Keep it away from penicillin, and harsh chemicals, and mutation-inducing tobacco smoke (as opposed to head-crash-inducing smoke for older disk drives.) And the term "computer virus" acquires a whole new range of meanings....
Agreed. There's certainly no point in reprinting the poem at the bottom until it's true again. "Take your poor, your tired, keep them at home, or ship them off to some free country, but if you let them come here, we'll jail them for a while and maybe ship them back." This certainly isn't the country I grew up in, though it's becoming more like the one most of my ancestors moved to, a colony with a nearby theocracy and a distant tyrrany that was rapidly decreasing in its respect for the traditional rights of Englishmen.
Sure, Singtel is great, but you really need to use VSNL services in India until you get this silly monopoly-is-good idea out of your head. And if you want to argue that that's just because they're a third-world kleptocracy, you should go use Telstra for a while - They're no longer quite a monopoly, but they're still almost one, and they've got the reputation of being the First World's Most Clueless Data Service Provider. It took a long, long time to get them to understand that some people wanted to use 2Mbps E1 circuits for single data channels, not for bundles of 64kbps data channels, and they seem to think that volume-capping cable modems is a good idea. After that, I invite you to set your clock back 5-10 years and buy bandwidth or Internet connectivity in still-PTT-monopoly Europe.
Economies of scale are important, but that doesn't mean that governments have any real advantages. They buy hardware from the same commercial vendors. They can try to hire employees from the same pools of very smart technical people and the same pools of not-so-smart grunt-workers that the free market hires from, but they've typically got much more restrictive internal rules on wages and benefits. They do have some artificial advantages - they don't have to pay taxes, unlike businesses in most countries, and they don't have to put up with clueless business regulators, but they've got the artificial disadvantage that clueless government policymakers have an easier time pushing them around.
The one real advantage they have is ability to get right-of-way, because any place that has government-run telcos has government-run highways, so negotiations for burying cable along or across highways are much much easier for them than for commercial businesses. (That's a real sore point in the San Francisco Bay Area:-) Similarly, restrictions on above-ground cables are something that commercial telcos often have to put up with that government telcos don't. Also, if the railroads are government-run, it's easier for government telcos to negotiate with them than for free-market telcos, but if the railroads are privately owned, they're on a more equal footing. Similarly for running telco along power-line routes, but that's a relatively new issue because high-speed copper-based telecom and high-voltage power don't always get along, unlike low-speed telecom and low-voltage copper.
Well-regulated private monopolies aren't much better than government-run telcos - at least in the US, they typically got to make a fixed percentage profit, so they did have incentives to grow their markets by providing better and somewhat cheaper services, and to use internal cost accounting mechanisms that let the pricing be somewhat related to the costs, and when there were social agendas like making business customers pay more to subsidize residential customers, at least they knew the actual costs that they were subsidizing. But they were still big and stupid. And they got to hire some of the best engineers and scientists in the world (shameless plug here:-) because they had more incentive to develop and deploy technology than most of the PTT-dominated telcos (with a few possible exceptions, but not most of them.)
The big advantage that competitive telecom companies over monopolies (government or not) is that having a market with competitors forces them to innovate, and to understand what their customers want, and to evaluate whether their value-for-money tradeoffs make sense compared to what the competition is offering. Most monopolies simply don't have real feedback, and many of them depend on technological innovation from other countries rather than doing their own.
The other big advantage that government telcos have over non-government telcos of all types, which they totally failed to take advantage of until cellphones gave them the technology, is the ability to use radio spectrum to build rural communications. They could have done it decades earlier, because fixed-wireless is a much simpler problem than moving-wireless, but they didn't. In the US, the radio spectrum was effectively the oligopoly of broadcasters, with exceptions like amateur radio (which had anti-free-speech provisions to prevent business use of radio) and eventually CB, and the phone companies didn't have enough incentive to develop it to make it worth getting the FCC to let them have the spectrum space. But in lots of other countries, it's different - radio-based telephony would have made sense, and with the government running the phone companies, they should have been able to get permission to use the spectrum without a problem.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that used to be a regulated monopoly, and is now partially regulated, though mostly unregulated. But these opinions are mine, not theirs.
I should have thought about microwave, since we sell it:-) I've mainly used it for applications of T3 and faster, where it's a bit easier to make it cost-effective. As long as you're within a reasonable distance of your POP and have line of sight, it works pretty well. Earthquakes and big windstorms can bother it a bit, but not usually much unless you're also getting building damage, at which point you've got more urgent problems.
The ranges we use it for are dependent on how much rain an area gets, which affects how much rain fade you can tolerate while still meeting 99.99% or whatever uptime SLA we're offering, and tend to be about 10 miles in Phoenix and 1-2 miles in Seattle, with San Francisco area getting about 3-5 miles depending on which microclimate you're in.
Some colo places insist that they maintain the servers, while others will sell you just the real estate and bandwidth, and let you maintain the servers. Some of _those_ colo centers aren't even in Chapter 11 yet (probably:-) though the overbuilding that happened during the boom was probably tougher on them than on most of the managed hosting people. So you can still be keeping your power complex fullfilled and ego-boosted, while getting more bandwidth and reliability. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for having your servers in your garage.
Also, if you are going to run colo at home or at a small office building, and if you're somewhere that you can get business cable modem service, I strongly recommend getting it to use as a backup, or otherwise see about low-end satellite service. The reason is backup connectivity - most telephone companies won't sell you T1s that are guaranteed to go down different streets and use different manholes, and if you're in a residential area it's almost totally guaranteed that if you buy two T1s, any backhoe or flooding accidents will take down both of them at once, and even if you've got ISDN dial backup it'll still all go at once. Cable modem service has technical limitations, even when they aren't deliberately imposed by the cable company to prevent people from running servers, but it's the one cheap service that has a good chance of not sharing the same physical routes as the telco circuits. It's asymmetric in the wrong direction, and you can't get BGP on it, but it's much better than nothing, and you can use DNS kluges to make up for part of it. Some of the satellite services have monthly volume caps as opposed to just speed caps, but for backup that's ok - you ideally won't be using it more than 4 hours a month except for low-level pings and SNMP monitoring. (The "4 hours" is "how long it takes a telco truck to go fix something", and hopefully you that won't happen more than once a month...)
