XORP isn't the same as Cisco... XORP is software (or will be), Cisco provides quite a few extras [...]
But you're missing the main point.
Yes, there's more to Cisco than the router software. But the router software is THE BIG THING that ENABLES the rest.
If anybody else wants to get into the router business at a commercial level they have to come up with carrier-grade routing software comparable to what Cisco has evolved over the years. That's a HUGE effort. (Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of router startups that failed to accomplish it.) Worse yet: Parts of it are a Black Art, requiring Occult Knowlege.
A case in point is BGP. The protocol itself is defined in the standard. But a working implementation does NOT obviously follow from it. BGP has negative feedback, delay, gain, and non-linearity, which means that if you don't do something about it you've created an oscillator.
Cisco did a workaround. If you don't do a working workaround that is compatible with Cisco's, not only does your router not work right, but peering it with other backbone routers starts a route-flapping mess that makes its neighborhood also not work right, literally "breaking the internet".
At the moment there may be as many as four routing software suites that have BGP implementations trusted by the big providers: Cisco, Juniper, Redback (just starting to prove itself), and maybe Huawei. Juniper and Redback wrote their own routing suites - using engineering teams with experience at Cisco. They did this with dotcom-boom financing that isn't likely to be repeated in the near future. (Redback alone burned half a BILLION investment dollars, much of it on their softwre development.) As for Huawei, some people believe they just cloned Cisco's software when they cloned their hardware.
If you can't do as well, you don't get to play.
XORP is an open-source project trying to do as well - replacing the dotcom venture capital with academic research funding and an army of volunteers. Once it gets solid enough, it can serve as an exemplar for manufacturers, who (under it's BSD-style licence) can then use it verbatim, port it as necessary to their own hardware, or just look at it to see what the right answers are while writing their own stuff.
XORP is the daemons and their environment (where most of the complexity is), talking to the forwarding engine proper (where things must be fast but are simpler) through an API. With the engine abstracted you can put XORP on a glue layer over your native IP stack, on a software router like MIT's CLICK, or on custom firmware in special-purpose packet processor chips. The rest of XORP doesn't care.
With this software in place, there's still the matter of building carrier-class hardware, tuning the software to it, getting it certified, and providing support. But those are NOT black arts - just a bunch of work. (And ATCA may render the "build the carrier-class hardware" part into "assemble carrier-class commodity components" in about a year.)
So XORP, once/if it becomes sufficiently robust, will drastically lower the barriers to entry into this market.
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device [with all these other carrier-class bells and whistles]
It's on its way now. It's called "Advanced Telecommunications Computation Archetecture" (ATCA).
It's a set of standards for exactly that sort of device: Form factors and connectors for the line and supervisory cards. Backplane design rules. Carrier and Mezzanine card form factors. Heat dissipation handling. Etc.
Backplane have:
- Redundant power.
- A pair of supervisory card slots.
- A (variable) number of line card/mezzanine carrier card slots.
- Interconnections:
- Two single-ended copper ethernet stars for basic control.
- Two switched stars for high-speed control/packet/TDM traffic (see below).
- A mesh for really high-bandwidth card-to-card linkage.
- Interconnects between selected slots for multi-card devices.
The switched stars are, by preference, Advanced Switching (AS), a compatible upgrade of PCI Express (using the same serial physical-layer signal transport) with improvements - most significantly that it's LOGICALLY a mesh though PHYSICALLY a star/tree. It tunnels PCI Express and several other bus protocols (and the switch chips can recognize when a PCI Express card has been inserted and be the tunnel entrance). But the interconnectinos can also be native PCI Express or copper 10G Ethernet.
Prototype devices are available now (mostly 10G E th, because the PCI Ex chips are just coming out and the AS chips are due about Q2 '05). Expect to see the prices start dropping toward commodity levels in about a year.
It does seem highly likely that we will see commoditization of the router market. It makes more sense to provide a chassis that takes full-length PCI cards than to require special cards which use a PCI interface anyway. PCI-E is the logical choice since it provides (potentially) more bandwidth than even PCI-X and you could use a wonky form factor if you wanted to, for example blade-type cards that have their connector on the back instead of the bottom.
Commodity hardware is already on its way, driven by Intel. It's called the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Archetecture (ATCA).
Actually, the summary says that the 22W LEDs produce twice the light of a 100W incandescent. So it's more that slightly better than compact fluorescent.
Right - I missed that.
OK, better than two-to-one improvement on power versus compact fluorescent. Still 8 1/3 to 1 better on number of replacements for a given lifetime (though you're now replacing different sized "bulbs").
If the color spectrum produced is good and the price comes within sanity we have a winner.
The text of HR 5382 isn't up on the congressional web site yet. But the text of HR 3752 is. And it seems to split the life of a vehicle design into a permitted experimental phase and a type-approved commercial phase.
The kicker is that the experimental phase doesn't allow carrying a payload for a fee, while the experimental permit dies upon the granting of the license for type-approved commercial operation.
Net result is that the entire development period MUST be financed off capital investment - including the jumping through ALL regulatory hoops to get the final approval for commercial use of a production design. You have to get to airline-level regulated convince-the-bureaucrats safety and red-tape levels before you collect your first cent (except for prize money, of course).
IMHO this is NOT a bill to encourage general private space development by entrepreneurs.
Instead it's a bill to give the current aircraft manufacturers a lock on spacecraft design and production, protecting them from competition by upstarts.
Vonage should just charge SBC a "termination" fee if their customers call vonage.
Yes, that's a nice idea.
But to do that they have to define themselves as a local phone carrier. Then they've waived their status as an unregulated internet service.
They get hit with the 911 tax, state and federal phone regulations, and have to pay the full interconnect charge rather than this "bargain rate" SBC is offereing on a "voluntary" basis.
THAT call same. Tarrifs. Last mile. WiMAX.
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SBC's VoIP End Run
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· Score: 5, Informative
How is this going to affect Skype? I just now started using it under Mac OS X to call from my Mac in the United States to my sister's landline in Turkey and it ROCKS.
