First of all, if you force everybody to have one, it's almost guaranteed that they won't be anonymous - governments just don't work that way, and there are too many potential uses for the things.
For traffic flow measurement, you don't need *everybody* to have one anyway - a few percent are enough to get traffic measurements.
If you always have a transponder with a consistent key, even if it's anonymous, it's easy to build up a history of location records, so if they get your ID, it's easy to trace *you* - and they cna walk up to your driveway and scan your car.
Tollbooths have cameras to read license plates, and they have transponders. Even without increasingly-practical optical character recognition, it's easy enough to hire a bunch of convicts to read license plate numbers from the pictures. San Francisco did this a few years ago when they were going to close one of the freeways - they read the plates from a week's traffic and sent everybody a postcard telling them to find a different route to work.
Yes, right now they're probably not tracking individuals, except at tollbooths for billing purposes, and they're using encrypted forms of the user ids for their traffic-flow monitoring, and they destroy any personally-identifiable data after 24 hours. This is really nice, but the first subpoena or court order they get can change it, especially the data destruction part. Good intentions are good, but I don't expect them to act like Julf Helsingius and fold up their service the first time they get a court order that prevents them from protecting their users' privacy.
The encryption part is potentially very interesting technically, and I don't expect an average newspaper article to get the details correct down to crypto-geek level:-) Chaum's Digicash technology could provide the privacy necessary to do toll collection privately, but isn't useful for traffic flow (where you want to be able to correlate separate transactions.) You could hash the userIDs along with a daily random key, which would still be susceptible to dictionary attacks if the daily numbers are retained, but would otherwise be somewhat secure. You get much better privacy if you hash the userID down to a value that's shorter than the number of userIDs (limits dictionary search attacks), but that makes it hard to track cars if you overdo it.
and believe me, you'd have to pay me six figures to maintain that cruft, and the high-order figure wouldn't be a "1" or "0".... The best thing to do with almost anything written for that brain-limited environment is to reverse engineer it and replace it with a very small Perl script, or a medium-sized C/C++/Java program. It was essentially a set of input/ouput format statements with the ability to do primitive arithmetic (no expression parsing - one operation per line) and simple looping control structures. Our main projects would crunch a bunch of data through an RPG system, then feed that through a sorter because you couldn't possibly do decent sorting in RPG, then post-process in RPG.
I've also done Fortran - easy to learn, a few really ugly contructs like array overlaps, lousy I/O and character handling, funky bug opportunities in call-by-reference, but f77 and newer versions could interact well enough with C, so you could do the complicated parts in C and hand off any big array-crynching jobs to Fortran subroutines.
Thanks for a discussion discussing actual speeds! O(logn**12) is pretty slow, but the paper also says that if a widely held conjecture is true, the algorithm should usually run in time O(logn**6), which is much less bad. That says that doubling the key length increases the run time by only a factor of 64, not 4096. I don't know if your run time examples are realistic, but this could make it occasionally usable. The authors also conjecture that if certain things are true, the algorithm could be changed to an O(logn**3) algorithm, which would be quite practical, perhaps competitive with the probablistic tests.
In practice, most public-key crypto algorithms formerly used 512-bit or 1024-bit keys, and are tending to do 2048 bits today. A few paranoids use longer keys just because they can, but 2048 is generally believed to be good enough. Existing factoring technology has cracked 512-bit keys, and I think the longest successful crack is about 640 bits. Dan Bernstein's factoring machine proposal has led some people to abandon trust in 1024-bit keys, though other people think that's premature.
Also sucks to not be carrying the MIL-SPEC ruggedized 5-pound GPS unit that only 5% of the soldiers are carrying because they're expensive and clunky - much better to be carrying the small cheap commercial version, and if it breaks, maybe your buddy's is still working. And it sucks even worse to be the guy flying the expensive surveillance plane getting shot at instead of the guy remotely operating a bunch of cheap drones even if they get shot down more.
