Yep, for me it was pretty much Paul Simon, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, & Bruce Springsteen (in that order) until I had a job & the dosh to buy my own records.
Then I discovered Rush (as you can see from my website that hasn't been significantly updated in a decade or so...
Got some links to back up that statement? Netbooting OS X over Airport with WPA keys?
Firewire requires 12V; battery on this is only 7.4V.
I imagine there's a voltage converter in there already, like in my Powerbook that has a powered firewire port on it... BTW, I said "DV-sized" for a reason; 6-pin firewire is pretty meaty as peripheral connectors go, which is why they removed it from the iPod after the 1st generation. The unpowered 4-pin Firewire connector present on most DV cams (aka i.Link in Sony land) is really tiny (smaller even than mini USB), and the TI chip that usually runs it costs about $5 (qty 1k).
On a high(er) end laptop like this I see it as the only glaring omission, even in the ultraportable minimalist meme that the MBA targets. I imagine the dialogue went something like this:
"Hey, all our expensive laptops have Firewire on them"
"But our connector's way too big"
"What about the 4-pin version?"
"Doesn't Sony have a brand consciousness build around that connector?"
"Yeah, and it already starts with the letter "I". Screw it, USB2 is good enough."
...which is really too damn bad. I would have much rather seen a mini-USB2 port and 4-pin Firewire than the standard-sized USB port, even if it meant using a dongle to connect "normal" USB peripherals, as most of the time I'd be using something that needs a USB cable (hub, drive, camera, card reader, etc) as opposed to a mouse or webcam or whatever that has a hardwired cable. This certainly would not have flown with the marketing guys as it's definately restrictive, but for me personally it's a design sacrifice that makes the difference between me wanting this machine and not. I just have too much Firewire stuff to not have it on any machine I own. Even the lack of wired ethernet port could be pardoned by having Firewire, but without one or the other there's just no real high-speed low-latency non-cpu-intensive way of getting large amounts of data in & out, which puts it in the same category for me as either (A) an EEEPC or (B) my phone (an E61).
BTW, this same conclusion lead me to wait until the 2nd iteration of the toilet-seat iBook was released before getting one, as it had Firewire (as did the Pismo).
Splashtop was mentioned a while back on Slashdot (and I'm far too lazy to look it up). This is basically an enhanced version of LinuxBIOS offered in certain Asus motherboards that allows you to do some basic net-appliance style stuff (web, mail, etc) directly from the BIOS without needing to boot an OS off the hard disk. It boots Really Fast as it loads directly from ROM and doesn't need to fark around with all the normal stuff usually necessary to bring an x86 machine live from disk.
Here's a review that goes into more detail, including lots of tasty pictures of using the mobo with no external storage attached.
It doesn't say anything about reinstalling the OS via Remote Disc: "In the Finder on MacBook Air, under Devices, select the icon that says Remote Disc. Click on the computer you enabled, and then double-click to open the software DVD. Now proceed with the installation just as if you had a built-in optical drive." EFI is nifty and all & I'd love to see it be able to netboot over 802.11n via bonjour, but somehow I don't think it's gonna happen. If you want to reinstall the OS, you're most likely looking at using a USB DVD drive.
On a side note, anyone else think that adding a DV-sized firewire port to this thing would have been trivial? It's just begging to be hooked up to a DV cam & edit video in the field...
Also announced were updates (& a price drop) to the AppleTV, a wireless basestation/NAS companion to Time Machine, and the long-anticipated iPhone SDK. Summary is too summary...
Well, in their infinite wisdom our elected officials eliminated most of our public transportation in the '60s (at the behest of lobbyists of the auto industry), so we don't have to worry about such things happening in the US any more...
On a pair of consumer-grade headphones or consumer stereo, I dare any pair of human ears to tell the difference between playing a CD through iTunes and listening to a 192kbps VBR MP3 or 128kbps VBR AAC through iTunes. On a pair of studio monitors, some folks probably can.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is not the medium. Does lossy encoding affect the sonics of digital music? Yes, by definition it does, but if encoded with a decent encoder at a decent bit rate, the changes are practically imperceptable, and frankly not particularly unpleasant. It may bring up the level of the lower bit or two of the 16-bit dynamic range of CD audio, but on most consumer gear you won't even notice, and if you set your bit-rate to something better than the default and turn on VBR, it's a non-issue.
