clothing's coloration, too.
Now THERE's an April Fool prank - that could get you fired, sued, and/or jailed.
The individual transistors may be approaching a limit that, in theory, could be passed by other materials. But silicon still has plenty of potential.
For starters we're still using a primarily two-dimensional structure on the surface. There's no reason you couldn't build your structures in three dimensions through a cube of the material. (Yes power and cooling become issues, but they're soluble.)
Going truly 3-D again shortens the wiring, leading to another speed increase with a given speed of components. More importantly, it enables tightly packaging an enormous number of components - and potentially a diversity of them for specialized tasks. This is applicable to problems that can be divided and distributed.
Power can be drastically reduced by switching to asynchronous, or partially asynchronous, designs. Alternatively it can also be drastically reduced in a synchronous design by using a looped/crossed-over transmission line clocking system, which recycles most of the energy of each clock pulse into the next, so the supply only has to make up losses rather than throw it away and start from scratch every cycle. Either requires upgrading design tools (to handle data-as-clock or massively-multiple clock phases respectively). But power saving aids capability and speed increase.
That's just two places it can advance. There are no doubt many more. (Especially once we're down to the place-every-atom level, where quantum-weirdness becomes more of a tool, less something you have to fight as in variable-cluster-of-atoms designs.)
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization.
And the first time you do a web search on any subject that came up with your friends you see multiple points of view. Follow them up and you'll see arguments. On some of them they'll convince you. Then you'll convince your friends - or switch circles of friends.
Meanwhile the Old Media (formerly the Mainstream Media) is strongly polarizing - presenting you with a very limited number of viewpoints on most subjects, leaving you to drop into one of the opinion slots in their story templates. Then it's "Let's You and Him Fight." with somebody in a different template slot.
So, no, social networks on the open Internet are far less polarizing than forming your opinions based on the Old Media.
Sure, that works for popular news. That's why CNN, foxnews, digg, reddit, etc all have news on Britney Spears or Brad Pitt. If the news gets that critical mass of people, it will make the rounds.
In the Old Media? Hardly.
Case in point: Ron Paul.
His grass roots campaign - composed mainly of the Internet-connected, because the MSM totally suppressed news of him - ended up with a head count comparable to the US troop strength in Iraq and broke all previous fundraising records via individual contributions averaging about $100.
If the operators of the corporate media don't want a story to get out they're fully capable of sitting on it no matter HOW popular is becomes by word-of-mouth - or word-of-net.
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view.
As compared to the Old Media? ROTFL!
The former mainstream media systematically suppress the news they don't want you to hear or they don't want to cover. (They were PARTICULARLY blatant during the presidential primary season, where they systematically avoided covering certain candidates: Ron Paul, Alan Keys, and Dennis Kucinich to name just three where they were particularly blatant.) If you compare the coverage on the Internet and that on the Old Media you'd think they were operating in two different universes.
In particular: Ron Paul was VERY popular with the people who actually found out about him. His single-digit showing in most of the primaries, despite his all-time-record fundraising (virtually all from individuals contributing an average of about $100) is a measure of how small a fraction of the population is currently getting a significant portion of their news from the Internet.
On the internet your social contacts might bring something to your attention and/or help you filter it. But if your circle of friends is missing some point of view, the first time you do a search on it you'll find plenty of opposing voices - and other circles of potential friends if you happen to change your mind about the issue.
This will continue unless/until the operators of all the major search engines become as politically corrupted as the operators of the Old Media, figure out how to work their bias into their search engine results, yet still manage to avoid being replaced by more open competitors. (Or some world-wide Stalinist-style regime manages to censor the whole internet.)
So, no. For the forseable future switching to internet news and social sites from Old/Mainstream Media will increase, not decrease, exposure to opposing points of view.
Slight problem for slashdot readers and others...Who don't have any friends.
That's just because they're newbies and haven't used the friends/foes tool yet.
See the FAQ on friends. Or hit the little clear button on postings by other slashdot users whose opinions you like and trust, and would like to see more of / have highlighted (or whose postings you DON'T like and don't want to see any more).