And remember all those M-16s jamming all the time in Nam? The commercial gun that the Army started with when they developed it was apparently much less likely to jam, but by the time it got kluged up into a more military-looking gun, it jammed more.
If this program gets anywhere, it can help the military retire a bunch of the old equipment that's hogging lots of that spectrum, and replace it with more flexible stuff that's less expensive, and can reduce the extent to which they're blocking development of new technologies (ultrawideband, etc.) that might interfere with their hogged spectrum.
The military *does* like spending money on new toys, and Darpa's job is partly to design lots of new toys. So why was it you thought that "making everyone buy new equipment" was bad?:-)
Cynicism aside, though, a lot of their existing communications tools are really expensive, and use old technology or newer technology that's made extra-complex to retain compatibility with older technology, and new equipment made with new commercially-viable parts can be *much* less expensive, often less expensive than maintaining existing equipment. For a computer example, compare the cost of buying a 1GHz 256M RAM 20GB disk machine today (about $400) with the cost of replacing fixing your 486 (which used different memory technology, EGA video, 5.25" disk drives, backup tape drives, no CDROMs, etc.) In some cases, the military does need militarized equipment (throwing radios around in trucks and dropping them off airplanes can be a bit rough), but often it's cheaper to buy 10 commercial units and have 8 of them break.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. If you're surprised, it's not just a problem with them....
You need to understand why they're not coding. Here are some possible reasons:
They're still trying to clarify the requirements. Some projects have well-defined requirements, but many real ones don't, and maybe their parts are fuzzier than yours, or maybe they need help understanding them.
They're still designing interfaces and test plans, and are wisely not writing code until they know what it should do and how to do it right. Maybe your part has more obvious interfaces than theirs, or maybe they need some help defining them, or maybe you're rushing off writing code before you've done your critical design work. Writing code is only the middlish 10% of the job.
Maybe they're trying to build tools they need to build their real code. This could be forward-thinking planning, or it could be they don't realize the resources they've got available and need help finding / getting them.
Maybe they're underskilled and over their heads and don't know how to do the job - but apparently you haven't been communicating with them, and also apparently they haven't been communicating with you.
So talk with them first and find out what's going on. If you can't come to an understanding, find a manager to help -- I don't mean a Boss to tell them what to do, I mean a Manager to actually manage the project and people. You probably need one of those anyway, and sometimes programmers can do that but sometimes they don't have the people skills to do it.
He *does* work for the FearMonger's Shop, er, Feds' Critical Infrastructure Protection Board after all. But the main article, while a fun rant, didn't really say very much, it just ranted about Schmidt fearmongering.
Some of the studies of fast-spreading worms demonstrate that, if there are simultaneous exploitable bugs in widespread versions of Apache and Microsoft webservers, a Bad Guy could take over and 0wn most of them faster than a credible response could be deployed, and if the Bad Guy wanted to be destructive, lots of those servers could be wiped (your basic Warhol Worm followed by a "Thhhattt's Alll, FFfffolkssss!!!"). Sites that aren't running decently secure environments (serious backups, separation between webservers and critical databases, good firewalls, etc.) would be toast. More fun if you can combine it with an attack on Microsoft Outlook Mail as well. There's far more potential for destruction if the attacker also targets important applications, but at some point it's a tradeoff between successful faster destruction and deeper destruction.
Of course, just because there are things that are worth being afraid of, that doesn't mean that we should immediately let the Feds tell us what to do and start trusting them to take care of us, or even give them whopping big budgets and unlimited powers to "inspect" our computer systems, which are some of the major purposes of government Fearmongering.
By the way, while it is owned by Fearmongers, the NIPC.GOV website really does have some good tools and material there - I found it very helpful when dealing with a Staecheldracht DDOS cracker on my lab machines last year.
