SteveJ-restore-test

Horace Dediu of asymco charts commodity computing up-take (as yearly sales) since 1975 in  " The evolution of the computing value chain ". It includes personal computers, smartphones and more. Current PC (desktop+laptop) and Android sales are about equal at 350MM/year, with iPhones ~150MM/year and iPads closing in on 100MM/year: or near 1Bn new personal compute devices per year. With current growth rates, how soon will we saturate the IPV4 address space? There are two questions in there: How many IPV4 addresses are left? Where? Each region has its own challenges. How fast is the demand for Internet addresses growing? New Sales are not the whole story: replacements account for most sales in mature markets. The active PC fleet is now somewhat static. When the smartphone and tablet markets mature, Sales will still hold up with replacements catering for the 2-5 year product life. The 32-bit IPV4 address space can assign no more than 4Bn unique identities. My guesstimate of realis...

At 'Comms Day' 2012, Malcolm Turnbull asked : [ more audio ] "Why do we need to run fibre into every home?" We aren't building a network for 2010, but one able to easily handle the demands of 2020 and upgradeable as needed during its 25-30 year life. There are 3 reasons we "need to run fibre into every home", beside the obvious [3G/4G networks are perfect for mobile devices and exactly wrong for fixed services]: Storage (Disk & Flash) drives demand for bandwidth, especially upload capacity. A Cyberwar will be won or lost in 3 minutes. Defences must be automatic and "full-coverage". Australian Telcos don't just not co-operate, they actively self-harm to attack competitors. There is also a wild-card: Just what will Apple come up with in 2013 to follow on from the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. Will it be "TV done right" as Walter Isaacson implies, or something closer to the "Knowledge Navigator"? Either way, we'...

AUSTRALIAN TELCO BUSINESS PRACTICES Australian Telcos aren't just uncooperative, their behaviours are pernicious, obstructive and often perversely self-injurious. This (and the GFC) is why Telstra's share price fell around three times pre-NBN, and has recovered over 10% in the short time since the NBN arrangement has been completed. There are 4 incontestable examples of this: Telstra/Optus cable rollout. ISDN only as a 'premium service'. ADSL 1 (ACCC intervention), ADSL 2 turn-on and ADSL 2 DSLAMs & ULL (non) churning. Mobile roaming. The massive and predictable waste of money caused by Telstra purposefully overbuilding the Optus network, even as they deployed, was sheer bloody-minded behaviour. When they'd beaten Optus to a standstill they proved that to "queer the pitch" (prevent others from 'scoring') was their only objective by never completing their own cable network. Telstra had the resources and capability to finish their roll-out to 85-...

STORAGE DRIVES DEMAND FOR INTERNET USE. Since IBM introduced the first disk (5MB, RAMAC) in 1956, demand for storage has grown relentlessly, as demonstrated by yearly total disk sales. Disk Vendors have collapsed to 2+1 as we enter the end-game. Storage drives demand for bandwidth, both for data exchange/transfer and backups. Bandwidth demand will track storage sold, lagged by 1-3 years. The proliferation of smartphones with video has driven the explosion of content on social media, and You-tube's "60 hours of video uploaded every minute" is only set to get higher. By 2020, the last 10-fold scale-up of disk drives will be complete with 3.5" drives maxxing at 20-40TB: 1-10,000 hrs video [or for 'action' HD, ~500 hours with MPEG-4 variable encoding/bitrates.] Flash is also in its last 10-fold scale-up and starting to suffer the same scaling problems that began in 2004/5 for DRAM. There are at least 3 candidate technologies to replace Flash and fuel further grow...

CYBER-WARFARE and the Australian NBN. We know from "Stuxnet" that Nation States are actively building and deploying Cyber warfare tools, applying them to National Security concerns and running them as Military, not technical, operations. This includes accurate reconnaissance and network topology and vulnerability mapping. The worst case is that attackers will gain access to the network control tools and infrastructure. Recent coverage suggests that Obama denied a US Military request to launch a cyber attack on Syria's infrastructure during the recent 'troubles'. From the "slammer" worm, we know that any Cyber warfare attack will be fully developed within 3 minutes, and any attack will be launched at the worst possible time for defenders, possibly accompanied by physical distractions. Recovery from "munitions grade" worm/malware compromise will be long and expensive. Experience is that malware infections is as damaging to businesses as a fire: W...

Information Security is both very hard and very easy at the same time. Not only are Internet Nasties a nuisance, or worse, they prevent the  new, useful Applications and Networks like e-Commerce, i-EDI, e-Health, e-Banking, e-Government and other business/commercial transactions systems. Perfect Security isn't possible: ask any bank. Defenders need to be 100.00% correct, every minute of every day. Attackers need just one weakness for a moment to get in. Not all compromises/breaches are equal: from nothing of consequence, up to being in full control with system owners not being aware of it. All 'Security Systems' can only be "good enough" for their role, which depends on many factors. How long do you need to keep your secrets? Minutes or Decades? Building a system isn't an end-point: "Information Security is a journey, not a destination" (Schneier) Security has two aspects: creation and operation or patrolling. Not only do you have to build it safe, ...

