How worried should we be about the growing number of potholes on the Information Superhighway?
August 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It’s amazing how well the Internet performs considering that so many different organisations supply the infrastructure and that so many different demands are made on the network and that so many individuals and companies all around the globe are using its services.
But, on a typical day, outages normally affect 6,000 routes and, earlier this week, the number doubled to 12,600. The number of routes mapped by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has just passed 512,000 which presents its own technical problems.
Then there is the issue of Internet addresses. The standard version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) ‘only’ provides 4.3 billion potential addresses but we are now running out of addresses and some infrastructure companies have been slow to roll out IPv6 which provides access to vastly more addresses.
You can read an article on the current problems, carried by today’s “Guardian”, here.
Now, as long as ten years ago, I first wrote a column about the technical challenges faced by the Internet. Seven years ago, I devoted a column to the capacity problems faced by the Net. Five years ago, I produced a column explaining the need for IPv6. A year ago, in a column, I detailed a series of breakdowns on the Net.
So we have seen these problems coming for a long time …
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
A listicle of the new words to enter the dictionary
August 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
How many of these new words have you come across?
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Where did ISIS or the Islamic State come from?
August 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The BBC explains in the short video and timeline here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The Imperial War Museum and the First World War
August 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have visited the Imperial War Museum in London many times but, on 19 July 2014, the museum reopened with new First World War Galleries to mark the centenary of the outbreak of what used to be called the Great War. So today I revisited the museum with my Sloval friend Ivan to see the new galleries and we spent three hours studying the fascinating texts and exhibits.
I always learn so much from these exhibitions. For instance, I had not fully appreciated the nature of the German atrocities in Belgium in the first days of the war (whole civilian communities were massacred) or the use of gas by the Allies as well as the Germans (neither side found it effective) or the extent of the hostility towards British men who remained on the Home Front (employers had to issue those needed for war work in manufacturing with special badges).
At the end of the galleries is a wall with various statistics on the casualties of the war, such as:
- Taking the four years of the war, on average over 6,000 soldiers were killed every day.
- One in every six British families suffered a direct bereavement.
- Some 750,000 British solders were killed.
- Almost 250,000 soldiers from other nations in the British Empire were killed.
- Almost 1.4 million French soldiers were killed.
- Over 2 million German soldiers were killed.
- Some 1.8 million Russian soldiers were killed.
- Over 16% of Serbs died – proportionately the greatest loss of any nation.
Posted in History | Comments (1)
A tribute to the actor Robin Williams
August 12th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Susan Schneider, the widow of the acclaimed actor Robin Williams, has said of his death: “As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.”
In that spirit, I encourage you to revisit some of his many wonderful performances in so many films and offer brief reviews of just four of his more recent movies:
- “Good Will Hunting” – my review here.
- “Insomnia” – my review here.
- “Night At The Museum” – my review here.
- “Night At The Museum 2” – my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
So is fruit really good for you or it is actually bad for you?
August 11th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I had a long conversation recently with a relative who told me that most fruit is not good for you because of the sugar content. There’s a lot of conflicting information on the Internet, but this advice from an Icelandic guy seems sensible to me.
So it seems that I can keep eating a banana with my granola cereal, but I have to give up my concentrated orange juice. What do you think?
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
“Hard Choices” (4): my review of the memoir
August 10th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have now finished reading the 600-page memoir by Hillary Clinton of her four years as America’s Secretary of State. You can read it here.
Posted in American current affairs, History, World current affairs | Comments (0)
American presidents (7): Bill Clinton
August 9th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The final session of my City Lit course on post-war US presidents covered two: the elder Bush and Clinton. This session saw a return of the lecturer Paul Hadjipieris who had previously covered Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He is a personable and able lecturer and we all learned a lot.
Bill Clinton was the 42nd president and served from 1993-2001.
There is no doubt that the guy is super bright – according to a table shown us by our lecturer, his IQ is 182, the highest of all the post=war presidents. There is no doubt that he was hugely ambitious and a terrific political campaigner – he was the youngest ever governor of Arkansas at the age of just 32 and, when he was first elected president, he was 47. In spite of the Republicans taking both houses of Congress in 1994, he managed to win re-election in 1996.
He was not a traditional Democrat, believing in stable taxes and balanced budgets. Indeed he produced the first balanced budget for 24 years and the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton’s presidency. Yet he also presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. By contrast, he failed to achieve his desired reform of health care because of Congressional opposition.
In terms of foreign affairs, he avoided ‘boots on the ground’ but his time in office saw both the Oslo Accords on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Dayton Accords on the Bosnian-Serb conflict.
Sadly Clinton’s tenure of the White House was mired in scandal from the start with first the Whitewater real estate allegations, then the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, and most imfamously the Monica Lewinsky case. The House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against him but the Senate did not manage to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him. He was forced into making a humiliating public apology.
In spite of all this scandal, he left the White House with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any US president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work and was a fierce campaigner for his wife Hillary when she sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency. What might this man have achieved if he’d kept his penis in his pants? Will his First Lady yet become the first female president?
You can read more about Bill Clinton here.
Posted in History | Comments (1)
American presidents (6): George H W Bush
August 8th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The final session of my City Lit course on post-war US presidents covered two: the elder Bush and Clinton. This session saw a return of the lecturer Paul Hadjipieris who had previously covered Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He is a personable and able lecturer and we all learned a lot.
George H W Bush was the 41st president and served from 1989-1993.
He came from a wealthy family and became independently rich through an oil venture in Texas. He was the son of a Republican Senator and served two terms in the House of Representatives before losing a bid for the Senate. In spite of this political background, he then did a series of ‘non-political’ jobs on a short-term basis: US Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-1972), Envoy to China (1974-1975) and Director of the CIA (1976-1977).
Bush failed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency when Reagan obtained it, but then Reagan made him his Vice-President from 1981-1989. In 1988, he told the Republican Convention that “I want a kinder and a gentler nation”, but his campaign eviscerated his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis with allegations of being weak on crime. In electoral college terms, his victory was massive.
At the Republican Convention, he famously declared his opposition to any tax increases with the words “Read my lips”, but as President he went on to sanction substantial hikes in taxes which led to a considerable fall in his popularity.
On the foreign fairs front, he is remembered most for putting together the international coalition which freed Kuwait after its invasion by Iraq, but some thought that he should have gone on to depose Saddam Hussein – something his son did later in his own tenure in the White House.
Bush only had one term as president because the Democrat Bill Clinton beat him in the presidential race of 1992. Although Clinton won less than 50% of the popular vote, he took the electoral college by 370 votes to 168.
You can read more about George Bush Sr here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Word of the day: argot
August 7th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Argot is a specialised idiomatic vocabulary peculiar to a particular class or group of people, especially that of an underworld group, devised for private communication and identification.
I guess classic examples would be the language used by criminal gangs or prison inmates, but the term argot is used more widely to refer to specialised jargon largely unintelligible to a lay audience.
I came across the term in the Hillary Clinton memoir where she uses the word rather cynically to refer to the sort of language used by many in the diplomatic community.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)