Backups? Sure, you'd know not to do future business with people who don't keep backups, but in far too many cases, that'd be because they'd be Dead, Out Of Business, Pining for the Fjords, and Ex-Customers. Far too many companies have far too many systems that aren't adequately backed up, and while I'd like to see them all Get The Clue, I'm really opposed to any policy of crashing cars into motorcycle riders as a method of educating them about helmets and safety, and this is pretty much the same thing. There are a lot of companies that have auditors or business requirements that force them to back up everything that needs backing up, and many other companies practice due diligence about things like backups, offsite backups, secondary data centers that are geographically separated so one earthquake or flood doesn't wipe them both out, using at least some internet providers who aren't in Chapter 11, use UPSs for their DHCP and DNS servers, not keeping their Accounts Receivable databases on their external web servers, etc. But there are a lot of companies that do some things right, create real value for their customers, and generally deserve to be in business who aren't doing everything right yet, and I'm glad lots of them didn't get shot in the head by the last few gifts from Microsoft.
By the way, Apache's had serious security flaws, and so has Sendmail, there are probably at least three other seriously dangerous bugs in widely-deployed Linux applications that could be exploited if the Bad Guys find them first. Any decent Warhol Worm will make sure it's got a good Apache bug to exploit as well as the easier Microsoft targets.
According to the article, the police used the offenders' PC and password to log in to the web site and change it. It didn't say how they got the password - was it saved on the PC, written on a yellow sticky note, or did they beat it out of the suspects? In any case, they didn't contact the US site or order them to take it down, so they didn't apply any jurisdiction over them, they just took direct action.
The catch is - Does this violate US laws against cracking into computers? Can it be construed as using illegally obtained passwords, and can the Italian police be charged under US law as illegal hackers? Would the US actually prosecute? Could it enforce a judgement if it succeeded? Would the ISP enjoy taking this to the World Court or some similar body? It appears from the news article that the accused blasphemers haven't been convicted of any crime yet, only accused, and this was part of the police investigation; don't know if that makes it legal under Italian law.
The one US datapoint I have for similar laws is that blasphemy was illegal in Delaware until 1968, when a court threw out both the blasphemy law (for violating the First Amendment) and the prescribed punishment ( N lashes at the whipping post, as cruel and unusual). The blasphemy laws hadn't actually been applied in ages until that case; don't know how often whipping was still used before then.
Why shouldn't the Vatican have its own top-level country-code domain? (Ignoring the issue of whether CCTLDs are a good idea...) It's surrounded by Italy, but it's a separate country, just like Monte Carlo, Lichtenstein, and other small governments left over from before the big governments took over Western Europe (primarily France and the various German and Austro-Hungarian conquerors.) Now, if you're offended that the Church used to run secular governments like the Papal States instead of sticking to spiritual matters, or that the Pope is more powerful than many other bishops, that's a separate issue, but there's no reason that the Italian government should be running their city.*
* I thought we were sort of an autonomous collective....
Typically, 64kbps raw voice gets compressed to 16kbps or 8kbps, then wrapped in several layers of RTP and IP overhead that bring it back up to around 12-24kbps. Won't make a dent in your shared 10Mbps Ether, much less Gig-E-to-the desktop. The problem is that it's latency-sensitive, and getting stuck behind big ftp transfers can be a problem - and it's unlikely that a high-powered switching network will be able to prioritize it. On the other hand, utilization will probably be low enough that there won't be much jitter - the real problem becomes connecting the PBX to the outside world.
If CWRU is installing the wireless, they'll have at least some semblence of security on it. If universities are hunting down rogue wireless, for reasons other than just clueless control-freakness, it's because they're (legitimately) concerned about uncontrolled access as a security risk. Of course, security problems are much different for academia than for businesses - here in the business world, the classic security threat is some college kid hacking into your network. But if you're *running* a university network, all those threats are already *inside* your firewall - and they're your customers....
Maybe most users can't use a full gbps of data. Most of them *can* use more than 100mbps, so even if they only double their bandwidth, it's still nice, and there's plenty of room for growth. Obviously things like file servers can benefit from the faster connections more directly, since they're often transmitting to many recipients at once, so they'll probably get beefed up early.