For big ISPs, it's *terribly* complicated, because supply and demand are related to marginal costs, and to fixed costs, and to prices charged by the competition, and to equipment amortization, and all of these things are getting yanked around rapidly by technology change; the only people who have a clue are the small ISPs who have to buy most of their services from other people, but even they can keep haggling down their prices a bit. There are people out there charging ~$50/Mbps for bandwidth, and doing peering for free, and charging $500/Mbps for bandwidth, and that's just in the US - once you start crossing oceans, or national boundaries, it gets far weirder, except in places that haven't liberalized their telecom and have oppressive stupid PTTs who can tell their customers what they have to pay.
Colocation centers and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing are to blame for most of this, along with Moore's Law making computers (and therefore routers) cheaper. A decade ago, it cost a lot of money to put fiber in the ground, and the fiber had a fixed capacity (typically 1.7gbps), and you could get some economies of scale by putting a bundle of fibers in the same trench, since the cost of the fiber was much less than the right-of-way or installation cost. DWDM lets you run many wavelengths on the same fiber. In ~1996, this meant 8 wavelengths of 2.4Gbps; today it's 80-160 wavelengths of 10 Gbps. Adding more capacity still costs you money, because you need to add repeaters in the middle and expensive electronics at the edges, but the costs of those keep dropping and repeater distances keep growing, so it makes sense to buy the edge equipment you need now and upgrade later when you need it, since the prices of the hardware are diving fast. The marginal costs on a backbone fiber aren't zero, but they're pretty close.
Colocation centers also change the economics radically, because they can buy a small number of fat pipes, which have much lower price per bit than skinny pipes, avoid paying the telcos much for access lines, because they can be located near big ISPs, can support thousands of machines in the same location, and to the extent that their customers are sending bits to each other instead of the outside world, can provide lots of bandwidth on very cheap LANs inside their buildings instead of to an ISP who charges them money. Before Exodus fell apart, there was a huge ecosystem of providers who sold services to each other inside their colo spaces, and some of the other hosting providers did that also.
A related business is carrier-neutral colo centers like Equinix or the Seattle Westin Building or LA's 1 Wilshire, which convince a bunch of telecom and ISP carriers to build connections into their buildings, rather than selling to hosting users, which lets the carriers connect to each other using cheap interconnects. So a big ISP would buy an OC48 pipe into the building from an access provider, buy a rack to put their routers on, and then use Gigabit Ether to connect to the other ISPs. Also, they can put a telco fiber into the center, so if a small customer wants a T1 to one of the carriers, they can just add the circuit onto the fiber. But how do you price bandwidth in this environment? For the colo company, it's easy; they're selling real estate and charging a flat fee for fiber patch panel connections (how they make money doing that is a different question, but at least they know their costs, so they can do prices that aren't artificial.) But for the carriers, is there any reason to run a peering connection at 100 Mbps vs. 1Gbps? Not really; their router hardware costs a bit more, but it's still a drop in the bucket.
Then there's Dark Fiber access and Dim Fiber access. It's not as common as George Gilder predicted, but there are places where it's available. The basic model is that the access provider isn't messing with routers or switches; they're acting more like a construction company, installing fiber and renting right-of-way (or conduit space) and letting the customer light it up themselves at whatever bandwidth they feel like. Sometimes this is a hybrid business - a provider might have a big lit ring around San Francisco Bay and sell wavelengths on the ring connecting to dark fiber on the last mile, or alternatively they'd have a big bundle of hundreds of fibers around the Bay and do patch panels. Some of that is technology dependent, because of distance limitations for different speeds, and therefore it's also influenced by geography - anything inside Manhattan doesn't need a a repeater, or from Manhattan to nearby parts of New Jersey where the real estate's a bit cheaper and there's less backhoe risk, but some distances in the San Francisco Bay Area are a bit too far for repeaterless operation at some speeds, and Los Angeles is really huge. Also, while fiber technology used to be just for long-haul telecom or lower-cost LANs, the Storage Area Network people have recently developed technologies like Fibre Channel for connecting disk drives to CPUs at 20km distances - there are starting to be a lot of banks and brokerages in Manhattan that have disk farms in New Jersey colo centers, and instead of their mainframes being all in the same building as the traders, they may be spread out geographically, often with primary capacity in one location and backup in another.
A minor note on the DDOS issue - Small internet providers may need to wake somebody up at 5am to stop a DDOS before it does major damage, but Tier 1 internet providers have people 7x24 (and coffee pots 7x24:-), so the only times they have a slow response to that kind of problem are when the attack is a new technique that's too complex for the night shift (or when you get the dumb phone-answering person, but that can be any time of day.)
On Peering and Transit - There are several different sets of definitions depending on technical subtleties, but the fundamental difference is that transit costs money, while peering is "free", but has restrictions on what you can do. In the transit model, Carrier A provides services that Customer B wants, so B pays A for them, and A transports B's packets anywhere that B wants; any restrictions are of the form "your pipe is this big" or "if you send more than X GB/month, it costs extra".
Peering is a connection between two carriers that both think that they get roughly equal value from connecting to each other, so they do some allocation of the costs of connecting their networks, don't charge each other for carrying the packets, and do some monitoring and limitation to make sure they really are getting roughly equal value. A traditional peering arrangement would be that Carrier A and Carrier B are North-America-wide carriers, and they put big "peering point" connections on the East and West Coasts, and A hands any traffic for B's customers to B at the nearest peering point and vice versa. Sometimes the peering points were "private peering", where they build a direct connection, but for smaller peering, they might just both buy pipes into MAE-West and MAE-East. The subtleties are typically about traffic to destinations other than A and B's direct customers. If A has a peering connection to Carrier C, and B doesn't, typical peering policies don't let B use its peering connections with A to reach C; it either has to peer with C, or buy transit from A or C or D to get there. (This is more common for US Tier 1 ISPs than for smaller ISPs or non-US peering points.) Also, there's typically a traffic ratio like 2:1 that defines whether the players are getting equal value from each other or not.