Now, compare the *extremely* slight sonic effects of even the default lossy compression in most ripping software to what the record labels have been *forcing* engineers to do to their works over the last 10-15 years. The waveform images in the article are not BS. This is not rocket science nor is it 'audiophile juju magic'; when a song looks like a flat blob of audio, it sounds like a flat blob of audio, and there is very little that can be done by the consumer to recover it once it's been sonically destroyed by order of a record-label higher-up.
Where the article (or the sources used in the article) falls flat on it's face is in stating that all this post-production compression has been applied to 'compensate' for a 'perceived lack of volume or dynamic range' in iPods or music encoded using lossy compression.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Apple is potentially litigious enough to draft a legal love note based on such statements. It sounds to me like the folks in the recording industry have a chip on their shoulder as a result of Apple's tactics in securing music for the iTunes store, and are suddenly willing to write off the sonic butchering of recorded works over the last decade as Apple's fault for making portable compressed digital music the de-facto medium of choice for consumers. I'm not one to stand up and defend Apple at every turn, but in this particular case it's absolutely clear-cut.
Pro Tools makes artists sound 'unnaturally perfect'? Equally as libelous and without merit. To name just a few whose albums I own, Geddy Lee and Art Neville have both recorded, produced, and released albums that were done start-to-finish in Pro Tools, and they sound great because no corporate rock production was involved.
Regardless of the reason, the 'loudness war' is real. There's nothing wrong with a certain degree of 'loudness', but the finished product must be 99% free of clipped transients and be loud where the music is loud and quiet where the music is quiet. The crash cymbal must be louder than the 'background' drum track, the bass' finger-popping must stand out, etc. A compromise can certainly be reached where music is 'loud' enough to satisfy both the label and people that actually care what the disc sounds like.
It's time to call a spade a spade. If music sounds like shit in the studio after post-prod compression, it will sound like shit on any playback device, regardless of the medium (including analog vinyl!). If computer-based digital audio workstations, lossy compression, and iPods sound so bad, then what exactly the hell should we be using to record, mix, master, and distribute music in 2008, Mr. Record Man? Ah, I seem to have forgotten: in order to sound good music must only come from from major labels' studios, sold on CD, and listened to on CD players...
I empathize with previous posts indicating that you are designing a computer room that happens to have the IT guy's desk in it, as opposed to an office per se.
If you've only got 4 racks of machines to house, depending on the power density a self-contained solution such as the Liebert MCR (mini computer room) may be of interest (APC also has similar products). These are racks with built-in aircon, UPS, & cable management. While they are certainly not cheap, they may be easier to fit into the budget than dealing with electricians & HVAC contractors to set up your computer room with a custom solution providing equivalent facilities. They are also a better investment as you can take them with you the next time you move, add more as necessary anywhere you want, etc.
Also they are nice racks made to show off das blinkenlightz and should be placed so that they are in view of anyone addressing you while seated at your desk if possible (your desk facing the door of the office with your back to the servers seen through a window etc). This may seem frivolous, but impressive cleanly installed racks of servers staring back at the minions as they address you behind your monitors (leave the lights off in the server room unless you're using them) will certainly add weight to your position in conversations. They will soon learn to fear the BOFH:-).
Network processors are moving towards remedying this. The Gemini SL3518 costs 20 bucks for q1000. This is not just a different ballpark from embedded solutions based on typical processor-based forwarding, it's a whole new league.
At the moment, IOX only runs on CRS-1 or [propoerly upgraded] GSRs, which pretty much excludes anything in their "enterpise" product portfolio.
Fact is, Cisco has been trying to be all things to all people and dominate every sector of the market that involves gear or software beyond the PC for such a long time that they have lost focus in their core business of making routers, where they are accustomed to market domination. Competitors have caught up to the point where anything short of carrier-grade Cisco hardware is either (a) a joke (b) overpriced, or more often (c) both. The carrier stuff at least has [most of] the performance where it counts, but if you're not a first-rate negotiator with a lot of boxes to buy it still prices itsself out of competitivity.
Basically, they just don't seem to get that IOS and their processor-forwarding-based platforms need a major overhaul in order to be capable of providing scalable carrier-grade service on their entry-level platforms.
> True, but the routers and repeaters on the backbone have buses don't they?
The 750hp 2.4L V8 engine in an F1 car produces about 3-4x the amount of power of a production car engine of the same displacement, but you don't see even high-end mfrs like Porsche putting that sort of thing in street cars (for reasons I hope I don't need to explain).
