tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-120747522008-07-02T20:49:24.736+02:00Peter's Griddlepvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-71591801325041871692008-07-02T16:02:00.003+02:002008-07-02T16:13:33.380+02:00Hardware can fail, you know. Things can break.Computers are terribly reliable, in general. Today's computers execute millions of instructions each second, with an error rate that is inconceivable in other technologies. Yet, if you have hundreds of thousands of machines, you do need to take care of failures.
A Cnet article elaborates on the Google situation (a Google cluster has several thousands of machines):
In each cluster's first year,pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-88998561174789706152008-04-22T08:46:00.003+02:002008-04-22T09:08:31.031+02:00Imminent death of the net predicted, film at 11At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, chief lobbyist at AT&T warned that the Internet will be fully clogged by 2010.
When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs around 20 years ago, the phrase "imminent death of the net predicted" was already a running joke, so something else must be going on.
In the past 20 years network bandwidth has grown by something like a factor of 1 pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-68892355639767495512008-03-21T17:36:00.007+01:002008-04-18T17:51:19.411+02:00Protect your online assetsWebsites can go down. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with all your digital assets online. Have you ever heard about site-defamations, spoofing, identity theft, plagiarism, and software vulnerabilies?
How much revenue will you lose, or damage will you suffer, if any of these happen? If so, do you know how to protect your assets against these risks, without paying an arm and a leg?
I pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-60760664111539654462008-03-04T09:11:00.003+01:002008-03-04T09:27:23.402+01:00Digital copy protection does not prevent piracyThe International Herald Tribune reports on an experiment done by Random House, a distributor of audio books. They released digitally watermarked books and then monitored file sharing networks for these books. It turned out that pirated copies were often made from physical CDs.
"Our feeling is that DRM (Digital Rights Management, another word for copy protection) is not actually doing anything pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-75922989490459262342008-02-19T16:13:00.002+01:002008-02-19T16:16:36.718+01:00Mobile Data to Overtake Voice in 2010According to Ericsson's CEO Svanberg, the volume of data traffic (i.e. Internet usage) on mobile networks will surpass the volume of voice by 2010. For fixed networks, this point was past years ago.pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-89728272947279549092008-02-06T14:16:00.000+01:002008-02-06T14:23:38.461+01:00The IPv6 Internet is aliveAs of this week, the IPv6 Internet is a reality.
IPv6-only devices can now access the Internet.
The Internet root name servers are now IPv6 enabled. This is a small but significant step on the road to the next generation Internet.pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-64593068230810020732008-01-08T14:42:00.000+01:002008-01-08T14:50:28.890+01:00Tamperproof electronic voting?Electronic voting has serious drawbacks. In fact, I would not recommend it for general elections. It would just be too easy to hack (look here).
Paper based voting has its own drawbacks, as recent events in Kenya show.
An article in the New York Times describes a way to combine electronic and paper voting in a way that allows the public to scrutinise the results.
Very nifty.pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-45579585317327167732007-12-28T20:59:00.000+01:002007-12-28T21:03:50.951+01:00Mobile mapsThe new Google maps for mobile (GMM) impresses me a lot. Have a look at http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html
It is an application that you can download to your mobile phone, in my case a Qtek phone with Windows Mobile 5.
It is a scaled down but very usefull version of the full version of google maps (GM). It shows roads or sattelite images, and it can plan routes. What makes it even more pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-37026504147173735622007-09-03T09:30:00.000+02:002007-09-03T09:37:09.230+02:00Internet censorship
Apparently Youtube reached an agreement with Thai authorities concerning the blocking of pictures that are deemed insulting to the Thai royal family. In effect, the Thai authorities now have the capability to selectively censor Youtube.
While I disagree with Internet censorship in general, I can sympathize with the Thai point of view. In Thailand the royal family is an extreme symbol of pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-32213152850398365682007-08-30T15:04:00.000+02:002007-08-30T15:53:41.727+02:00Perfectly clear service level agreements?
Service level agreements (SLA) describe the services you have contracted, and their quality levels.
Typically, the SLA is provided by the supplier, as they are in the best position to describe the intricacies and characteristics of the services. The result of that is that the customers can see the words 'service level agreement' in the title, and some solid numbers in the text. The rest of thepvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-16657201069159352522007-08-02T15:21:00.000+02:002007-08-02T15:32:51.560+02:0010 skills and trendsA TechRepublic article describes 10 skills that are relevant to develop if you are into technical IT infrastructures, or digital infrastructures as I call them. These skills obviously point to areas in which we can expect serious development in the coming years.
They are:
Voice over IP, especially for replacing phone systems withing companies.
Unified communications: One inbox for e-mail, pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-65138296470423154682007-08-02T12:35:00.000+02:002007-08-02T12:48:39.702+02:00Telco strategy: moving up the value chain, are we?Two major announcements by dutch telco incumbent KPN underline the need for strategic change in telco land, as margins on traditional services are eroded.
I posted a blog entry that touched on that topic nearly two years ago.
In a deal with its supplier ATOS Origin, KPN takes over three data centers, and expands its workplace services to small and medium enterprises. In a more significant pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-25568040609604792022007-07-24T11:18:00.000+02:002007-07-24T11:30:19.012+02:00New models for networking"A new way to look at Networking" is a presentation by Van Jacobson about the next generation of networking. It is worth viewing on Google Video.