Of course we'll start yelling about compression:-) Lossless compression algorithms have been around for a long time - they don't usually save as much space as lossy algorithms, but they keep all your data. The simpler algorithms (Huffman codes, Lempel-Ziv variations, and all the things that zip and gzip formats use) aren't tuned for images, but I found that they gave me 3:1 compression on satellite images, and much higher compression on images that were mostly black space. And the decompression is fast enough that it's almost always a win to burn the compression time - sometimes the savings in transmission time alone makes it worthwhile.
I don't know if anybody's done 2-dimensional lossless coding, or how well it works, but it shouldn't be hard - do line-by-line differences and then compress those, if you want something crude.
You can also find lossless music coders - "Shorten" used by etree.org gets compression ratios of 2-3, which is a lot bigger than MP3s but keeps the audiophiles happy.
There are starting to be a lot of copper gig-e cards out there; I've seen them as cheap as $59 at Fry's. By contrast, the Netgear GA621 is $249, though the school probably gets some huge volume discount.
Jandar0's other article mentioned that there's an adapter for 100Mbps service for people who can't use gig-e fiber cards (Mac users, etc.), which is probably good enough for laptops (otherwise, if you've got a roommate with a desk-top, use their PC as a bridge or something...) That shouldn't be too bad for performance - you'll be limited to 100Mbps, but the performance should be better since the backbone has more bandwidth for everybody, so you should still get decent file-server performance, and Gnutella won't be bandwidth-limited...
Worldcom, L3, Global Crossing, and anybody else who built out big fiber networks got caught because the technology for multiplexing lots of very fast connections on a fiber finally caught up with the market. Back in 1990 or 1991 I heard a talk from somebody at MCI predicting we'd have problems like that, though back in those days we were worried about the failure mode of "Cheap bandwidth, smart PBXs -> customers build their own phone networks and undercut the telcos" as a likely method of killing the cash cow, rather than the internet-speed version of the problem.
European telcos were hit by this, partly because they'd gotten away with charging huge amounts of money for small connections for years, and all of a sudden they could be out-competed, but they had another serious problem: They'd believed all the market hype about wireless and spent billions of euros on auctions for government licenses to allow them to run the next-generation wireless technology, when in fact the revenue just wasn't there, so they bankrupted themselves. Unfortunately, after the first auction collected a few billions for the lucky government running it, everybody else got into the act, and the wireless companies all believed that they *had* to pay up, because otherwise they wouldn't get their piece of the pie, and besides, everybody else had mortgaged their futures so *they* presumably knew what they were doing and knew that the marketing analysts were correct. Unlike the Internet market, where dogfood-on-line.com could fail and only bother the employees, stockholders, and venture capitalists plus a few suppliers and their loyal customer base, this was a much larger amount of money (I think I read that the totals were about $35B, more than all the Silicon Valley VC money during the boom) this upfront tax on vaporware trashed a lot of companies providing critical infrastructure for the continent, and dragged down most of the European economy's productivity by taking otherwise useful money that might have funded real business activities and pouring it down the drain.
Of course the internet isn't the next big place to make money, because as we've discovered the last couple of years, making money is much harder than just getting on the internet. Lots of the free services we all like are subsidized by that mass-market advertising you're disparaging, like the Slashdot you're reading right now, and the real problem is that they've been getting better estimates of how much the ads are really worth:-) But meanwhile, the amount of human-to-human communication on the net has gone up as well, and unlike TV and Movies-in-commercial-movie-theaters, that fact that there's more commercial noise doesn't mean there's less signal or that it's harder to find what you want.
