I live close to a major railroad tunnel. Rail right of ways are often used by telecom companies for inter-LATA and long haul connections. If you look along the rail line, you will see underground cable markers for Quest, MCI, AT&T, and I know for a fact that Level3 leases/trades fiber with Quest. A few years ago there was a train derailment in the tunnel, which cut at least Quest's cable (which also took out Level3, and in turn Comcast's Internet).
Last summer there was some underground work being done on 14th and Champa in Denver. This is right next to the AT&T wire center. The ground was covered with locate marks for all the different network and phone companies that have a POP in the building, and guess what? They were all within a few feet of each other!
Did the companies conspire to put their undersea cables right next to each other? No, it is just that they all have the same engineering data, and all want the cheapest route to the POP. Most of the world's population is concentrated in the cities, so that's where you run your cable.
Now, should they have built equal-cost redundant routes between POPs, like the US phone companies did back in the good old days? Of course. Is that practical in a world that wants 100Mbps Internet for $20/month? Doubtful.
I love that they put the installation and maintenance vessels on the high seas. Reminds me of the 17th century maps showing sea monsters in unexplored areas.
Maybe they all got cut because they all run in parallel? An anchor dragging along a canal, breaks one immediately, and opens up the other two, exposing the bare fibers. The current or wake from passing ships break more and more fibers, leading to more outages. I've seen pix of the suez canal, and it doesen't seem all that wide, compared to the ships that pass through it.
There's one other possibility: the companies who own the networks are leasing glass from each other and there's really only one cable. For example, Level3 (lvlt) builds a network. Since it expensive to build out, they trade glass with whoever may have dark fiber available (often times telcos). It shows up on the books as theirs, but really it maintained by a telco. Happens all the time in the US.
They've become quite a bit cheaper over the years, and some of the newer wired sensors are very affordable: http://www.aagelectronica.com/. You don't need a display unit for the 1-wire sensors, just an open serial port. There is some free software available.
We don't need grants, just people willing to maintain a personal weather station and share data.
Now, I live in an area with a lot of federal land (a national park, forest and recreation area). It would be useful, since the ranger stations already are equipped with weather stations, if they could add their observations to the CWOP, or get them to NOAA somehow, but I'm sure that would require an act of congress, and be way over the top as far as cost/value of the info.
Another interesting byproduct is that innovation and thought power will be directed to gaming the system instead of inventing new ways to fix the fundamental problems. Just in these messages there have been several good, easy ideas to alter the thermostats to override the system. This leads to a situation similar to the PSP, where new firmware is released, the hackers spend time breaking the protection, the developers spend time working on a new scheme, and less time is spent on innovation.
As for politicians, don't think for one minute they wouldn't happily suffer along with the rest of us. The difference is they would make sure it is on the front pages.
And the utility doesn't have to provide you with electricity, either.
An odd side note: In most cases, a bank will not provide you a mortgage unless the house is considered habitable. Without electricity, it may not be...
In a convention open to the general public, sure. This is an event for retailers (and press) to see what they should be stocking their shelves with next Christmas. They should expect a little more professional behavior from the attendees.
That being said, I'm sure that if the purchasing manager from Best Buy did it, he'd just get a laugh and not get tossed out.
OLPC has helped to define a market (actually, it seems more like they discovered it, the more I read), and now when someone else sets up shop next door, they cry foul. There's room for Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, and Starbucks and the locals, why not in the third world?
Think of it this way: If a church has a homeless shelter, it is a good thing. If a businessman sees the chance to offer a flophouse for a few bucks a week, it is a bad thing. Either way, the homeless are off the streets at night, but because the businessman isn't doing it to get into heaven, but to make a buck or two, he's the worst kind of evil. But a profitable building is sustainable, a handout only lasts as long as the charitable continue to give.