Van Jacobson could be described as the guy who saved the Internet from congesting, by inventing the slow start algorithm for TCP/IP. This presentation goes deep into the fundamentals of digital communication, yet presents a very clear vision of future pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-63742786595811447452007-05-29T23:53:00.001+02:002007-05-29T23:55:36.395+02:00Who needs Windows Vista?Vista is Microsoft's newest version of Windows, yet I have not seen wide enthusiasm for it.
As I was walking through the rain this morning I pondered this question, and why this version of Windows is less of a breakthrough than other versions.
Typically, people don't move to new technology because they want its features, but because it allows them to get rid of old cumbersome ways of working, pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-47664870451187013092007-05-29T23:43:00.000+02:002007-05-29T23:58:56.766+02:00IPv6 implementation study availableIPv6 is the new version of the current Internet protocol IPv4. I wrote about that earlier.
As a follow up I was asked to write a report on practical implementations of IPv6.
It describes how organisations got started on using IPv6 and where it will be deployed first.
This report is now translated in English. You can get a copy if you mail any message to the autoresponder at ipv6@getreponse.compvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-13384684703495062842007-05-24T17:06:00.000+02:002007-08-27T18:29:21.287+02:00Online backup now also for MacA while ago I expressed my positive experiences with the online backup service Mozy.
For you Macintosh users, the good news is that there is now a version for that platform.
If you feel your Mac is not yet safely backed up, surf to Mozy
now and give it a try.
pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-46661254892375382962007-03-29T16:48:00.000+02:002007-04-04T14:18:49.060+02:00How one second delay can kill your online businessJust one second delay in delivering a web page can make a devastating impact on your online business.
Consider this: an item on an online auction site is easily viewed 300 times.
This means that a user in search of particular item could therefore view 300 items before making a choice.
If each of these views incurs an additional 1 second of delay, this will add 5 minutes to the total search. pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-12587619456519365162007-03-20T11:01:00.000+01:002007-03-20T11:04:48.657+01:00Email service level agreements or lack thereof.How reliable is e-mail? Read this revealing article by Bob Cringely. Apparently Gmail is good, and some ISPs have a 80% failure rate because their servers are overloaded.
The article continues with some more observations on service level agreements in a networked world. I wrote a magazine article about these issues a while ago (in dutch). Mail me to encourage me to translate it..pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-58822194262918414612007-03-10T15:39:00.000+01:002007-03-19T16:21:08.470+01:00Who needs dual power for their computers?In the region where I live, last year the electrical power was down on the average for 36 minutes, up from 29 minutes the year before. That constitutes an uptime of 99.996 %.
Research I have been involved in indicates that the best banking websites have a hard time getting 99.967 % uptime, equivalent to 3 hours of downtime per year. A more typical banking website has 99.8 % uptime, which is pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-7629304289839073232007-02-09T14:45:00.000+01:002007-02-05T08:46:49.271+01:00Burglary, the scary ICT risksLast night, somebody broke into my house and took my mobile phone, wallet (with bankcards and credit cards), and some other valuable stuff (but little of emotional value). Curiously, a laptop and passports where untouched. It awoke me again to the risks that are part of our highly IT dependent life.
Although the laptop was not taken, I felt very relieved that I had just completed installing Mozypvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-35304686726968073512007-01-18T14:38:00.000+01:002007-08-27T18:31:17.962+02:00Take your backups to placesI finally got around to working on one of my New Year’s resolutions (I am not saying which New Year!): doing better backups for the computers under my administration.
I used to do my own backups, but it is a hassle. CDs need administration, hard disks need attending to. I must have spent hours keeping track of stuff, fixing problems, and what have you. I am not alone in this, see http://pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1164834204715962642006-11-29T21:46:00.000+01:002006-11-29T22:03:25.200+01:00The business case for IPv6The other week I was invited to give a presentation on IPv6 migration scenarios at the Dutch IPv6 summit. IPv6 is alive, somewhat, as I described earlier.
Daniel Karrenberg of RIPE (see his presentation) and I made similar points. Daniel explained that the business difference between an IPv4 network and an IPv6 network is in the cost of acquiring the address space, the cost of designing the pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1163970828312005452006-11-19T22:11:00.000+01:002006-11-19T22:13:48.323+01:00Can you hear digital music compression?Does it matter much how digital music is coded and compressed? Theoretically, more bandwidth leads to more expression and better sound quality. Of all songs, I could only hear a difference between the CD version of a song and the mp3 version in Bach’s cantata “Wachet Auf” (BMV 140), in the part where the orchestra throws in all its instruments, and the basses, tenors and sopranos max out.
“pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1162041386597368472006-10-28T15:15:00.000+02:002006-10-28T15:27:35.390+02:00Broadband Internet: unsafe at any speed?Last week the Dutch consumer rights organization 'Consumentenbond' proposed to make computer companies and internet service providers responsible for the security of home computers. The majority of home computer users has had security incidents in the past 12 months, and is not capable of accurately describing the most important computer security threats. See also my previous blog entry here on pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1161724262676101212006-10-24T23:07:00.000+02:002006-10-24T23:11:02.690+02:00An unsolved problem in digital home infrastructuresYesterday I met with a company in Paris to progress a business opportunity, on which I will report later. They are deploying a computing device in customer homes, which connects by wifi to the Internet. Some people call this 'ambient intelligence'. The connectivity is absolutely essential to the operation of the device. However, it turns out that it is not easy to deploy.
A few years ago, wifi pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com