And phones, paper mail, and libraries are all _highly_ commercial as well as personal. The contents of your mail should be private, and who you get mail from should be private, and in a free market they would be, but the government monopoly lets the post office open your mail to inspect it for politically incorrect plants and sexually incorrect pictures, and doesn't require a warrant to give the police records about who you got mail from. Some libraries are tax-funded, some are privately funded membership-based, some are run by other kinds of organizations for their members, and some are purely commercial - Borders and Blockbuster Video and the wonderful independent bookstores we have in the San Francisco Bay Area are just as much in the library business as your town's library, and the books your library buys are mostly byproducts of the commercial publishing business (Authors may write books for artistic reasons as well as financial reasons, but publishers pay for the cost of printing and distributing them purely because they're trying to make money....)
Cable services will have to be opened or *DSL* will end up owning the Internet. There's a wide variety of quality of cable modem service, unfortunately by geographically limited former monopolies, so your choices are to like it, move:-), or buy DSL if you can. Cities originally gave monopoly franchises to cable TV companies for reasons that usually had nothing to do with forward-looking visions for telecommunications and often everything to do with whose brother-in-law got the contract for street paving, and you were often lucky to get your MTV, and when the original smaller companies got bought up by bigger ones, that improved a bit. That's gradually changing, as cable companies realize that they can get 50-100% more revenue per customer by cable modems, but the fundamental problems are not that they need clueless local or national governments to bully them into getting a clue, but that they need potential customers to bully them into getting a clue.
Me? I work for a large company that (until sometime in the near future) owns a large cable TV system - but I'm planning to get DSL, because I want to run servers and don't want to put up with the service restrictions. Some of the DSL providers are equally clueless, but some aren't....
I live in a condo with nice high ceilings, lots of open space and airflow, and don't need or miss air conditioning (though we've got one room a/c downstairs that we've never used.) I spend more on heat in the winter time than I ever did in New Jersey, where we had real winter. (Half of that is because I've got electric heat - the place was built in the mid 70s, and doesn't have much insulation, either.)
Modems have start and stop bits on them. Yeah, OK, cable modems, so I should have done 8-bit bytes:-) DSL doesn't have them either, but DSL does have ATM headers which add about 12%. But even 64kbits takes half a second on your 128kbits upstream, which can easily annoy your downstream traffic.
There are a couple of problems that can lead to this symptom, and asymmetric connections are more likely to suffer from it. Basically, if your upstream bandwidth is swamped with file transfers, it's hard for the ACKs for packets you receive on your downstream to get through, so the downstream TCP sessions get throttled. Many DSL providers oversubscribe their links (though the problem is usually worse downstream than upstream)(cable can have this problem also), so that 128kbps upstream you thought you had might only be 38kbps if lots of people are uploading at the same time - so your upstream packets may be queued at the DSLAM, and your little ACK packets have to wait for a windowful of big file transfer packets to clear out, or they may be queued in _your_ DSL router. An 8KB TCP window is 80k bits, so even if you're getting your whole 128kbps upstream, that's over half a second of data that could be sitting ahead of your ACK, dogging your downstream flow rate. It's especially bad if your upstream traffic has a big window size, while your downstream is using slowstart and has never gotten a very big window.
So yes, traffic shaping can be your friend. Unfortunately, it may be hard to know what to tune it too, depending on where the bottleneck is.
The largest amounts of space on my machine are taken up by Microsoft software (at work), Linux software (at home and my work lab), and training material (bloated Powerpoint slideware), all of which have lots of identical copies and a small number of non-identical ones. If the software can recognize these efficiently, that part's an easy win, and the system should be able to manage it well. And it's possible to make much of the administration work automagically by setting up a row of cheap PCs with big disk drives which can serve backups to everybody. If you've done everything well, and have a wide area network you can flood, such as VPN over internet, you get offsite backup for free too.
Unfortunately, the biggest single file on my system is my Microsoft Outlook Mailbox, which is in a proprietary format that doesn't make incremental backups possible. Since we're laptop-users who go out in the field a lot, we need to keep the mailboxes on our PCs, not on the server. While the best solution is "So don't use Outlook, then",/i>, in a lot of corporate environments, that's an unrealistically lost battle.