That call should be the same - unless/until the local phone company in Turkey does something similar or your VoIP carrier pays for the local cost jump by raising its overall rates.
As I understand what happened:
1) Several decades back, independent long-distance companies were formed (starting with MCI). They took advantage of court decisions and FCC regulations intended to allow attaching telephones and modems manufactured by other companies, rather than renting phones and modems from the phone company at high rates. But they used the equipment they attached to bypass the phone company's long-distance network, selling long-distance at a lower rate. To use it you had to call their local site, enter your user code, and dial the distant number (much like "phonecards" today).
Of course the tellco didn't like this - and the alternative companies wanted to let you opt to use them as your "dial 1" long-distance provider. This went to court, and ended up with a new "tarrif" (set of standards, fees, and requirement that the tellco provide the service) for connecting long distance service to a local tellco.
2) Then the big Bell tellco was broken into AT&T and the Baby Bell local companies (and a few other splinters) to settle an antitrust suit. At this point the Baby Bells (and a few legacy non-bell local tellcos) could provide their own long distance WITHIN their area, but not with their neighbors. All long distance companies BETWEEN the BBs had to go through long-distance players (AT&T, Sprint, MCI, etc.) on an even footing at the special rate.
3) After a number of years of bulldozing it, the courts decided the playing field was level enough, and let the Baby Bells start merging and get back into the long distance game.
4) The VoIP companies have apparently started up getting their termination to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phones the same way the early long-distance bypass companies did: Instead of paying the fee for connecting the way long distance companies do, they rented some ordinary phone lines and make their calls on those. This is cheaper. It's also not what was intended by the regulations.
5) The tellcos STILL don't like having their own long-distance service bypassed (and its revenue drained) by an upstart that isn't playing by the rules. The pure long-distance companies couldn't do anything but sue to require the VoIP carriers to connect like other long distance operations and pay that fee. But the local companies didn't like the competition either, and tried to define VoIP companies as phone companies providing local service, thus subjecting them to all the regulations and taxes involved (like the 911 service fee). That finally got settled, just weeks ago. The decisions was "hands off VoIP - the Fed won't regulate 'em and prohibits the states from doing so".
6) Next step would be to try to force them to do their local connect like a long-distance carrier or different local carrier, rather than a local phone customer. (This is actually reasonable. But it might also be slapped down after much expensive fighting.)
So SBC came up with a cute alternaitve: They're making a special new service with a price LOWER than that of connecting as a long-distance carrier but HIGHER than a local phone line. They say it's voluntary, that they're offering the VoIP providers a better deal than they give the traditional long-distance carriers, and that they CAN make this offer because VoIP is an internet service and thus NOT regulated. "We're being good guys!".
But the next step, of course, is to disconnect the local lines, claiming that using them to terminate long-distance service is outside the lines' terms-of-service. Or to tweak the service level actually delivered on those particular lines down to the minimum allowed by the tarrif t
Some buddies are trying to put together a startup. Word from Sand Hill is you won't get capital unless you have an "offshoring strategy", i.e. the bulk of the labor is offshore - preferably India. And that over 95% of the venture capital is going to operations where the bulk of the tech work is outside the US. Your core team can be here. But you need a clear reason why each member is a guy (or gal) in the US rather than a platoon offshore.
Judging by the traffic here in silicon valley, and the number of empty office buildings, the next tech boom is not yet happening. Day job dumped three of its four buildings during the bust and so far only one of 'em has been filled - by a spinout from a VERY venerable company moving to cheaper space.
Judging by the experiences of some of my collegues, there is SOME hiring going on - better than this time last year. But it's not much.
Personal experience: I'm still needed at the "day job" for a while yet. So far only one headhunter has come sniffing by all year. A few years back it was daily.
If the stations are a mile apart -- that puts you a maximum of a HALF-Mile away from any given station.
Right. Divide my oopsie by two.
If it's a 1 mile grid and you're in the exact center, then you've got a 0.707107 mile to any of four stations.
Only if you can fly - or your neighbors don't mind you tromping over their flower beds and roof, or you can walk through the skyscrapers. (And if you can "leap tall buildings in a single bound" you don't need the train. B-) )
Otherwise you're stuck on the streets. Then what matters is "manhattan distance", the sum of the distances along the axes rather than the hypotenuse of the triangle.
Because they intend to install it in a grid pattern rather than a line. They can manage this because of the relatively low price per mile for the rail.
But they're still talking about the stations being a mile apart. Which means an average of a one-mile hike and a max of a two mile hike if your starting location and destination are exactly between stations.
It's twice as expensive per mile to install as a fleet of busses, which can stop every block and cost more per passenger-mile than passenger cars (even if you DON'T include the extra security costs to put police on them to deal with gang activity).
You still need roads everywhere, anyhow, to deliver heavy goods (like building material and furniture). And a car can go anywhere there's a decent road (and an SUV where the roads are truly rotten and many places where they're just dirt paths or nonexistent), rather than being limited to the pricey rails.
So while it's a very pretty utopian dream, it's not as practical as the current, heavily-debugged, individualized technology.
... the ultra-slim CRT developed by Samsung SDI has a depth of 417mm and weighs 44kg,
417 mm = 16.4". Somehow nearly a foot and a half doesn't seem "thin" to me.
44 kg = 97 lb. Ninety Seven Pounds!?
I think I'll wait a bit.
= = = = =
What I'd like to know is what happened to field emission displays. Yes, they'd be heavy, too. But they'd be really thin, (like LCDs) distortioin free, and (like CRTs) bright.
If it's erosion of the field-emission cathode by ions I have already thought of a possible fix for that (which wouldn't have been as effective when they first tried it due to lack of modern materials.)
Re:What's the point?
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Internet Hunting
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship.
No.
That's what city people who never actually hunted think.
Hunting is NOT a game.
Hunting is about skill, and patience, and responsibility, and consequences.
