The Telecom Digest for August 22, 2010
Volume 29 : Issue 227 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
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Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:26:48 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: In battle of smartphones, Google has the right answer
Message-ID: <4C6F5588.6070904@thadlabs.com>
On 8/19/2010 8:57 PM, Monty Solomon wrote:
> TECH LAB
> In battle of smartphones, Google has the right answer
> Company's decision to distribute Android operating system widely
> gives it an edge
>
> By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | August 19, 2010
>
> The war for smartphone domination is pretty much over, and the
> reasons are sitting on my desk.
>
> There's the Vibrant from Samsung Group, a sleek, four-ounce beauty
> with a dazzling color screen. Next to it sits the hulking, half-pound
> Streak from PC maker Dell Inc., the biggest cellphone I've seen since
> NBC canceled "Miami Vice.''
>
> Each, in its own way, is delightful. And both are built around
> Android, the smartphone operating system from Google Inc. that's
> outselling Apple Inc.'s in the US smartphone market.
>
> Apple and its excellent iPhone will do fine, but Google will seize
> most of the market because it has adopted Microsoft Corp.'s old PC
> playbook. By selling Windows software to any computer maker,
> Microsoft flooded the world with Windows machines.
>
> Today, there are just three iPhone models, all from Apple, and
> available in the United States through just one cell carrier: AT&T.
> There are more than 20 Android models, made by a host of companies,
> and available from every cell carrier. Of course Android wins.
>
> The Android approach encourages phone designers to create innovative
> devices to target particular niche markets. So we're getting products
> like the Vibrant and the Streak, devices that have almost nothing in
> common except the software they run.
> [...]
Yep, Android's where it's at. I don't even see anyone using iPhones
here in Silicon Valley -- it's all Android.
Earlier this week I attended the first annual Plug Computer Developer
Camp hosted by Marvell (http://www.marvell.com/) in Santa Clara CA.
Ugh, talk about information overload. :-) There were a ton of sessions
focused on interfacing between Plug computers and Android; nothing for
iPhone.
A computer I received for attending the Camp is a Globalscale
(http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/ Guruplug Server which is
about the same size as my SheevaPlugs and it features both WiFi and
Bluetooth. What is neat about its WiFi is that it can be quickly
changed from an AP (Access Point) to a Client. Note also the Server-Plus
has two gigabit Ethernet ports vs. the Server's one.
An amazing thing about these Plug computers is low power operation; I
measured mine (using a Kill-A-Watt) to vary from 4 to 5 watts. From
the factory the SheevaPlugs come with Ubuntu and the GuruPlugs with
Debian installed. These are all based on 1.2GHz to 2GHz ARM computers
which are used in many cellphones.
I don't (yet) have pictures of my GuruPlug Server but you can see one
of my SheevaPlugs here (pictures from 2009):
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/SheevaPlug_first.jpg
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/SheevaPlug_labelled.jpg
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/SheevaPlug_underside.jpg
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Sheevaplug_Webmin.jpg
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/SheevaPlug_ext_HD.jpg
More info about Plugs at the above URL for Globalscale and here:
http://plugcomputer.org/, and
http://computingplugs.com/index.php/Main_Page
Another manufacturer of Plug computers is Ionics (who uses the
Marvell Sheeva 2 GHz 88F6282 RISC ARMs):
http://www.ionicsplug.com, and
http://www.ionics-ems.com
***** Moderator's Note *****
Ah, but WHY does Google have the right answer? Is Android going to
change the way consumers use cell phones? I doubt it. Will it change
the functionality? No. So, where's the advantage? Compared to the cost
of the phone, or the revenue cell carriers receive, the license fees
for existing phone software are probably not enough of a factor to
make Android a game-changer.
My 2¢.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:41:24 -0400
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Why we love Ct. librarians, and admire Nicholas Merrill
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1008211332000.15541@panix5.panix.com>
Nicholas Merrill owned an ISP in NYC, was served with an FBI
"National Security Letter" - along with an associated gag order.
He fought it.
Connecticut librarians received them, too, and with the
gag orders as well. They fought back.