And if you put the corner on twisted by a third of a turn, then scramble it up again, you have an insoluble puzzle to leave lying about to drive people nuts. B-)
Mainframes are about three things:
- Reliability
- Availability
- Capacity (including compatibility across upgrades) in that order.
Reliability is the absolute must. Dropping pennies through the cracks adds up to big bucks in lost coinage and much BIGGER bucks in legal trouble from the people whose pennies got lost. Consistently total the bill wrong and you face class action suits, too.
Mainframes don't make errors, period. The internal components DO make errors, and the mainframe fixes the errors so the result is correct (though it may be delayed by milliseconds when a bit drops internally). They do this a number of ways: Error detection/bus-logging/stop-fix-restart, redundant components and voting, redundant components and comparison (see "error detection..."), error correcting codes to name just a few.
Redundant collections of less reliable machines don't cut it. Businesses solve the "distributed update problem" by avoiding it: Transactions are processed on a single, ultra-reliable, server. The data is backed up (offsite and often dynamically via a network) so that, in case of disaster, they can switch to ANOTHER single, ultra-reliable, server. But spreading the work over multiple flakey machines is not an option. (They know how to do it with people. But they don't want to go there with computers when there's a better option.)
- Availability is right up there.
Drop the real-time logging of phone calls for a reboot and a baby-bell's ong-distance phone lines are free. That's in the million bux and hour range. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an outage in the trading support systems of a major brokerage.
- Capacity must continue to be "enough" as a business grows.
Throttling a growing business because the IT department can't crunch the extra transactions kills shareholder value. And this includes compatibility: Thrashing the applications and inducing delays and bugs, just to port to a machine of the necessary capacity, also isn't an option. A business-critical legacy application has to "just work" if the system must be upgraded for higher capacity. The source may be long lost and the programmer long dead, so even recompilation (or reASSEMBLY) may not be practical options. (Even if the source code ISN'T lost it may be in a language that's no longer supported and/or with no experts available.)
===
Makers of non-mainframe computers and their components and operating systems still haven't "gotten it" on these issues. The hardware designs are almost totally composed of "single points of failure" and flake out from time to time. OS crashes are a way of life (especially with the "dominant desktop OS" - which is what business decision-makers see).
The chip makers blew it with things like Weitek's floating-point accelerator that didn't do denormals and Intel's Pentium bug. (Those little numbers are VERY important for things like interest calculations.) In particular, Intel could have recovered from that by immediately replacing the chips with the fixed ones and giving business customers priority. Instead they fought it and claimed that the errors didn't matter for anybody but the users of "high-end games". GAMES? What does THAT look like to a guy in a business suit in the executive suite of a fortune 500 corporation?
Imperfect computers can work for the desktops that support the imperfect people who handle the day-to-day operation. The infrastructure is already in place for distributing the load across them and recovering from their errors. And they can work for the core of a network - where protocols can repeat dropped packets and machines can route around failed peers and cables. But like the EDGE of a network (where a customer's lines funnel through a single box, which must have telephone-switch-like reliability), the core of corporations' information processing is already built on and optimized for near-perfectly-operating machines. Despite their cost they're FAR cheaper and less risky than switching to, and running on, something less.
PJ says: "...the bottom line to me is that a process that worked perfectly well when folks all trusted each other falls into chaos when there are allegations of dirty tricks or undue pressure."
But standards operations have ALWAYS been about cutthroat politics and dirty tricks to gain competitive advantage. (For instance: There's stuff in an international protocol standard from the '70s or so that was transparently-crufty weirdness a US delegation proposed to get the French to back down from something they didn't like - but the French instead embraced the cruft wholeheartedly and the US negotiators couldn't admit it was just a bluff...)
The ideal is to standardize exactly what you're already marketing (or are about to release), so you continue to sell it and become (or become more) the dominant and entrenched market player while everybody else is delayed while they make changes - and become incompatible with their previous prototypes or products. This is a massive advantage even if you DO have to give up your patent locks on the technology to make it into a standard.
What's different about this is just the scale and the ability of the multibillion-dollar gorilla to afford tactics that weren't cost-effective enough to be common.
You forget that in the free market the customer is at the mercy of the company.
And vice-versa.