Hunting is about handling deadly tools safely.
Hunting is about working alone, or in a group, to achieve a difficult goal.
Hunting is about coming to a personal understanding that you, and your family, are also animals, that every day you live because something else - plant or animal - died to feed you.
Hunting is about the lengths you will go to keep your family fed and healthy.
Hunting is about knowing, deep in your gut, that the animal you hunt will hurt and die. And hunting (for humans) is about honoring that animal, by making its death for your benefit as fast and painless as possible, an easier death than it would suffer from the teeth and claws of some other peredator, from disease, from accident, or from starvation.
Hunting is about understanding your place in nature:
You are a predator.
You are at the top of the food chain
You are SO effective at what you do that you MUST be careful, lest you wipe out those things you depend on for your own life.
60000 miles = 316,800,000 feet. 316,800,000 feet / 29 feet per minute = 20.77 years
And the first automobile didn't break the sound barrier either - though we now have an experimental model that has, and consumer-grade vehicles routinely cruise FAR faster than those early manufacturers considered.
Ditto trains. Ditto planes. Ditto ships.
Also: As you get farther up you can go faster for a given horsepower. Once you cross synchronous orbit (or when you go back down) you GAIN energy from going farther, and the limit (if you don't want to keep it as velocity) is how fast you can store or dump it.
As I understand it, if you run across a 'possible' infringement and decide to go ahead and then some court deems that it is an infringement, then you knowingly have perpetrated the deed, and the penalty is greater than just simply going ahead and writing the code and letting the chips fall where they may.
That's about what our patent attorneys told me, too. (I was doing hardware at the time, but the advice should apply to software as well.)
Also: If you read a lot of patents (that aren't yet expired) you risk unconsciously learning something and incorporating it later.
So our attorneys advised us not to read other patents in the field.
Single exception: When we WERE sued (Nortel going insolvent and trying to turn their SONET patents into a revenue stream to bail out the lifeboat), THEN we looked at the patents - so we could tell the lawyers whether / how we WEREN'T violating them. This puts them in a better bargaining position:
- If no infringement, no pay. Maybe cross-license for the future while we're still in the same room if we have anything they want.
- If some infringement, pay a small license fee and cross-license. Fee will be 'WAY smaller than if you fight and lose - and either way it will be smaller than if you had read the patents in advance.
The minutes do NOT conclusively prove that Novell owns Unix, only that they believed they did, and were acting WITHOUT malice, but in good faith.
Or at least that the board didn't authorize the sale of any portion of the copyrights.
However the sales contract has words to the effect of Novell retaining copyrights etc. EXCEPT those necessary for SCO to enforce their ownership of the Unix business. And it seems pretty clear that's the hook SCO is hanging their claims on - that they DID get enough of the copyrights to go after Linux.
If I (who ANAL) understand this correctly: If the Novell execs thought the wording didn't pass any copyrights and the SCO execs thought they did, and the words could be interpreted either way, the contract will be interpreted depending on which side proposed the wording - with the runling in favor of the other side's position.
The Novell minutes serve merely as proof that the Novell board didn't authorize the execs negotiating the fine print to hand over any copyrights.
This idemifaction 'issue' seems to be part of the larger FUD campaign against linux.
It's not just FUD but free FUD. They'd have to help defend anyway, because a successful suit against a customer of their products would put their entire customer base in jepoardy and result in an instant migration to another platform and a crash in their sales. (It might also be followed by a suit against their distributors, too.)
As for being FUD, wasn't one of the issues that got settled in the SCO debacle that a user, even of open source that he loaded as source, wasn't liable for damages from the owners of any IP that got improperly included? If so, by promising indemnification they can make people think the legal system will zing them even if it's already decided it won't.
Wi-Fi usually operates at much smaller distances than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna. Cellular operates at much lower speed than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna.
Nope.
Antenna size (beyond a half-wave dipole or a quarter-wave whip above a relatively large ground - such as a handset) doesn't give you any more power. It just lets you direct the power you have more selectively, making your signal stronger in some directions by stealing power from other directions. (When receiving it lets you intercept more approximately in proportion to the area of the antenna plus an imaginary quarter-wavelength "aura" region around it, provided it's coming from the correct direction - expanding the antenna unavoidably makes it directional.)
But "size" is in terms of wavelengths of the frequency in question.
WiFi usually operates at shorter distances - but it uses less efficient modulation and coding schemes. WiMAX can pack more bits per unit of bandwidth and its forward error correction lets you pull them out from much closer to the noise floor. So (at the same frequencies as WiFi - and one of the WiMAX bands is right there) it can go farther or send more bits with a given amount of power.
WiMAX is similarly more efficient than the codings used on most cellphone systems - so again you can go farther for a given bit rate or run a higher bit rate over the same distances for a given unit of power. If you want to send live HDTV you'll still drain your batteries faster than if you want to send voice. But if you're sending voice (or anything with a similar bit rate) you might come out ahead.
A typical WiFi deployment uses omnidirectional antennas at both the transmitter and receiver. With the energy going in all directions from the transmitter and noise picked up from all directions at the receiver. A typical WiMAX or cellphone deployment uses a high-gain directional antenna at the base station, acting as a spotlight rather than a floodlight on transmit, a telescope collecting lots of light from that particular direction on receive. Just as with cellphones (or WiFi with a beam antenna at one end) you can get a good connection over several miles to a small omnidirectional antenna this way.
Just as with cellphones (or WiFi with beam antennas at BOTH ends) you can go still farther if you use large aimed (or electronically "steered") directional antennas at BOTH ends. But you can happily go miles with a directional antenna at the base and a rubber duckie at the subscriber station.
WiFi g is 52 MBps raw, while a 14 MHz WiMAX channel is 70 MBps raw. But WiFi is pure contention while WiMAX uses allocated timeslots (similar to DOCSIS cable TV boxes) so WiMAX makes more efficient use of the spectrum - you don't have to waste power retransmitting because of collisions. WiMAX can operate on licensed bandwidth, too, so you can have a lower noise floor (no microwave ovens, speed-trap radar, cordless phones, or non-system hotspots to compete with) and that means lower transmit power again.
