Unconvinced

If you keep the existing logical network structure, then you'd still need separate aerials, network kit, backhaul links etc. even if the masts were shared. So the savings would be considerably less than claimed.

Even if you went back to the days of (effectively) a single provider (and those old enough to remember the days of GPO telephony will know how well that worked) you would still need to provide nearly as many cells to meet the total capacity, so the savings would be correspondingly reduced.

DPI?

ISPs have no need for DPI to know which web sites you visit. DPI is needed to decipher the content you exchange (though it's doubtful that even the NSA have the computing power to do that for everyone in the US) and, in particular, where the IP port is obfuscated to disguise traffic such as torrents.

As usual, if you want to exchange data over the Internet that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard, use encryption. If you don't want folks to know the sites you're visiting, use Tor.

A modest proposal

Government IT project:

a) delivers no benefit

b) costs too much

c) doesn't work

d) no voters want it.

If only our 'leaders' this side of St George's Channel had the balls of our Irish cousins.

Physical access required?

"If somebody gets access to this network, it's quite easy to cause disastrous havoc."

If a third party can gain physical access to your or your carrier's backbone, it's pretty much game over.

Write out 100 times:

"Arctic temperatures are of particular concern to those worried about the effects of global warming, as a melting of the ice cap could lead to disastrous rises in sea level - of a sort which might burst the Thames Barrier and flood London, for instance."

The Arctic ice cap floats, so its melting would have negligible effect on sea levels. Now the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, on the other hand ...

US != World

This may be a plausible view if you've only been exposed to US newspapers. It's true that if you live around New York or LA you have access to reasonable papers, but there's no real national press (unless you count USA Today - I don't).

Here in Blighty we have a choice of 4 national (somewhat) high-brow papers, to suit a range of political views. I buy a paper every day (partly because it's fair value and partly because it's a pain to read it on a PDA) and use PDA versions to check the others if there's a story I'm particularly interested in (or read George Monbiot if I think I'm feeling too cheerful).

Local papers in the UK (with some honourable exceptions) have become advertising-driven free rags, worth every penny.

IPv6 and security

You're right, IPv6 doesn't improve security. It does, however, make it easier for people to create better security. The security extensions in IPv4 are all optional - you can't rely on the stacks at both ends being able to support signed or encrypted packets, so you may need to install additional software before it will work.

With IPv6 it's all built in and support for encryption, authentication etc is mandatory. Whether or not people will choose to take advantage of this, is another matter.

BTW it's a bit unfair to IBM (I can't believe I just wrote that!) and others in a similar position to claim they're 'sitting' on Class A addresses. As you point out, they're using them internally (quite legitimately). I'm sure if someone was prepared to reimburse them for the costs of moving to 10.0.0.0/8, they'd be prepared to consider doing so. Anyone who's undertaken a transition from public to private IP addresses will know the cost of doing so on a large network is far from trivial.

@Anthony

By my reckoning that's about 0.5p refund you're owed. Where shall I send it?

Now, if the Beeb had the cojones to sack Wossy and a few of the other talentless tossers they employ on ludicrous salaries, they might be able to afford a decent refund.

@Camilla

A fair point. For such attacks to succeed, it requires inadequate input validation at two points: the web interface (allowing XSS and SQL injection attacks) and the underlying DB software (allowing buffer overflow attacks). So, you have two choices to prevent them;

a) wait for Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL etc to produce a database server guaranteed free of buffer overflow vulnerabilities (might be a long wait, and you'd still be vulnerable to XSS); or

b) proper validation of web input strings.

The latter looks more attractive to me given that:

1. It isn't too technically demanding (the most popular web servers provide tools to help, although they aren't 100% effective).

2. It doesn't require a huge effort (given reasonably documented and structured code, admittedly not a very likely contingency :).

3. It protects against XSS as well as SQL injection.

@Niall Campbell

"Like all American beers, it is gnats pee."

Maybe you haven't been to the states recently. Your statement was true 20 years ago, and remains true for the mega-brewers - Bud, Coors, even Miller (no relation) - but there are lots of microbreweries producing very good beer, they're mostly along the west coast and in the Bos-Wash region, producing bottles (except for the brewhouses) because the US lacks the distribution network for real ales. Their scale is too small for many of them to appear this side of the pond, though I've seen Anchor Steam Beer (somewhat like Ruddles) from San Francisco in my local Waitrose.

No risk of confusion

One is a beer and the other is a disgusting artificially-flavoured alcoholic beverage. Which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Maybe I'm just bitter

"bitter on the customer side (because they get the least amount of service from the vendor to stay in compliance with the contract)"

So Gartner know of outsourcing contracts where the supplier freely delivers service over and above the small print in the contract? Sorry, have to go, I'm being dive-bombed by a squadron of flying pigs.

@FIAT LUX

Have Liverpool Uni got a new AI lab or are you a computer in Turin? Either way, amanfromMars has clearly got serious competition.

I'd like to think you're right

And that we'd get the innovation of Sun combined with the financial muscle and corporate omnipresence of IBM. Sadly, what usually happens with these M&A deals is that you get the innovation of IBM combined with the financial presence of Sun. IF this goes ahead, I'd bet that in five years' time the question will be 'Sun who?'

And the moral is

Even the best IT security is useless if the bad guys can gain physical access to sensitive equipment.

Reality

"That which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick, who (on his worst day) was a ten times better writer than El Ron (on his best day).

@Richard Hebert

.. and if you swap the battery, then the exhausted battery still needs to be recharged. You can either do this on site or have a massive central recharging plant (probably sited next to a power station). In the latter case you've got to include the cost of transporting all these used batteries, so I guess you're no further forward. In either case, the resulting energy demands are unrealistic IMHO.