The thing that I find interesting is that Negroponte keeps pointing out all the faults with the Intel box to the press, like superior technology is always a no-brainer. Maybe he just needs to become a better pitchman when he's meeting with these countries. Maybe these countries have a hard time justifying a purchase that until a few months ago was vaporware. Maybe there's more PCs in these countries than Negroponte thinks, and these countries want to make sure their kids are able to use them.
Analog on a non-destructable medium: Laserdisks uased a 12" optical disk to store FM video years before CD auudio. The only reason they failed (technically) was because the 2 sided disks were glued together, for some reason. This problem was later solved.
FM to store audio was also used on videotape, although the tapes do degrade over time, and the mechanism for playback is overly complex, in comparison to disk based systems.
A laserdisk based FM audio system could theoretically store hours and hours of hq audio. might be a fun project, except for the cost of the mastering equipment.
Hey, this guy actually knows something about compression. Sorry sir, but you'll have to leave. There's no place for engineering in the audiophile debates.
Except that Heath is largely unnecessary nowadays. Yes, it would be nice to get the catalog, there are plenty of great kit available. From some guy who puts together a circuitboard in his basement to the basic stamp guys and even Ramsey Electronics. Don't like solder? Spend hours custom building PCs.
And as I recall, their ham gear was the only somewhat affordable stuff in the book (compared to Colllins and Hellicrafters). Everything else was way overpriced, including their lousy computers.
And don't forget that it will allow TW cable to go into markets that they currently are not in, overbuild and squeeze the current provider out of business.
Ironically, this may lead to lower prices for consumers. After the trust busters went after Standard Oil, the price of gasoline went up. Not because Rockefeller was mad that he lost, but because now profits had to be made at every step of the process, where before it was much easier to run some processes at cost, as long as the company showed a profit at the end of the day. Plus, TW gets economies of scale, being able to build out their network and fill in the gaps that may exist today. Too bad it has to happen because the phone companies want to make their own rules instead of playing by the existing ones. I'm sure some old time cable guys are kicking themselves wondering why they didn't think of it first.
"This is a nice sense of direction statement - it says that Cisco understands that SOA and Web 2.0 are fundamentally changing how applications are built"
"According to our router's logfile, your port on the switch has been modded down below the switch's current threshold."
router#show int eth0/0 adds by google: Get a Juniper router today! Best deals on Cisco routers: www.cisco4less.com Sid : 5 Traffic Priority : 0 Maximum Sustained Rate : 64000 Maximum Burst : 0 Minimum Reserved Rate : 0 Minimum Packet Size : 0 Maximum Concatenated Burst : 1522 Scheduling Type : Best Effort Nominal Grant Interval : 0 Tolerated Grant Jitter : 0 Nominal Polling Interval : 0 Tolerated Polling Jitter : 0 Unsolicited Grant Size : 0 Grants per Interval : 0 Request/Transmission Policy : 0x0 IP ToS Overwrite [AND-mask, OR-mask] : 0x0, 0x0 Current Throughput : 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec
Agreed. Sure, I did not need to learn code (but I know it enough to get the repeater ID), but I mess around with advanced modes and SDR. Different skill set. Morse is useful for kids who may have trouble with the theory, though.
Re:The Secret to Futurama's success
on
Futurama Returns!
·
· Score: 1
10 Sin 20 GOTO Hell
I chr$(2665) Mom*
"Hey Hey! Ho Ho! 100110!"
"Intruder alert! Intruder alert! Get the human"
*Technically, it had a different number maybe from an old basic, but I don't have access to the episode in question
Forget the "computer" part. Just tap and start talking. The communicator will figure out who you are calling and automagically put the call through, just like in TNG.
Slashdot Mirror
I live close to a major railroad tunnel. Rail right of ways are often used by telecom companies for inter-LATA and long haul connections. If you look along the rail line, you will see underground cable markers for Quest, MCI, AT&T, and I know for a fact that Level3 leases/trades fiber with Quest. A few years ago there was a train derailment in the tunnel, which cut at least Quest's cable (which also took out Level3, and in turn Comcast's Internet).