So for distances of a couple miles without obstacles, using directional antennas at the service provider end, a WiMAX enabled laptop with an internal antenna could be running at a battery drain comparable to a similar WiFi setup running at your local coffee shop, airport, or office hotspot.
An algal bloom large enough to make a difference to global carbon levels would need to be massively larger than current naturally occuring blooms. Are you confident that you know what the outcome would be?
Hell, no!
It might turn out to be like importing the bug-eating toads to Austrailia (which didn't do much about the imported bug they wanted it to eat and later made it hard to establish dung beetles to clean up after the imported cattle - until they imported one strong enough to dig its way out through the side of the toad).
I was just pointing out that nuclear fission isn't the ONLY possible solution, not claiming that this one was practical. B-)
WiMAX may require too much power for a light-weight laptop.
I've heard that a lot. But I haven't seen evidence for it yet.
WiMAX can run the link farther - which takes more power. But it also uses a modulation scheme that gets closer to the shannon limit yeilding more bits per watt - which takes less power in the radio. There's a bit more crunch - but crunch per watt has also come down with time.
Yes, if you want to hit a tower mounting an omnidirectional antenna from ten miles away using your laptop, you'll have lower battery life than you would talking to a WiFi access point across the room. But if you want to bounce off the relay on the lamppost down the block - or on your neighbor's roof - or if the base station's smart antenna steers a tight beam onto your house or has a high-gain sector antenna pointed your way - it's a whole 'nother story.
Only a die-hard Star Trek junkie would propose space collectors as a "price-competitive" alternative to any ground based system. The obstacle isn't "eco-fascists" but physics and current (or any foreseeable) technology.
Bull.
This was studied in the '70s. It was a bargan even then. It's even more so now, with the price of surface-based plants higher and space transport lower.
NASA's study to the contrary made a fundamental error: They separately designed a plant, then a launch system to lift the pieces. With no feedback from the launch system effort the plant designer got a few percent extra efficiency by making the turbine rotor enormous. This resulted in a perceived need to build a GIANT booster to lift the turbine - a design cost to be ammortized over a small number of launches since it could lift the rest in a very few shots.
But foregoing that efficiency tweak (unnecessary, since you can just make your collector and radiator a few percent larger when "fuel" is free), means you can use more shots of smaller vehicles, at much smaller per-shot costs. Even with '70s tech it would have been a big win compared to a ground plant.
But NASA was heavily invested in the shuttle (to the point of "losing" the plans for the Saturn V). So there was little ineterest in anything that didn't need to carry those big wings and live crews on every trip.
What aboutWhat about by being more efficient/less wasteful?
[...] 10% of the planets population using 25% of the resources [...]
And the other 90% of the world are increasing their resource consumption just as fast as they can raise their standard of living to do so. So we'd need nearly a ten-to-one efficiency improvement just to keep from losing ground. And that's not taking population increase into account, either.
SUVs and the I'm alright Jack attitude is going to choke our children.
SUVs have their place: It includes farms, ranches, and other non-city places where superhighways and other paved roads aren't available for the whole trip, and/or weather is severe. (For instance: The last 7/10 mile getting to my Nevada house is impassible by anything else for several months of the year.)
The bloom of SUVs in cities ("Mall Terrain Vehicles") is the result of misguided attempts by environmental regulators to force people into vehicles that are TOO small for their cargo/passenger needs, too flimsy for safety in the overcrowded and over-potholed road system, and/or unable to tow a reasonable weight. The CAFE standards eliminated the larger cars that some people need, leaving them with only two options: The off-road truck variants that they couldn't eliminate without destroying the entire rural infrastructure, and the vans that they couldn't eliminate without doing the same to urban commerce.
Of course these are even more wasteful than the vehicles they replaced (large cars, station wagons, etc.). So, as usual, the second-order effects of a regulation designed to solve a problem ended up making it worse.
Banning SUVs won't work. It would just destroy farms, kill people in rural areas when the doctor can't make it in time, make it even harder to fight forest fires. And yelling for "less waste" won't work either. The thing to do is get out of the way and let the market (in the form of higher gas prices) and gentle persuasion do the job.
There are a LOT of SUV drivers who would gladly switch to a less-resource-guzzling vehicle on their next vehicle purchase - IF one were available that would serve their needs.
But when you need to car-pool a little-league team to the field, get to work, the store, and back home through miles of foot-deep mud or yard-deep snow, or haul hay out to the back forty, you have very few options left.
And you're not at all concerned that algal blooms destroy the marine ecosystem? Great idea - destroy the food chain so we can drive SUV's for longer.
Given that there's hardly any food in the food chain in the area in question, such a bloom seems unlikely to be a major issue even if it DOES turn around and do a total dieoff. But it seems more likely that an artificial bloom from nutrient injection will also result in a bloom of the algae-eating plankton and fish, expanding the food chain rather than destroying it.
Algae blooms that result in dieoffs come in several sorts. Two biggies are:
- Intermittent blooms of particular toxic algae that kill fish. Fish are seceptable because blooms of that particular algae are relatively rare, so they haven't had to evolve defenses. The blooms are intermittent because the particular conditions that cause the toxic species to overgrow are rare.
- FRESHwater blooms from nutrient injection (i.e. phosphates) overpopulate the limited oxygen resources, suffocate themselves at night, die, and rot, suffocating the fish as well.
But oceanic nutrient injection blooms (typically around upwellings) tend to be chock full of fish chowing down on the algae, plankton, and smaller fish. They're the meat market of the oceans.
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XORP isn't the same as Cisco... XORP is software (or will be), Cisco provides quite a few extras [...]
But you're missing the main point.
Yes, there's more to Cisco than the router software. But the router software is THE BIG THING that ENABLES the rest.