The company can do whatever it wants in order to save money; the customer is the enemy and must be prevented from doing the same, lest it lead to the company losing money.
In a free market contract is king. The company can NOT violate its contracts and get away with it. The contracts are enforcible in whatever legal system applies. Further (even in a market-anarchy) those who violate contracts are likely to be the subject of published warnings from the contract partners they shafted.
He claimed... latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent
Sounds like they didn't configure it right, on one or both of two issues.
First: WiMAX has a frame rate that is an exact multiple of the 8000 frames/second rate of the telephone networks' digital carriers (and A/D converters). While this was obviously intended to allow it to carry telephone TDM signals and their associated timing (which normally isn't an issue for IP transport), WiMAX has its own, unrelated, timing issues that mandate the base stations be synchronized - to each other and preferably to a telephony network clock or a GPS-derived clock.
The base stations assign timeslots to each remote. They measure the propagation characteristics and (depending on the sort of base station) may adjust signal strengths, modulation rates, and/or antenna aim for the associated timeslot to obtain good communication, and may pick a timeslot that is currently "quiet" on the antenna / antenna-aim appropriate for the remote in question.
The problem is that multiple subscriber stations between two base stations (perhaps not adjacent ones) that are reusing a channel may both be "audible" to both base stations - perhaps due to using non-directinal antennas, perhaps due to reflections. If the base stations assign overlapping timeslots to their peered subscriber stations they will interfere. So the base stations try to assign their subscriber stations "quiet" slots - i.e. slots that don't already have interference from another nearby base station's remotes.
Now that's just fine if the base stations' clocks are synchronized. The timeslots hold a constant relationship to each other and a quiet slot stays quiet. But if the base stations are not synchronized their relative framing drifts. So one base station's subscriber's slot may drift into that of another base station's subscriber, resulting in a drop of the link quality. Then the base stations readjust the configuration - perhaps moving the subscriber stations to new slots. But these do the same thing. Over and over. Result: Links keep flaking out and control traffic is massive.
With the base stations synchronized and the subscriber stations carrying VoIP or other fixed-rate stream traffic, the stations will tend to hold on to quiet slots that march along with the stratum-III timing regularity of telephone carriers.
The second Quality of Service issue is packet priority. The routers at both the subscriber and base stations should be identifying the VoIP (or other fixed-bandwidth streaming) flow and giving its packets priority over other traffic on the link. That way the (limited and constant bandwidth) voice packets can take the preallocated slots every time while any additional variable traffic waits for the necessary additional slot allocation. If this is not done, other traffic (such as file transfers and web browsing) will keep "stealing" the time slots out from under the time-critical VoIP / streaming packets, resulting in long and variable latencies - horrendous jitter. If it IS done (and the link is stable due to the base-station timing synchronization), the VoIP flows will have jitter characteristics virtually identical to those of telephony TDM networks.
(This, by the way, is why "network neutrality" can't be reduced to "treat all packets the same" if you want to share the same IP network between streaming services such as video and VoIP and best-effort services such as file transfers and browsing.)
It first existed before canned sendmail configurations from vendors were common, when mail bounced from site to site much like Internet packets from router to router (rather than straight over the net to the target's Mail Transfer Agent), and most sites hacked up their own MTA configurations. A significant number of system administrators (especially at big companies and universities) got the bright idea that their users were likely to follow the manual too closely and send mail to "user@node.com". So they'd hotwire their MTA config such that mail to "@node.com" would bounce the mail with a friendly note to the user.
Of course that massively disrupted mail to node.com. So the sysadmin, from time to time, had to hunt down another "helpful" site's mail admin and educate him.
He also set up a "user"(@node.com) account and used the "vacation" program to send the "helpful letter", thus providing the service for the entire net. Vacation saves the incoming mail, too. It turns out the "problem" was essentially non-existent. "user@node.com" only got one or two mails per month - at least until some idiots used "user" and "node.com" as the default fields in their mailing list signup pages... And then the spammers got hold of it...
Slashdot Mirror
I once heard it comes originally from a Yiddish term for a person who makes furniture with an axe. B-)
...)
My own preferred definition of (computer {software}) hacker has been "A person who is able to achieve exceptional (programming) results using skill, tenacity, and intelligence, if necessary substituting those personal characteristics for lack of (software development) tools."
