Archive for non-tech category:
The modern day window tax on the internet
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In 1696, King William III of England imposed a tax on glass. Essentially, houses with more than ten windows paid a levy to the government, but the tax is now remembered as unfair and very avoidable by bricking up the windows in your home. Today there is a new tax on glass – [...]
IPv4 Run-out policies in Europe
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There are a few policy suggestions pushing their way through the RIPE policy development process which discuss how the final remaining IPv4 addresses should be given to end users in the European region.
They all show that the effects of scarsity of IP addresses will be felt before the final few addresses become assigned to end [...]
iPhone battery life
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The iPhone is the best portable computer I have ever owned, in every regard but one – the battery life for me was shockingly bad. When it reached the point where I could not go a full day without charge, I decided that I would have to return the device, because it was not useful [...]
Preventing Mailman annoyances
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Inspired by TheHodge’s “After you install Wordpress” article, I made a note of the things I did to configure a Mailman mailing list, after creating it. Much of this is to make the look-and-feel replicate how I used to run Majordomo lists.
Firstly, I like the Bounce handling and web-interface to Mailman, so this is why [...]
Internet TV is ace
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Lots of people have been telling me that IP delivered video will be big. For a long time, I have disagreed because innovations like the PVR (and therefore simple timeshifting) and the coming of age of multiplexing (and therefore multi channel tv) have expanded choice and allowed me to fit good TV that I like [...]
Openness and telecoms
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This is a response to Lee Dryburgh’s article on Skype. We had a debate on Twitter, but I have not yet mastered the art of debate in 140 characters!
Lee’s premise is that “Certainly Skype is not a walled garden. All things being relative, it’s certainly not overly closed either.” Lee claims that the accusations of [...]
2011 – An addressing odyssey. Preparing enterprise for IPv6.
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Yesterday I gave a talk to Sheffield GeekUp on preparing enterprises for IPv6 [download]. The premise of the talk was :
IPv4 addresses are scarse, and at current consumption rates, the IANA pool of free v4 addresses will be gone at the start of 2011.
This starts a “Post IPv4 world” where the IPv4 internet continues to [...]
Internationalisation of DNS continues
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Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all [...]
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