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The Telecom Digest for June 18, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 132 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
|
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Date: 17 Jun 2013 01:45:49 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: End of Cable Bundle Inevitable, With or Without Aereo: CEO
Message-ID: <20130617014549.83222.qmail@joyce.lan>
>Well, if your business model is stealing (oops -- I mean "stealing") a
>product from one party and selling it to another party, I guess that
>argument make sense. After all, you don't have to comply with
>programming agreements if you don't have any.
We have laws that describe the deal that broadcasters make with the
public, including a set of requirements in return for an extremely
valuable local monopoly on a slice of the RF spectrum. Part of that
deal has always been that anyone with an antenna gets to listen to or
watch the broadcast. Aereo doesn't cut out the commercials, which have
always been where the broadcasters' revenue comes from.
Although I understand why the broadcasters would like the laws to be
different, and to be able to extract even more money from the rest of
us than their current franchise allows, wanting doesn't make it so.
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:16:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Google unveils Internet beaming balloons launched into stratosphere
Message-ID: <5b4b5459-6e4f-418a-9e97-df6b325858b8@2g2000yqr.googlegroups.com>
By Nick Perry and Martha Mendoza | Associated Press | Jun 15, 2013
| Wrinkled and skinny at first, the translucent, jellyfish-
| shaped balloons that Google released this week from a frozen
| field in the heart of New Zealand's South Island hardened into
| shiny pumpkins as they rose into the blue winter skies above
| Lake Tekapo, passing the first big test of a lofty goal to get
| the entire planet online.
|
| It was the culmination of 18 months' work on what Google calls
| Project Loon, in recognition of how wacky the idea may sound.
| Developed in the secretive X lab that came up with a
| driverless car and web-surfing eyeglasses, the flimsy helium-
| filled inflatables beam the Internet down to earth as they
| sail past on the wind.
Continued:
http://tinyurl.com/lpavlf5
Neal McLain
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:15:30 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Credibility Crunch for Tech Companies Over Prism
Message-ID: <51BE7F52.5040502@thadlabs.com>
On 6/12/2013 12:10 PM, PV wrote:
> Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> writes:
>> Everything is now being stored at the NSA's Utah facility which has
>> a yottabyte capacity (1 trillion terabytes or 1 quadrillion gigabytes)
>
> Um, a yottabyte is a quadrillion terabytes - you're off by 3 orders
> of magnitude.
No, Paul, you seem to be using the British "-illions" nomenclature which
differs from how "-illions" are expressed in the USA (and possibly in the
rest of the world), thus my original statement was correct for a Usenet
group hosted in the USA.
Referring to an extract of the table I constructed after your comment:
[...]
Terabyte: 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
[...]
Yottabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
[...]
a yottabye is clearly 1 trillion terabytes.
> I know people have thrown around the idea of the Utah facility being
> yottabyte class storage, but that's about the technology they're using
> (such as ZFS as you mentioned), not what they actually have. A yottabyte
> is a couple hundred times larger than the entire estimated size of the
> internet. There is no present technology that could pack that much data
> into their datacenter and still access it. A solid block of micro-SD
> cards with the cases removed wouldn't fit. *
We don't know that since the total volume of the Utah facility is not
public knowledge. When one examines this 50 Petabyte test bed at LLNL
for the ZoL (ZFS on Linux project), it's fairly small, only 1.5 times
larger than the refrigerator in my kitchen.
http://zfsonlinux.org/llnl-zfs-lustre.html
Deploying 10000s of those in a multi-level underground facility is not
an issue; I've personally seen 1000s of cabinets 20 years ago at an Amdahl
facility in Sunnyvale CA to physically test the max possible configuration
(CPUs, selector channels, etc.) and it was all on one floor in a medium size
building, so I can readily believe the NSA will have at least one yottabyte
of storage in that Utah facility. CERN is going to be needing something
similar as more new experiments proceed at the LHC gathering terabytes of
information per second.
Thad
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:07:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: India to send world's last telegram
Message-ID: <2644e687-c0b0-41ea-a7be-7e9a9602fbdc@5g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>
By Shivam Vij, Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor, June 14, 2013
fast.
| New Delhi
| At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-
| owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix
| printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi.
| "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's
| one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by
| telegram - a format favored for its "sense of urgency and
| authenticity," explains a BSNL official.
|
| But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's
| last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on
| July 14.
| That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the
| first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western
| Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India,
| telegraph services were introduced by William O'Shaughnessy,
| a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for
| the first time in 1850 to send a message.
Continued:
http://tinyurl.com/mlgu3kg
Neal McLain
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