It's not always that simple technically, and there's often politics involved. Consider a dial ISP and a hosting center. The traffic may be very asymmetric, say 10:1 from the hosting center to the dial ISP, but it may be worthwhile for both of them to peer with each other rather than buying transit from somebody else. The dial ISP gets to offer its customers more content value, and the hosting center gets to offer its customers more eyeballs. Assuming they're near enough to each other for the peering infrastructure to be cheap, it's a win for everybody, right? But if the dial ISP is AOL and the hosting center is Joe's Garage, Joe will probably have to pay AOL for the privilege, while if the dial ISP is Joe's Garage and the hosting center is Exodus or Abovenet, Joe will probably also have to pay. During the boom, of course, the problem was often resolved by one side buying the other for stock, causing the market to overvalue the combined stock even more:-) Other examples of politics - for many private interconnection arrangements, especially in the past, the terms were often secret, because one side didn't want to admit that it had to pay somebody else to carry some of their traffic instead of using their own backbone, or one of the big carriers didn't want to admit that it *wasn't* charging money to a medium-sized ISP because being a "peer" with somebody small makes it look like you're not the 800-pound gorilla, plus it makes other medium-sized carriers think that maybe they can peer with you for free instead of paying you.
One other common definition of "peering" is "using BGP to connect to each other", which is a description of the technology rather than the cash flow. The Border Gateway Protocol is a routing protocol that's used to exchange information about who connects to what networks, and it's the main way that big ISPs talk to each other. However, it's also used for customer-to-ISP connections even if you're just buying transit, usually for customers who are buying service from two ISPs for reliability reasons. BGP is an amazingly complex protocol with a dozen or so different knobs to tweak to give you very fine-grained control over complex routing situations and different kinds of load-balancing, but if you're not a Tier 1 ISP, the amount you actually need to do to use it effectively is pretty minimal. In the past, BGP only worked on really big routers, but these days you can use even a Cisco 2600 unless you need to get full Internet routes (which burn too much memory), and you can also get Linux Zebra routers to do BGP.
You'll get much better reliability and probably a lower cost putting your boxes into a colocation center. Depending on the place, you can either buy managed machines, or unmanaged machines, or rack space with an internet connection. Typical prices for a full rack with a 10Mbps Ethernet feed and some amount of bandwidth on it tend to be in the same range as a T1 line, but you're in a building with two or more physically separate pipes to the internet, no backhoes (though more technicians, who are about as dangerous), highly reliable power systesms, and infinite expansion capability. Some colo vendors give you a limit on GB/month (probably a bad deal compared to buying a straight T1), but many some of them charge you for 95th percentile bandwidth peaks, and since you're using Linux machines you can play with different traffic shaping tools to manage that.
Disclaimer - I work for a big company that sells this sort of stuff, but we also sell T1s and T3s and OC48s and several different flavors of hosting, so I can be pretty neutral about technology tradeoffs
If they'd gone and searched for PC-type jobs only, that might very well skew the results, but if their search was only based on languages, they picked a pretty representative set (except for C, which other people have commented is hard to grep for.) PCs have largely gotten big enough to cover most commercial applications, and Sun and HP machines that aren't running Windows are running Unix versions which mainly use the same languages (obviously more C/C++/Perl and minimal Visual Basic), and there's not much new development in Cobol or RPG (or certainly shouldn't be!) During the Y2K runup, there were a bunch of jobs for Cobol programmers to fix old non-Y2K-compliant systems, but that's over with now, and many of the fixes were to "build glue to extract the data from the legacy system and feed it to Peoplesoft." There's probably a bit of new development, mainly in mainframe shops, but most of those are at places that don't need to do much new hiring.
I used RPG II for a summer job back in college on an IBM System 34 (yes, that was before many of you were born:-) It had 48K of Semiconductor RAM (not core!) and a 13MB disk drive, and the Apple 2 could kick its butt a couple years later, and RPG was a terribly limiting language to program in, mainly tolerable for the accounting applications that we worked on which were simple accumulate-subtotal-print nested loops. If the machine had had a BASIC interpreter, it would have been much more effective, but it didn't. My father knew a number of people doing chemical system simulations in RPG, which they were doing because they ran on hardware that was affordable by individual departments, somewhat like PDP-8s. But that was then, and even by five years later, there was really no excuse for doing new RPGs.
HR people often don't know what they're really writing in job ads. Especially in bigger companies (i.e. big enough to have an HR bureaucracy that doesn't actually know the products or the engineers, which seems to happen when Silicon Valley startups reach 200 people, which is also when the HR professionals start saying things like "No, you've got to stop the Friday afternoon beer, that's politically incorrect and exposes us to liability for drunk drivers"), managers trying to hire employees and potential employees trying to find jobs that match their skills have to start working around them. I remember seeing job ads looking for people with 5 years of Java experience early in the boom, back when there was really only one person who could say that he had that much (James Gosling of Sun, the inventor of Java, who wasn't particularly looking for a journeyman programmer job right then...)
(Ok, so it was lame, I've modded myself down for it already:-) Meanwhile, I'll add some gratuitous actual content just so it wasn't a total waste of your time...
I worked in San Francisco before, during, and after the boom, and sometime during the boom, a building near the train station on 4th St. got converted into a Starbucks/WellsFargo/BriazzSandwiches. Pretty quickly it became a surrogate office for much of Multimedia Gulch - I'd stop there in the morning, and there'd be three or four tables of groups of salespeople planning for the sales calls they were about to make or managers interviewing potential employees or people plotting corporate mergers or whatever. Early in the crash, the place started to be pretty empty:-(, though it was gradually picking up by the time I started working in San Jose instead.
My family went to Disney World last month so the various kids could see the Big Mouse. While I'm not very convinced of the usefulness-vs-cost ratios for Segways in general, they're so cute and futuristic looking that how could Disney *not* buy the things? I mean, if you lived in an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, wouldn't *you* use a Segway to head down to the corner general store if you weren't going far enough to take the Flying Car but were going along the big sidewalk so you didn't need your Rocket Belt?
We saw a couple of Disney managers zipping around on the things - they're just right for EPCOT's big sidewalks and flat terrain. One of them said that Disney ordered a bunch of them when they first became available, and had to bully the Segway folks a bit to get the N of them they wanted out of early production (there were some early investment connections there...) They're fast enough to be helpful, but unobtrusive-looking and not so fast that they'd cause problems, and the managers are obviously having fun cruising around on them. And after all, cost-effectiveness in the Magic Kingdom is at least as much about image as practicality, which makes them way more effective there than at most businesses.
