If I have to pull 5 miles of fiber from the switch to a building to deliver an OC-48 to 1 customer, then extend that back through a SONNET with 3 pass-through points....thats pretty expensive. And for the customer it ties them to one company...
Now if you look at most Urban areas in the UK, France, Spain, etc there are a lot more public switches, tons of MAN setups, etc...not to mention the fact that wireless is a lot easier when you have a smaller geographical area.
2. Regulation + MA Bells
Fixed lines prices, taxes, etc all can hold back expansion of networks. ILECs still have power in the US. Even though Verizon and AT&T are buying everything they still can't consolidate all their networks and unify on new technology because that would be viewed as an unfair advantage to other companies.
Simple...local loops, SONNET use, any pass-throughs to the terminating switch all use up very finite resources to give you highly reliable frame level service. Not to mention the required costs from regulation (yes lines prices + competition are still regulated by the government in the US)
Now when you can buy all your access from the lowest bidder, ride on the other people's copper, have uniform configurations, etc you can cut costs.
Of course if you happen to have p2p fiber, or a ring right to your building; and your end carrier is also your ILEC, bandwidth is damn cheap.
It sounds more like they created a substance that uses intermolecular forces to have a high attraction to water (like salt or any other desiccant). The secret is making it so that under a specific condition these water molecules can be released again (heat, pressure, etc). Then possibly combined it with standard evaporation methods through compression and cooling (standard dehumidifier).
So in all they probably just found, or dynamically adjust, the 'sweet spot' between the two methods to produce the most amount of water with the least power.
Oh yeah, lets solve the email problem by making the protocol more complex. Or maybe, just maybe, we could develop open standard that extends delivery that people could adopt....nah lets just ditch everything and start from scratch. Oh and while your throwing away billions of dollars of existing systems, ditch cars for mass transit systems, oh and ditch wasting paper, use of fossil fuels, pollution, corruption, poverty, and stupid columnists who just create a headline and thow bunches of meaningless buzzwords and acronyms in an article.
SMTP is not an issue...its getting large software vendors to adopt a more complex RFC that has hooks for authentication, and encryption, etc. Since one major providers do, others will exploit that added information to filter content. Of course if you keep your 'standard' private like some software vendors, it kind of breaks the entire chain of events. In other words SMTP is not the issue, the issue is that a lot of large software companies really don't see the value in attempting improving things they don't directly make money from.
Oh and his 'new' idea about creating a standard that differentates based email based on variables passed in the email address....Sorry its called 'Address Extensions' and has Been around for a long time.
Of course nice little things like NTP servers, and DNS root servers, free software mirrors, usenet etc are usually hosted by people who volunteer their time, hardware, and some extra bandwidth. Now if many of these universities, NPOs, and generious companies have to pay a premium so that people can actually reach their server, it won't be long till these servers start getting taken down from lack of funding.
So lets rely on a few giants to run the entire network. I'm sure no media companies, commerce giants, reporters, software companies would ever want to supress the free dissemination of news, and communication, and open standards.
Just don't leave the country again Zimmerman...or you may end up locked inside that customs office where they 'want to leave lawyers out of this' again.:)
GFS over a FC SAN with some EMC CLARiiON CX700s as the hosts is the solution that I'm going to looking at deploying next year, although there is still some thoughts on using iSCSI instead of FC. It all really depends on what your usage patterns and performcance requirements are. I don't believe GFS supports ATAoE systems but since their is linux support I doubt it would be too far of a strech.
Certifications are only useful for those who are 1) Trying to get a job where they don't have several years experience working with a subject, but still want to show they have some general understanding of the information involved (a.k.a. getting your foot in the door). 2) As a stepping-stone for more advanced training and certifcations that have benifits such as discounts, support agreements, etc for large companies (e.g. a CCIE ).
Check out the recent This Old House project houses. Several times they have purchased premade concrete foundations and "real timber" external wall sections (pre-filled with rigid insulation) that allow them to have higher energy savings, better overall strength, and are all perfectly plum and square. True it costs more for the materials but they can finish a massive house foundation in one afternoon (no setting time, no forms, etc). So factoring in labor your overall cash expense is roughly the same, but you save time on site.
Complete finished prefab rooms systems (which are popular in Japan these days) have problems in the US. Mainly because the size of many of the rooms are so large that having modular sections would then require you to some finishing on floors, walls, etc to remove any of the seams.
So prefabricating is not all bad, it just depends on the situation, how much you have prefabricated, and the quality offered by the prefabrication company.
Many of the new releases of Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 7 and 8) do a very good job off recognizing speech and filtering out non-speech. The main problem is adequate training...
My company has been working tightly with Scansoft engineering for the past year+ and on most of their recent developer beta releases we can easily achieve 98.5-99.9+ recognition rates (We just got copies of v8 desktop, and haven't messed with it much). However to achieve those rates we use their backend server engine (essentially the same core technology as the desktop, just better server-oriented APIs) to process, at minimum, 4-6 hours of pre-recorded speech from each user.
