January 2006 Archives

So Google's fourth quarter's profit growth was only 82% and not the full 100% that analyists were expecting. So what do we do? Drop the share price 12% and erradicate 16 Billion in Market Cap.

The amount of shareholder wealth shed by Google during extended trading exceeds the current market value of General Motors Corp.

See: Google Earnings Disappoint; Shares Plunge

Last month, researchers found the 43rd Mersenne Prime: 230,402,457-1. It's 9,152,052 decimal digits long.

Taken from Schneier on Security: 43rd Mersenne Prime Found

The 700 campus computers are part of an international grid called PrimeNet, consisting of 70,000 networked computers in virtually every time zone of the world. PrimeNet organizes the parallel number crunching to create a virtual supercomputer running 24x7 at 18 trillion calculations per second, or 'teraflops.' This greatly accelerates the search. This prime, found in just 10 months, would have taken 4,500 years on a single PC.

For more information check out Mersenne Primes on Wikipedia.

An interesting event took place last week in New York. Basically an ISP started telling the Internet that traffic for another ISP should be sent to them instead. This is the equivilent of Cingular telling the world to direct all calls to Verizon to them instead. There is a lot of discussion on if this was intentional or an accident, either way it shouldn't happen. What's really amazing is how frequent this type of thing really is. From the message posted on Nanog:

All Panix services are currently unreachable from large portions of the Internet (though not all of it). This is because Con Ed Communications, a competence-challenged ISP in New York, is announcing our routes to the Internet. In English, that means that they are claiming that all our traffic should be passing through them, when of course it should not. Those portions of the net that are "closer" (in network topology terms) to Con Ed will send them our traffic, which makes us unreachable.

A good summary Renesys Blog: Con-Ed Steals the 'Net

Why did this happen? Probably someone at Con Edison made a mistake, although this series of events is messy and complicated enough that it's hard to imagine exactly what kind of mistake it could have been. Perhaps they'll comment here or on the NANOG mailing list. Probably not.

See: Wired News:

The December CGA report -- the first comprehensive look at digging accidents -- found that nearly half of the 675,000 incidents in 2004 resulted from the excavator failing to contact the local One Call center. The most common facilities damaged as a result were gas pipelines, representing 51.6 percent of the damage. Telecommunications facilities came in second at 27.5 percent. Backhoes, trenchers and shovels tended to hit gas lines, while augers, borers and drills had it in for telecom cables.

Thank God!

Google told Networking Pipeline's Paul Kapustka in no uncertain terms that it won't give in to the cyberextortion. And despite reports to the contrary, Google says, it isn't talking with any carriers about the issue. Google's Barry Schnitt told Paul in an email: "Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations."

See: Networking Pipeline | Blog | Google: We Won't Pay Broadband Cyberextortion

I really need to get into the credit reporting business. As a business you have to have a Duns number with the reports that come along with it. I just received a call from Dun and Bradstreet to inform me that there have been several inquires on my business and that they are currently returning a risk score because of incomplete information in their system. The person went on to explain that I really should fill out the profile and give them the rest of the information so they can remove this erroneous risk score from future requests. Of course there is an "administrative fee" of $499 to fill out said paperwork. So let's summarize:

1. I have a free Duns profile,
2. My free Duns profile returns a risk score because it doesn't have all of the information submitted,
3. Businesses have requested this profile and received this information,
4. They cannot disclose who is requesting the information because it is confidential,
5. To fix this problem I need to pay a $499 administrative fee.

Like I said, I seem to be in the wrong business.

If you haven't been paying attention an interesting thing has been happening with the datacenters in Los Angeles and other cities. They are running out of space. That's right Los Angeles is nearing capacity for available datacenter space, the few players left with floor tiles open have realized this and raising their prices like there's no tomorrow. What's really scary about this is unlike 1999/2000 during the peak of the Internet bubble no one is building new facilities out. We are going to be looking at a major shortage soon.

See: Internet Daily: BellSouth wants new Net fees

BellSouth Corp. confirmed Monday that it is pursuing discussions with Internet content companies to levy charges to reliably and speedily deliver their content and services. Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth, justified content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it.

This is so painfully retarded I am at a loss for words. Mark Cuban has decided this is a great idea in his post titled: Hey Baby Bells & Cable, We need multiple tiers of service

There are some basic facts about the internet that remind me of driving on the 405 in Los Angeles.  Traffic jams happen. There is no end in sight for those traffic jams. The traffic jams are  worse at certain times of the day. Whether its the 405 or the internet. Uless of course we add multiple tiers of service so that users, companies and applications that want to, or need to avoid those traffic jams have alternatives. We need HOV lanes and toll roads on the net as badly as we need the HOV lanes on the 405.

This is very basic... if I am a BellSouth customer I am paying, that's right I am paying BellSouth for my Internet connection. I have given them my hard earned dollar to surf on the internet and use whatever service I want. But I guess this isn't enough, now BellSouth wants to extort the web sites that I visit and charge them money to ensure that the content I want actually makes it to me. This is insane, please somebody stop this madness.

Thanks to Jeremy for this one:

Recently someone pointed me at SkyVector.com which can most easily be described as "the Google Maps of Aviation." They've taken the aviation sectional charts for the entire USA, scanned them, broke them up into square "tiles", and provide a smooth click-and-drag panning interface for navigating them maps. Like Google maps, you can zoom in and out, drag around, and quickly get a feel for what's there. And there's some overlay data too. They overlay graphics for all known airports. You can click on one to get a detail page. For example, the page for Reid-Hillview in Santa Clara County.

The best blonde joke ever.

There are some very interesting ideas here on simple things you to can to make your system [feel] faster. While I am not going to subscribe to all of them - I learned a couple new tricks.

• 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP
• 10 Intermediate Ways To Speed Up Windows
• More Ways To Speed Up Windows XP