If anybody else wants to get into the router business at a commercial level they have to come up with carrier-grade routing software comparable to what Cisco has evolved over the years. That's a HUGE effort. (Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of router startups that failed to accomplish it.) Worse yet: Parts of it are a Black Art, requiring Occult Knowlege.
A case in point is BGP. The protocol itself is defined in the standard. But a working implementation does NOT obviously follow from it. BGP has negative feedback, delay, gain, and non-linearity, which means that if you don't do something about it you've created an oscillator.
Cisco did a workaround. If you don't do a working workaround that is compatible with Cisco's, not only does your router not work right, but peering it with other backbone routers starts a route-flapping mess that makes its neighborhood also not work right, literally "breaking the internet".
At the moment there may be as many as four routing software suites that have BGP implementations trusted by the big providers: Cisco, Juniper, Redback (just starting to prove itself), and maybe Huawei. Juniper and Redback wrote their own routing suites - using engineering teams with experience at Cisco. They did this with dotcom-boom financing that isn't likely to be repeated in the near future. (Redback alone burned half a BILLION investment dollars, much of it on their softwre development.) As for Huawei, some people believe they just cloned Cisco's software when they cloned their hardware.
If you can't do as well, you don't get to play.
XORP is an open-source project trying to do as well - replacing the dotcom venture capital with academic research funding and an army of volunteers. Once it gets solid enough, it can serve as an exemplar for manufacturers, who (under it's BSD-style licence) can then use it verbatim, port it as necessary to their own hardware, or just look at it to see what the right answers are while writing their own stuff.
XORP is the daemons and their environment (where most of the complexity is), talking to the forwarding engine proper (where things must be fast but are simpler) through an API. With the engine abstracted you can put XORP on a glue layer over your native IP stack, on a software router like MIT's CLICK, or on custom firmware in special-purpose packet processor chips. The rest of XORP doesn't care.
With this software in place, there's still the matter of building carrier-class hardware, tuning the software to it, getting it certified, and providing support. But those are NOT black arts - just a bunch of work. (And ATCA may render the "build the carrier-class hardware" part into "assemble carrier-class commodity components" in about a year.)
So XORP, once/if it becomes sufficiently robust, will drastically lower the barriers to entry into this market.
THAT's why it's a big deal.
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device [with all these other carrier-class bells and whistles]
It's on its way now. It's called "Advanced Telecommunications Computation Archetecture" (ATCA).
It's a set of standards for exactly that sort of device: Form factors and connectors for the line and supervisory cards. Backplane design rules. Carrier and Mezzanine card form factors. Heat dissipation handling. Etc.
Backplane have:
- Redundant power.
- A pair of supervisory card slots.
- A (variable) number of line card/mezzanine carrier card slots.
- Interconnections:
- Two single-ended copper ethernet stars for basic control.
- Two switched stars for high-speed control/packet/TDM traffic (see below).
- A mesh for really high-bandwidth card-to-card linkage.
- Interconnects between selected slots for multi-card devices.
The switched stars are, by preference, Advanced Switching (AS), a compatible upgrade of PCI Express (using the same serial physical-layer signal transport) with improvements - most significantly that it's LOGICALLY a mesh though PHYSICALLY a star/tree. It tunnels PCI Express and several other bus protocols (and the switch chips can recognize when a PCI Express card has been inserted and be the tunnel entrance). But the interconnectinos can also be native PCI Express or copper 10G Ethernet.
Prototype devices are available now (mostly 10G E th, because the PCI Ex chips are just coming out and the AS chips are due about Q2 '05). Expect to see the prices start dropping toward commodity levels in about a year.
It does seem highly likely that we will see commoditization of the router market. It makes more sense to provide a chassis that takes full-length PCI cards than to require special cards which use a PCI interface anyway. PCI-E is the logical choice since it provides (potentially) more bandwidth than even PCI-X and you could use a wonky form factor if you wanted to, for example blade-type cards that have their connector on the back instead of the bottom.
Commodity hardware is already on its way, driven by Intel. It's called the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Archetecture (ATCA).
Actually, the summary says that the 22W LEDs produce twice the light of a 100W incandescent. So it's more that slightly better than compact fluorescent.
Right - I missed that.
OK, better than two-to-one improvement on power versus compact fluorescent. Still 8 1/3 to 1 better on number of replacements for a given lifetime (though you're now replacing different sized "bulbs").
If the color spectrum produced is good and the price comes within sanity we have a winner.
The text of HR 5382 isn't up on the congressional web site yet. But the text of HR 3752 is. And it seems to split the life of a vehicle design into a permitted experimental phase and a type-approved commercial phase.
The kicker is that the experimental phase doesn't allow carrying a payload for a fee, while the experimental permit dies upon the granting of the license for type-approved commercial operation.
Net result is that the entire development period MUST be financed off capital investment - including the jumping through ALL regulatory hoops to get the final approval for commercial use of a production design. You have to get to airline-level regulated convince-the-bureaucrats safety and red-tape levels before you collect your first cent (except for prize money, of course).
IMHO this is NOT a bill to encourage general private space development by entrepreneurs.
Instead it's a bill to give the current aircraft manufacturers a lock on spacecraft design and production, protecting them from competition by upstarts.
How does this compare to...Energy saving bulbs we have today?
Power usage for a given amount of light is slightly better (22 vs 26 watts for a 100 watt equivalent).
Life is a lot better. (50,000 hours vs. 6,000, or about 8 1/3 compact fluorescents to match rated lives with one LED lamp.)
Vonage should just charge SBC a "termination" fee if their customers call vonage.
Yes, that's a nice idea.
But to do that they have to define themselves as a local phone carrier. Then they've waived their status as an unregulated internet service.
They get hit with the 911 tax, state and federal phone regulations, and have to pay the full interconnect charge rather than this "bargain rate" SBC is offereing on a "voluntary" basis.
How is this going to affect Skype? I just now started using it under Mac OS X to call from my Mac in the United States to my sister's landline in Turkey and it ROCKS.