The article you're replying to asserts that if you're going at average Segway speeds, you won't get sweaty. At least on flat ground, I'd agree with that, though if you're on San Francisco's hills it may be a bit different. Certainly if you're cruising at 3-4mph on a bike like sidewalk speeds you're not putting out as much effort as walking - and if you want to cruise on the sidewalk at Segway speeds, e.g. 10mph, you're about as much traffic hazard as a bicycle and don't belong there. Now, I happen to disagree with the San Francisco board of supervisors decision to ban Segways from bike lanes. I think they should be able to coexist just fine with bikes in that environment. But they shouldn't be going fast on sidewalks if there are pedestrians around. If you want to go walking speed on sidewalks, there are old-people motorized chairs that work ok except on steep hills.
And as far as powered transportation goes, yes, there's a place for it, and I've seen a wide variety of electric bikes in the ~$1000 range - lots cheaper than Segways, lighter though bigger, and much more versatile. (Also, an electric bike with the batteries run down works a lot better than a Segway with the batteries run down:-) Next step up, things like Vespa scooters in the $1000-2000 range give you a lot more speed and distance, or electric scooters in the $500 range get you Segway-like speed, range, and weight, though they're a lot lamer:-)
I have gotten spam on my fastmail account, but I'm not using their spam filters. The thing that fastmail does that I haven't seen is that in addition to allowing the usual (for recent email systems) tagged login format like username+tag@fastmail.fm , which lets you give everybody email addresses with a different tag value, it also automagically translates between this and tag@username.fastmail.fm - this not only avoids confusing web forms and avoids confusing your mother, it also reduces the risk that spammers will guess that simply using the untagged "username@domain.com" will reach you.
Actually, it was Disney World, and last month, so I got my prognostications about the future taken care of early instead of my usual procrastination. Must...obey....Big.....Mouse......
Oh, right, the other point I'd forgotten to make while posting was that New Jersey had extensive "blue laws" about not being able to sell things on Sunday until the mid-80s, for much the same reason. The State (actually, a bunch of counties) was pretending that it was protecting something or other about the morality or goodness and niceness in society and preventing workers from being exploited by preventing them from working on Sunday, but it was really because owners of small and mostly family-run businesses didn't want competition from big shopping malls, which could much better afford to employ workers on Sundays, as opposed to getting yet another family member to work on Sunday.
"Tennent" is a town in New Jersey. A "tenant" is someone who holds land, typically a renter. You probably meant "tenet", which is "An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization". Note that a tenet may be held by a ranter....
I'm not sure about Oregon, but I lived in New Jersey for 20 years and have some insight into their version of this stupidity.
First of all, it's a safety issue. If you let people pump their own gas, they'd get it wrong and you'd have cars and gas stations exploding right and left, just like you always hear about happening in the 48 dangerous self-service states! (Oh, wait, you haven't heard about that, except in movies like "The Birds"? Obviously they must think it's so commonplace they don't report it....)
Second of all, it would radically raise the cost of gasoline for full-serve customers, forcing poor elderly people like YOUR GRANDMOTHER who can't afford to pay those prices to get out of the car in the pouring rain and snow and balance themselves on their walkers while trying to pump gas with their other hands. If you don't believe this is a serious social problem, you should read all the letters to the newspapers any time any politicians suggests that New Jerseyans might not explode if they pumped their own gas, because you'll be hurting YOUR GRANDMOTHER if you don't read them. (Here in California, if you have a handicapped sticker for your car, gas stations that have attendants are apparently required to pump your gas while charging you self-serve prices.)
In fact, self-service gas will obviously raise the price of gas for everybody! If your read the occasional newspaper articles on surveys of national gasoline prices, they always say "except New Jersey and Oregon", but the national average price of self-serve gas always seems to be higher than NJ's typical prices for full-service gas. And if you allow self-serve gas, it cuts the total labor costs for gas stations, at least a bit, even though the cost of employees does get pushed much more heavily onto the full-serve customers.
As near as I could tell, the real reason for it was that NJ has lots of independent gas stations that make money by fixing cars and subsidize their costs by also selling gasoline, and self-serve gas would push most of the gasoline business to high-volume self-serve stations, driving margin out of the business and making it harder for the independents to stay in business. I don't know if there are also organized crime reasons (it's much easier for the Mafia to extort protection money from an independent gas station than from Exxon), but that may also be a factor.
A few years ago I was back in Jersey and needed gas for my rental car. I went into the station to pay, and was told by the mechanic that the guy who pumps gas was on lunch break. I went out and pumped my gas, went in to pay again, and got yelled at; I'd forgotten that they had this silliness.
The SPEC benchmarks are the descendants of the late-80s SPECmark benchmarking projects that did performance comparisons across a wide variety of machines and architectures, using code derived from real applications rather than purely synthetic little benchmarks like Dhrystone. Their benchmark suites were roughly 10 programs, with weightings on each program's results and scaling to compare with some popular architectures. They now have a variety of different benchmarks, covering a range of types of applications, including floating point. The benchmarks have tended to be used by hardware manufacturers, so they'll usually have just one result for a given machine, with the options obviously tweaked for maximum performance, but the details are provided and sometimes there'll be tests using different compilers (e.g. because it's a compiler maker doing the test.)
The benchmark programs aren't free - this is a non-profit industry association that charges money to cover its costs, but there are a number of universities that are members or associates which may be able to do testing that could explore some of the compiler differences; poke around their website to see who's reported what kinds of results.
If you're going to have DouglasAdamsWear, go for the right stuff, Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses that detect scary and potentially upsetting things and darken so you won't look at them.
"Wouldn't you really rather go to the basement, RIGHT NOW, than up to the 15th floor? Thank you for making a humble elevator so very, very happy...."
The ability to have a draft is really important to politicians, because if the politicians want to have a big war and can't talk their people into volunteering, it lets them have their war anyway. Without it, politicians could only have wars that the people of their country actually want. Also, it lets politicians have a medium-sized war without having to pay mercenaries' wages, because they can get draftees for less than minimum wage.
Draft registration is important for a couple of reasons
It keeps the public in the habit of obeying orders.
If they want to have a big war in a hurry, and the public doesn't want to participate, it's much faster to draft people if you already know where they live.
If you've don't do mandatory registration in peacetime, lots of people won't obey or register when you announce that you're having a war, and tracking them down is a slow process - it's much easier to do in peacetime when you're not in a hurry.
