Tech Internet Infrastructure

Net Neutrality

I'm sure I'm late to the party with this one but I haven't noticed it blogged anywhere until spotting it at craigblog. Ted Stevens, Senior Senator for the state of Alaska (he's 83) and President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate explained why he voted against a 'net neutrality' amendment to a telecoms bill - Your own personal Internet. An example;

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

It doesn't surprise me that a Senator is so obviously unfamiliar with the technology. What is amusing is that his staff let him come out with this.

And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

Good one!

UPDATE: Jon Stewart said it good on the daily show.

Google Network Speculation

Robert X. Cringely's column is always interesting, the most recent particularly so to network geeks. In Google-Mart he speculates that Google aims to get closer to their users by locating mini data-centers at peering points and connecting to each other using the, currently dark, fibre they have recently been accumulating. Why the fibre he asks, and answers thus;

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

The article is sub-titled, "Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did". Like Wal-Mart, cheap and convenient, such a move would put Google Inc. 2 or 3 hops from the user and positions them well to deliver a faster and less onerous proposition be that in search, mail, video or an office suite.

Google Talk: IM Service launched

So, after years of speculation Google have finally brought out .

It is, as rumoured, based on the Jabber/XMPP spec so any adhering clients can make use of the service. The client software (a slim 900K) which Google have brought out today is Windows only, and only XP/2000 at that. Linux, Mac and other Windows users have to use an alternative client.

It seems fairly glued in to Gmail sharing address book and user authentication information, it also replaces the gmail notifier program by building in that functionality. It isn't showing ads either. In a phrase that is going to come back and bite them one day they say, "We aren't showing any ads on Google Talk. There are no pop-ups or clutter—just a clean and simple interface to make it easy for you to communicate instantly with your friends." So the ads elsewhere are clutter? ;-)

Looks good overall, interesting to see where this road leads to...

Like a phoenix

And so it came to be that sixteen full days after 'the move' the omnipotent British Telecommunications plc. have activated ADSL on my line. Most people wait only ten days to be activated but living, as it transpires I do, at the extremity of the (now obsoleted) 'maximum distance from the phone exchange test' there were a multitude of checks which *had* to be carried out. I don't think it helps the consumer's case to live in an area without an alternative fixed line supplier, there's clearly not the same incentive for BT to pull their finger out. But I'm not one to whine, so suffice to say I'm glad that the purgatory is over; old 56K faithful is retired once more.

Determined never again to move flat with six increasingly crappy desktop PC's and two laptops, I used the sixteen down days productively and have thus far cannibalised three of them to make one nice one. I think there is potential for one further good desktop and perhaps a couple of boxes dedicated to specific geek tasks. The remainder will be trashed.

This new apartment is great, good location (Stockbridge / Canonmills), spacious and a little quieter than being in the heart of the West End. My flatmate Anna-Lisa, LA's funniest export since Airplane!, seems to be coping with me so far also. Which is useful. At least I think so, her online debut may however reveal otherwise - The Ferocious Reader.

New TLD's

Via Andy Oram a link to a diagram explaining the process of securing a new generic top level domain. It explains why in the last tranch .aero, .museum and .coop somehow managed to be approved while others, equally abstract, failed. Proposed new gTLDs include .travel, .jobs, .cat, .mobi and .xxx.