That call should be the same - unless/until the local phone company in Turkey does something similar or your VoIP carrier pays for the local cost jump by raising its overall rates.
As I understand what happened:
1) Several decades back, independent long-distance companies were formed (starting with MCI). They took advantage of court decisions and FCC regulations intended to allow attaching telephones and modems manufactured by other companies, rather than renting phones and modems from the phone company at high rates. But they used the equipment they attached to bypass the phone company's long-distance network, selling long-distance at a lower rate. To use it you had to call their local site, enter your user code, and dial the distant number (much like "phonecards" today).
Of course the tellco didn't like this - and the alternative companies wanted to let you opt to use them as your "dial 1" long-distance provider. This went to court, and ended up with a new "tarrif" (set of standards, fees, and requirement that the tellco provide the service) for connecting long distance service to a local tellco.
2) Then the big Bell tellco was broken into AT&T and the Baby Bell local companies (and a few other splinters) to settle an antitrust suit. At this point the Baby Bells (and a few legacy non-bell local tellcos) could provide their own long distance WITHIN their area, but not with their neighbors. All long distance companies BETWEEN the BBs had to go through long-distance players (AT&T, Sprint, MCI, etc.) on an even footing at the special rate.
3) After a number of years of bulldozing it, the courts decided the playing field was level enough, and let the Baby Bells start merging and get back into the long distance game.
4) The VoIP companies have apparently started up getting their termination to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phones the same way the early long-distance bypass companies did: Instead of paying the fee for connecting the way long distance companies do, they rented some ordinary phone lines and make their calls on those. This is cheaper. It's also not what was intended by the regulations.
5) The tellcos STILL don't like having their own long-distance service bypassed (and its revenue drained) by an upstart that isn't playing by the rules. The pure long-distance companies couldn't do anything but sue to require the VoIP carriers to connect like other long distance operations and pay that fee. But the local companies didn't like the competition either, and tried to define VoIP companies as phone companies providing local service, thus subjecting them to all the regulations and taxes involved (like the 911 service fee). That finally got settled, just weeks ago. The decisions was "hands off VoIP - the Fed won't regulate 'em and prohibits the states from doing so".
6) Next step would be to try to force them to do their local connect like a long-distance carrier or different local carrier, rather than a local phone customer. (This is actually reasonable. But it might also be slapped down after much expensive fighting.)
So SBC came up with a cute alternaitve: They're making a special new service with a price LOWER than that of connecting as a long-distance carrier but HIGHER than a local phone line. They say it's voluntary, that they're offering the VoIP providers a better deal than they give the traditional long-distance carriers, and that they CAN make this offer because VoIP is an internet service and thus NOT regulated. "We're being good guys!".
But the next step, of course, is to disconnect the local lines, claiming that using them to terminate long-distance service is outside the lines' terms-of-service. Or to tweak the service level actually delivered on those particular lines down to the minimum allowed by the tarrif t
Some buddies are trying to put together a startup. Word from Sand Hill is you won't get capital unless you have an "offshoring strategy", i.e. the bulk of the labor is offshore - preferably India. And that over 95% of the venture capital is going to operations where the bulk of the tech work is outside the US. Your core team can be here. But you need a clear reason why each member is a guy (or gal) in the US rather than a platoon offshore.
Judging by the traffic here in silicon valley, and the number of empty office buildings, the next tech boom is not yet happening. Day job dumped three of its four buildings during the bust and so far only one of 'em has been filled - by a spinout from a VERY venerable company moving to cheaper space.
Judging by the experiences of some of my collegues, there is SOME hiring going on - better than this time last year. But it's not much.
Personal experience: I'm still needed at the "day job" for a while yet. So far only one headhunter has come sniffing by all year. A few years back it was daily.
If the stations are a mile apart -- that puts you a maximum of a HALF-Mile away from any given station.
Right. Divide my oopsie by two.
If it's a 1 mile grid and you're in the exact center, then you've got a 0.707107 mile to any of four stations.
Only if you can fly - or your neighbors don't mind you tromping over their flower beds and roof, or you can walk through the skyscrapers. (And if you can "leap tall buildings in a single bound" you don't need the train. B-) )
Otherwise you're stuck on the streets. Then what matters is "manhattan distance", the sum of the distances along the axes rather than the hypotenuse of the triangle.
Because they intend to install it in a grid pattern rather than a line. They can manage this because of the relatively low price per mile for the rail.
But they're still talking about the stations being a mile apart. Which means an average of a one-mile hike and a max of a two mile hike if your starting location and destination are exactly between stations.
It's twice as expensive per mile to install as a fleet of busses, which can stop every block and cost more per passenger-mile than passenger cars (even if you DON'T include the extra security costs to put police on them to deal with gang activity).
You still need roads everywhere, anyhow, to deliver heavy goods (like building material and furniture). And a car can go anywhere there's a decent road (and an SUV where the roads are truly rotten and many places where they're just dirt paths or nonexistent), rather than being limited to the pricey rails.
So while it's a very pretty utopian dream, it's not as practical as the current, heavily-debugged, individualized technology.
... the ultra-slim CRT developed by Samsung SDI has a depth of 417mm and weighs 44kg,
417 mm = 16.4". Somehow nearly a foot and a half doesn't seem "thin" to me.
44 kg = 97 lb. Ninety Seven Pounds!?
I think I'll wait a bit.
= = = = =
What I'd like to know is what happened to field emission displays. Yes, they'd be heavy, too. But they'd be really thin, (like LCDs) distortioin free, and (like CRTs) bright.
If it's erosion of the field-emission cathode by ions I have already thought of a possible fix for that (which wouldn't have been as effective when they first tried it due to lack of modern materials.)
I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship.
No.
That's what city people who never actually hunted think.
Hunting is NOT a game.
Hunting is about skill, and patience, and responsibility, and consequences.
Hunting is about handling deadly tools safely.
Hunting is about working alone, or in a group, to achieve a difficult goal.