Reporter Amy Goodman is co-host of a widely admired radio
(and now tv) program, Democracy Now. Loosely affiliated with
WBAI/Pacifica Radio in NYC and fed to affiliates around the
world. She interviewed Mr. Merrill a week ago.
Given that tens of thousands of NSLs have been served each year,
many of which have been handed over to telecom and similar
groups, the interview illustrates a disturbing practice.
"We begin today's show with a guest here in New York who has been
under an FBI gag order for the past six years. In early 2004, an
FBI agent visited Nicholas Merrill and handed him a national
security letter that ordered him to hand over detailed private
records about some of his customers. At the time, Merrill was
running an internet service provider in New York called Calyx. "
Rest of transcript:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/11/gagged_for_6_years_nick_merrill
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:32:47 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Why we love Ct. librarians, and admire Nicholas Merrill
Message-ID: <i4pd5f$aut$1@news.albasani.net>
danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> wrote:
>Nicholas Merrill owned an ISP in NYC, was served with an FBI
>"National Security Letter" - along with an associated gag order.
>He fought it.
>Connecticut librarians received them, too, and with the
>gag orders as well. They fought back.
I thank them for standing up for liberty.
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:00:39 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Overlay acceptance
Message-ID: <i4p0nn$odg$1@news.albasani.net>
David Lesher <wb8foz@panix.com> wrote:
>"Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:
>>David Lesher <wb8foz@panix.com> wrote:
Please retain the attribution lines.
>>>But now, does anyone even raise their voice? My pet theory is
>>>coincident with splits/overlays was the saturation of users
>>>with cell phones. Most cell phone calls are dialed with 10D;
>>>and the users seem to cope. That coping seems to translate
>>>back to wireline, even if the 2500 pad lacks a SPEND key to
>>>push.
>>I don't agree.
>>While nearly no cell phone user cares about where the cell
>>phone number is rated to (which could mean distance-based
>>charges on an incoming caller's local calling plan), generally
>>they care about area code, especially in situations in which
>>7 digit home NPA dialing exists.
>In MD, 10D has nothing to do with toll. All toll calls must be 11D.
>(Local calls can be dialed with 10 or 11D.)
I wasn't discussing dialing plans that included toll alerts. (My area
has never had toll-alerting dialing plans.) I'm stating that a typical
cell phone subscriber would request telephone number assignment from a
particular area code without concern for rating point, a concept he won't
even be aware of applying to inbound calls to cell phones.
Depending on local calling plans available, a call to a cell phone in
the home area code could very well include distance-rated charges because
the rating point assigned to the cell phone could be a great distance from
the caller's exchange, even though it's a home area code call.
Local calls in my area, at various times, depending on the calling plan,
some calls were time-and-distance rated as toll calls, on the state-wide
long distance calling schedule, even though on other calling plans they
could have been time-and-distance rated as measured service, a cheaper
rating plan that never applied to (what would eventually be called)
in-state interLATA calls. On still other plans, the same local call
could be included in the pre-paid area. In the mid '80's, we went to another
plan for local calls that changed everyone's rates in that calls within
8 miles (later 15 miles) were flat rate untimed and calls beyond were
time-and-distance rated on something that had been similar to the measured
rates for local calls, and only in-state inerLATA calls were rated on
the state-wide toll schedule.
When we got "competition" for "local toll", generally, calls within 15 miles
were untimed or prepaid (there was a choice), and calls beyond were rated
on the schedule of the carrier one selected.
All Chicago area codes include points that are more than 15 miles in between
so there's great potential for calls to home area code cell phones to have
distance charges under all the scenarios I described. But a cell phone
subscriber won't likely be aware of it and won't request a cell phone number
assigned to a rating point that could avoid distance charges for some of
his inbound callers, like family members.
Well, not until he saw his next residential phone bill.
Date: 21 Aug 2010 19:55:07 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Overlay acceptance
Message-ID: <20100821195507.89686.qmail@joyce.lan>
> I'm stating that a typical cell phone subscriber would request
>telephone number assignment from a particular area code without
>concern for rating point, a concept he won't even be aware of
>applying to inbound calls to cell phones.