Any 'green' transport system that wouldn't drastically curtail people's ability to travel has to address the problem of energy density. Batteries and capacitors are still a long way behind kerosene in this respect.

Environmentalists need to either:

a) invent a way of producing petroleum (or something very similar) in a sustainable fashion; or else

b) figure out how to convince everyone that when they want to travel 100 miles to visit their mum, they'll need to book their trip with the authorities three months in advance (good luck with that).

@ian: "very large battery"

You ain't kidding. My 'local supermarket' filling station is nearly always busy from 7am-7pm and opens 24 hrs. Let's suppose an average of 15 'filling up' during peak periods and 5 overnight. That means we 'only' need a supply that can average 5MW. But we would need a 'battery' that can hold 30MWh (or 110GJ if you prefer). That's about 50,000 standard lead-acid car batteries.

@The maths

Thanks and well done, that all looks very plausible.

If you think about it though, a filling station where every vehicle takes 10 minutes to fill up would need to be able to service at least 8 (my village petrol station has 8 pumps) and for a larger establishment 20 (my local supermarket) recharging operations simultaneously. That takes us up to 10MW for every Tesco in the country.

Put your money into wind turbines, folks (or, more likely, copper for all the new cabling that will be needed).

Nildram

Another very satisfied long-term customer here. I haven't detected any degradation in service and the help desk (last time I needed them, which was last year due to a BT problem) are still the same charming, intelligent, helpful folks in Aylesbury.

I wonder if Adrian Mardlin (yes really) would be interested in buying them back?

Desktop virtualization?

I'm guessing that this means thin clients, i.e. Citrix (other solutions are available :). I can't see any reasons why general purpose desktops would need to run multiple OS instances under a true VM (and it certainly wouldn't reduce costs).

@Mr Gumby

"Outsourcing of operations is one way that companies can lower their IT costs"

Very few outsourcing activities result in lower costs*. Outsourcing is Sale & Leaseback by another name - it's just that it involves people and equipment rather than commercial properties. The aim is not to reduce costs, it's to capitalise future (probably increased) expenses to provide a one-off capital injection that can be disguised as a performance improvement and used to maintain senior mgt bonuses until the golden parachute kicks in.

*Those that do are usually where there are genuine economies of scale or the existing IT ops are truly FUBAR.

BTW How come the '08 EPS exceeds Pre-tax income? Did IBM get a big rebate last year?? (IANABeancounter!)

My post @ 12:48

Sorry Darling, wrong Alistair - for Campbell read Darling.

Relinquishing your pension

Apparently Fred 'the Shred' has been asked to consider giving up some or all of his £650,000 a year pension "on a voluntary basis". It certainly seems obvious that those responsible for one of the biggest cock-ups in financial history should not be allowed to benefit from it in so egregious a fashion.

No doubt we will soon be hearing from Messrs Brown and Campbell that they too will be giving up their taxpayer funded pensions "on a voluntary basis". I'm not holding my breath, though.

Pot to Kettle:

"YOU'RE A MONOPOLY!"

"NO, YOU'RE A MONOPOLY!"

(repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseam)

I don't get it

I can see how you can rapidly switch the demand for CPU resources to cloud B if cloud A goes offline. But where does the data reside? Unless you've replicated it between clouds A and B (or have some sort of RAID thing going on between clouds A, B, C, D, & E), which must be a substantial extra cost - you're stuffed.

I agree with Jake - like any outsourcing deal, it doesn't make economic sense unless you're not big enough to get the economies of scale yourself.

Just another security checklist

All very worthy, but doesn't mean a thing without a management system to ensure that the parameters chosen (eg for "control of ports, protocols and services") are aligned with the needs of the organisation and (equally important) stay aligned as the needs evolve. It's a pity no-one in the US seems to have heard of ISO 27001 - oh I forgot, it's Not Invented Here.

$10bn?

Small change - that's a bit over 1% of the recovery package signed off in the US and less than 10% of what GB is spending funding bonuses for w^Hbankers who, in any civilised society, ought to be dangling from the end of a rope. Come on Barack:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before 2020, of making this puppy fly!"

And the winner is ...

... Stephen Fry!

All other comment is superfluous, I fear.

I Sing the Body Electric

I thought for a mo' you were referring to Ray Bradbury. As you were.

@Vincent

There are many proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox/question - for 50 of them, see "Where is Everybody?" by Stephen Webb. None of them (to my satisfaction, anyway) addresses the issue that if just one technological civilisation discovers (during its 1,000 year lifetime) a means of breaking free from its original solar system, it can 'easily' colonise a galaxy within a few hundred million years (no warp drive necessary, though it would be nice).

SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess)

There's plenty of evidence that planetary systems are relatively common around normal (and some abnormal) stars. Nearly all those observed so far, however, have been Jupiter-sized or larger in very close proximity to the star - there's a lot of observational bias (this type of planet is much easier to detect using current methods), but still it appears that nice, orderly solar systems like the one we live in may be the exception. Gas giants tend to form further out than rocky planets like the Earth - if they then somehow migrate inwards, the aforementioned earth-like planets will get skittled out of the way, into a zone that is not habitable.

Any theory that proposes a significant number of 'advanced' civilisations in the galaxy must find a plausible method of dealing with Fermi's paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

@Inachu

If your web page is vulnerable to a SQL injection attack, it doesn't matter where the SQL server is hosted (the web server must still be able to access it). OTOH if you just want a static web server providing plain vanilla HTML, then you may have a point.

The answer to SQL injection is proper validation of all input strings - 'simple' as that.

@Uses P2P

How does that work? I'm not downloading a library of tracks to my PC, so unless two users are listening to the same track at the same time, there's no way for P2P to be of any use (either to Spotify or its users).

I call BS.

Spotify looks rather good - even though I've no interest in 'pop'.