The data plane in high-end routers have custom-designed switch fabrics, which technically are not buses and operate in a different (more scalable) fashion. The wiki article is actually on fibre channel, but the concept is the same. Cost alone precludes use of such components in PC hardware, not to mention various other factors.
That said, PCI Express is pretty damn nice when you start talking performance vs. cost (both per $ and per watt) when the number of high-bandwidth devices on the bus is low, and the existing plethora of 8 & 16 lane devices & motherboards and the potential to scale to 32 lanes (64gbit/sec) in the future mean that the bus in a modern COTS PC is not the bottleneck in high-performance networking on such hardware. The two things that are:
- The ability of the operating system & host processor to handle the load offered by the networking stack at such speeds. Mitigated by techniques such as TOE and interrupt mitigation & hardware polling. Done in hardware, getting cheaper, widespread implementation in common NICs not there or crappy (ahem, Realtek).
- The bandwidth to the user's machine, which is what TFA is about...
Probably because you haven't seen a Juniper T1600. It has 2.5x the per-slot bandwidth of the CRS-1. The Cisco marketing literature may go to 92tbps, but I challenge you to show me a production CRS multishelf system with more than one fabric shelf. Once T1600 modules are available for the TX Matrix the system will provide 6.4tbps in two and a half racks, using far less power than the equivalent real estate worth of CRS hardware (2.4tbps max), at about the same cost. BTW a fully configured 72-rack CRS-1 would require about.8 megawatts of power and belch about 2.5 million BTUs of heat per hour...
Erm, not that that's a biased viewpoint or anything (heh)...
Anyway, IMHO far more important to router scalability is the per-slot and per-watt bandwidth, not how many systems you can chain together (as long as you can chain some reasonably useful number, but I don't see a need for more than 8 chassis in a system). The CRS-1 won't be able to handle 100gE without a system-wide fabric upgrade or double-width cards or something. The T1600 (and for that matter, the Foundry NetIron X series, though not in the same class of capabilities or scalability as the Juniper) will be able to slot in 8 100gE linecards the day they're available.
Why is it that when internet performance is discussed in the media, "solutions" always involve some new box or protocol that's supposed to make your packets move faster?
It's inadequate infrastructure as a result of the political climate. At every level.
The single largest impediment to mass consumer broadband in the West is irresponsible corporate monopolies or borg-like incumbent telecoms making life hell for consumers.
In developing nations, it is often more a case of the aforementioned telecoms making life hell for entire nations e.g. if you are a landlocked African country you have no direct access to undersea cable, so even your national incumbent telecom is screwed. And the hell of it is that various borgcoms owns so much of said undersea cable (and especially the access rights to the landing stations) that even if you are a country with access to the cable, you are still only slightly less screwed. This is why in most places in sub-Saharan Africa, it is still cheaper to send data 72000km through space via a low-bandwidth geostationary satellite link than use the optical undersea cable: there is global competition in the sat bandwidth market.
Even in the case of carrier-carrier interconnects (the "inter" part of the internet), sustained scalability relies upon the mutual goodwill of carriers to upgrade their common interconnects. If one feels the other is taking advantage of the situation, then it's no soup for the other guy. This is only fair in business of course, but it leads to congestion which impacts performance. Video hosting has recently exacerbated this issue significantly.
Something obvious to me seems to escape most folks, so I'll state it again for posterity: the internet is a media delivery system, not unlike TV, newspapers, & magazines. Most of the money going into the "internet economy" from the rest of the world comes from two places: advertisers, and consumers paying for something useful that is also used as an ad-delivery mechanism (i.e. internet access).
Google had this figured out a long time ago. Just because it's technology doesn't mean it's different.
It is in the apparent interest of large/incumbent telecoms to keep the net out of their country/market as long as possible, because net proliferation inherently means competition. This is why most French people didn't know about the net until around '99 or so; France Telecom was making truckloads of cash off the minitel since the early '80s and had no intention of changing that, so they did their best to make life hell for any ISP trying to build a business in the country. Around '99 or 2000 the government realized that they were starting to look pathetic and did something about it. In late 2001, all the FT COs were opened up to competition, and of course FT lost loads of business.
