Delayed write failure - tracking down the cause

We're being forced to migrate to newer and "better" versions of Windows Server.  Our brand new spiffy Windows 2003 file server is making me miserable.  First the permissions work slightly differently... which caused 40 minutes of down time as I watched all of them get reset. Now we get "delayed write failure" messages on our XP workstations.

It turns out that Microsoft decided that any task can be completed in 15 minutes flat... and built that timeout into the file server.  There is an easy way to disable it..

net config server /autodisconnect:-1

This tells it never to disconnect a user... which is as it should be.

Whew!

Tired of the monopoly game.

Doc Searls is tired of a specific part of the monopoly game, sucky AT&T coverage.

I like to think bigger, I'm tired of the whole monopoly game.

I think we should take a few big chunks of spectrum and dedicate them to a new mesh transport network. There would be standards for equipment, with the good old FCC doing type approvals. We could then all buy our own off the shelf part of the internet. Everyone could own it, or improve it. I expect that groups would quickly form to meet common needs, and the commercial interest would leverage their existing sites to move into this new opprotunity.

Instead of government enforced monopoly use of the spectrum, everyone would have to fairly peer with everyone. For the commercial end of things, there would be minimum requirements that would allow you make money, but keep the incentive there for others to contribute to the spectral commons. The main billing event would be transit off the wireless grid and back into the phone company or internet. Those would be the toll booths. This means that if you maintained enough equipment to have good wireless connectivity, you wouldn't have to pay any tolls.

The other option would be to bill it out like railroads if necessary so that everyone gets fairly paid for how much traffic they help move. It's my understanding that owner of a section of rail gets paid by whoever moves cars over it. The owners of the cars get paid rent to use them. It's complicated, but it works.


Either way, let's give strong incentives for people to put up mesh network nodes, and keep them powered and maintained. This can help route around the huge cost of laying fiber, and get us acceptable speeds at acceptable costs, right now, in spite of the economy, etc. Pay back the unused portion of the rents we've charged the cellular networks if they agree to the plan, and are willing to provide access in a neutral manner.

Blogging tools still suck

Here's an article which is interesting, insightful, and dead wrong...

To be able to do a full criticism of it, you really need to be able to do markup on it. That is, you need to be able to add a layer of commentary on top of it. Currently, the only way to do this is to copy the whole bloody thing, and then embed your own layer of markup into the copy. This sucks.

The idea of marking up text is hard coded into things like the Torah... which is 5000+ years old... yet the wizards that give us toys like IE, Firefox and Chrome can't seem to grasp this concept.

ugh!