Hunting is about coming to a personal understanding that you, and your family, are also animals, that every day you live because something else - plant or animal - died to feed you.
Hunting is about the lengths you will go to keep your family fed and healthy.
Hunting is about knowing, deep in your gut, that the animal you hunt will hurt and die. And hunting (for humans) is about honoring that animal, by making its death for your benefit as fast and painless as possible, an easier death than it would suffer from the teeth and claws of some other peredator, from disease, from accident, or from starvation.
Hunting is about understanding your place in nature:
You are a predator.
You are at the top of the food chain
You are SO effective at what you do that you MUST be careful, lest you wipe out those things you depend on for your own life.
60000 miles = 316,800,000 feet.
316,800,000 feet / 29 feet per minute = 20.77 years
And the first automobile didn't break the sound barrier either - though we now have an experimental model that has, and consumer-grade vehicles routinely cruise FAR faster than those early manufacturers considered.
Ditto trains. Ditto planes. Ditto ships.
Also: As you get farther up you can go faster for a given horsepower. Once you cross synchronous orbit (or when you go back down) you GAIN energy from going farther, and the limit (if you don't want to keep it as velocity) is how fast you can store or dump it.
As I understand it, if you run across a 'possible' infringement and decide to go ahead and then some court deems that it is an infringement, then you knowingly have perpetrated the deed, and the penalty is greater than just simply going ahead and writing the code and letting the chips fall where they may.
That's about what our patent attorneys told me, too. (I was doing hardware at the time, but the advice should apply to software as well.)
Also: If you read a lot of patents (that aren't yet expired) you risk unconsciously learning something and incorporating it later.
So our attorneys advised us not to read other patents in the field.
Single exception: When we WERE sued (Nortel going insolvent and trying to turn their SONET patents into a revenue stream to bail out the lifeboat), THEN we looked at the patents - so we could tell the lawyers whether / how we WEREN'T violating them. This puts them in a better bargaining position:
- If no infringement, no pay. Maybe cross-license for the future while we're still in the same room if we have anything they want.
- If some infringement, pay a small license fee and cross-license. Fee will be 'WAY smaller than if you fight and lose - and either way it will be smaller than if you had read the patents in advance.
The minutes do NOT conclusively prove that Novell owns Unix, only that they believed they did, and were acting WITHOUT malice, but in good faith.
Or at least that the board didn't authorize the sale of any portion of the copyrights.
However the sales contract has words to the effect of Novell retaining copyrights etc. EXCEPT those necessary for SCO to enforce their ownership of the Unix business. And it seems pretty clear that's the hook SCO is hanging their claims on - that they DID get enough of the copyrights to go after Linux.
If I (who ANAL) understand this correctly: If the Novell execs thought the wording didn't pass any copyrights and the SCO execs thought they did, and the words could be interpreted either way, the contract will be interpreted depending on which side proposed the wording - with the runling in favor of the other side's position.
The Novell minutes serve merely as proof that the Novell board didn't authorize the execs negotiating the fine print to hand over any copyrights.
This idemifaction 'issue' seems to be part of the larger FUD campaign against linux.
It's not just FUD but free FUD. They'd have to help defend anyway, because a successful suit against a customer of their products would put their entire customer base in jepoardy and result in an instant migration to another platform and a crash in their sales. (It might also be followed by a suit against their distributors, too.)
As for being FUD, wasn't one of the issues that got settled in the SCO debacle that a user, even of open source that he loaded as source, wasn't liable for damages from the owners of any IP that got improperly included? If so, by promising indemnification they can make people think the legal system will zing them even if it's already decided it won't.
WiFi g is 52 MBps raw,
Typo: 54 Mbps.
Wi-Fi usually operates at much smaller distances than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna. Cellular operates at much lower speed than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna.
Nope.
Antenna size (beyond a half-wave dipole or a quarter-wave whip above a relatively large ground - such as a handset) doesn't give you any more power. It just lets you direct the power you have more selectively, making your signal stronger in some directions by stealing power from other directions. (When receiving it lets you intercept more approximately in proportion to the area of the antenna plus an imaginary quarter-wavelength "aura" region around it, provided it's coming from the correct direction - expanding the antenna unavoidably makes it directional.)
But "size" is in terms of wavelengths of the frequency in question.
WiFi usually operates at shorter distances - but it uses less efficient modulation and coding schemes. WiMAX can pack more bits per unit of bandwidth and its forward error correction lets you pull them out from much closer to the noise floor. So (at the same frequencies as WiFi - and one of the WiMAX bands is right there) it can go farther or send more bits with a given amount of power.
WiMAX is similarly more efficient than the codings used on most cellphone systems - so again you can go farther for a given bit rate or run a higher bit rate over the same distances for a given unit of power. If you want to send live HDTV you'll still drain your batteries faster than if you want to send voice. But if you're sending voice (or anything with a similar bit rate) you might come out ahead.
A typical WiFi deployment uses omnidirectional antennas at both the transmitter and receiver. With the energy going in all directions from the transmitter and noise picked up from all directions at the receiver. A typical WiMAX or cellphone deployment uses a high-gain directional antenna at the base station, acting as a spotlight rather than a floodlight on transmit, a telescope collecting lots of light from that particular direction on receive. Just as with cellphones (or WiFi with a beam antenna at one end) you can get a good connection over several miles to a small omnidirectional antenna this way.
Just as with cellphones (or WiFi with beam antennas at BOTH ends) you can go still farther if you use large aimed (or electronically "steered") directional antennas at BOTH ends. But you can happily go miles with a directional antenna at the base and a rubber duckie at the subscriber station.
WiFi g is 52 MBps raw, while a 14 MHz WiMAX channel is 70 MBps raw. But WiFi is pure contention while WiMAX uses allocated timeslots (similar to DOCSIS cable TV boxes) so WiMAX makes more efficient use of the spectrum - you don't have to waste power retransmitting because of collisions. WiMAX can operate on licensed bandwidth, too, so you can have a lower noise floor (no microwave ovens, speed-trap radar, cordless phones, or non-system hotspots to compete with) and that means lower transmit power again.
