Archive for December, 2009
Galileo’s Telescope 400th Anniversary, sunspots and climate
Sunday, December 27th, 2009Obama’s Patriot Act Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Sunday, December 27th, 2009Exploring the stairs
Saturday, December 26th, 2009Secrets and Surprises.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009HOMELAND ALERT: Attempted Terrorist Attack Heightens U. S. Air Security
Friday, December 25th, 2009Time for China-US-Russia Joint Human Missions in 2012-2013 to Space Stations
Friday, December 25th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Friday, December 25th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Friday, December 25th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Thursday, December 24th, 2009European Space Trekkers Send Greetings
Thursday, December 24th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Christmas on the International Space Station
Thursday, December 24th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Thursday, December 24th, 2009NASA: 2009 in Review
Thursday, December 24th, 2009WEATHER ALERT for VA - Washington County
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Site upgrade, search working again
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Some of you may have noticed that the search function on the site has not worked for some time. After struggling for months to get our hosting service to fix the problem, we have moved the site to a new server hosted by a different company. Not only is the site much faster, search now works. If you notice any problems, please drop me a note.
Have a great Christmas!
Andrew Cohill
Blackberry outage highlights need for network diversity
Thursday, December 24th, 2009The recent outage that took down the RIM Blackberry network highlights the need for network diversity. The Internet has, in part, been such a fantastic success because there is no central controlling authority. In fact, there really is no "Internet." It just does not exist. What exists are hundreds of thousands of individual, physically separate networks that use a common set of protocols (rules) to exchange information like email, Web pages, and YouTube videos, among other types of information.
Any one of these networks can down without affecting any other network. Many of these networks can down without affecting the rest of the Internet. But it is even better than that. If major chunks of the Internet (i.e. individual networks) go down, these Internet protocols (rules) allow routing around the damage and most users on all those other networks do not even realize some portion of the Internet is temporarily down.
The Internet just works. To keep it working, we need more independent networks, not fewer, larger networks. We need private sector networks. We need community-owned networks. We need neighborhood networks. More networks, more independent networks equals more reliability, more competition, more choice, more robustness.