The disruption to East assess Internet connections because of an earthquake in Taiwan is disturbing. This is a network originally designed to survive a nuclear war, and yet a single point of failure is causing massive disruption. It appears that the East Asian telecoms companies will have to seriously review their infrastructure.
An important lesson from this is that relying on one technology is dangerous. While relying on the net is risky, a far more risky proposition is relying on the mobile phone network. As we see here every bushfire season, the mobile phone network is quickly swamped in an emergency.
The worst example is the September 11 atrocity in New York. Taking out the World Trade Centre towers crippled New York's mobile phone and Internet networks as well as taking a number of TV stations off air. Even before the collapse, the web had pretty well choked.
We really have to remember that in an emergency too much reliance on mobiles and the net could well make a disaster much worse. Probably the best emergency communication technology is still radio. Don't throw away that transistor radio yet.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Tech reviews
As we deal on a regular basis with computers that have been messed up by poorly designed and over-bloated security packages, I read with interest the Sydney Morning Herald's review of the more popular ones.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/reviews/net-nasties-face-onestop-blocks/2007/01/02/1167500118494.html
One of my criticisms of newspaper, and many magazine, reviews is the reviewers often seem to have only read the press pack rather than actually try the products. In this case, it appears Adam Turner did at least try McAfee, and it irritated him. If he did try Norton then he either had a clean machine with 2Gb RAM.
Norton 2007 is awful. Thankfully I've only seen it once and that system was reduced to a crawl. Uninstalling it was a nightmare as it refused to run the wizard while Live Update was running, and Live Update didn't want to stop. Is it really that hard to stop a service when you want to uninstall the product.
Given the sheer weight of problems Norton products have created for users over the last five years, it would be nice for reviewers to at least acknowledge the problems. Reviews like this only encourage customers to continue making the wrong decisions. It also lets these companies get away with selling poor products.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/reviews/net-nasties-face-onestop-blocks/2007/01/02/1167500118494.html
One of my criticisms of newspaper, and many magazine, reviews is the reviewers often seem to have only read the press pack rather than actually try the products. In this case, it appears Adam Turner did at least try McAfee, and it irritated him. If he did try Norton then he either had a clean machine with 2Gb RAM.
Norton 2007 is awful. Thankfully I've only seen it once and that system was reduced to a crawl. Uninstalling it was a nightmare as it refused to run the wizard while Live Update was running, and Live Update didn't want to stop. Is it really that hard to stop a service when you want to uninstall the product.
Given the sheer weight of problems Norton products have created for users over the last five years, it would be nice for reviewers to at least acknowledge the problems. Reviews like this only encourage customers to continue making the wrong decisions. It also lets these companies get away with selling poor products.
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