A submarine communications cable is a cable laid beneath the sea to carry telecommunications between countries.
The first submarine communications cables carried telegraphy traffic. Subsequent generations of cables carried first telephony traffic, then data communications traffic. All modern cables use optical fiber technology to carry digital payloads, which are then used to carry telephone traffic as well as Internet and private data traffic. They are typically 69 millimetres (2.7 in) in diameter and weigh around 10 kilograms per meter (7 lb/ft), although thinner and lighter cables are used for deep-water sections.[1]
As of 2003, submarine cables link all the world’s continents except Antarctica.
Submarine communications cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Internet
Twitter directories such as Twellow and the newer WeFollow from Digg founder Kevin Rose can go a long way toward helping you find Twitterers of interest. But when it comes down to compiling a really focused list, you have to get your hands dirty and plunge around through a bunch of individual Twitter accounts, too.
Enterprise IT pros, I’ve done the dirty work for you here and compiled if not the ultimate list of enterprise IT and network companies, at least a pretty good one of about 100 companies. (For those of you I accidentally missed, please make your presence known via the comments box or email me at bbrown@nww.com. You can follow me on Twitter here. Keep in mind, though, that I have tried to limit this list to companies providing IT/network products and services to enteprise IT customers, not to service providers or OEMs. Maybe that’s a list for another time.)
Twitter directory to enterprise IT and network companies | NetworkWorld.com Community
People, Resources
Find out what books William Stallings, the author of Business Data Communications and Computer Organization and Architecture, was recommending in 1995, and see his updated comments from 2009.
This article was originally published in the Winter 1995 issue of Addison-Wesley’s newsletter, Innovations.
William Stallings is the author of more than a dozen books, including Business Data Communications and Computer Organization and Architecture. Back in 1995, we asked Bill to list his top choices for technical books. Here are his selections from back then, and his updated annotations from 2009 [in italics].
InformIT: A Look Back: Expert’s Choice of Must-Have Books by William Stallings >
Network
The United States has lost one of its most ardent proponents of IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, with the death of Jim Bound earlier this week. Bound was a Senior Fellow with HP, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force and CTO of the IPv6 Forum.
U.S. loses IPv6 leader - Network World
History, IPv6, Internet
One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.
Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.
The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.
Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.
New Search Technologies Mine the Web More Deeply - NYTimes.com
Internet
“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”
That was driven home late last year, when a malicious software program thought to have been unleashed by a criminal gang in Eastern Europe suddenly appeared after easily sidestepping the world’s best cyberdefenses. Known as Conficker, it quickly infected more than 12 million computers, ravaging everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer networks of the French military.
Do We Need a New Internet? - NYTimes.com
Internet, Security
Perhaps Sun Microsystems’ valuation of MySQL wasn’t too far off. Sun acquired the open-source database leader in January 2008 for a whopping $1 billion, a sum that many rational people thought was way too high.
Perhaps they were wrong; $1 billion is beginning to look like a bargain.
MySQL’s sales catching up with Red Hat’s | The Open Road - CNET News
Linux
Microsoft has just pushed live its Release Candidate for Internet Explorer 8, the latest update to the world’s most widely used web browser. You can download it here. Unfortunately the release is only for Windows Vista, XP, and Server - if you’re trying out Windows 7 you’ll have to wait for the next OS update to try out the RC.
The new version, which comes after two public beta releases, is now considered “platform complete” - the product is “effectively complete and done” writes IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch. Unless there are major critical issues that arise, the final version of the browser should be identical. Other changes between Beta 2 and the Release Candidate include improved reliability, performance, and compatibility, as well as ‘clickjacking‘ protection.
Microsoft’s IE8 Release Candidate Is Live; Nearly Identical To Final Release
Windows