But now France has one of the best deployed broadband infrastructures in the world, and France Telecom (though forced to be competitive) is making far more revenue from triple-play services than they ever made off the minitel, because even though they only have one piece of the pie (albeit a big piece,) the broadband market has exploded, and the net has significantly increased revenue from their mobile phone division as well. If one could have told an FT executive in 1998 that in a few years they'd open up all their POPs to stiff competition but make record revenue delivering IP, voice, and TV via their existing copper and mobile infrastructure, I'd love to see his reaction...
This lesson needs to be taught everywhere that a half-decent internet connection is unavailable, including most of the US.
Evidently you've never been to Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Melbourne, etc. etc. etc. Hell, even Savannah, GA is a great example of a US city that is an excellent place to live and raise a family at modest expense.
Vyatta is not just open-source routing software, they are a company that supports said software. Yes, if you have a support contract you can call them at 4 am if your network breaks.
The term "open-source router" is extremely vague. A router is a physical device that forwards packets at layer 3. In the case of the Vyatta OFR (as wel as Zebra, OpenBGPd, etc), the routing software (roughly, the RIB) is Vyatta, the forwarding software (roughly, the FIB) is the Linux kernel, and the hardware is a PC. In addition to various silicon-based solutions to speed up packet forwarding, software projects such as the Click! modular router exist that replace the routing code in a commonly available kernel (Linux, BSD, etc) that increase packet forwarding performance exponentially. The fact is that the commodity packet forwarding code in off-the-shelf OSs (OSS or commercial) hasn't evolved much in a long time, because it hasn't needed to.
Procket (founded by Tony Li, bought by Cisco for the engineering team) had also developed software forwarding based products that had similar performance without using custom forwarding hardware (1+ mpps on x86). Too bad they will never see the light of day. Of course, their hardware was also capable of 12bpps (yes, billion) in 2003....
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, for me it was pretty much Paul Simon, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, & Bruce Springsteen (in that order) until I had a job & the dosh to buy my own records.
Then I discovered Rush (as you can see from my website that hasn't been significantly updated in a decade or so...
Or a hands-free kit...
> I really didn't like Bill Clinton as president, but compared to Bush, the 90s look like the golden years.
Dude, the '90s were the golden years...
It works.
...which is really too damn bad. I would have much rather seen a mini-USB2 port and 4-pin Firewire than the standard-sized USB port, even if it meant using a dongle to connect "normal" USB peripherals, as most of the time I'd be using something that needs a USB cable (hub, drive, camera, card reader, etc) as opposed to a mouse or webcam or whatever that has a hardwired cable. This certainly would not have flown with the marketing guys as it's definately restrictive, but for me personally it's a design sacrifice that makes the difference between me wanting this machine and not. I just have too much Firewire stuff to not have it on any machine I own. Even the lack of wired ethernet port could be pardoned by having Firewire, but without one or the other there's just no real high-speed low-latency non-cpu-intensive way of getting large amounts of data in & out, which puts it in the same category for me as either (A) an EEEPC or (B) my phone (an E61).
Got some links to back up that statement? Netbooting OS X over Airport with WPA keys?
Firewire requires 12V; battery on this is only 7.4V.
I imagine there's a voltage converter in there already, like in my Powerbook that has a powered firewire port on it... BTW, I said "DV-sized" for a reason; 6-pin firewire is pretty meaty as peripheral connectors go, which is why they removed it from the iPod after the 1st generation. The unpowered 4-pin Firewire connector present on most DV cams (aka i.Link in Sony land) is really tiny (smaller even than mini USB), and the TI chip that usually runs it costs about $5 (qty 1k).
On a high(er) end laptop like this I see it as the only glaring omission, even in the ultraportable minimalist meme that the MBA targets. I imagine the dialogue went something like this:
"Hey, all our expensive laptops have Firewire on them"
"But our connector's way too big"
"What about the 4-pin version?"
"Doesn't Sony have a brand consciousness build around that connector?"
"Yeah, and it already starts with the letter "I". Screw it, USB2 is good enough."
BTW, this same conclusion lead me to wait until the 2nd iteration of the toilet-seat iBook was released before getting one, as it had Firewire (as did the Pismo).
No.
Splashtop was mentioned a while back on Slashdot (and I'm far too lazy to look it up). This is basically an enhanced version of LinuxBIOS offered in certain Asus motherboards that allows you to do some basic net-appliance style stuff (web, mail, etc) directly from the BIOS without needing to boot an OS off the hard disk. It boots Really Fast as it loads directly from ROM and doesn't need to fark around with all the normal stuff usually necessary to bring an x86 machine live from disk.
