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.
Ok, I got a little dramatic in the title of the post. Body is accurate though, I really did get a lot out of the discussion here. People thought it was just a load balancer, and everyone was very wary of yet another subscription. It was real feedback that helped explain a lot about what was going on with the campaign.
Sorry, you're right. Here's what changed: Originally this was going to be cloud based service. We'd have servers all over the world, which would aggregate your connections for you to give you faster Internet. But people wanted to run it themselves. And once that happened, we realized that we might as well make it clear that Switchboard is really a VPN. So once you're running your own server, you can start sharing resources off your network with yourself, wherever you are.
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
More and more, I'm coming to think of myself as a guy who takes complex networking technology and tries to make it simple. I'm doing this because I want to give people not only faster internet access, but also free them from the companies that would control what we can do on the Internet connections that we're paying for. Well that's my big vision, mostly I answer emails, and wish I had more time to actually code.
I did create an account purely for this post because I've been wanting a Linux release of Dispatch for almost a year.
Linux will be a supported platform for Switchboard. We did a much better job of building cross platform C++ with an HTML user interface from the ground up. Dispatch's a code has a lot of Windows specific stuff throughout it, the port would have be a new development effort almost from scratch. So I can't really say if Dispatch will really ever happen on other platforms (it could but... not soon, anyways).
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)
Hi, This is Dave, the lead developer on Switchboard. Alex had to step into a meeting, so I'll be sitting in for him for a bit. It's not exactly a switch in the traditional sense, but the Switchboard code takes into account bandwidth, latency and loss to decide which connection to send traffic over in a bonded channel. Thanks for the questions, and keep them coming! Dave
Who brings a duck to a horse fight?
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.
Dave from Connectify filling in for Alex here. Here's our Dispatch FAQ: http://www.connectify.me/dispatch-faq/. As you can see, Linux is behind Mac and Mac is a ways off. The benefit of Switchboard is that it can bond channels, so it can help every application you can think of, including those Dispatch can't (video streaming, file uploading, VPNs). We thought fixing all the complaints for Dispatch (supporting more applications AND more platforms) was a winning goal.
I concur. I use crowd funding or private funding (commission) to pay for my work and working expenses. Then the work I do belongs to the private company (unless open source, but they still get a copyright assignment if negotiated), or in the case of crowd funding my work belongs to the public at large, and they can use it for free. Instead of selling bits which are in infinite supply (and thus Economics 101 says have zero price regardless of cost to create), I simply do more work to get more money... The bits aren't valuable. The ability to configure the bits (do work) is valuable. Just like when I was an Electrician, or small engine Mechanic before that, or Home Builder before that, or Data Entry Clerk before that, or fast food Burger Flipper before that, or Pre-Teen Lawn Mowing service before that... It's a proven model. The Artificial Scarcity Racket of selling infinitely reproducible information is Evil and economically untenable. The model where you sell bits is DUMB. Stop it. It's simple: You want to do work and get paid for it? Then DO WORK, and get paid for it. For a model that works see: Car Mechanics or any other labor industry where an estimate is given, price agreed upon, work performed. It's not rocket science. I have no sympathy for fools.
Actually, I find this sort of encouraging.
There's a whole raft of companies out there that simply can't let go of The Vision. And absolutely MUST ram The Vision down everyone's throats.
It's rather refreshing to see a company stop, mid-stride, and re-evaluate a product and actually be willing to make a change like this.
To actually, y'know, LISTEN to feedback. Instead of bulling ahead and damn the torpedoes.
Or worse, making some a pointless token gesture.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
"Please enable Javascript to browse this website."
F.U. no.
Forcing potential customers - especially technically-literate potential customers - to allow crap scripting so they can read text is a NonStarter.