Similarly for computer hardware hacker. Also for some other skill sets (typically engineering-related) that don't already have some other definition for "hack(er)". (I.e. not writing, golf,
Just as being a (sea) pirate implied being a sailor and being a cattle rustler implied being a cowboy (but not the other way around), being a (computer) cracker once implied being a (computer) hacker (but not the other way around). That changed with the distribution of cracking tools which allowed the unskilled to play. So now a small subset of crackers are also hackers (just as the crackers among hackers has always been a subset).
I typed a LOT different when I broke my finger and had the hand in a brace. B-(
The dollar has been dropping, yes, but we hardly have the hyperinflation that actually results in worthless currency. The Duetchmark in the 1920's was worthless. The dollar is just dropping a bit compared to other currencies.
The Deutschmark was never worthless. It just diluted at an accelerating rate - eventually getting to the point that checkout counters listened to the radio to get the current adjustment and people fought for places in line so they could buy food before the next step.
You think it's dropped now? Just wait until the IRS starts mailing out those "economic stimulus payments": Printed paper diluting the value of every dollar-denominated asset, to fool people into spending the value of the money they'd decided to save (like in their retirement accounts).
Or perhaps the value of somebody ELSE's savings, since the payments aren't necessarily in proportion to the payee's holdings - thus resulting in some wealth-transfer as well.
No, the government really isn't afraid of terrorists, but making sure the citizens are allows them to expand their budgets, clamp down harder on John Q Citizen's movements and basic Constitutionally-recognised freedoms, ...
Too true.
If the government were REALLY afraid of terrorists the southern (and northern) borders would look like the old Berlin Wall.
If they REALLY want to go after internet sources of funding for terrorists they should start with the spam / phishing /identity theft gangs.
That's, what? Hundreds of billions a year in direct theft and extortion of people's and companies' hard-earned cash, plus more multibillions in anti-malware products, damage to data, equipment, and network infrastructure, costs to overbuild the net to handle the bogus traffic, lost revenue due to DDoSing, etc. Not to mention the ongoing construction and debugging of a technology that can be used for even more nefarious purposes - including espionage and sabotage.
I'll take the glasses that let me see computer annotations on the world around me, while leaving everybody else unaware of them.
I don't recall the name of the company. But they're being made in Israel. For a couple years the FAA has working with prototypes for air traffic ground controllers - so they can look out of the tower at the planes and see the annotations - and images of the planes and runways themselves in a solid fog.
The lens has near-planes (slightly curved) of refractive-index discontinuities and works by multiple total-internal-reflection until the light hits the desired discontinuity and is deflected. The projectors are in a thickening in the frame at each side.
A projector for a flat surface in that size is easy. The high-tech is creating the 3-D screen in midair and only illuminating the selected parts.
(Holograms won't do it: You can only see the floating image if the hologram, a mirror giving you an image of the hologram, or a diffuser that is already encoded into the hologram, is in the line-of-sight to every pixel.)
What happened to typical slashdot April Fool's Day?
The Department of Homeland Security realized that April Fools jokes make it possible for terrorists to stage attacks and have the response delayed and disrupted by people who think the reports are pranks. So April Fools pranks are now considered to be acts of terrorism.
The historic worst offenders are already at Gitmo (due to a preemptive strike). Teams are rounding up additional pranksters as they commit their terrorim and cleaning out their postings from forums such as Slashdot.
If you've already pulled something today and haven't met them yet, it was either too small to be worth their immediate attention or they haven't found out and traced you down yet.
With a feedback video camera to detect the "screen"'s location, position, and shape-distortion, plus some serious processor power, you could texture map any costume (or lack thereof) on a moving body (with sufficiently light-colored clothing). Cancel out the existing clothing's coloration, too.
Now THERE's an April Fool prank - that could get you fired, sued, and/or jailed.
How many mini projectors will have to "be comming soon" to get the editors to stop posting these stories?
As many as are hyped until one of them actually comes to market at an affordable price.
More integrated into the OS!1!!!
More integrated into the interwebs!1!
May I be the first to say... Eww.