Here's a review that goes into more detail, including lots of tasty pictures of using the mobo with no external storage attached.
It doesn't say anything about reinstalling the OS via Remote Disc: "In the Finder on MacBook Air, under Devices, select the icon that says Remote Disc. Click on the computer you enabled, and then double-click to open the software DVD. Now proceed with the installation just as if you had a built-in optical drive." EFI is nifty and all & I'd love to see it be able to netboot over 802.11n via bonjour, but somehow I don't think it's gonna happen. If you want to reinstall the OS, you're most likely looking at using a USB DVD drive.
On a side note, anyone else think that adding a DV-sized firewire port to this thing would have been trivial? It's just begging to be hooked up to a DV cam & edit video in the field...
Also announced were updates (& a price drop) to the AppleTV, a wireless basestation/NAS companion to Time Machine, and the long-anticipated iPhone SDK. Summary is too summary...
Well, in their infinite wisdom our elected officials eliminated most of our public transportation in the '60s (at the behest of lobbyists of the auto industry), so we don't have to worry about such things happening in the US any more...
Listen:
On a pair of consumer-grade headphones or consumer stereo, I dare any pair of human ears to tell the difference between playing a CD through iTunes and listening to a 192kbps VBR MP3 or 128kbps VBR AAC through iTunes. On a pair of studio monitors, some folks probably can.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is not the medium. Does lossy encoding affect the sonics of digital music? Yes, by definition it does, but if encoded with a decent encoder at a decent bit rate, the changes are practically imperceptable, and frankly not particularly unpleasant. It may bring up the level of the lower bit or two of the 16-bit dynamic range of CD audio, but on most consumer gear you won't even notice, and if you set your bit-rate to something better than the default and turn on VBR, it's a non-issue.
Now, compare the *extremely* slight sonic effects of even the default lossy compression in most ripping software to what the record labels have been *forcing* engineers to do to their works over the last 10-15 years. The waveform images in the article are not BS. This is not rocket science nor is it 'audiophile juju magic'; when a song looks like a flat blob of audio, it sounds like a flat blob of audio, and there is very little that can be done by the consumer to recover it once it's been sonically destroyed by order of a record-label higher-up.
Where the article (or the sources used in the article) falls flat on it's face is in stating that all this post-production compression has been applied to 'compensate' for a 'perceived lack of volume or dynamic range' in iPods or music encoded using lossy compression.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Apple is potentially litigious enough to draft a legal love note based on such statements. It sounds to me like the folks in the recording industry have a chip on their shoulder as a result of Apple's tactics in securing music for the iTunes store, and are suddenly willing to write off the sonic butchering of recorded works over the last decade as Apple's fault for making portable compressed digital music the de-facto medium of choice for consumers. I'm not one to stand up and defend Apple at every turn, but in this particular case it's absolutely clear-cut.
Pro Tools makes artists sound 'unnaturally perfect'? Equally as libelous and without merit. To name just a few whose albums I own, Geddy Lee and Art Neville have both recorded, produced, and released albums that were done start-to-finish in Pro Tools, and they sound great because no corporate rock production was involved.
Regardless of the reason, the 'loudness war' is real. There's nothing wrong with a certain degree of 'loudness', but the finished product must be 99% free of clipped transients and be loud where the music is loud and quiet where the music is quiet. The crash cymbal must be louder than the 'background' drum track, the bass' finger-popping must stand out, etc. A compromise can certainly be reached where music is 'loud' enough to satisfy both the label and people that actually care what the disc sounds like.
It's time to call a spade a spade. If music sounds like shit in the studio after post-prod compression, it will sound like shit on any playback device, regardless of the medium (including analog vinyl!). If computer-based digital audio workstations, lossy compression, and iPods sound so bad, then what exactly the hell should we be using to record, mix, master, and distribute music in 2008, Mr. Record Man? Ah, I seem to have forgotten: in order to sound good music must only come from from major labels' studios, sold on CD, and listened to on CD players...
I empathize with previous posts indicating that you are designing a computer room that happens to have the IT guy's desk in it, as opposed to an office per se.
:-).