The big problem with the desktop version is that not many people want to sit down for 6 hours reading random chapters from a book out loud. The easier way is to use pre-recorded audio along with transcribed text. Then the engine can just chug along and create a pretty accurate model with 8-14 hours of audio files.
Another big problem is punctuation...not many people feel like saying 'period', 'semi-colon', 'newline', etc. as they go along. Personally I find speaking formatting clues extremely frustrating, and end up giving up. So you really need learning engines to analyze the inflections and pause in people's speech patterns, and infer this missing information automatically (of course that's what we're working on right now).
All in all, if you spend all day typing large volumes of text (writing novels, instruction manuals, etc.) the current tools could get the job done (if you have the patients to stick with the training). But IMO a keyboard is much more efficient for average users.
I have nothing against Python, Ruby, Java, etc...but they weren't all that in 1995 when Mechmania started, and most of the classes at the time were, and still are, C/C++ based.
Not that change is a bad thing, we've concidered it before...BTW usually calls to any external libraries are allowed.
Mechmania Coordinator Emeritus,
-Nicko
We are writing to encourage your State to take concrete and meaningful steps to address the serious risks posed to the citizens of our States by your State's attorneys ("lawyers") legal practices. By addressing such problems today as the use of loopholes and misinformation to disseminate corporate fraud, invasion of citizen privacy and infringe on their basic human freedoms, lawyers may one day realize its potential as a means for facilitating a wide range of crime prevention, justice, fair business activities, and efficient government actions. At present, the law has too many times been hijacked by those who use loopholes and poor moral practices in the assistance to those who have enguaged in illegal practices to which the vast majority of citizens do not wish to be exposed.
We have carefully considered your actions in a vast history of legitimate court cases. However, we find that this history fails to address and help prevent the actions of many false accusations and unjust verdicts.
Our fellow citizens actively need to be provided with the information necessary to understand this law and to make informed decisions concerning its use. Many lawyers make their living by allowing their clients to propigate false claims and mislead the public as to the actual facts and events related to the client's practices. This type of direct manipulation of public opinion differentiates the misuse of the court system from its original intended purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Population Density.
If I have to pull 5 miles of fiber from the switch to a building to deliver an OC-48 to 1 customer, then extend that back through a SONNET with 3 pass-through points....thats pretty expensive. And for the customer it ties them to one company...
Now if you look at most Urban areas in the UK, France, Spain, etc there are a lot more public switches, tons of MAN setups, etc...not to mention the fact that wireless is a lot easier when you have a smaller geographical area.
2. Regulation + MA Bells
Fixed lines prices, taxes, etc all can hold back expansion of networks. ILECs still have power in the US. Even though Verizon and AT&T are buying everything they still can't consolidate all their networks and unify on new technology because that would be viewed as an unfair advantage to other companies.
Simple...local loops, SONNET use, any pass-throughs to the terminating switch all use up very finite resources to give you highly reliable frame level service. Not to mention the required costs from regulation (yes lines prices + competition are still regulated by the government in the US) Now when you can buy all your access from the lowest bidder, ride on the other people's copper, have uniform configurations, etc you can cut costs. Of course if you happen to have p2p fiber, or a ring right to your building; and your end carrier is also your ILEC, bandwidth is damn cheap.
It sounds more like they created a substance that uses intermolecular forces to have a high attraction to water (like salt or any other desiccant). The secret is making it so that under a specific condition these water molecules can be released again (heat, pressure, etc). Then possibly combined it with standard evaporation methods through compression and cooling (standard dehumidifier).
So in all they probably just found, or dynamically adjust, the 'sweet spot' between the two methods to produce the most amount of water with the least power.
Oh yeah, lets solve the email problem by making the protocol more complex. Or maybe, just maybe, we could develop open standard that extends delivery that people could adopt....nah lets just ditch everything and start from scratch. Oh and while your throwing away billions of dollars of existing systems, ditch cars for mass transit systems, oh and ditch wasting paper, use of fossil fuels, pollution, corruption, poverty, and stupid columnists who just create a headline and thow bunches of meaningless buzzwords and acronyms in an article. SMTP is not an issue...its getting large software vendors to adopt a more complex RFC that has hooks for authentication, and encryption, etc. Since one major providers do, others will exploit that added information to filter content. Of course if you keep your 'standard' private like some software vendors, it kind of breaks the entire chain of events. In other words SMTP is not the issue, the issue is that a lot of large software companies really don't see the value in attempting improving things they don't directly make money from. Oh and his 'new' idea about creating a standard that differentates based email based on variables passed in the email address....Sorry its called 'Address Extensions' and has Been around for a long time.
Of course nice little things like NTP servers, and DNS root servers, free software mirrors, usenet etc are usually hosted by people who volunteer their time, hardware, and some extra bandwidth. Now if many of these universities, NPOs, and generious companies have to pay a premium so that people can actually reach their server, it won't be long till these servers start getting taken down from lack of funding.
