“This groundbreaking analysis identifies a critical issue facing the Internet – that we must take the necessary steps to build out network capacity or potentially face Internet gridlock that could wreak havoc on Internet services,” stated Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance.

Things like BlackBerrys, YouTube, and file-sharing have brought us to this point, according to Nemertes, and without an improved infrastructure, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever get beyond it.  The study’s title does, after all, include the phrase “Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web.”

What will this improved infrastructure cost, then?  Nemertes tosses out some large numbers – an extra $42-$55 billion – but then provides a point of comparison by adding, “this is roughly 60-70 percent above and beyond the $70 billion service providers are already planning to invest.”

Assuming the accuracy of the study, that much of a difference might necessitate some price hikes or even government intervention.

So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.

The move has received flak from webmasters. When Google and Yahoo! can handle such queries, what makes Live so handicapped? However, Eytan Seidman hinted that Live Search is working on “a few good ides up our sleeve” to offer better functionality for such queries.

Barry Schwartz has stated that this might be the indications that Microsoft is launching a webmaster tools section similar to Google’s Webmaster Central. Is there a upside to this seeming handicap of Live Search?

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The disc is the latest addition to the DVD TWIN format, discs that support both DVD and HD DVD content and that are fully compatible with both formats.

The new disc boosts capacity and expands versatility with a three-layer structure for support for two HD DVD layers and one DVD layer or two DVD layers and one HD DVD layer.

Memory-Tech and Toshiba will propose the new disc to the HD DVD Forum, the industry body that defines DVD standards.

In a two-layer HD DVD configuration, the new TWIN disc has a 30GB HD DVD capacity, plus 4.7GB of standard DVD capacity.

Configured to maximize standard DVD content, the disc can support 8.5GB on two layers, plus 15GB of HD DVD content on the third layer. DVD content can be played back on a standard DVD player, while HD DVD players can play back both formats.

Memory-Tech and Toshiba together proposed the DVD/HD DVD TWIN to the DVD Forum in 2004, as a transitional format able to support both standard DVD and HD DVD content.

The single-sided, dual-layer TWIN disc was adopted as part of the HD DVD specifications, and has found wide application since HD DVD players and PC drives were launched in the Japanese and North American markets in March this year.

The TWIN disc allows standard definition and high definition versions of a movie to play on present DVD players, and on the high definition version players upon upgrade.

The first generation TWIN disc had limited capacity: support for 15GB of HD DVD content and 4.7GB of DVD content.

The companies say that the new 3-layer disc meets demand from movie studios and software companies in North America and Japan for a capacity boost, and offers double the maximum capacity for each format.

“We have been releasing TWIN Format titles since April,” said Hideki Oyagi, General Manager, Visual Entertainment Department, PONY CANYON INC. “We are getting very positive feedback from the market, and our TWIN Format titles are selling better than anticipated. The new 3-layer TWIN Format will allow us to develop even more products and I am sure it will accelerate acceptance of the HD DVD format in the market.”

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My very first thought was that they’ve wrapped a gui front-end around filesystem versioning or snapshots. That would be the logical way to do this; otherwise you waste a tremendous amount of unnecessary space for backup:

(From http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/leotimemac/index.php):

How will Time Machine work for people who modify gigantic files on a regular basis? For example, consider a 1GB database file. If I make a tiny modification to that file, Time Machine writes out another 1GB file to record that change. As a result, drive space on my backup device could quickly disappear.

A while back, it was rumored that Apple might be working on ZFS for Leopard. Is that how they are doing this? Well, maybe, but others say “ZFS is not in the Leopard discussed at WWDC in any capacity”

Maybe they added versioning to HFS+?. It wouldn’t seem all that hard to do given the metadata capabilities already present. Versioning itself isn’t all that new; it goes back to DEC’s TENEX and VMS filesystems. Even SCO implemented undelete with versioning. But no, the descriptions of Time Machine don’t sound like versioning: they talk about having a separate drive for the backups. So that’s probably not it.

So do they really duplicate data over and over again? That seems so unlikely. At the very least a simple version control diff method would cut down on that tremendously. But we don’t yet know. Wikipedia’s reference says:

It is unclear at this time whether Time Machine should be considered as a simple back-up utility or as a complete filesystem-level version control mechanism. Apple’s website merely states that an API will be released so that third party developers can take advantage of Time Machine.

And that’s where it stands for now.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

The United States Department of Energy issued their weekly report yesterday. The report said oil inventories dropped 1.8 million barrels but was still up 26 million for the year. Gasoline dropped 900,000 barrels but gas is up 9.8 million barrels for the year.

In many ways a sigh of relief came though as distillate inventories climbed again for the 5th straight week by 2.5 million barrels and actually putting the yearly total on the plus side by 400,000 barrels. This certainly must be good news for consumers as heating oil prices start to lower ever so slightly and diesel prices should follow suit. Gasoline prices started moving up some this morning but are about even during midday trading.

According the report, there are two major schools of thought right now in the oil analyst business. One is that the oil problems will straighten out soon because crude oil is bottlenecked on refineries and demand will drop some when the problems are resolved. OPEC falls into this category right now.

The other school, which seems to be driving the speculation bubble is that oil demand will remain high worldwide for the coming months and that the world will barely be able to handle it particularly with regard to China and India.

MorganStanley economist Andy Xie sees things quite differently. In a report he recently prepared for investors, he warned China’s purchasing of oil is temporary and the oil “bubble” will burst very shortly.

“I believe China’s oil imports are likely to decline in 2005 and may fall further in 2006, as China’s investment cycle turns down,” said Xie in the report. “The economic fundamentals for oil look very weak at present and into next year.”