Last summer there was some underground work being done on 14th and Champa in Denver. This is right next to the AT&T wire center. The ground was covered with locate marks for all the different network and phone companies that have a POP in the building, and guess what? They were all within a few feet of each other!
Did the companies conspire to put their undersea cables right next to each other? No, it is just that they all have the same engineering data, and all want the cheapest route to the POP. Most of the world's population is concentrated in the cities, so that's where you run your cable.
Now, should they have built equal-cost redundant routes between POPs, like the US phone companies did back in the good old days? Of course. Is that practical in a world that wants 100Mbps Internet for $20/month? Doubtful.
Newfoundland to Ireland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
There is also a natural shelf along most of the route.
I love that they put the installation and maintenance vessels on the high seas. Reminds me of the 17th century maps showing sea monsters in unexplored areas.
Are you going to pay for that?
Maybe they all got cut because they all run in parallel? An anchor dragging along a canal, breaks one immediately, and opens up the other two, exposing the bare fibers. The current or wake from passing ships break more and more fibers, leading to more outages. I've seen pix of the suez canal, and it doesen't seem all that wide, compared to the ships that pass through it.
There's one other possibility: the companies who own the networks are leasing glass from each other and there's really only one cable. For example, Level3 (lvlt) builds a network. Since it expensive to build out, they trade glass with whoever may have dark fiber available (often times telcos). It shows up on the books as theirs, but really it maintained by a telco. Happens all the time in the US.
They've become quite a bit cheaper over the years, and some of the newer wired sensors are very affordable: http://www.aagelectronica.com/. You don't need a display unit for the 1-wire sensors, just an open serial port. There is some free software available.
We don't need grants, just people willing to maintain a personal weather station and share data.
Now, I live in an area with a lot of federal land (a national park, forest and recreation area). It would be useful, since the ranger stations already are equipped with weather stations, if they could add their observations to the CWOP, or get them to NOAA somehow, but I'm sure that would require an act of congress, and be way over the top as far as cost/value of the info.
Here's a few more:
Hey, it looks like you have a yeast infection...
Hey, it looks like you have diarrhea...
Hey, it looks like you have halitosis...
Hey, it looks like you have head lice...
Another interesting byproduct is that innovation and thought power will be directed to gaming the system instead of inventing new ways to fix the fundamental problems. Just in these messages there have been several good, easy ideas to alter the thermostats to override the system. This leads to a situation similar to the PSP, where new firmware is released, the hackers spend time breaking the protection, the developers spend time working on a new scheme, and less time is spent on innovation.
As for politicians, don't think for one minute they wouldn't happily suffer along with the rest of us. The difference is they would make sure it is on the front pages.
And the utility doesn't have to provide you with electricity, either.
An odd side note: In most cases, a bank will not provide you a mortgage unless the house is considered habitable. Without electricity, it may not be...
What if you need to use the remote as part of the demo?
This is the Consumer Electronics show, after all.
In a convention open to the general public, sure. This is an event for retailers (and press) to see what they should be stocking their shelves with next Christmas. They should expect a little more professional behavior from the attendees.
That being said, I'm sure that if the purchasing manager from Best Buy did it, he'd just get a laugh and not get tossed out.
QRP WAS at the QTH!
OLPC has helped to define a market (actually, it seems more like they discovered it, the more I read), and now when someone else sets up shop next door, they cry foul. There's room for Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, and Starbucks and the locals, why not in the third world?
Think of it this way: If a church has a homeless shelter, it is a good thing. If a businessman sees the chance to offer a flophouse for a few bucks a week, it is a bad thing. Either way, the homeless are off the streets at night, but because the businessman isn't doing it to get into heaven, but to make a buck or two, he's the worst kind of evil. But a profitable building is sustainable, a handout only lasts as long as the charitable continue to give.