So lets rely on a few giants to run the entire network. I'm sure no media companies, commerce giants, reporters, software companies would ever want to supress the free dissemination of news, and communication, and open standards.
Just don't leave the country again Zimmerman...or you may end up locked inside that customs office where they 'want to leave lawyers out of this' again. :)
PGP Story:
MPG 1.1G
WMV 378M
From what I've heard OCFS2 can be a bit...finicky like most oracle systems, and it hasn't really taken off like they really hoped.
GFS over a FC SAN with some EMC CLARiiON CX700s as the hosts is the solution that I'm going to looking at deploying next year, although there is still some thoughts on using iSCSI instead of FC. It all really depends on what your usage patterns and performcance requirements are. I don't believe GFS supports ATAoE systems but since their is linux support I doubt it would be too far of a strech.
We secretly replaced NASA's space shuttle with new folgers crystals. Now with 10 times that real mountain grown flavor.
Certifications are only useful for those who are 1) Trying to get a job where they don't have several years experience working with a subject, but still want to show they have some general understanding of the information involved (a.k.a. getting your foot in the door). 2) As a stepping-stone for more advanced training and certifcations that have benifits such as discounts, support agreements, etc for large companies (e.g. a CCIE ).
Check out the recent This Old House project houses. Several times they have purchased premade concrete foundations and "real timber" external wall sections (pre-filled with rigid insulation) that allow them to have higher energy savings, better overall strength, and are all perfectly plum and square. True it costs more for the materials but they can finish a massive house foundation in one afternoon (no setting time, no forms, etc). So factoring in labor your overall cash expense is roughly the same, but you save time on site.
Complete finished prefab rooms systems (which are popular in Japan these days) have problems in the US. Mainly because the size of many of the rooms are so large that having modular sections would then require you to some finishing on floors, walls, etc to remove any of the seams.
So prefabricating is not all bad, it just depends on the situation, how much you have prefabricated, and the quality offered by the prefabrication company.
Similar things have been done for OSX before:
3D-OSX
It even got Slashdotted Before
I noticed last night that you guys have interesting closed captions in Mountain View.
Warning - A Possibly Offensive Keyword
On the other hand, it is Fox News Channel.
Many of the new releases of Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 7 and 8) do a very good job off recognizing speech and filtering out non-speech. The main problem is adequate training...
My company has been working tightly with Scansoft engineering for the past year+ and on most of their recent developer beta releases we can easily achieve 98.5-99.9+ recognition rates (We just got copies of v8 desktop, and haven't messed with it much). However to achieve those rates we use their backend server engine (essentially the same core technology as the desktop, just better server-oriented APIs) to process, at minimum, 4-6 hours of pre-recorded speech from each user.
The big problem with the desktop version is that not many people want to sit down for 6 hours reading random chapters from a book out loud. The easier way is to use pre-recorded audio along with transcribed text. Then the engine can just chug along and create a pretty accurate model with 8-14 hours of audio files.
Another big problem is punctuation...not many people feel like saying 'period', 'semi-colon', 'newline', etc. as they go along. Personally I find speaking formatting clues extremely frustrating, and end up giving up. So you really need learning engines to analyze the inflections and pause in people's speech patterns, and infer this missing information automatically (of course that's what we're working on right now).
All in all, if you spend all day typing large volumes of text (writing novels, instruction manuals, etc.) the current tools could get the job done (if you have the patients to stick with the training). But IMO a keyboard is much more efficient for average users.
I have nothing against Python, Ruby, Java, etc...but they weren't all that in 1995 when Mechmania started, and most of the classes at the time were, and still are, C/C++ based. Not that change is a bad thing, we've concidered it before...BTW usually calls to any external libraries are allowed. Mechmania Coordinator Emeritus, -Nicko
We are writing to encourage your State to take concrete and meaningful steps to address the serious risks posed to the citizens of our States by your State's attorneys ("lawyers") legal practices. By addressing such problems today as the use of loopholes and misinformation to disseminate corporate fraud, invasion of citizen privacy and infringe on their basic human freedoms, lawyers may one day realize its potential as a means for facilitating a wide range of crime prevention, justice, fair business activities, and efficient government actions. At present, the law has too many times been hijacked by those who use loopholes and poor moral practices in the assistance to those who have enguaged in illegal practices to which the vast majority of citizens do not wish to be exposed.
We have carefully considered your actions in a vast history of legitimate court cases. However, we find that this history fails to address and help prevent the actions of many false accusations and unjust verdicts.
Our fellow citizens actively need to be provided with the information necessary to understand this law and to make informed decisions concerning its use. Many lawyers make their living by allowing their clients to propigate false claims and mislead the public as to the actual facts and events related to the client's practices. This type of direct manipulation of public opinion differentiates the misuse of the court system from its original intended purpose.
etc, etc...