Depends where you are. Where I live, people are quite aware of the
difference between an Ithaca and a Binghamton number. They're both
607 numbers, but different LATAs so for most landlines it's an
expensive toll call from one to the other. FWIW, we do not have and
have never had toll alerting, either.
In New Jersey, people know Trenton vs. Atlantic City numbers for the
same reason, again no toll alerting but inter-LATA toll.
R's,
John
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:41:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: film "Executive Suite"
Message-ID: <e7e55dde-87a7-4e4d-8dd1-1a26340bde93@s9g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 20, 8:09 pm, Wes Leatherock <Wesr...@aol.com> wrote:
> Of course, at all of them you can use your "Pikepass" (called
> different things in eash state) which bills you automatically with no
> need for a toll taker. One notable toll gate has the "Pikepass"
> dedicated lane marked "Ramp Speed 75."
Is this pass compatible with the "EZPASS" which is used in the east
coast*?
I've read where parking can be paid for by cellphone. Any toll
facilities thinking of allowing for that?
*For some reason, the customer service center for EZPASS users is
located in Richardson, TX.
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:59:38 +0000 (UTC)
From: Paul <pssawyer@comcast.net.INVALID>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: film "Executive Suite"
Message-ID: <Xns9DDBC139893EFSenex@85.214.73.210>
Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in
news:e7e55dde-87a7-4e4d-8dd1-1a26340bde93@s9g2000yqd.googlegroups.com
:
> On Aug 20, 8:09 pm, Wes Leatherock <Wesr...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> Of course, at all of them you can use your "Pikepass" (called
>> different things in eash state) which bills you automatically
>> with no need for a toll taker. One notable toll gate has the
>> "Pikepass" dedicated lane marked "Ramp Speed 75."
>
> Is this pass compatible with the "EZPASS" which is used in the
> east coast*?
>
> I've read where parking can be paid for by cellphone. Any toll
> facilities thinking of allowing for that?
>
>
> *For some reason, the customer service center for EZPASS users is
> located in Richardson, TX.
At least for NH and NJ, E-ZPass customer service seems to be in NJ.
--
Paul
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 23:00:54 +0000 (UTC)
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: film "Executive Suite"
Message-ID: <i4plr6$2d5g$1@gal.iecc.com>
>> Of course, at all of them you can use your "Pikepass" (called
>> different things in eash state) which bills you automatically with no
>> need for a toll taker. One notable toll gate has the "Pikepass"
>> dedicated lane marked "Ramp Speed 75."
>
>Is this pass compatible with the "EZPASS" which is used in the east
>coast*?
It appears to be the same ETC technology, but it doesn't interoperate
with EZPass and Fastlane. Their web site says they're working on it.
>I've read where parking can be paid for by cellphone. Any toll
>facilities thinking of allowing for that?
Not that I've heard, but you can pay for airport parking at LGA, JFK,
EWR, ALB, SYR, and ACY with your E-Zpass, as well as some parking lots
in Atlantic City and parking for the NY State Fair in Syracuse next
week. See you there.
R's,
John
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:37:08 -0400
From: Fred Goldstein <fgoldstein.SeeSigSpambait@wn2.wn.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Simplifying the Lives of Web Users
Message-ID: <20100821223727.732184F42@mailout.easydns.com>
On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:22:21 -0400, Monty Solomon contributed,
...By DAVID POGUE (NYTimes)
>August 18, 2010
>
>...
>Behind the scenes, the actual address is a string of numbers (called
>an I.P. address, for Internet protocol) that looks something like
>this: 74.125.53.100. (That happens to be Google's address.)
>
>Nobody can remember those addresses, though they are no longer than a
>phone number, so the Web's thoughtful designers came up with a
>secondary system: plain-English addresses like www.whatever.com. When
>you type that into your browser, a computer at your Internet provider
>performs a quick lookup. "Aha," it says to itself in its little
>digital way, "you just typed www.google.com. What you really want, of
>course, is 74.125.53.100. Please hold; I'll connect you."
>
>That, in a nutshell, is how D.N.S. works. (It stands for domain name
>system, in case that helps.)
Pogue got it wrong. It is the DNS, but it's not how the web works.