The other big concern I'd have is that, while the system looks really cool for desktop PC users, it's less practical for an environment where everybody uses laptops and on any given day, half the people are out of the office at customer locations or working from home on slow connections - so their PCs are much less usable as a backup mechanism, and may not have the bandwidth half the time.
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The encryption part is potentially very interesting technically, and I don't expect an average newspaper article to get the details correct down to crypto-geek level :-) Chaum's Digicash technology could provide the privacy necessary to do toll collection privately, but isn't useful for traffic flow (where you want to be able to correlate separate transactions.) You could hash the userIDs along with a daily random key, which would still be susceptible to dictionary attacks if the daily numbers are retained, but would otherwise be somewhat secure. You get much better privacy if you hash the userID down to a value that's shorter than the number of userIDs (limits dictionary search attacks), but that makes it hard to track cars if you overdo it.
I've also done Fortran - easy to learn, a few really ugly contructs like array overlaps, lousy I/O and character handling, funky bug opportunities in call-by-reference, but f77 and newer versions could interact well enough with C, so you could do the complicated parts in C and hand off any big array-crynching jobs to Fortran subroutines.
The authors also conjecture that if certain things are true, the algorithm could be changed to an O(logn**3) algorithm, which would be quite practical, perhaps competitive with the probablistic tests.
In practice, most public-key crypto algorithms formerly used 512-bit or 1024-bit keys, and are tending to do 2048 bits today. A few paranoids use longer keys just because they can, but 2048 is generally believed to be good enough. Existing factoring technology has cracked 512-bit keys, and I think the longest successful crack is about 640 bits. Dan Bernstein's factoring machine proposal has led some people to abandon trust in 1024-bit keys, though other people think that's premature.
What, a convenient delivery vehicle to haul a few kilos or a few tons of material somewhere without needing a driver? Who'd want that?
And remember all those M-16s jamming all the time in Nam? The commercial gun that the Army started with when they developed it was apparently much less likely to jam, but by the time it got kluged up into a more military-looking gun, it jammed more.
If this program gets anywhere, it can help the military retire a bunch of the old equipment that's hogging lots of that spectrum, and replace it with more flexible stuff that's less expensive, and can reduce the extent to which they're blocking development of new technologies (ultrawideband, etc.) that might interfere with their hogged spectrum.
Cynicism aside, though, a lot of their existing communications tools are really expensive, and use old technology or newer technology that's made extra-complex to retain compatibility with older technology, and new equipment made with new commercially-viable parts can be *much* less expensive, often less expensive than maintaining existing equipment. For a computer example, compare the cost of buying a 1GHz 256M RAM 20GB disk machine today (about $400) with the cost of replacing fixing your 486 (which used different memory technology, EGA video, 5.25" disk drives, backup tape drives, no CDROMs, etc.) In some cases, the military does need militarized equipment (throwing radios around in trucks and dropping them off airplanes can be a bit rough), but often it's cheaper to buy 10 commercial units and have 8 of them break.
You need to understand why they're not coding. Here are some possible reasons:
- They're still trying to clarify the requirements. Some projects have well-defined requirements, but many real ones don't, and maybe their parts are fuzzier than yours, or maybe they need help understanding them.
- They're still designing interfaces and test plans, and are wisely not writing code until they know what it should do and how to do it right. Maybe your part has more obvious interfaces than theirs, or maybe they need some help defining them, or maybe you're rushing off writing code before you've done your critical design work. Writing code is only the middlish 10% of the job.
- Maybe they're trying to build tools they need to build their real code. This could be forward-thinking planning, or it could be they don't realize the resources they've got available and need help finding / getting them.
- Maybe they're underskilled and over their heads and don't know how to do the job - but apparently you haven't been communicating with them, and also apparently they haven't been communicating with you.