The 7 Millennium Prize Problems don't resonate for me... These are the areas that do engage me: Datacentre Hardware organisation , power, cooling and interconnect fabric Multi-level memory and impact on Operating Systems. Flash as RAM, disk cache or SSD? Flexible Hardware and supporting Systems and Software Internetworking protocols . IPv4 isn't secure, IPv6 is overblown. The piece for the second item, "Multi-level memory" is old and not specifically written for this set of questions. Expect it to be updated at some time.

Does Rupert Murdoch know something the rest of us don't? The recent news is that News Ltd would start charging for on-line access to its newspapers. Not a good idea. Experienced Journalist & commentator, Alan Kohler also thinks so ... First, Rupert is not in the business of selling 'news', quality journalism or not. He sells Advertising . Just like Google and friends. But apparently not nearly as well as they do on-line. There are people who sell 'news', and they are going strong. Organisations like Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, AAP, ... The wire-services. The same ones that sell to Google, businesses, TV and Mr Murdoch's newspapers. News Ltd doesn't sell journalistic content (news): like every major newspaper, it has always given away its content. Exactly the same as Free-to-Air radio and TV. The "value proposition" to most newspaper customers, News & Stories, is a Free Good. Major papers actually cost their publishers to sell...

The News Broadsheet was a pivotal element of the 1776 American Revolution, eventually becoming enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Newspapers were integral to the Twentieth Century rise and evolution of Western Democracies. Without "frank and fearless" reporting (and an engaged electorate), governments can quickly spiral out of control. We're now 15+ years into the "Internet Revolution", so where are Newspapers in their journey on-line? Significantly, nobody seems to have discovered a "secret sauce" to generally monetise News and the work of Journalists in the way that Amazon and Google etc have monetised books and on-line ads. Those who make money from writing seem to do so from direct subscriptions - the on-line form of "newsletters". In my first job , there was a direct and obvious connection between the 5g +/- 0.01g of sugar being analysed and 'the business': Our analyses determined payments for 500 or 1,00...

For many years I had the uneasy feeling that the Telco Engineers I worked with/for over most of a decade at O.T.C. did not actually understand Computer Data Networks. Here I attempt to formalise and explain that thought. The implications/ramifications won't be examined in this piece. History Telephone/Telco Engineering dates back to between ~1880 with the formation of the first phone companies and 1915 with the first US transcontinental (long-distance) calls. Dial phones were introduced in the US circa 1919, but automatic exchanges had been invented well before. The profession of Telco Enginering has around 125 years of tradition and practice. As a profession, they have been very good at doing what they do - creating reliable point-to-point voice communication. They have extended into high-availability point-to-point digital services. Modern Computer Data Network Engineering dates from around 1982 with cheap mini-computers and the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet. Cheap PC...

Connecting Australia with broadband/fibre systems is closer to implementing Cable TV than a new Phone network. The $43B estimate is 3-5 times too high based on Cable TV rollouts. That difference completely changes the economics of the project. The $43B NBN estimate is for 90% houses connected, or ~$5,500 per house passed. Stewart Fist estimated in an article, 'Pipe Dreams' , in 1996, that it would cost $10Bn to roll-out cable TV to 66% of houses. That's not the 90% of the NBN, but indicates a factor of three difference in price. Queensland Government in Project Vista ($550M) was looking at around $3,000/house, as was ConnectSEQ ($300M for '3 million people' - for perhaps 1M houses) The Victorian Governments "Project Aurora" was estimating $1500/lot in a new subdivision, confirming the QLD ~$3000/house. The Bis Shrapnel report to the ACCC in 2001 on "Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia" cites: TransActs' costs for fibre (phone ...

Update 1 : 26-May-2009 A very kind person @ ABC took the time to read this piece and to give me some valuable comments: We are paid to make editorial decisions ... This is our job. news is about immediate events and happenings and it is short, brief and factual. 'News' is just one kind of ABC broadcast. Don't confuse it with our entire output. As to your specific proposals... - SPAM is a "dropdead" problem (my words) - automatically generated responses are a waste of time... listener input should be read and acknowledged by a real person, - but the problem is that we are all under time pressure. So where to from here? Appears to be end-of-the-road for this approach. How does "The Internet Changes Everything" apply to News and Journalism at the ABC - Australia's national broadcaster? Contents: Background , How the Internet Changes Everything and Proposal What are the sources of Good Stories? Do Journalists have a monopoly on sources and Perfect Jud...

It never ceases to amaze me, the Politician attitude to Porn and 'Spam' & it's friend, malware. Porn is "bad, bad, bad" and Pollies show very high interest - including policy & legislation. Lots of angst & trashing around about eradicating something that 2,000+ years of writing/publishing shows can't be controlled/legislated away. The physical publishing world & (cable) TV show that the *only* effective is means of control is to allow-but-license. Same as tobacco. Never going to eradicate it, only control it. 'Restricted Content' access can only be controlled iff: every page is 'classified' at source (meta-tags), an unforgeable Internet 'proof-of-age' card/system is created, there are criminal penalties for subverting the system, forging identities or misclassifying pages, there are no legal jurisdictions outside 'the system' [e.g. on the high-seas], all browsers enforce 'the rules', and browsers can...