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Comment Why FTTC and not FTTH, anyway? (Score 2) 136

This seems to be as good a place as any to ask this: why are providers going with FTTC anyway, rather than FTTH (fibre-to-the-home)? These large cabinets are artifacts of FTTC -- at some point the fibre has to be broken out into bundles of dozens or hundreds of copper (coax or twisted-pair) drops that then need to be driven with enough power to push the signal for the last few hundred metres. Isn't this already a flawed approach? Moreover, this reduces the total bandwidth available between the local exchange carrier and the premises.

As I understand it, FTTC permits the provider to deliver high bandwidth services (at least by today's standards) at lower infrastructure costs then FTTH. However, this seems to be 'kicking the can down the road', to use the prosaic expression.

So, how much are the providers saving? For example, I've read it costs the National Grid on average 13 times more per mile to run 400 kV transmission lines underground as it does via pylons. Is there a similar figure that can be cited for the difference between FTTC and FTTH?

We seem to be living in a golden age of infrastructure underinvestment.

Comment Re:I would deploy a Domino cluster (Score 2) 333

I would deploy IBM Domino

A company I worked at a few years ago used Domino. I thought it was a great proof-of-concept for some future groupware product, but not ready for real-world use. It was broken in so many ways! I saved my list of Domino issues, which I've included below. This is for Domino version 7, so some of these issues may be fixed in subsequent versions. But to be this broken as recently as five years ago (and after 16 years of development, too!) is unforgivable.

So, check out my list of issues, and decide whether this is a product you would want to deploy in your organization!

Domino Issues:

- Slow.

- Spell checker with mailer is lame. Better to have MS Word-style
    spell checker.

- When using View -> Find in view, defaults in such a way that
    deletes all entries when the user thinks they are deleting a single
    entry. Virtually impossible to undo.

- When using View -> Find in view, can't delete individual e-mails.
    (see previous). Messages that are de-selected disappear from the view.

- Really crappy mailbox search algorithm

- Very weak mailbox filtering capability (compared with procmail)

- Hard to gauge where to wrap lines when using so-called
    `Internet-Style' messages. No automatic line wrap.

- When replying using `Internet-Style History', quotes sender
    in message envelope rather than sender in `From:' field.

- "Show source" on e-mail message does not show message envelope.

- Won't display HTML content of messages . . . good that it doesn't
    happen by default, but wish it were an option.

- View -> Show -> Source doesn't work for messages with no text in
    the message body, so no way to view headers of empty spam messages.

- Message size bears little relationship to actual content.

- Very slow over low-bandwidth connection. Much more overhead than
    IMAP.

- No multiple levels of undo -- can only undo last change

- When using find, it checkmarks all found messages. Then if you
    highlight one and attempt to delete it, it delete all checked messages
    *without prompting*. And no option to undo!

- When clicking on links in e-mail messages, unclear whether browser
    has been launched. Mouse cursor doesn't change, as it does with
    most other mail clients, unless you move it outside of the Notes window.

- Can't sort by date/title/etc in View -> Search this View in Tech Docs

- No Day of Week in Message. Month is numeric only.

- Mail Search is fucked. Try:
    "Author contains Sender/Organization AND outgoing".

- When opening mail attachments, no option to select which application
    to use.

- When opening mail attachments, cannot open an attachment with an
    unknown extension.

- Crashes when reporting certain messages to Symantec

- Cannot set different chimes for incoming mail. E.g. mail going to
    group folder due to mail rule makes same chime as mail going into
    mail inbox.

- Can't cut-and-paste into mail rules.

- No log to see when messages are deleted by mail rules.

- Can't respond to a message in a "meeting accepted" / "meeting
    declined" without cut-and-paste to a new memo.

- Copying a memo from a folder to a nested folder with the same name
    causes a duplicate of the memo to appear in the original folder.
    E.g. copy something from "Sent" to "Folders->Temp->Sent".