So for distances of a couple miles without obstacles, using directional antennas at the service provider end, a WiMAX enabled laptop with an internal antenna could be running at a battery drain comparable to a similar WiFi setup running at your local coffee shop, airport, or office hotspot.
An algal bloom large enough to make a difference to global carbon levels would need to be massively larger than current naturally occuring blooms. Are you confident that you know what the outcome would be?
Hell, no!
It might turn out to be like importing the bug-eating toads to Austrailia (which didn't do much about the imported bug they wanted it to eat and later made it hard to establish dung beetles to clean up after the imported cattle - until they imported one strong enough to dig its way out through the side of the toad).
I was just pointing out that nuclear fission isn't the ONLY possible solution, not claiming that this one was practical. B-)
WiMAX may require too much power for a light-weight laptop.
I've heard that a lot. But I haven't seen evidence for it yet.
WiMAX can run the link farther - which takes more power. But it also uses a modulation scheme that gets closer to the shannon limit yeilding more bits per watt - which takes less power in the radio. There's a bit more crunch - but crunch per watt has also come down with time.
Yes, if you want to hit a tower mounting an omnidirectional antenna from ten miles away using your laptop, you'll have lower battery life than you would talking to a WiFi access point across the room. But if you want to bounce off the relay on the lamppost down the block - or on your neighbor's roof - or if the base station's smart antenna steers a tight beam onto your house or has a high-gain sector antenna pointed your way - it's a whole 'nother story.
For WiMAX you need a relatively large, outdoor antenna that is pointing towards the tower.
If that were true you'd need the same for your cellular phone - and your WiFi card.
An outdoor antenna pointed toward a tower is more efficient. But in the 2-11 GHz low-bands used by the SCa, OFDM, and OFDMA PHYs it's NOT necessary.
Only a die-hard Star Trek junkie would propose space collectors as a "price-competitive" alternative to any ground based system. The obstacle isn't "eco-fascists" but physics and current (or any foreseeable) technology.
Bull.
This was studied in the '70s. It was a bargan even then. It's even more so now, with the price of surface-based plants higher and space transport lower.
NASA's study to the contrary made a fundamental error: They separately designed a plant, then a launch system to lift the pieces. With no feedback from the launch system effort the plant designer got a few percent extra efficiency by making the turbine rotor enormous. This resulted in a perceived need to build a GIANT booster to lift the turbine - a design cost to be ammortized over a small number of launches since it could lift the rest in a very few shots.
But foregoing that efficiency tweak (unnecessary, since you can just make your collector and radiator a few percent larger when "fuel" is free), means you can use more shots of smaller vehicles, at much smaller per-shot costs. Even with '70s tech it would have been a big win compared to a ground plant.
But NASA was heavily invested in the shuttle (to the point of "losing" the plans for the Saturn V). So there was little ineterest in anything that didn't need to carry those big wings and live crews on every trip.
What aboutWhat about by being more efficient/less wasteful?
[...] 10% of the planets population using 25% of the resources [...]
And the other 90% of the world are increasing their resource consumption just as fast as they can raise their standard of living to do so. So we'd need nearly a ten-to-one efficiency improvement just to keep from losing ground. And that's not taking population increase into account, either.
SUVs and the I'm alright Jack attitude is going to choke our children.
SUVs have their place: It includes farms, ranches, and other non-city places where superhighways and other paved roads aren't available for the whole trip, and/or weather is severe. (For instance: The last 7/10 mile getting to my Nevada house is impassible by anything else for several months of the year.)
The bloom of SUVs in cities ("Mall Terrain Vehicles") is the result of misguided attempts by environmental regulators to force people into vehicles that are TOO small for their cargo/passenger needs, too flimsy for safety in the overcrowded and over-potholed road system, and/or unable to tow a reasonable weight. The CAFE standards eliminated the larger cars that some people need, leaving them with only two options: The off-road truck variants that they couldn't eliminate without destroying the entire rural infrastructure, and the vans that they couldn't eliminate without doing the same to urban commerce.
Of course these are even more wasteful than the vehicles they replaced (large cars, station wagons, etc.). So, as usual, the second-order effects of a regulation designed to solve a problem ended up making it worse.
Banning SUVs won't work. It would just destroy farms, kill people in rural areas when the doctor can't make it in time, make it even harder to fight forest fires. And yelling for "less waste" won't work either. The thing to do is get out of the way and let the market (in the form of higher gas prices) and gentle persuasion do the job.
There are a LOT of SUV drivers who would gladly switch to a less-resource-guzzling vehicle on their next vehicle purchase - IF one were available that would serve their needs.
But when you need to car-pool a little-league team to the field, get to work, the store, and back home through miles of foot-deep mud or yard-deep snow, or haul hay out to the back forty, you have very few options left.
And you're not at all concerned that algal blooms destroy the marine ecosystem? Great idea - destroy the food chain so we can drive SUV's for longer.
Given that there's hardly any food in the food chain in the area in question, such a bloom seems unlikely to be a major issue even if it DOES turn around and do a total dieoff. But it seems more likely that an artificial bloom from nutrient injection will also result in a bloom of the algae-eating plankton and fish, expanding the food chain rather than destroying it.
Algae blooms that result in dieoffs come in several sorts. Two biggies are:
- Intermittent blooms of particular toxic algae that kill fish. Fish are seceptable because blooms of that particular algae are relatively rare, so they haven't had to evolve defenses. The blooms are intermittent because the particular conditions that cause the toxic species to overgrow are rare.
- FRESHwater blooms from nutrient injection (i.e. phosphates) overpopulate the limited oxygen resources, suffocate themselves at night, die, and rot, suffocating the fish as well.
But oceanic nutrient injection blooms (typically around upwellings) tend to be chock full of fish chowing down on the algae, plankton, and smaller fish. They're the meat market of the oceans.