Flat Rate Considered Harmful

awball

Link: Flat Rate Considered Harmful

Lots of people, including for example my CEO, say that the hand-held mobile is going to be a crucial, maybe a dominant, way for people to experience the Net; particularly on the other side of what we now call the digital divide. Only there’s an economic problem.

I don’t know anyone who’s really satisfied with the quality of the mobile Net experience; the iPhone seems to be pushing the edge of tolerable, as long as you’re on WiFi. But still, where’s the rich menu of multi-modal multi-media location-sensitive always-on exquisitely-personalized applications that the hardware and the Net ought to deliver? Surely there’s something more interesting than Blackberry-style mail?

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The Journey of Radios From Hardware to Software

awball

Link: The Journey of Radios From Hardware to Software

An anonymous reader writes “The New York Times is carrying a story all about the process of replacing radios with software. The article tells the tale of Vanu Bose, son of the man who started the Bose company, and his quest to bring software to what was previously a hardware-only enterprise. He met a lot of resistance in the 90s to his ideas, because processor technology was not up to the task. Now that technology has caught up with Vanu, his software (and other products like it) are increasingly replacing now-outdated hardware components. ‘Well-established companies like Motorola and Ericsson now use elements of software-defined radio for their base stations. But Mr. Bose was the first to come to market with software that could handle multiple networks with the same equipment. Software radio appears to offer an elegant solution to what has been a vexing problem: how to have a single handset, like a cellphone, communicate across multiple networks. For instance, the G.S.M. standard, for global system for mobile communications, is used broadly in Europe, and most notably in the United States by AT&T.’”

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awball

Canadian Dollar at par…

The Canadian dollar is now worth roughly 1 USD. I think that’s the first time in my life, and certainly the first time I remember…

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U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read

awball

Link: U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read

boarder8925 writes “Be careful what you read when you fly in the United States. What you read is being monitored by airport screeners and stored in a government database for years. ‘Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore’s choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he’d packed for the trip. The breadth of the information obtained by the Gilmore-funded Identity Project (using a Privacy Act request) shows the government’s screening program at the border is actually a survelliance dragnet.”

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Monitor your servers with SNMP and Cacti (6 Sep 2007)

awball

Link: Monitor your servers with SNMP and Cacti (6 Sep 2007)

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol for managing networks. Each managed entity in the network will run an snmp server (snmpd) which is going to collect datas from the server such as networking, load, cpu …

Cacti on the other hand is a frontend to the RRDTool with SNMP support. It collects and keep data in a MySQL database and display them through a PHP web frontend.

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