He's probably thinking about what he could have learned from a
textbook in the 19900s, when TCP/IP was still sort of fresh, and
seemed to work the way it did in the early 1980s when it first went
public. But it doesn't work like that any more. TCP/IP is obsolete,
sensescent, and held together by a remarkable collection of bailing
wire and spit. DNS is just one of the old wads of chewing gum.
When I look up www.google.com here, I get 173.194.33.104, not the
number he gets. This is to be expected. DNS and the web go together
like SPAM (that's the Hormel stuff, not the lower-case email stuff) on a bagel.
TCP/IP was designed when the ARPANET had a few hundred host
computers, mainly timesharing systems, and each was connected to one
of the government-owned IMPs (as its routers were called
then). Since the early pre-TCP/IP (it used NCP for its first decade
or so) ARPANET wanted to get going and prove packet switching before
it thought about addressing, it simply copied the telephone network
of the 1960s. The first part of the NCP address identified the IMP;
the second part identified the port on the IMP. When TCP was
developed around 1975 (IP was split off of it in 1978, in Version 4,
hence it began as "IP version 4"), they simply copied NCP's
semantics. Which were already wrong. An IP address thus does not
identify a computer. It identifies a connection to a network from a
computer. Two connections? Two addresses. Each router thus has
multiple addresses, one on each port. Heck, even the phone network
is well beyond this nowadays... And because it's identifying the
underlying link, not the node, an IP address is not an "internet"
address (layer 3); it is simply a synonym for a layer 2 (link)
address! There is no true layer 3 address in TCP/IP.
But now let's move on. Addresses pretend to identify host
computers. But the web rarely has a one-on-one relationship between
host and IP address. Take a small web site like mine,
http://www.ionary.com/ . It's hosted at an ISP's server, and the IP
address is shared among many web sites. You really think anyone's
getting a dedicated computer and IP address out of a hosting plan
that costs under $20/month? Of course not. HTML, however, is
smarter than IP; it's one of the best-designed application
protocols. It sends the actual URL to the server. So the server is
responding to the URL, not to the IP address. The server may have a
default service associated with its own address, but everybody else
is only reachable via the URL. And that's the way it should
be. Applications, like the web, should only be addressed at the
application layer. Underlying plumbing, like IP, should be hidden.
So that's the case where a lot of small web sites (URLs) share an IP
address. What about Google? That's the opposite case: One web site
needs many, many servers. This isn't what DNS was built for. What
we have here, instead, is a case of *anycast*: Many devices all
share the same identity, and any one of them can field the
question. In the telephone world, this is akin to "multiple
appearance directory number - single call appearance" (MADN-SCA), or
a call distributor. Contrast this with multicast, which is
MADN-multiple call appearance (one number rings multiple
phones). Anycast is far more common, but gets less attention.
How is anycast done with TCP/IP? On a small basis -- a few servers
in one location -- it's typically done with a distributor like a "Big
Iron" box. This is a specialized router that receives the HTTP
request and forwards it to one of a group of servers. But what
happens when one distibutor can't handle it? That's when you have to
start hacking DNS, as Google does. In such a case, DNS does not
return a single address to a request. It distributes the requests
among multiple IP addresses. So the one cached in the DNS server my
ISP is using might not be the one cached in the DNS server yours is
using. And it may change. It can also be done more cleverly,
looking at the IP address that's making the request, and returning
the IP address of the distributor that's closest (in Internet terms,
like hops, or being on the same ISP) to the requester. This is how
content delivery networks (CDNs), like Akamai, work, too. They
return the IP address of the nearest Akamai server.
So it's really all about work-arounds. If you use a third-party DNS
server like OpenDNS, as Pogue suggests, you get the IP address in the
OpenDNS cache, or from the server that they are directed to (DNS is a
hierarchy of referring servers). This may be the one closest to
them, not you, and thus not even the ideal choice.
For more information on why we think TCP/IP is obsolete and you
shouldn't waste your time on IPv6, check out the Pouzin Society web
site http://www.pouzinsociety.org/ or in particular this article on my site:
http://www.ionary.com/PSOC-MovingBeyondTCP.pdf .
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
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