It's easier to get people to comply when the risk of registration looks low - "having your name in yet another government database" is easier to put up with that "getting sent to VietNam.".
The reason the US has draft registration today is that Bill Clinton, having been a successful draft dodger and a hypocritical President, didn't want to take the political heat that the Republicans would have given him if he had approved the small amount of funding for closing down Selective Service when it came up for renewal during his term. If he'd had the guts to serve his country by saying "Peacetime Draft Registration is Un-American, let's kill it", we'd be better off. If I remember correctly, the peacetime draft registration was the fault of Jimmy Carter, but it might have been Ford or Reagan.
My Draft Lottery Number was something over 300, in the last lottery, and I was classified "1-H", which is a holding category that means that the Army didn't want to bother paying to give me a physical. I lost my draft card some time before I turned 26....
If you only use one address, eventually a spammer will get it. One of the solutions for spam prevention is to have an essentially infinite number of addresses, and use different ones for different recipients so you can easily dispose of ones you don't want. If you've got your own domain name, this is somewhat obvious - use addresses like anything1@mydomain.com,anything2@mydomain.com, etc. If somebody starts spamming anything3@mydomain.com, discard it.
A number of the Unix email systems let you get a similar effect by tagging addresses - myusername+tag1@example.net, myusername+tag2@example.net, etc., though sometimes the separator is a "-" or a "+" or something else, and sometimes web forms choke on the separators, and mail forwarding systems don't explicitly support them, and too many humans aren't good at copying them correctly (which has been the real limitation, unfortunately.) You have to discard the abused addresses in your mail client or procmail instead of rejecting it from sendmail or pointing the mailbox to/dev/null, but it otherwise works the same way as the domain solution. Also, if anybody sends mail to myusername@example.net, without the tag, you'll probably get it, and spammers can figure that one out.
Fastmail.fm has a nice intermediate solution, using third-level domains. If your account is username@fastmail.fm, you can use username+tag@fastmail.fm, or you can also use tag@username.fastmail.fm, which works well in web forms and people seem to be able to copy accurately. (They also seem to be much more generally clueful than most webmail systems I've seen.) Their system runs on some kind of Unix system - I think *BSD rather than Linux, but it's at least a flexible and stable enough environment for them to build mail handling tools.
I don't know quite how many people use AOL, but it's about 30 million, plus or minus 50-200%. That's about 200 times as large as XS4ALL. Most of the other big US ISPs have somewhere between 1 and 10 million dialup users. I don't know how many people Hotmail and Yahoo provide email for, but most of those accounts are disposable and low-use. On the other hand, the ISP I use for my email and web page has somewhere around 1000 users, maybe a bit more, so XS4ALL is about 100 times as big:-)
If you're an individual user, a computation-intensive spamassassin approach can do a really good job of blocking most spam and blocking very little non-spam. But if you're an ISP or Mail Service Provider, having a conservative RBL can save you a lot of resources, including bandwidth and computation, by throwing away the high-volume relay-abuse spams with as little work as possible, saving the more complex work for mail that's less likely to be spam. (By conservative, I mean "trying to only block actual relays and other known spammer systems", as opposed to "broad-spectrum insecticides and lists that do collateral damage to pressure ISPs or harass their competition.") That might be a 25-50% reduction in total email that the ISP needs to handle, but from an instantaneous-resources standpoint, it's probably higher than that, because spam tends to come in high-volume blasts, while real email is mostly Poisson arrivals. And if an ISP's failure responses are the "Temporarily inaccessible, try again later" type as opposed to permanent rejections, real email systems are much more likely to try again later than spammers are (though of course open relays may still try again later, because they're just mal-administered, not necessarily broken.)
"Opt-in" is a perfectly legitimate term, which was intended to mean "yes, the recipient really asked us for this", but spammers being the liars that they are, often really means "the recipient made his email address known somehow so we're going to use it" or "checked a box saying something and we did something else" or "I opted in to send him that mail" or "didn't use enough nuclear weapons while opting out".
The legitimate part of the email list industry responded with "double opt-in" to indicate that the listbot sends the recipient a message saying "you or somebody pretending to be you asked to subscribe you to the list, click here or reply if you really want to be on the list" and doesn't add the user to the list if they don't confirm. Most legitimate mailing lists bots do that, though some don't bother. Spammers occasionally claim to be double opt-in, but that's just because they're liars.
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Keep it away from penicillin, and harsh chemicals, and mutation-inducing tobacco smoke (as opposed to head-crash-inducing smoke for older disk drives.) And the term "computer virus" acquires a whole new range of meanings....
Agreed. There's certainly no point in reprinting the poem at the bottom until it's true again. "Take your poor, your tired, keep them at home, or ship them off to some free country, but if you let them come here, we'll jail them for a while and maybe ship them back." This certainly isn't the country I grew up in, though it's becoming more like the one most of my ancestors moved to, a colony with a nearby theocracy and a distant tyrrany that was rapidly decreasing in its respect for the traditional rights of Englishmen.
Economies of scale are important, but that doesn't mean that governments have any real advantages. They buy hardware from the same commercial vendors. They can try to hire employees from the same pools of very smart technical people and the same pools of not-so-smart grunt-workers that the free market hires from, but they've typically got much more restrictive internal rules on wages and benefits. They do have some artificial advantages - they don't have to pay taxes, unlike businesses in most countries, and they don't have to put up with clueless business regulators, but they've got the artificial disadvantage that clueless government policymakers have an easier time pushing them around.
The one real advantage they have is ability to get right-of-way, because any place that has government-run telcos has government-run highways, so negotiations for burying cable along or across highways are much much easier for them than for commercial businesses. (That's a real sore point in the San Francisco Bay Area :-) Similarly, restrictions on above-ground cables are something that commercial telcos often have to put up with that government telcos don't. Also, if the railroads are government-run, it's easier for government telcos to negotiate with them than for free-market telcos, but if the railroads are privately owned, they're on a more equal footing. Similarly for running telco along power-line routes, but that's a relatively new issue because high-speed copper-based telecom and high-voltage power don't always get along, unlike low-speed telecom and low-voltage copper.
