Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

The Standard has a good writeup on how we accept less than stellar uptime for things that are becoming more and more valuable such as broadband.
Phone service is reliable because it’s mandated to be. There’s pretty strict rules regarding uptime. As a result it’s pretty good. The reason for this is that [...]

I’m going to make a giant proposal to the web. Identifiers suck. Email, IM, Phone, etc. Most people have more than one of each. Lets fix that. Step by step.

According to Wired the Boeing 787 Dreamliner connected the networks for passenger services to critical flight systems:

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.

Here’s what a Boeing spokesperson had to say:

…it is employing a [...]

China’s Great Firewall has now started blocking RSS, a long known loophole to get information blocked all other ways. An entire syndication standard is now blocked. According to the Ars Technica:

PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “RSS,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds [...]

Drobo initially didn’t impress me to much, but after watching a demo I’m somewhat impressed. The positives:

The hotswapping, RAID-like (but not RAID) redundancy is awesome. That’s perfect for backup/bulk storage purposes.
Transfer isn’t bad (Up to read 22MB/s write 20MB/s)
Power consumption idles at about 12 watts which isn’t bad.
Adding storage capacity is really easy.

There [...]

I’ve moaned before about the lack of good upload bandwidth despite having rather decent download speeds. Comcast’s new PowerBoost for upload took effect this week, giving a burst of about 1Mbps for uploads for the first part. While this doesn’t quite fix the problem with making remote backups, it does help in some [...]

It’s well known cable modems are “shared bandwidth”, meaning if everyone on your neighborhood is downloading Paris Hiltons latest video off the net (ahem… her music video), your connection slows down. Well Comcast’s feature for the past several month allows you to briefly use the excess bandwidth when it’s quiet. So what does [...]

Several weeks ago the root servers were attacked. CNet is running a story that says Anycast played a role in preventing larger problems.
It would be interesting to see if all the root servers switch to Anycast. Where would the new distributed servers go? Does Verisign etc. own that many data centers? [...]

I noticed this a few months ago, but never gave it much thought until recently. My Laptop has a Intel 2915 A/B/G Wireless Card, more commonly known as the wireless portion of the Centrino package. It’s pretty decent in regards to power consumption, and performance is typically not to bad. But I’m [...]

Norton AntiVirus has this strange omission I just can’t figure out. For some reason “Internet Worm Protection” won’t allow for creating a connection to a PPTP VPN. Not very helpful if you have to connect to one of the many VPN’s out there that use this protocol.
First a little primer on making a [...]