Fred’s Notes

About every corporate ISP in this world will try to sell you some kind of QoS Service on top of the ‘wholesale jungle network’: MPLS, Diffserv, etc. You get to pay more for a special ‘premium’ and optimized network where the right bits are delivered faster than the other ones or not delivered at all. Well, this guy says that the all concept of Qos is broken, but from a economic perspective:

This was the outline of a paper I planned to write, but for which I just have too little time to get it finished. My main point is that QoS mechanisms in a network are a bad idea ™ This is generally examined from a technical point of view. The arguments are either generally that we tried it and it didn’t work. There is little research on that evaluates the economical side. The little research that there is, generally argues that QoS mechanisms could work if all parties in a communication chain just work together and the reason they don’t is because of the lack of incentives. I belief there are several reasons why QoS can’t work and why it is a failure of logic.

In many business cases surrounding QoS mechanisms there is an assumption that QoS enabled traffic that has been paid for, has a higher value to the user than data that has not been paid for. This sounds logical from an economical point of view if money is an adequate proxy. However it isn’t. Compare a VoIP call that clashes with a pay per view movie. If the VoIP call is about an important subject (birth of child) than it has priority for the receiver, regardless of the QoS level paid for.

So, if QoS is broken and your network is acting slow, what is the solution? Well, overengineer your network, that it’s the same thing to say: upgrade your pipes. It’s a Layer 1 problem, not Layer2-7.

Interesting read.

Amazon announced S3 for Europe. What you win in latency access to Amazon european datacenters you loose at the price. They are 20% higher than the US prices. Check it out (US Dollars):

Storage
$0.18 per GB – Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB/month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB/month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out/month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

For some people, the price/performance trade-off may be not that bad at all.

Cringley, as usual, with an interesting article (with the suggestive title, The Future is Cloudy: Google’s plan to host ALL our applications.):

Here’s the grand plan: By working with IBM to promote cloud computing to universities, Google is accomplishing two very important goals. It will first put them in touch with every graduate student doing work Google might find interesting. So it is first a hiring tool. But by teaching students about cloud computing Google and IBM are also seeding the technology in the companies where those students will take their first jobs after graduation. Five years from now cloud computing will be ubiquitous primarily for this reason.

But Google wants us to embrace not just cloud computing but Google’s version of cloud computing, the hooks for which will be in every modern operating system by mid-2009, spread not by Google but by a trusted open source vendor, MySQL AB.

This is a really good article explaining why ISP’s and operators most of the times don’t think about the consequences of packet inspection (DPI). False positives are very bad for business.

My view is that a lot of the more onerous terms-of-service for broadband (fixed or wireless), or heavy-handed traffic shaping, are going to evaporate under commercial & PR pressure over the next year or so. And I’m expecting quite a lot of Comcast-type attempts to be outed by people monitoring traffic flows and reverse-engineering what’s causing problems.

As I’ve said before – I can’t get especially exercised about Net Neutrality. Because anyone stupid enough to block benign traffic (even if they don’t like it for commercial reasons) is going to heavily burnt. I think the market will understand providers wanting to stop network integrity being threatened – but it will show zero tolerance for vindictive or accidental ‘collateral damage’.

Well, now that Gmail is offering IMAP in the near future, all the ISP’s or cheap meeto mail hosting companies will not have any advantage whatsoever to compete with Google. I think the future is on complete collaboration solutions like Zimbra. Via Pedro and Pedro.

Disclaimer: My company is selling Zimbra solutions. If you’re interested, drop me a mail.

I really think that maybe there’s a reason behind corporate firewalls. To keep people away from doing real work. Oh well, running ssh over corkscrew over the almighty http proxy is not enough. Tomorrow I’ll go for OpenVPN over http and tunnel every piece of packet on top of it. Long live open source.

It’s all about Freedom, really.

Consumers now want the freedom to use their media as they wish. When it comes to music, they want to listen to songs in their cars, on their PCs and on their living room stereos. They want to create mixes and playlists and share them with friends; to rip apart songs and create mashups. They want to customize their experience of music.

Estou um pouco à parte de toda a discussão que se gerou em torno dos Radiohead terem decidido colocar à venda o último álbum (In Rainbows) directamente em formato mp3, do próprio site, sem intermediários pelo caminho. Sendo isto uma não novidade (não foi a primeira banda que o fez), já o preço do álbum é determinado pelo que o fã/consumidor estiver disposto a pagar, a partir de 0 libras. Não sei se foi publicity stunt ou não, só sei que pelo menos não se fala de outra coisa (com direito a entrada no Wikipedia). Só acrescento que já ouvi o álbum e provávelmente só compraria o Bodysnatchers e Jigsaw Falling into Place. E é por isso que gosto da loja iTMS e outros clones. Para mim, é-me difícil apanhar álbuns bons e que ache que os deva comprar a granel.

In case you forgot, July 27th was the 8th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. And a good day to pay a tribute to BOFH.

In case you didn’t noticed, my personal domain, marques.cx disappeared for the last 2 days. It all started with a friend messaging me that it could not reach his website and another hosted for a non-profit association on my server. I could not figured it what it was because the dns cache of my isp would still answer me the correct ip address of the sites and the a record for my primary nameserver. And yes, all of my domains were registered on a primary nameserver belonging to a ghost domain. Finally I discovered that none of the nameservers of .CX TLD were giving any replies whatsoever for the NS records of marques.cx. Did a whois query, bingo, no renewal, no domain, it was expired. Oh, the horror. The shock. And I didn’t received any alert or information for the renewal. Then, I thought, well, the secondary nameserver will answer queries for my domains until ns.marques is back from dead. Yeah, right. For making things worse, the secondary nameserver I was using had an old glue record entry on the registrar, a very strange problem and guess what, the domain ttl’s were expiring and no nameserver was there to answer for it. I rely heavily on my marques.cx domain, including customer mails, Paypal, mailing lists, blogs, everything. It was all gone. So I went to COCCA website, the registrar of .CX domain and sent several desperate e-mails asking for help and how to renew my domain. But I had no replies, nothing. One day passed and I decided to stay up late and make a phone call to the COCCA offices on the tiny Christmas Island. Talked to a lady with a funny asian-australian accent who could not understand what was my problem and she gave me the phone number of Garth Miller himself, the man in charge of .CX COCCA Registrar. So I phone Garth, thinking in all this amazing situation and for my relief, he answered my call, asked me to send an e-mail with the domain details and in 15 minutes he re-activated my domain and I was back in business. So, thank you Garth Miller, you saved my day. But beware of domain registrars in exotic places. You have been warned.

Quem diria?

“That said, I do agree with my dear friend Cynthia Brumfield, who very succinctly says, there is no such thing as too much bandwidth.”

Via GigaOm.