I seem to recall Microsoft losing an antitrust suit over this very issue.
IMHO this is a big step backward. I like my OS and applications to be compartmented. It helps with both security and portability across platforms.
The individual transistors may be approaching a limit that, in theory, could be passed by other materials. But silicon still has plenty of potential.
For starters we're still using a primarily two-dimensional structure on the surface. There's no reason you couldn't build your structures in three dimensions through a cube of the material. (Yes power and cooling become issues, but they're soluble.)
Going truly 3-D again shortens the wiring, leading to another speed increase with a given speed of components. More importantly, it enables tightly packaging an enormous number of components - and potentially a diversity of them for specialized tasks. This is applicable to problems that can be divided and distributed.
Power can be drastically reduced by switching to asynchronous, or partially asynchronous, designs. Alternatively it can also be drastically reduced in a synchronous design by using a looped/crossed-over transmission line clocking system, which recycles most of the energy of each clock pulse into the next, so the supply only has to make up losses rather than throw it away and start from scratch every cycle. Either requires upgrading design tools (to handle data-as-clock or massively-multiple clock phases respectively). But power saving aids capability and speed increase.
That's just two places it can advance. There are no doubt many more. (Especially once we're down to the place-every-atom level, where quantum-weirdness becomes more of a tool, less something you have to fight as in variable-cluster-of-atoms designs.)
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization.
And the first time you do a web search on any subject that came up with your friends you see multiple points of view. Follow them up and you'll see arguments. On some of them they'll convince you. Then you'll convince your friends - or switch circles of friends.
Meanwhile the Old Media (formerly the Mainstream Media) is strongly polarizing - presenting you with a very limited number of viewpoints on most subjects, leaving you to drop into one of the opinion slots in their story templates. Then it's "Let's You and Him Fight." with somebody in a different template slot.
So, no, social networks on the open Internet are far less polarizing than forming your opinions based on the Old Media.
Sure, that works for popular news. That's why CNN, foxnews, digg, reddit, etc all have news on Britney Spears or Brad Pitt. If the news gets that critical mass of people, it will make the rounds.
In the Old Media? Hardly.
Case in point: Ron Paul.
His grass roots campaign - composed mainly of the Internet-connected, because the MSM totally suppressed news of him - ended up with a head count comparable to the US troop strength in Iraq and broke all previous fundraising records via individual contributions averaging about $100.
If the operators of the corporate media don't want a story to get out they're fully capable of sitting on it no matter HOW popular is becomes by word-of-mouth - or word-of-net.
... is a little kid who's had ALL these ADVENTURES! B-)
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view.
As compared to the Old Media? ROTFL!
The former mainstream media systematically suppress the news they don't want you to hear or they don't want to cover. (They were PARTICULARLY blatant during the presidential primary season, where they systematically avoided covering certain candidates: Ron Paul, Alan Keys, and Dennis Kucinich to name just three where they were particularly blatant.) If you compare the coverage on the Internet and that on the Old Media you'd think they were operating in two different universes.
In particular: Ron Paul was VERY popular with the people who actually found out about him. His single-digit showing in most of the primaries, despite his all-time-record fundraising (virtually all from individuals contributing an average of about $100) is a measure of how small a fraction of the population is currently getting a significant portion of their news from the Internet.
On the internet your social contacts might bring something to your attention and/or help you filter it. But if your circle of friends is missing some point of view, the first time you do a search on it you'll find plenty of opposing voices - and other circles of potential friends if you happen to change your mind about the issue.
This will continue unless/until the operators of all the major search engines become as politically corrupted as the operators of the Old Media, figure out how to work their bias into their search engine results, yet still manage to avoid being replaced by more open competitors. (Or some world-wide Stalinist-style regime manages to censor the whole internet.)
So, no. For the forseable future switching to internet news and social sites from Old/Mainstream Media will increase, not decrease, exposure to opposing points of view.
Here's the FAQ on friends.
Slight problem for slashdot readers and others...Who don't have any friends.
That's just because they're newbies and haven't used the friends/foes tool yet.
See the FAQ on friends. Or hit the little clear button on postings by other slashdot users whose opinions you like and trust, and would like to see more of / have highlighted (or whose postings you DON'T like and don't want to see any more).
