Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Killed My Kickstarter Campaign
New submitter agizis writes "Alex from Connectify here. I wanted to say thanks to all of you who commented on the Slashdot story about our Kickstarter campaign It was super-educational discussing Switchboard with all of you: you wanted your own servers, and we weren't doing enough to communicate what was so special about Switchboard. Based in a large part on your feedback, we blew up our Kickstarter campaign, and changed almost everything. Thanks, Slashdot. This isn't reddit, but ask me anything."
Hi Alex, thanks for the info. Based on your experience with Kickstarter, do you think a Kickstarter to get a subscription to Slashdot would be successful? I don't seem to be able to disable ads anymore based on my karma, and I'm finding them highly annoying.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Seems now days with fast interwebs and badass servers you don't see many pages getting /.'d which was half the fun of posting websites back in the day. Now we are here to /. your kickstarter projects
Let me get this straight....
You had an idea on Kickstarter. You asked slashdot when they thought. You got tons of "you're doing it wrong"s. Now you're abandoning ship?
Someone wasn't taught to ignore the bullies in grade school. Slashdot posters will hate on everyone's ideas and suggest even stupider ones, just to be funny/trollish. You must be pretty new here.
When you're are the person who made the choice to pull the plug on your own Kickstarter.
Who do you think you are? What do you think you're doing?
Why is there no content in this article ? How hard can it be to do a 2 line summary of what the heck actually changed ?
Based on the new direction of Switchboard, do you prefer chocolate, strawberry of vanilla shakes?
Stop. You're giving people here a feeling of relevance. They might try to fight the RIAA/MPAA in court next, or come up with a new way to find extra-solar planets, or create new physics, or even run for public office.
Who knows what they might do with this new feeling of power? It's dangerous, and you need to stop encouraging this behavior right now!
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thanks guy. Since we can ask anything.
Why is Slashdot so much better than reddit?
Because the stories hit Slashdot days after reddit so we've had plenty of time to think about our sarcastic posts.
I find that a well-tuned bullshit detector blocks Slashvertisements just fine.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think you made the right choice in regards to your kickstarter campaign but at the same time I think we all knew you wouldn't reach your goal and had to rethink your strategy. No one can see a value in a monthly fee for something like this. My problem is you are releasing new software when I would be happy to give you money in exchange for Linux Dispatch. Do you still have the intention to release this for Linux or have you decided to move on to new products?
Thanks for letting us ask you anything.
Can you please tell me if your switches uses quantitative balancing algorithms?
Thanks.
I mean presumably you have to be charging for the severs, and now your asking for people to pay you to write software thats already working, so that you can continue to make money on the software, that eventually you may abandon sometime later if its unprofitable?
Step 1. GPL the client software
Step 2. GPL the server software (which is probably running linux).
Step 3. Offer a optional traffic package
Step 4. Ask for crowd funded money.
Why would you take any kind of advice from here? We just want you out of our damn yard, kid!
But let's get the important question out of the way: would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So, I think I get the point here.
I have multiple ISP's here (I use pfSense for load balancing) but I can't aggregate them for a single connection because I have multiple IP's and unicast doesn't work that way. So the cloud-hosted version would have allowed all my pipes to talk to your endpoint, which would give a single IP to the data-provider and then you could backhaul it over my multiple links. So, a multi-link VPN, right?
So, that sounds like it could be useful in some cases.
Now then, if I'm running my own server, where is it? If it's just here it doesn't do anything new, since I'm back to where I started. So, I can buy the software and then run it on a VPS provider or something?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why is Slashdot so much better than reddit?
Because CowboyNeal and a large chunk of his Slashdot friends is now on Reddit now looking at cat pictures, leaving Slashdot a much quieter place?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
In soviet russia, kickerstarter campaign kills YOU!
Just an FYI for everyone reading the terrible summary.
Switchboard was advertised as a "MAGIC OMG FASTER INNERNETS BECUZ POWER OF TEH CLOUD" thing.
What it actually was:
A VPN client that aggregated all internet-connected links you had, split up packets across all your pipes (you have to have multiple ISPs), and then sent them off to some server they leased which has a fatter pipe, reconstructed your packets from the split up packets, and then routed your traffic to its intended destination, and did the reverse for traffic going to you.
So WTF are you doing here, troll? Go back to reddit!
But let's get the important question out of the way: would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
WTF does this even mean?
I'm so sick of the Redditisms and the banal mentality. Mobs lack intelligence and Reddit proves it.
You're still not communicating well. The announcement of the new thing doesn't seem to say what Switchboard does. A different link in this Slashdot summary does describe Switchboard as doing connection bonding, but does not seem to state what OSes it is for. I could not easily find that information on your website.
The key disadvantage of Reddit is that the regulars there are hipsters and arrogant twits.
Then nevermind, it appears you don't know what you are doing.
I hope the slashdot crowd puts their money where their mouth is then. It's a good idea, VPNs are always a hassle to set up and tune, so this would be welcome. I wonder, though, if "normal" people will try out this... On the other side, if you went the cloud route, you'd be the ten thousandth or so VPN provider, with only performance to differentiate the product. And you may even have lost out on performance, despite the channel bonding, if the competitors had servers all over the world.
