ping
Al Gore will fix it. After all, he invented the internet.
What does GPS have to do with the Internet?
A better question is: What happens when the White House takes control of the internet?
Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones...Now that's serious... :-)
Henry Blodget - Dec. 5, 2009, 8:32 PM
Jenna Wortham explains the power of Apple's mobile app platform in a long article in the NYT.
Apple has the opportunity to do in mobile what Microsoft did on the desktop: Own the standard platform upon which every popular application is based. The irony of this cannot be lost on Microsoft, which has flubbed its own opportunity to do the same.
Google's Android could mount a strong charge here because it's hardware agnostic (the same way Microsoft Windows is, ironically). But otherwise it's Apple's game to lose.
Jenna Wortham:
IAN LYNCH SMITH, a shaggy-haired ball of energy in his late 30s, beams as he ticks off some of the games that Freeverse, his little Brooklyn software company, has landed on the iPhone App Store’s coveted (and ever-changing) list of best-selling downloads: Moto Chaser, Flick Fishing, Flick Bowling and Skee-ball.
Skee-ball, Mr. Smith says, took about two months to develop and deploy and then raked in $181,000 for Freeverse in one month. The company’s latest bid for App Store fame? A game featuring a Jane Austen character in a lacy dress who karate-chops her way through hordes of advancing zombies.
“There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,” Mr. Smith says of the App Store boom. “This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content.”
Expect cost to consumers to rise and service deteriorate.
Those with AT&T phone service probably know what I mean.
To Ms. Lewis:
Kate...really?
Really? You penned this as a serious piece? Really?
How old are you...10?
I reckon we’ll go back to libraries and Playboys.
It would be a blessing in disguise.
(though I’d miss FR)
DARPA designed it to be robust and route around damage. You might be able to take a subset of users off the 'Net, or take a set of co-located servers off the 'Net. But, it's far too decentralized to take the entire 'Net down.
Localized parts of the 'Net are more vulnerable to a clueless backhoe driver than to a "cyber attack".
The author does not understand how the Internet works, therefore she does not understand what "breaks" means. The Internet was designed to survive multiple nuclear attacks, distributing control and routing data around failures. It's not something that "goes out" like an electrical blackout. There is nothing to "break".
Two scenarios come close to what she's getting at:
- Local outage. If a dominant last-mile ISP suffers a catastrophic event, a whole lotta customers in a small area may lose 'net service. Those outside the area are not affected.
- Backbone overload. While the Internet was designed to assure transfer of data from A to B, it was not designed to handle such heavy loads as we have today (streaming video, gazillions of users); shutting down one of the major conduits would slow performance enough to cause problems. This is akin to a total shutdown of a major freeway thru a city.
These are, however, not the complete "break" she thinks could happen.
Wow, 40 years old! Getting pretty long in the tooth! And creaky in the joints! It's a wonder it doesn't simply collapse due to old age!
/sarcasm
Regards,
Oops, switched to VOIP for those. Looks like I'll have to set a fire and use smoke signals.
Just imagine the mail if all of the automatic bill payments suddenly need a stamp instead.
Thats why regular maintenance is so important. You have to change out the belts and pulleys from time to time, and bring it in for lubrication on regular intervals.
And for overall health of the system, I suggest adding a little STP to the air intake quarterly.
Duct tape it!
See "The Machine Stops."