So talk with them first and find out what's going on. If you can't come to an understanding, find a manager to help -- I don't mean a Boss to tell them what to do, I mean a Manager to actually manage the project and people. You probably need one of those anyway, and sometimes programmers can do that but sometimes they don't have the people skills to do it.Some of the studies of fast-spreading worms demonstrate that, if there are simultaneous exploitable bugs in widespread versions of Apache and Microsoft webservers, a Bad Guy could take over and 0wn most of them faster than a credible response could be deployed, and if the Bad Guy wanted to be destructive, lots of those servers could be wiped (your basic Warhol Worm followed by a "Thhhattt's Alll, FFfffolkssss!!!"). Sites that aren't running decently secure environments (serious backups, separation between webservers and critical databases, good firewalls, etc.) would be toast. More fun if you can combine it with an attack on Microsoft Outlook Mail as well. There's far more potential for destruction if the attacker also targets important applications, but at some point it's a tradeoff between successful faster destruction and deeper destruction.
Of course, just because there are things that are worth being afraid of, that doesn't mean that we should immediately let the Feds tell us what to do and start trusting them to take care of us, or even give them whopping big budgets and unlimited powers to "inspect" our computer systems, which are some of the major purposes of government Fearmongering.
By the way, while it is owned by Fearmongers, the NIPC.GOV website really does have some good tools and material there - I found it very helpful when dealing with a Staecheldracht DDOS cracker on my lab machines last year.
By the way, Apache's had serious security flaws, and so has Sendmail, there are probably at least three other seriously dangerous bugs in widely-deployed Linux applications that could be exploited if the Bad Guys find them first. Any decent Warhol Worm will make sure it's got a good Apache bug to exploit as well as the easier Microsoft targets.
The catch is - Does this violate US laws against cracking into computers? Can it be construed as using illegally obtained passwords, and can the Italian police be charged under US law as illegal hackers? Would the US actually prosecute? Could it enforce a judgement if it succeeded? Would the ISP enjoy taking this to the World Court or some similar body? It appears from the news article that the accused blasphemers haven't been convicted of any crime yet, only accused, and this was part of the police investigation; don't know if that makes it legal under Italian law.
The one US datapoint I have for similar laws is that blasphemy was illegal in Delaware until 1968, when a court threw out both the blasphemy law (for violating the First Amendment) and the prescribed punishment ( N lashes at the whipping post, as cruel and unusual). The blasphemy laws hadn't actually been applied in ages until that case; don't know how often whipping was still used before then.
* I thought we were sort of an autonomous collective....
Typically, 64kbps raw voice gets compressed to 16kbps or 8kbps, then wrapped in several layers of RTP and IP overhead that bring it back up to around 12-24kbps. Won't make a dent in your shared 10Mbps Ether, much less Gig-E-to-the desktop. The problem is that it's latency-sensitive, and getting stuck behind big ftp transfers can be a problem - and it's unlikely that a high-powered switching network will be able to prioritize it. On the other hand, utilization will probably be low enough that there won't be much jitter - the real problem becomes connecting the PBX to the outside world.
If CWRU is installing the wireless, they'll have at least some semblence of security on it. If universities are hunting down rogue wireless, for reasons other than just clueless control-freakness, it's because they're (legitimately) concerned about uncontrolled access as a security risk. Of course, security problems are much different for academia than for businesses - here in the business world, the classic security threat is some college kid hacking into your network. But if you're *running* a university network, all those threats are already *inside* your firewall - and they're your customers....
Maybe most users can't use a full gbps of data. Most of them *can* use more than 100mbps, so even if they only double their bandwidth, it's still nice, and there's plenty of room for growth. Obviously things like file servers can benefit from the faster connections more directly, since they're often transmitting to many recipients at once, so they'll probably get beefed up early.
I don't know if anybody's done 2-dimensional lossless coding, or how well it works, but it shouldn't be hard - do line-by-line differences and then compress those, if you want something crude.
You can also find lossless music coders - "Shorten" used by etree.org gets compression ratios of 2-3, which is a lot bigger than MP3s but keeps the audiophiles happy.