Well-regulated private monopolies aren't much better than government-run telcos - at least in the US, they typically got to make a fixed percentage profit, so they did have incentives to grow their markets by providing better and somewhat cheaper services, and to use internal cost accounting mechanisms that let the pricing be somewhat related to the costs, and when there were social agendas like making business customers pay more to subsidize residential customers, at least they knew the actual costs that they were subsidizing. But they were still big and stupid. And they got to hire some of the best engineers and scientists in the world (shameless plug here :-) because they had more incentive to develop and deploy technology than most of the PTT-dominated telcos (with a few possible exceptions, but not most of them.)
The big advantage that competitive telecom companies over monopolies (government or not) is that having a market with competitors forces them to innovate, and to understand what their customers want, and to evaluate whether their value-for-money tradeoffs make sense compared to what the competition is offering. Most monopolies simply don't have real feedback, and many of them depend on technological innovation from other countries rather than doing their own.
The other big advantage that government telcos have over non-government telcos of all types, which they totally failed to take advantage of until cellphones gave them the technology, is the ability to use radio spectrum to build rural communications. They could have done it decades earlier, because fixed-wireless is a much simpler problem than moving-wireless, but they didn't. In the US, the radio spectrum was effectively the oligopoly of broadcasters, with exceptions like amateur radio (which had anti-free-speech provisions to prevent business use of radio) and eventually CB, and the phone companies didn't have enough incentive to develop it to make it worth getting the FCC to let them have the spectrum space. But in lots of other countries, it's different - radio-based telephony would have made sense, and with the government running the phone companies, they should have been able to get permission to use the spectrum without a problem.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that used to be a regulated monopoly, and is now partially regulated, though mostly unregulated. But these opinions are mine, not theirs.
The ranges we use it for are dependent on how much rain an area gets, which affects how much rain fade you can tolerate while still meeting 99.99% or whatever uptime SLA we're offering, and tend to be about 10 miles in Phoenix and 1-2 miles in Seattle, with San Francisco area getting about 3-5 miles depending on which microclimate you're in.
Also, if you are going to run colo at home or at a small office building, and if you're somewhere that you can get business cable modem service, I strongly recommend getting it to use as a backup, or otherwise see about low-end satellite service. The reason is backup connectivity - most telephone companies won't sell you T1s that are guaranteed to go down different streets and use different manholes, and if you're in a residential area it's almost totally guaranteed that if you buy two T1s, any backhoe or flooding accidents will take down both of them at once, and even if you've got ISDN dial backup it'll still all go at once. Cable modem service has technical limitations, even when they aren't deliberately imposed by the cable company to prevent people from running servers, but it's the one cheap service that has a good chance of not sharing the same physical routes as the telco circuits. It's asymmetric in the wrong direction, and you can't get BGP on it, but it's much better than nothing, and you can use DNS kluges to make up for part of it. Some of the satellite services have monthly volume caps as opposed to just speed caps, but for backup that's ok - you ideally won't be using it more than 4 hours a month except for low-level pings and SNMP monitoring. (The "4 hours" is "how long it takes a telco truck to go fix something", and hopefully you that won't happen more than once a month...)
Colocation centers and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing are to blame for most of this, along with Moore's Law making computers (and therefore routers) cheaper. A decade ago, it cost a lot of money to put fiber in the ground, and the fiber had a fixed capacity (typically 1.7gbps), and you could get some economies of scale by putting a bundle of fibers in the same trench, since the cost of the fiber was much less than the right-of-way or installation cost. DWDM lets you run many wavelengths on the same fiber. In ~1996, this meant 8 wavelengths of 2.4Gbps; today it's 80-160 wavelengths of 10 Gbps. Adding more capacity still costs you money, because you need to add repeaters in the middle and expensive electronics at the edges, but the costs of those keep dropping and repeater distances keep growing, so it makes sense to buy the edge equipment you need now and upgrade later when you need it, since the prices of the hardware are diving fast. The marginal costs on a backbone fiber aren't zero, but they're pretty close.
Colocation centers also change the economics radically, because they can buy a small number of fat pipes, which have much lower price per bit than skinny pipes, avoid paying the telcos much for access lines, because they can be located near big ISPs, can support thousands of machines in the same location, and to the extent that their customers are sending bits to each other instead of the outside world, can provide lots of bandwidth on very cheap LANs inside their buildings instead of to an ISP who charges them money. Before Exodus fell apart, there was a huge ecosystem of providers who sold services to each other inside their colo spaces, and some of the other hosting providers did that also.
A related business is carrier-neutral colo centers like Equinix or the Seattle Westin Building or LA's 1 Wilshire, which convince a bunch of telecom and ISP carriers to build connections into their buildings, rather than selling to hosting users, which lets the carriers connect to each other using cheap interconnects. So a big ISP would buy an OC48 pipe into the building from an access provider, buy a rack to put their routers on, and then use Gigabit Ether to connect to the other ISPs. Also, they can put a telco fiber into the center, so if a small customer wants a T1 to one of the carriers, they can just add the circuit onto the fiber. But how do you price bandwidth in this environment? For the colo company, it's easy; they're selling real estate and charging a flat fee for fiber patch panel connections (how they make money doing that is a different question, but at least they know their costs, so they can do prices that aren't artificial.) But for the carriers, is there any reason to run a peering connection at 100 Mbps vs. 1Gbps? Not really; their router hardware costs a bit more, but it's still a drop in the bucket.
Then there's Dark Fiber access and Dim Fiber access. It's not as common as George Gilder predicted, but there are places where it's available. The basic model is that the access provider isn't messing with routers or switches; they're acting more like a construction company, installing fiber and renting right-of-way (or conduit space) and letting the customer light it up themselves at whatever bandwidth they feel like. Sometimes this is a hybrid business - a provider might have a big lit ring around San Francisco Bay and sell wavelengths on the ring connecting to dark fiber on the last mile, or alternatively they'd have a big bundle of hundreds of fibers around the Bay and do patch panels. Some of that is technology dependent, because of distance limitations for different speeds, and therefore it's also influenced by geography - anything inside Manhattan doesn't need a a repeater, or from Manhattan to nearby parts of New Jersey where the real estate's a bit cheaper and there's less backhoe risk, but some distances in the San Francisco Bay Area are a bit too far for repeaterless operation at some speeds, and Los Angeles is really huge. Also, while fiber technology used to be just for long-haul telecom or lower-cost LANs, the Storage Area Network people have recently developed technologies like Fibre Channel for connecting disk drives to CPUs at 20km distances - there are starting to be a lot of banks and brokerages in Manhattan that have disk farms in New Jersey colo centers, and instead of their mainframes being all in the same building as the traders, they may be spread out geographically, often with primary capacity in one location and backup in another.