The thing that I find interesting is that Negroponte keeps pointing out all the faults with the Intel box to the press, like superior technology is always a no-brainer. Maybe he just needs to become a better pitchman when he's meeting with these countries. Maybe these countries have a hard time justifying a purchase that until a few months ago was vaporware. Maybe there's more PCs in these countries than Negroponte thinks, and these countries want to make sure their kids are able to use them.
And that will piss us all off enough to construct a giant cube shaped ship and destroy (oops, I mean assimilate) other cultures and planets.
Analog on a non-destructable medium: Laserdisks uased a 12" optical disk to store FM video years before CD auudio. The only reason they failed (technically) was because the 2 sided disks were glued together, for some reason. This problem was later solved.
FM to store audio was also used on videotape, although the tapes do degrade over time, and the mechanism for playback is overly complex, in comparison to disk based systems.
A laserdisk based FM audio system could theoretically store hours and hours of hq audio. might be a fun project, except for the cost of the mastering equipment.
Hey, this guy actually knows something about compression. Sorry sir, but you'll have to leave. There's no place for engineering in the audiophile debates.
Except that Heath is largely unnecessary nowadays. Yes, it would be nice to get the catalog, there are plenty of great kit available. From some guy who puts together a circuitboard in his basement to the basic stamp guys and even Ramsey Electronics. Don't like solder? Spend hours custom building PCs.
And as I recall, their ham gear was the only somewhat affordable stuff in the book (compared to Colllins and Hellicrafters). Everything else was way overpriced, including their lousy computers.
http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/ is using a video card to make music.
And don't forget that it will allow TW cable to go into markets that they currently are not in, overbuild and squeeze the current provider out of business.
Ironically, this may lead to lower prices for consumers. After the trust busters went after Standard Oil, the price of gasoline went up. Not because Rockefeller was mad that he lost, but because now profits had to be made at every step of the process, where before it was much easier to run some processes at cost, as long as the company showed a profit at the end of the day. Plus, TW gets economies of scale, being able to build out their network and fill in the gaps that may exist today. Too bad it has to happen because the phone companies want to make their own rules instead of playing by the existing ones. I'm sure some old time cable guys are kicking themselves wondering why they didn't think of it first.
Time Warner has a giant call center in Columbus.
"This is a nice sense of direction statement - it says that Cisco understands that SOA and Web 2.0 are fundamentally changing how applications are built"
"According to our router's logfile, your port on the switch has been modded down below the switch's current threshold."
router#show int eth0/0
adds by google:
Get a Juniper router today!
Best deals on Cisco routers: www.cisco4less.com
Sid : 5
Traffic Priority : 0
Maximum Sustained Rate : 64000
Maximum Burst : 0
Minimum Reserved Rate : 0
Minimum Packet Size : 0
Maximum Concatenated Burst : 1522
Scheduling Type : Best Effort
Nominal Grant Interval : 0
Tolerated Grant Jitter : 0
Nominal Polling Interval : 0
Tolerated Polling Jitter : 0
Unsolicited Grant Size : 0
Grants per Interval : 0
Request/Transmission Policy : 0x0
IP ToS Overwrite [AND-mask, OR-mask] : 0x0, 0x0
Current Throughput : 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec
Agreed. Sure, I did not need to learn code (but I know it enough to get the repeater ID), but I mess around with advanced modes and SDR. Different skill set.
Morse is useful for kids who may have trouble with the theory, though.
10 Sin
20 GOTO Hell
I chr$(2665) Mom*
"Hey Hey! Ho Ho! 100110!"
"Intruder alert! Intruder alert! Get the human"
*Technically, it had a different number maybe from an old basic, but I don't have access to the episode in question
Forget the "computer" part. Just tap and start talking. The communicator will figure out who you are calling and automagically put the call through, just like in TNG.
They kind of faded into the background of Excite after the meltdown.