The Military

Iran Wants To Clone Downed US Drone 663

PolygamousRanchKid sends this quote from the LA Times: "The Obama administration has sent a formal diplomatic request asking Iran to return the radar-evading drone aircraft that crashed on a CIA spying mission this month, but U.S. officials say they don't expect Iran will comply. 'We have asked for it back,' Obama said Monday at a news conference in Washington with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. 'We'll see how the Iranians respond.' His comments marked the first public confirmation that the RQ-170 Sentinel drone now in Iranian hands is a U.S. aircraft, though U.S. officials privately acknowledged that in recent days. Iran has claimed it downed the stealthy surveillance drone, but U.S. officials say it malfunctioned. Capture of the futuristic-looking unmanned spy plane has provided Tehran with a propaganda windfall. The government announced that it planned to clone and mass produce the bat-winged craft for use against its enemies." Iran has also demanded an apology from the U.S. for the drone flight in its airspace.
Cloud

Submission + - Build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384 (extremetech.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Backblaze, the cloud-based backup provider, has revealed how it continues to undercut its competitors: by building its own 135TB Storage Pods which cost just $7,384 in parts. Backblaze has provided almost all of the information that you need to make your own Storage Pod, including 45 3TB hard drives, three PCIe SATA II cards, and nine backplane multipliers, but without Backblaze's proprietary management software you'll probably have to use FreeNAS, or cobble together your own software solution.

Using Storage Pods, Backblaze says it can provide 1 petabyte of storage with rackspace, power, and bandwidth for three years, for just $95,000. Using Dell hardware it would cost $500,000 — and using Amazon S3, 1PB costs $2.5 million.

(A couple of years ago they showed how to make their first-generation, 67TB Storage Pods: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/138209/Build-Your-Own-28M-Petabyte-Disk-Array-For-117k)

Media

Submission + - Reddit Co-Founder accused of Hacking MIT Computers (webmarketingwar.com)

An anonymous reader writes: New York Times has reported that Reddit co founder Aaron Swartz has been indicted for stealing more than 4 million documents from the highly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) .
AMD

Submission + - What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards (blogspot.com)

badger.foo writes: "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Book of PF author Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."
Science

Submission + - Can Science Survive the Coming Age of Austerity?

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Alexis Madrigal writes that everyone agrees you need science and technology R&D, but when budgets get tight, research into quantum dots or the fundamental forces that cause earthquakes has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans. Different countries are taking different approaches. Japan is focusing on its most elite researchers, giving up to $50 million to 30 different people. Other countries are just giving up on some areas of research to focus on others; for example, take US particle physicists, who will spend their careers trying to drive from the backseat as our European counterparts run the Large Hadron Collider. A third approach might be to reduce redundancies in research. "An idea to provide funding in a larger number of key areas that would avoid duplication is to create dedicated research centers where several investigators can work in parallel on complementary topics," writes Joerg Heber. "If we do less research we need to do it right. And using this crisis to think about our research infrastructure needn’t be a bad thing. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform the academic research system in a more comprehensive and fundamental way than the academic community and the politicians normally dare to think about.""

Comment Re: Not really new from him. (Score 1) 347

I remember this. Quote from that programme:

"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."

Really?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/hendrikshontrans.shtml

Image

Quadruped CHEETAH Robot To Outrun Any Human 177

cylonlover writes "Robots are faster than humans at a lot of things, but up until now running hasn't been one of them. That is set to change with robotics company Boston Dynamics recently awarded a contract by DARPA to design and build a quadraped CHEETAH robot that is faster than any human. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier."
Transportation

Ford Building Cars That Talk To Other Cars 239

thecarchik writes "Ford's new system works over a dedicated short-range WiFi system on a secure channel allocated by the FCC. The company says the system one-ups radar safety systems by allowing full 360-degree coverage even when there's no direct line of sight. Scenarios where this could benefit safety or traffic? Predicting collision courses with unseen vehicles, seeing sudden stops before they're visible, and spotting traffic pattern changes on a busy highway. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers. As such, it could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year."

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