On Peering and Transit - There are several different sets of definitions depending on technical subtleties, but the fundamental difference is that transit costs money, while peering is "free", but has restrictions on what you can do. In the transit model, Carrier A provides services that Customer B wants, so B pays A for them, and A transports B's packets anywhere that B wants; any restrictions are of the form "your pipe is this big" or "if you send more than X GB/month, it costs extra".
Peering is a connection between two carriers that both think that they get roughly equal value from connecting to each other, so they do some allocation of the costs of connecting their networks, don't charge each other for carrying the packets, and do some monitoring and limitation to make sure they really are getting roughly equal value. A traditional peering arrangement would be that Carrier A and Carrier B are North-America-wide carriers, and they put big "peering point" connections on the East and West Coasts, and A hands any traffic for B's customers to B at the nearest peering point and vice versa. Sometimes the peering points were "private peering", where they build a direct connection, but for smaller peering, they might just both buy pipes into MAE-West and MAE-East. The subtleties are typically about traffic to destinations other than A and B's direct customers. If A has a peering connection to Carrier C, and B doesn't, typical peering policies don't let B use its peering connections with A to reach C; it either has to peer with C, or buy transit from A or C or D to get there. (This is more common for US Tier 1 ISPs than for smaller ISPs or non-US peering points.) Also, there's typically a traffic ratio like 2:1 that defines whether the players are getting equal value from each other or not.
It's not always that simple technically, and there's often politics involved. Consider a dial ISP and a hosting center. The traffic may be very asymmetric, say 10:1 from the hosting center to the dial ISP, but it may be worthwhile for both of them to peer with each other rather than buying transit from somebody else. The dial ISP gets to offer its customers more content value, and the hosting center gets to offer its customers more eyeballs. Assuming they're near enough to each other for the peering infrastructure to be cheap, it's a win for everybody, right? But if the dial ISP is AOL and the hosting center is Joe's Garage, Joe will probably have to pay AOL for the privilege, while if the dial ISP is Joe's Garage and the hosting center is Exodus or Abovenet, Joe will probably also have to pay. During the boom, of course, the problem was often resolved by one side buying the other for stock, causing the market to overvalue the combined stock even more :-) Other examples of politics - for many private interconnection arrangements, especially in the past, the terms were often secret, because one side didn't want to admit that it had to pay somebody else to carry some of their traffic instead of using their own backbone, or one of the big carriers didn't want to admit that it *wasn't* charging money to a medium-sized ISP because being a "peer" with somebody small makes it look like you're not the 800-pound gorilla, plus it makes other medium-sized carriers think that maybe they can peer with you for free instead of paying you.
One other common definition of "peering" is "using BGP to connect to each other", which is a description of the technology rather than the cash flow. The Border Gateway Protocol is a routing protocol that's used to exchange information about who connects to what networks, and it's the main way that big ISPs talk to each other. However, it's also used for customer-to-ISP connections even if you're just buying transit, usually for customers who are buying service from two ISPs for reliability reasons. BGP is an amazingly complex protocol with a dozen or so different knobs to tweak to give you very fine-grained control over complex routing situations and different kinds of load-balancing, but if you're not a Tier 1 ISP, the amount you actually need to do to use it effectively is pretty minimal. In the past, BGP only worked on really big routers, but these days you can use even a Cisco 2600 unless you need to get full Internet routes (which burn too much memory), and you can also get Linux Zebra routers to do BGP.
Disclaimer - I work for a big company that sells this sort of stuff, but we also sell T1s and T3s and OC48s and several different flavors of hosting, so I can be pretty neutral about technology tradeoffs
I used RPG II for a summer job back in college on an IBM System 34 (yes, that was before many of you were born :-) It had 48K of Semiconductor RAM (not core!) and a 13MB disk drive, and the Apple 2 could kick its butt a couple years later, and RPG was a terribly limiting language to program in, mainly tolerable for the accounting applications that we worked on which were simple accumulate-subtotal-print nested loops. If the machine had had a BASIC interpreter, it would have been much more effective, but it didn't. My father knew a number of people doing chemical system simulations in RPG, which they were doing because they ran on hardware that was affordable by individual departments, somewhat like PDP-8s. But that was then, and even by five years later, there was really no excuse for doing new RPGs.
HR people often don't know what they're really writing in job ads. Especially in bigger companies (i.e. big enough to have an HR bureaucracy that doesn't actually know the products or the engineers, which seems to happen when Silicon Valley startups reach 200 people, which is also when the HR professionals start saying things like "No, you've got to stop the Friday afternoon beer, that's politically incorrect and exposes us to liability for drunk drivers"), managers trying to hire employees and potential employees trying to find jobs that match their skills have to start working around them. I remember seeing job ads looking for people with 5 years of Java experience early in the boom, back when there was really only one person who could say that he had that much (James Gosling of Sun, the inventor of Java, who wasn't particularly looking for a journeyman programmer job right then...)
I worked in San Francisco before, during, and after the boom, and sometime during the boom, a building near the train station on 4th St. got converted into a Starbucks/WellsFargo/BriazzSandwiches. Pretty quickly it became a surrogate office for much of Multimedia Gulch - I'd stop there in the morning, and there'd be three or four tables of groups of salespeople planning for the sales calls they were about to make or managers interviewing potential employees or people plotting corporate mergers or whatever. Early in the crash, the place started to be pretty empty
We saw a couple of Disney managers zipping around on the things - they're just right for EPCOT's big sidewalks and flat terrain. One of them said that Disney ordered a bunch of them when they first became available, and had to bully the Segway folks a bit to get the N of them they wanted out of early production (there were some early investment connections there...) They're fast enough to be helpful, but unobtrusive-looking and not so fast that they'd cause problems, and the managers are obviously having fun cruising around on them. And after all, cost-effectiveness in the Magic Kingdom is at least as much about image as practicality, which makes them way more effective there than at most businesses.