In any event, until that happens, prices at the pump continue to climb. Gas is up over a penny at the pump on average which may not seem like much, on the scale gasoline is purchased for everyone, it adds up to quite a bit. Plus, 50% of the cost of gasoline comes directly from the price of oil so, unfortunately, the price will go up. Some market watchers are looking for totals over $60 a barrel and in one instance over $100 a barrel.

With oil and gas continuing to climb, it should continue to slow the economy. Until a cheaper fuel source is used, consumers will continue to pay the exorbitant pump prices.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The persistent problem driving oil and gasoline prices upward hasn’t been a production issue. Instead, a lack of new refineries, unwanted in most places in the United States, has been the problem.

That concern has taken oil off of its three month low, as light crude rose to $48.97 at today’s Mercantile close. In London, Brent crude closed at $49.34, a 25 cent increase.

According to Bloomberg, about 1 million barrels a day of refinery capacity will be added in 2005. Demand will pace at about 1.78 million barrels a day this year, according to an earlier International Energy Agency report.

The Saudi Arabian oil minister also commented that oil producers and consumers must work to remove the bottlenecks that have helped drive prices skyward.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Currently, the Gmail storage capacity resides at 2057 megabytes and it continues to increase. There has been no word from Google on how much longer the increase is going to occur. They have dropped hints that they would be increasing Gmail’s capacity past the 2-gigabyte mark on their blog, which says, “to celebrate our birthday, we’re giving all Gmail users another gigabyte of space, and then some.”

With the counter continuing its increase, which is already past the 2-gig mark, users can only guess where it will stop.

With the Gmail increase well under way, one can imagine Google’s competitor’s to follow suit. However, Yahoo only recently announced their intentions to increase storage on their free accounts from 250MB to 1GB.

Microsoft’s Hotmail, which still resides at a 250MB capacity, has yet to respond to Yahoo and Gmail’s recent increases.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

“Our goal is to make sure storage is no longer an issue for Web mail users,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products.

Not only is Google in the process of increasing storage capacity, they’ve also introduced some other features to improve overall service. One of the major improvements include rich layout control, which Google describes as:

“Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.”

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Options for another 70 of the 737-800 aircraft are included in the agreement.

According to a Reuters article,

“Boeing’s list price for the plane is $65 million, putting the value of the deal at up to $9.1 billion if all options are converted to firm orders, though discounts are common.

Ryanair said the deal would enable it to create 2,500 jobs and expand to become Europe’s largest airline in seven years. The jobs will include pilots, cabin crew and engineers and reflect plans to open 10 new bases, it said.”

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Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Lee’s Answer:

Great question and my answer, I hope, will help you a bit. There are a couple of things you need to consider and understand first before you can determine if your platform is adequate.

Based on your question here is what I would interpret as your solution:

You are using SQL Server to store your data surrounding your survey data and this will be where you will be reporting from. You may be using Java as your middle tier and connectivity component and possibly your GUI. Since you are using Small Business Server I will assume you are using IIS as your web server.

Whether you can support concurrent connections will be driven by the following factors:

• The Java application / connectivity piece – does it use connection pooling (a term used to describe the ability to perform concurrent connections from different places using the same connection)? By doing connection pooling , you cut down on the number of individual connections, which may be an issue (e.g. I have a 10-user license for my version of SQL Server , so I use connection pooling to reduce the number of connections into SQL Server). Also, connection pooling is generally quicker since you don’t have to spend time establishing the connection and closing it.
• The way your connection / pages have been built. By this I mean the following. Typically what happens is you run some query which gets some data (your survey questions, perhaps) which is then rendered to the web page. Now your application can be built in one of two ways – at this point it could disconnect (ie not hold any resources in the database) until the user has finished typing in their responses and hit the submit button or it may retain its hold on the database, waiting for the user to hit the submit button. If you use method 2, certain things may be an issue since you would create a locking situation. If you use method 1, then this is an optimal utilization of resources since nothing is waiting on anything else, and the next time you worry about connectivity is when the page is submitted to the server.

So, given these items, your infrastructure technology (MS SBS) accounts for 15% of the overhead, while the rest is in the way the person coded the Java app and in the way they wrote the SQL to get to the database. My app is hosted on a Dell Power Edge Server with 1 CPU and 512MB of memory on a 256KB line (admittedly I don’t use IIS – I use Apache for my web server for a number of reasons) and I get fairly good response times since I optimized the SQL Side and minimize the interaction between the pages and the server.

In terms of the data you are describing, I can’t imagine the volume is large (10M+ rows). I suspect you have small amounts of data (depending on whether this is an open ended questionnare or pick the best answer) and the data is valuable for small periods of time during the collection and analysis period, and typically analysis succeeds collection (ie the majority of the reporting occurs after the collection completes). Given that, you have several options available to you. After the survey completes and its reported on, move it off the database into a secondary instance where you can do aggregate reporting on it (a warehouse) which is not available online and then the amount of data on your primary server will remain small. Also, the size of your individual data points assuming its not open ended surveys are probably fairly small, so if your database is designed correctly you should be able to get pretty good performance from what you are doing – assuming indexes are correct and the code is solid.

One thing you may want to try is running the application on a small box and then running the app from that box to see what response you get. If the response is not good, e.g. 5-10 seconds per request (a good recommendation is 2 seconds per page max), then it’s unlikely you are going to get lightning-fast performance when you go to the real thing.

I hope that helps give you a direction. Good luck,

Lee

Lee Gould , President of Rocketrainer (http://www.rocketrainer.com) a revolutionary web based athletic coaching ASP. Lee does database architecture and development consulting for Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. Lee is a co-author of Transact SQL Programming published by O’Reilly and has been a database professional for over 14 years, working on Wall Street for 7 years. Lee holds an MBA from Seton Hall University.