PCMagazine: The Killing of Wi-Fi

John Dvorak talks about how cell phone companies see ubiquitous WiFi is a threat.

It's not about the technology. It's about the threat of Wi-Fi overall. And I mean free Wi-Fi in particular. If you take a city the size of San Francisco and give the entire population free high-speed Wi-Fi, think of the applications that will fall into place. That includes VoIP calls galore. Move over, cell phone; hello, Wi-Fi phone.

This of course, assumes that bandwidth over a municipal Wi-Fi network - where anyone can connect remains plentiful enough to make the call, and it also assumes that there's very little latency even over Wi-Fi.

Speaking of VoIP…

Ars Technica: FCC forces rural phone companies to carry VoIP traffic

A "net neutrality" issue, rural phone companies in Nebraska and South Carolina can't block calls coming from VoIP services.

If you're thinking this is indicative of some of the debate over network neutrality, there's good reason. At its heart, this is an issue of net neutrality. The rural telecoms were discriminating against certain types of traffic by refusing to connect VoIP calls to their network. Since they have a monopoly in the areas they serve, their decision to lock out VoIP traffic left the VoIP providers at a competitive disadvantage in those markets.

Although, assuming a broadband connection, if I wasn't getting calls from my phone company, I'd just switch to using VoIP full time. Of course, if I wasn't getting calls from my phone company, how would I know that I wasn't?

LinuxWatch: Switching your Linux systems to the new DST

This guide tells you how to, what else, switch your Linux systems over to the new Daylight Savings Time. Basically, you have to update a file called /usr/share/zoneinfo. But this little tidbit is particularly interesting…

The system clock, no matter how you update it, doesn't keep time the way most of us do. For Linux, the universe began at midnight UTC (a.k.a. Coordinated Universal Time), or 12:00 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1970. The system clock tells time by counting the number of seconds since the Linux "universe" began. This method of telling time is referred to as the Unix Epoch.

(As an aside, since most computers store the Epoch's number of seconds as a 32-bit signed integer, the "End of Time" will come at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038. That, however, is a problem for another day.)

Specifically, it's a problem for Tuesday, January 19, 2038. EVERYBODY PANIC!