Jandar0's other article mentioned that there's an adapter for 100Mbps service for people who can't use gig-e fiber cards (Mac users, etc.), which is probably good enough for laptops (otherwise, if you've got a roommate with a desk-top, use their PC as a bridge or something...) That shouldn't be too bad for performance - you'll be limited to 100Mbps, but the performance should be better since the backbone has more bandwidth for everybody, so you should still get decent file-server performance, and Gnutella won't be bandwidth-limited...
European telcos were hit by this, partly because they'd gotten away with charging huge amounts of money for small connections for years, and all of a sudden they could be out-competed, but they had another serious problem: They'd believed all the market hype about wireless and spent billions of euros on auctions for government licenses to allow them to run the next-generation wireless technology, when in fact the revenue just wasn't there, so they bankrupted themselves. Unfortunately, after the first auction collected a few billions for the lucky government running it, everybody else got into the act, and the wireless companies all believed that they *had* to pay up, because otherwise they wouldn't get their piece of the pie, and besides, everybody else had mortgaged their futures so *they* presumably knew what they were doing and knew that the marketing analysts were correct. Unlike the Internet market, where dogfood-on-line.com could fail and only bother the employees, stockholders, and venture capitalists plus a few suppliers and their loyal customer base, this was a much larger amount of money (I think I read that the totals were about $35B, more than all the Silicon Valley VC money during the boom) this upfront tax on vaporware trashed a lot of companies providing critical infrastructure for the continent, and dragged down most of the European economy's productivity by taking otherwise useful money that might have funded real business activities and pouring it down the drain.
And phones, paper mail, and libraries are all _highly_ commercial as well as personal. The contents of your mail should be private, and who you get mail from should be private, and in a free market they would be, but the government monopoly lets the post office open your mail to inspect it for politically incorrect plants and sexually incorrect pictures, and doesn't require a warrant to give the police records about who you got mail from. Some libraries are tax-funded, some are privately funded membership-based, some are run by other kinds of organizations for their members, and some are purely commercial - Borders and Blockbuster Video and the wonderful independent bookstores we have in the San Francisco Bay Area are just as much in the library business as your town's library, and the books your library buys are mostly byproducts of the commercial publishing business (Authors may write books for artistic reasons as well as financial reasons, but publishers pay for the cost of printing and distributing them purely because they're trying to make money....)
Me? I work for a large company that (until sometime in the near future) owns a large cable TV system - but I'm planning to get DSL, because I want to run servers and don't want to put up with the service restrictions. Some of the DSL providers are equally clueless, but some aren't....
I live in a condo with nice high ceilings, lots of open space and airflow, and don't need or miss air conditioning (though we've got one room a/c downstairs that we've never used.) I spend more on heat in the winter time than I ever did in New Jersey, where we had real winter. (Half of that is because I've got electric heat - the place was built in the mid 70s, and doesn't have much insulation, either.)
Modems have start and stop bits on them. Yeah, OK, cable modems, so I should have done 8-bit bytes :-) DSL doesn't have them either, but DSL does have ATM headers which add about 12%. But even 64kbits takes half a second on your 128kbits upstream, which can easily annoy your downstream traffic.
So yes, traffic shaping can be your friend. Unfortunately, it may be hard to know what to tune it too, depending on where the bottleneck is.
Unfortunately, the biggest single file on my system is my Microsoft Outlook Mailbox, which is in a proprietary format that doesn't make incremental backups possible. Since we're laptop-users who go out in the field a lot, we need to keep the mailboxes on our PCs, not on the server. While the best solution is "So don't use Outlook, then",/i>, in a lot of corporate environments, that's an unrealistically lost battle.
The other big concern I'd have is that, while the system looks really cool for desktop PC users, it's less practical for an environment where everybody uses laptops and on any given day, half the people are out of the office at customer locations or working from home on slow connections - so their PCs are much less usable as a backup mechanism, and may not have the bandwidth half the time.