I think there is hope for both business plans. The personal VPN server market hasn't been cracked yet. There was Hamachi, but it was bought by some company and not much happened. OpenVPN is as hard to set up as ever. NAT and firewalls mean that you need layers of fallback for reliable operation. I would suggest making a Linux version with low system requirements, in addition to the "Enterprise" linux version, because linux users will be overrepresented in the group of people who run always-on systems at home, and it could also run on VPSs. The enterprise VPN market is quite crowded, I can't say anything about how that will go. The hosted VPN market is equally crowded, but there is also a huge demand, partly because of inane geo-IP restrictions on various services. You'd have to sell it on speed, and speed is very much key for things like video on demand. I'm not sure about the value of channel bonding for personal use, as for many people their home connection or even courtesy wi-fi at coffee shps is significantly faster than the mobile connection, so switching to wi-fi when possible should give good speed and less monetary cost. This feature would be brilliant for enterprise systems though.
Let me lick the cheesy poofs off my fingers before I reply...
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
When last Connectify appeared on Slashdot, I stopped reading the moment I saw the word cloud. Now Connectify is back and it's completely different, but is it really?
I'm looking to Alex to clarify my understanding of this, but if I understand correctly, the Connectify "client" must connect to a Connectify server in order for it all to work. So, does the client require multiple internet connections to a Connectify server(mine?) with very high speed internet and or multiple internet connections? If not, doesn't the client's single internet connection to the server not become the bottleneck and if so, what's the point?
Finally, there seems to be harping on the ability to improve streaming performance. How does that work? Even if both client and server have multiple internet connections being bonded/multiplexed channels Netflix, for example, is only going to offer a single connection for the stream's origination, again choking down your connection to a single TCP stream over a single internet connection, which my Connectify server will then needlessly split into a bonded connection.
The only situation where I can see value in this is where my server has a highspeed internet connection and my client is only able to get multiple low speed internet connections which Connectify then multiplexes. Thus the 10Mbps Netflix tream hits my Connectify server and the client receives the stream over 8 xDSL connections. This sounds exactly like Multilink Point-to-Point Protocol(MLPPP) circa 1996.
What am I missing?
To half of us slashtards here, you seem a whiny half-grown-up. To the other half, it is not fully intelligible what goal exactly you are trying to reach . For the potential future CEO of an internet company, that is a bad start. Get yourself a business angel, work hard and stop embarrassingly mentioning who your father is. I mean it. Stop whining and work hard.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
It should be "Slashdot helped me realise my kickstarter idea was stupid"
Greetings, Alex.
In the past, I've used Hamachi, Tunngle and failed entirely to set up the Microsoft VPN software (even getting two game clients to interact was two wasted days). Hamachi "just worked". Same with Tunngle. Eventually I gave up on both of those as well even though they worked for my needs. The reason I stopped using them was because I didn't trust either company.
In the process of reinstalling my OS I discovered that even though I had previously uninstalled Hamachi it had left behind an active, registered network connection to their servers--I had to wipe the drive to get rid of it.
The exact same thing happened when I intentionally uninstalled Tunngle as a test. Massive backdoors left wide open on my machine. What I thought was a tunnel was actually a massive hole smashed through my firewall and covered over with a few leaves.
My point is that without the trust, I feel I am better off without those products. I feel the same way about the "cloud". THAT is why everyone wants to run their own servers--they don't trust you.
It doesn't sound like you're jealous of the cool kids at all, you arrogant twit.
In some ways it sounds like it's borrowing from the swarm/torrent concept. Smaller amounts of data divided among many sources.
I wonder how it would work out in terms of RIAA copyright bots if you ran a torrent behind this protocol?
and digg blows them all away
rewriting history since 2109
So far it sounds great for our awful rural connections but I need to ask, if I use this with a 1mb ADSL line and a 20mb bidirectional satellite link will I get the ping of the ADSL but the bandwidth of the satellite? Currently VNC and Skype etc aren't really possible on the satellite link due to the latency but I saw Skype being used in the demo video. Anyone tried Xbox Live or similar? We basically bought the satellite connection to be able to work as the kids kill the crap ADSL on their own.
i have to agree. If you want to comment go to /. because the reddit croud can be incredibly stupid, and somehow the stupidity is actully popular.
Am I getting that right? It reads like the $90 license is just win/mac?
I have to allow google-analytics javascript to read content on your site?
Well, just knowing that tells me that I don't need to read anything on your site after all.
I took a look at your "What's So Special About Switchboard" link and I thought it was pretty terrible. Oh... it had a lot of good technical explanations, but from a marketing standpoint it pretty much stinks.
People want to know first: "What can this do for me? Then, if they are technically-minded, they will want to know HOW. But what it does NOT do -- which you go to great lengths to explain on that page -- is something they might want to know, but if they do they'll want to know it last.
Your page was really weak on the "what it does for me" and not so good on the "how it does it" part. Very strong on the "what it is not" category.
As I say: just a suggestion. The information there is valuable, I just don't feel it's presented in the best way.
when i can dd-wrt + balanced round robin bonding to achieve the same results?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dd-wrt+bonding
"Hipsters and Arrogant twits" - that's a redundant statement.