And if you put the corner on twisted by a third of a turn, then scramble it up again, you have an insoluble puzzle to leave lying about to drive people nuts. B-)
That wouldn't have been key labs or hal, would it?
Mainframes are about three things:
- Reliability
- Availability
- Capacity (including compatibility across upgrades)
in that order.
Reliability is the absolute must. Dropping pennies through the cracks adds up to big bucks in lost coinage and much BIGGER bucks in legal trouble from the people whose pennies got lost. Consistently total the bill wrong and you face class action suits, too.
Mainframes don't make errors, period. The internal components DO make errors, and the mainframe fixes the errors so the result is correct (though it may be delayed by milliseconds when a bit drops internally). They do this a number of ways: Error detection/bus-logging/stop-fix-restart, redundant components and voting, redundant components and comparison (see "error detection..."), error correcting codes to name just a few.
Redundant collections of less reliable machines don't cut it. Businesses solve the "distributed update problem" by avoiding it: Transactions are processed on a single, ultra-reliable, server. The data is backed up (offsite and often dynamically via a network) so that, in case of disaster, they can switch to ANOTHER single, ultra-reliable, server. But spreading the work over multiple flakey machines is not an option. (They know how to do it with people. But they don't want to go there with computers when there's a better option.)
- Availability is right up there.
Drop the real-time logging of phone calls for a reboot and a baby-bell's ong-distance phone lines are free. That's in the million bux and hour range. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an outage in the trading support systems of a major brokerage.
- Capacity must continue to be "enough" as a business grows.
Throttling a growing business because the IT department can't crunch the extra transactions kills shareholder value. And this includes compatibility: Thrashing the applications and inducing delays and bugs, just to port to a machine of the necessary capacity, also isn't an option. A business-critical legacy application has to "just work" if the system must be upgraded for higher capacity. The source may be long lost and the programmer long dead, so even recompilation (or reASSEMBLY) may not be practical options. (Even if the source code ISN'T lost it may be in a language that's no longer supported and/or with no experts available.)
===
Makers of non-mainframe computers and their components and operating systems still haven't "gotten it" on these issues. The hardware designs are almost totally composed of "single points of failure" and flake out from time to time. OS crashes are a way of life (especially with the "dominant desktop OS" - which is what business decision-makers see).
The chip makers blew it with things like Weitek's floating-point accelerator that didn't do denormals and Intel's Pentium bug. (Those little numbers are VERY important for things like interest calculations.) In particular, Intel could have recovered from that by immediately replacing the chips with the fixed ones and giving business customers priority. Instead they fought it and claimed that the errors didn't matter for anybody but the users of "high-end games". GAMES? What does THAT look like to a guy in a business suit in the executive suite of a fortune 500 corporation?
Imperfect computers can work for the desktops that support the imperfect people who handle the day-to-day operation. The infrastructure is already in place for distributing the load across them and recovering from their errors. And they can work for the core of a network - where protocols can repeat dropped packets and machines can route around failed peers and cables. But like the EDGE of a network (where a customer's lines funnel through a single box, which must have telephone-switch-like reliability), the core of corporations' information processing is already built on and optimized for near-perfectly-operating machines. Despite their cost they're FAR cheaper and less risky than switching to, and running on, something less.
PJ says: "...the bottom line to me is that a process that worked perfectly well when folks all trusted each other falls into chaos when there are allegations of dirty tricks or undue pressure."
But standards operations have ALWAYS been about cutthroat politics and dirty tricks to gain competitive advantage. (For instance: There's stuff in an international protocol standard from the '70s or so that was transparently-crufty weirdness a US delegation proposed to get the French to back down from something they didn't like - but the French instead embraced the cruft wholeheartedly and the US negotiators couldn't admit it was just a bluff...)
The ideal is to standardize exactly what you're already marketing (or are about to release), so you continue to sell it and become (or become more) the dominant and entrenched market player while everybody else is delayed while they make changes - and become incompatible with their previous prototypes or products. This is a massive advantage even if you DO have to give up your patent locks on the technology to make it into a standard.
What's different about this is just the scale and the ability of the multibillion-dollar gorilla to afford tactics that weren't cost-effective enough to be common.