If you've only got 4 racks of machines to house, depending on the power density a self-contained solution such as the Liebert MCR (mini computer room) may be of interest (APC also has similar products). These are racks with built-in aircon, UPS, & cable management. While they are certainly not cheap, they may be easier to fit into the budget than dealing with electricians & HVAC contractors to set up your computer room with a custom solution providing equivalent facilities. They are also a better investment as you can take them with you the next time you move, add more as necessary anywhere you want, etc.
Also they are nice racks made to show off das blinkenlightz and should be placed so that they are in view of anyone addressing you while seated at your desk if possible (your desk facing the door of the office with your back to the servers seen through a window etc). This may seem frivolous, but impressive cleanly installed racks of servers staring back at the minions as they address you behind your monitors (leave the lights off in the server room unless you're using them) will certainly add weight to your position in conversations. They will soon learn to fear the BOFH
Network processors are moving towards remedying this. The Gemini SL3518 costs 20 bucks for q1000. This is not just a different ballpark from embedded solutions based on typical processor-based forwarding, it's a whole new league.
Extreme's CLI resembles IOS like my brother's '74 VW bug resembles a Porsche 993.
At the moment, IOX only runs on CRS-1 or [propoerly upgraded] GSRs, which pretty much excludes anything in their "enterpise" product portfolio.
Fact is, Cisco has been trying to be all things to all people and dominate every sector of the market that involves gear or software beyond the PC for such a long time that they have lost focus in their core business of making routers, where they are accustomed to market domination. Competitors have caught up to the point where anything short of carrier-grade Cisco hardware is either (a) a joke (b) overpriced, or more often (c) both. The carrier stuff at least has [most of] the performance where it counts, but if you're not a first-rate negotiator with a lot of boxes to buy it still prices itsself out of competitivity.
Basically, they just don't seem to get that IOS and their processor-forwarding-based platforms need a major overhaul in order to be capable of providing scalable carrier-grade service on their entry-level platforms.
If you're reading /. and you don't know WTF FTTH is, IMHO it is IYBI to RTFM before a BOFH applies a LART. THBS, IANAL so YMMV.
Actually, in the US the bottleneck is carrier monopolies and their influence on politicians (more at the local level than anywhere else).
> True, but the routers and repeaters on the backbone have buses don't they?
The 750hp 2.4L V8 engine in an F1 car produces about 3-4x the amount of power of a production car engine of the same displacement, but you don't see even high-end mfrs like Porsche putting that sort of thing in street cars (for reasons I hope I don't need to explain).
The data plane in high-end routers have custom-designed switch fabrics, which technically are not buses and operate in a different (more scalable) fashion. The wiki article is actually on fibre channel, but the concept is the same. Cost alone precludes use of such components in PC hardware, not to mention various other factors.
That said, PCI Express is pretty damn nice when you start talking performance vs. cost (both per $ and per watt) when the number of high-bandwidth devices on the bus is low, and the existing plethora of 8 & 16 lane devices & motherboards and the potential to scale to 32 lanes (64gbit/sec) in the future mean that the bus in a modern COTS PC is not the bottleneck in high-performance networking on such hardware. The two things that are:
- The ability of the operating system & host processor to handle the load offered by the networking stack at such speeds. Mitigated by techniques such as TOE and interrupt mitigation & hardware polling. Done in hardware, getting cheaper, widespread implementation in common NICs not there or crappy (ahem, Realtek).
- The bandwidth to the user's machine, which is what TFA is about...
> Youd think slashdot would have better things to post than PR releases.
Depends on one's definition of "you"...
Probably because you haven't seen a Juniper T1600. It has 2.5x the per-slot bandwidth of the CRS-1. The Cisco marketing literature may go to 92tbps, but I challenge you to show me a production CRS multishelf system with more than one fabric shelf. Once T1600 modules are available for the TX Matrix the system will provide 6.4tbps in two and a half racks, using far less power than the equivalent real estate worth of CRS hardware (2.4tbps max), at about the same cost. BTW a fully configured 72-rack CRS-1 would require about .8 megawatts of power and belch about 2.5 million BTUs of heat per hour...
Erm, not that that's a biased viewpoint or anything (heh)...
Anyway, IMHO far more important to router scalability is the per-slot and per-watt bandwidth, not how many systems you can chain together (as long as you can chain some reasonably useful number, but I don't see a need for more than 8 chassis in a system). The CRS-1 won't be able to handle 100gE without a system-wide fabric upgrade or double-width cards or something. The T1600 (and for that matter, the Foundry NetIron X series, though not in the same class of capabilities or scalability as the Juniper) will be able to slot in 8 100gE linecards the day they're available.