And as far as powered transportation goes, yes, there's a place for it, and I've seen a wide variety of electric bikes in the ~$1000 range - lots cheaper than Segways, lighter though bigger, and much more versatile. (Also, an electric bike with the batteries run down works a lot better than a Segway with the batteries run down :-) Next step up, things like Vespa scooters in the $1000-2000 range give you a lot more speed and distance, or electric scooters in the $500 range get you Segway-like speed, range, and weight, though they're a lot lamer :-)
I have gotten spam on my fastmail account, but I'm not using their spam filters. The thing that fastmail does that I haven't seen is that in addition to allowing the usual (for recent email systems) tagged login format like username+tag@fastmail.fm , which lets you give everybody email addresses with a different tag value, it also automagically translates between this and tag@username.fastmail.fm - this not only avoids confusing web forms and avoids confusing your mother, it also reduces the risk that spammers will guess that simply using the untagged "username@domain.com" will reach you.
Actually, it was Disney World, and last month, so I got my prognostications about the future taken care of early instead of my usual procrastination.
Must...obey....Big.....Mouse......
Oh, right, the other point I'd forgotten to make while posting was that New Jersey had extensive "blue laws" about not being able to sell things on Sunday until the mid-80s, for much the same reason. The State (actually, a bunch of counties) was pretending that it was protecting something or other about the morality or goodness and niceness in society and preventing workers from being exploited by preventing them from working on Sunday, but it was really because owners of small and mostly family-run businesses didn't want competition from big shopping malls, which could much better afford to employ workers on Sundays, as opposed to getting yet another family member to work on Sunday.
"Tennent" is a town in New Jersey.
A "tenant" is someone who holds land, typically a renter.
You probably meant "tenet", which is
"An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization".
Note that a tenet may be held by a ranter....
A few years ago I was back in Jersey and needed gas for my rental car. I went into the station to pay, and was told by the mechanic that the guy who pumps gas was on lunch break. I went out and pumped my gas, went in to pay again, and got yelled at; I'd forgotten that they had this silliness.
The benchmark programs aren't free - this is a non-profit industry association that charges money to cover its costs, but there are a number of universities that are members or associates which may be able to do testing that could explore some of the compiler differences; poke around their website to see who's reported what kinds of results.
"Wouldn't you really rather go to the basement, RIGHT NOW, than up to the 15th floor? Thank you for making a humble elevator so very, very happy...."
Draft registration is important for a couple of reasons
- It keeps the public in the habit of obeying orders.
- If they want to have a big war in a hurry, and the public doesn't want to participate, it's much faster to draft people if you already know where they live.
- If you've don't do mandatory registration in peacetime, lots of people won't obey or register when you announce that you're having a war, and tracking them down is a slow process - it's much easier to do in peacetime when you're not in a hurry.
- It's easier to get people to comply when the risk of registration looks low - "having your name in yet another government database" is easier to put up with that "getting sent to VietNam.".
The reason the US has draft registration today is that Bill Clinton, having been a successful draft dodger and a hypocritical President, didn't want to take the political heat that the Republicans would have given him if he had approved the small amount of funding for closing down Selective Service when it came up for renewal during his term. If he'd had the guts to serve his country by saying "Peacetime Draft Registration is Un-American, let's kill it", we'd be better off. If I remember correctly, the peacetime draft registration was the fault of Jimmy Carter, but it might have been Ford or Reagan.My Draft Lottery Number was something over 300, in the last lottery, and I was classified "1-H", which is a holding category that means that the Army didn't want to bother paying to give me a physical. I lost my draft card some time before I turned 26....
A number of the Unix email systems let you get a similar effect by tagging addresses - myusername+tag1@example.net, myusername+tag2@example.net, etc., though sometimes the separator is a "-" or a "+" or something else, and sometimes web forms choke on the separators, and mail forwarding systems don't explicitly support them, and too many humans aren't good at copying them correctly (which has been the real limitation, unfortunately.) You have to discard the abused addresses in your mail client or procmail instead of rejecting it from sendmail or pointing the mailbox to /dev/null, but it otherwise works the same way as the domain solution. Also, if anybody sends mail to myusername@example.net, without the tag, you'll probably get it, and spammers can figure that one out.
Fastmail.fm has a nice intermediate solution, using third-level domains. If your account is username@fastmail.fm, you can use username+tag@fastmail.fm, or you can also use tag@username.fastmail.fm, which works well in web forms and people seem to be able to copy accurately. (They also seem to be much more generally clueful than most webmail systems I've seen.) Their system runs on some kind of Unix system - I think *BSD rather than Linux, but it's at least a flexible and stable enough environment for them to build mail handling tools.
I don't know quite how many people use AOL, but it's about 30 million, plus or minus 50-200%. That's about 200 times as large as XS4ALL. Most of the other big US ISPs have somewhere between 1 and 10 million dialup users. I don't know how many people Hotmail and Yahoo provide email for, but most of those accounts are disposable and low-use. On the other hand, the ISP I use for my email and web page has somewhere around 1000 users, maybe a bit more, so XS4ALL is about 100 times as big :-)
If you're an individual user, a computation-intensive spamassassin approach can do a really good job of blocking most spam and blocking very little non-spam. But if you're an ISP or Mail Service Provider, having a conservative RBL can save you a lot of resources, including bandwidth and computation, by throwing away the high-volume relay-abuse spams with as little work as possible, saving the more complex work for mail that's less likely to be spam. (By conservative, I mean "trying to only block actual relays and other known spammer systems", as opposed to "broad-spectrum insecticides and lists that do collateral damage to pressure ISPs or harass their competition.") That might be a 25-50% reduction in total email that the ISP needs to handle, but from an instantaneous-resources standpoint, it's probably higher than that, because spam tends to come in high-volume blasts, while real email is mostly Poisson arrivals. And if an ISP's failure responses are the "Temporarily inaccessible, try again later" type as opposed to permanent rejections, real email systems are much more likely to try again later than spammers are (though of course open relays may still try again later, because they're just mal-administered, not necessarily broken.)
The legitimate part of the email list industry responded with "double opt-in" to indicate that the listbot sends the recipient a message saying "you or somebody pretending to be you asked to subscribe you to the list, click here or reply if you really want to be on the list" and doesn't add the user to the list if they don't confirm. Most legitimate mailing lists bots do that, though some don't bother. Spammers occasionally claim to be double opt-in, but that's just because they're liars.