You forget that in the free market the customer is at the mercy of the company.
And vice-versa.
The company can do whatever it wants in order to save money; the customer is the enemy and must be prevented from doing the same, lest it lead to the company losing money.
In a free market contract is king. The company can NOT violate its contracts and get away with it. The contracts are enforcible in whatever legal system applies. Further (even in a market-anarchy) those who violate contracts are likely to be the subject of published warnings from the contract partners they shafted.
Which is exactly what we see here.
He claimed ... latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent
Sounds like they didn't configure it right, on one or both of two issues.
First: WiMAX has a frame rate that is an exact multiple of the 8000 frames/second rate of the telephone networks' digital carriers (and A/D converters). While this was obviously intended to allow it to carry telephone TDM signals and their associated timing (which normally isn't an issue for IP transport), WiMAX has its own, unrelated, timing issues that mandate the base stations be synchronized - to each other and preferably to a telephony network clock or a GPS-derived clock.
The base stations assign timeslots to each remote. They measure the propagation characteristics and (depending on the sort of base station) may adjust signal strengths, modulation rates, and/or antenna aim for the associated timeslot to obtain good communication, and may pick a timeslot that is currently "quiet" on the antenna / antenna-aim appropriate for the remote in question.
The problem is that multiple subscriber stations between two base stations (perhaps not adjacent ones) that are reusing a channel may both be "audible" to both base stations - perhaps due to using non-directinal antennas, perhaps due to reflections. If the base stations assign overlapping timeslots to their peered subscriber stations they will interfere. So the base stations try to assign their subscriber stations "quiet" slots - i.e. slots that don't already have interference from another nearby base station's remotes.
Now that's just fine if the base stations' clocks are synchronized. The timeslots hold a constant relationship to each other and a quiet slot stays quiet. But if the base stations are not synchronized their relative framing drifts. So one base station's subscriber's slot may drift into that of another base station's subscriber, resulting in a drop of the link quality. Then the base stations readjust the configuration - perhaps moving the subscriber stations to new slots. But these do the same thing. Over and over. Result: Links keep flaking out and control traffic is massive.
With the base stations synchronized and the subscriber stations carrying VoIP or other fixed-rate stream traffic, the stations will tend to hold on to quiet slots that march along with the stratum-III timing regularity of telephone carriers.
The second Quality of Service issue is packet priority. The routers at both the subscriber and base stations should be identifying the VoIP (or other fixed-bandwidth streaming) flow and giving its packets priority over other traffic on the link. That way the (limited and constant bandwidth) voice packets can take the preallocated slots every time while any additional variable traffic waits for the necessary additional slot allocation. If this is not done, other traffic (such as file transfers and web browsing) will keep "stealing" the time slots out from under the time-critical VoIP / streaming packets, resulting in long and variable latencies - horrendous jitter. If it IS done (and the link is stable due to the base-station timing synchronization), the VoIP flows will have jitter characteristics virtually identical to those of telephony TDM networks.
(This, by the way, is why "network neutrality" can't be reduced to "treat all packets the same" if you want to share the same IP network between streaming services such as video and VoIP and best-effort services such as file transfers and browsing.)
Node.com had a number of similar problems.
It first existed before canned sendmail configurations from vendors were common, when mail bounced from site to site much like Internet packets from router to router (rather than straight over the net to the target's Mail Transfer Agent), and most sites hacked up their own MTA configurations. A significant number of system administrators (especially at big companies and universities) got the bright idea that their users were likely to follow the manual too closely and send mail to "user@node.com". So they'd hotwire their MTA config such that mail to "@node.com" would bounce the mail with a friendly note to the user.
Of course that massively disrupted mail to node.com. So the sysadmin, from time to time, had to hunt down another "helpful" site's mail admin and educate him.
He also set up a "user"(@node.com) account and used the "vacation" program to send the "helpful letter", thus providing the service for the entire net. Vacation saves the incoming mail, too. It turns out the "problem" was essentially non-existent. "user@node.com" only got one or two mails per month - at least until some idiots used "user" and "node.com" as the default fields in their mailing list signup pages... And then the spammers got hold of it...