Sounds like a good plan to me :-)
Erm, contractual obligation (with AT&T), not legal obligation, and AFAIK said contract only applies to phones sold in the US...
Why is it that when internet performance is discussed in the media, "solutions" always involve some new box or protocol that's supposed to make your packets move faster?
It's inadequate infrastructure as a result of the political climate. At every level.
The single largest impediment to mass consumer broadband in the West is irresponsible corporate monopolies or borg-like incumbent telecoms making life hell for consumers.
In developing nations, it is often more a case of the aforementioned telecoms making life hell for entire nations e.g. if you are a landlocked African country you have no direct access to undersea cable, so even your national incumbent telecom is screwed. And the hell of it is that various borgcoms owns so much of said undersea cable (and especially the access rights to the landing stations) that even if you are a country with access to the cable, you are still only slightly less screwed. This is why in most places in sub-Saharan Africa, it is still cheaper to send data 72000km through space via a low-bandwidth geostationary satellite link than use the optical undersea cable: there is global competition in the sat bandwidth market.
Even in the case of carrier-carrier interconnects (the "inter" part of the internet), sustained scalability relies upon the mutual goodwill of carriers to upgrade their common interconnects. If one feels the other is taking advantage of the situation, then it's no soup for the other guy. This is only fair in business of course, but it leads to congestion which impacts performance. Video hosting has recently exacerbated this issue significantly.
Something obvious to me seems to escape most folks, so I'll state it again for posterity: the internet is a media delivery system, not unlike TV, newspapers, & magazines. Most of the money going into the "internet economy" from the rest of the world comes from two places: advertisers, and consumers paying for something useful that is also used as an ad-delivery mechanism (i.e. internet access).
Google had this figured out a long time ago. Just because it's technology doesn't mean it's different.
It is in the apparent interest of large/incumbent telecoms to keep the net out of their country/market as long as possible, because net proliferation inherently means competition. This is why most French people didn't know about the net until around '99 or so; France Telecom was making truckloads of cash off the minitel since the early '80s and had no intention of changing that, so they did their best to make life hell for any ISP trying to build a business in the country. Around '99 or 2000 the government realized that they were starting to look pathetic and did something about it. In late 2001, all the FT COs were opened up to competition, and of course FT lost loads of business.
But now France has one of the best deployed broadband infrastructures in the world, and France Telecom (though forced to be competitive) is making far more revenue from triple-play services than they ever made off the minitel, because even though they only have one piece of the pie (albeit a big piece,) the broadband market has exploded, and the net has significantly increased revenue from their mobile phone division as well. If one could have told an FT executive in 1998 that in a few years they'd open up all their POPs to stiff competition but make record revenue delivering IP, voice, and TV via their existing copper and mobile infrastructure, I'd love to see his reaction...
This lesson needs to be taught everywhere that a half-decent internet connection is unavailable, including most of the US.
Buy a new one... With your page views.
Evidently you've never been to Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Melbourne, etc. etc. etc.
Hell, even Savannah, GA is a great example of a US city that is an excellent place to live and raise a family at modest expense.
Hannibal was commenting on someone's liver, for which Chianti could be a very nice match. Liver would overpower a delicate Burgundy.
Vyatta is not just open-source routing software, they are a company that supports said software. Yes, if you have a support contract you can call them at 4 am if your network breaks.
The term "open-source router" is extremely vague. A router is a physical device that forwards packets at layer 3. In the case of the Vyatta OFR (as wel as Zebra, OpenBGPd, etc), the routing software (roughly, the RIB) is Vyatta, the forwarding software (roughly, the FIB) is the Linux kernel, and the hardware is a PC. In addition to various silicon-based solutions to speed up packet forwarding, software projects such as the Click! modular router exist that replace the routing code in a commonly available kernel (Linux, BSD, etc) that increase packet forwarding performance exponentially. The fact is that the commodity packet forwarding code in off-the-shelf OSs (OSS or commercial) hasn't evolved much in a long time, because it hasn't needed to.
Procket (founded by Tony Li, bought by Cisco for the engineering team) had also developed software forwarding based products that had similar performance without using custom forwarding hardware (1+ mpps on x86). Too bad they will never see the light of day. Of course, their hardware was also capable of 12bpps (yes, billion) in 2003....