When microsoft is involved even small news items gets blown up to be 1 of the 10 headlines of the day.
Is this really news? Please answer that question after reading for example the hard legal stuff from a computer scientist who was an expert whitness in the trial.
Yes, bandwidth is costly.
The operational cost of such a service can be high, but advertisements can bring the money back in. Every 1000 users will give you around $15-$20. Good internet bandwidth costs monthly about $25/GByte. Users only use a few KB per visit, meaning it can be done if you do not lauch costly television adds...
I have programmed an alternative to remarq.com and deja.com. It is a 1 GByte news archive available here, with browsing, searching, archive downloading, etc. This archive is only a few newsgroups big currently, but will be expanded if users are intrested.
Several months ago I saw that Deja.com was not providing an open access to Usenet and programmed a solution for it. My project is hosted at sourceforge..
My girlfriend has started a company for it and we now try to keep this free service in operation.
Our operational costs are $90/month and we need a few daily visitor to break even. The advertisement income would cover our hosting cost. The advertisements are not yet on-line, but will need to be soon.
Check out the open source usenet archive.
If you would like to contribute source code to this Open SOurce project, or want to run your own deja.com-like server, please send me and e-mail.
As the developers of the LART board we are impressed with your intrest, thanx.
MP3, Quake, LCD are ALL planned for the LART future. Here at the university we have permission to build the ultimate Linux wearable and get paid with a Ph.D. for it. Within 1 month we hope to have MP3s playing to the speakers. We estimate that with advanced techniques such as voltage scaling (I wrote the driver and will release it soon) the power consumption will be about 300 mW. With some good bateries you will get a few hours of music out of a LART.
Quake is a different story, as said 3D stuff is heavy on the processor, but more importantly a good color LCD is very expernsive in terms of power. We have a 6 W color LCD...
We estimate that a single LART can be equiped with a wireless link of 5 Mbps using advanced stuff like OFDM software radio. We are building a radio frontend for it now.
If you want to build your own LART, read the mailinglist. Building is possible, but getting the parts is next to impossible.
The black scenario of all major ISPs falling for this software is very grim. But is it realy true that in a commercial world the ISPs that deliver bad service or block parts of the Internet *remain* big ISPs? Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? Shouldn't we look at things in perspective: they just getting in panic mode now that the Napster phenomenon and other threaths are here to stay.
Try to predict the infuence of Napster technology, compression, and Terabyte storage on the future of the music industry. Their future looks grim. Now it is possible for consumers to store 12 audio CDs/ CDrom. With recordable DVDs and the AAC compression standard the audio track/disc are raised to more then 2500... Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc. Just imagine the impact on the music industries business model.
The point is often raised that the Napster concept needs to evolve from MP3 only, to video and pictures. The Napster concept also needs to be fully open Source. I hope that it is possible to go beyond an Open Source napster implementation for audio,video and pictures.
The ambitious goal we should set for ourselfs is: Unlocking the knowledge of humanity.
A far more sophisticated system is need then napster to acomplish this. Such a system was first discussed by V.Bush in 1945. Napster is only about sharing standard mp3 files. UseNET is also all about distribution of information. Napster is dedicated for MP3, where UseNET allows distribution of text, audio, CDROM images, etc in all forms. The current traffic volumes are around 1 GByte / day ! Compared to this volume Napster is small, yett Napster is more usefull then the special news clients that gather all MP3s from a binairy newsgroup.
A very important feature lacking in both Napster and UseNET is advanced review and moderation. Slashdot is an example of how review should work: by the people and for the people. When the produkt is becoming more diverse the need for distingtion increases. The MP3 files of Napster are fairly standard. Only the quality of the encoder matters if you rip directly of the CD. For images things become more tricky. The resolution can be checked by simple scripts, but the overall image quality must always be rated by the users. The description, quality and content of video can be entered by the user colectively. Shashdot proves that a review mechnisms on text work effectively and gems of information can be distinghished. This information is the greatest challange. Currently there are tutotials for mastering the art of C, C++, java, perl, php3, etc. programming. It would be a great leap if such writings could evolve from the work of several people on the Internet, each contributing the unique piece of knowledge and experience they own.
We therefore need to add rating and review mechanisms to the open source Napsters that distribute the knowledge and information of humanity. The mechanism of karma, and score's for the content need to be refined for the various types of information.
With such a mechanism copyright issues are no longer relevant and information can flow and evolve freely. To pay the people for their work it must be possible to send small amount of money directly to the people, instead of the big amount of money that is currently asked by the media industry. This small transfer of money should be optional.
The Wavelan is only one of the implementations of the IEEE802.11 standard and will probably drop further in price. The competition is picking up. Harris annouced a price of $14 for the components of an 11MBps wireless LAN card...
Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.
Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.
The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...
Slashdot Mirror
When microsoft is involved even small news items gets blown up to be 1 of the 10 headlines of the day.
Is this really news?
Please answer that question after reading for example the hard legal stuff from a computer scientist who was an expert whitness in the trial.
Just my 2 eurocents,
Johan
The operational cost of such a service can be high, but advertisements can bring the money back in. Every 1000 users will give you around $15-$20. Good internet bandwidth costs monthly about $25/GByte. Users only use a few KB per visit, meaning it can be done if you do not lauch costly television adds...
I have programmed an alternative to remarq.com and deja.com. It is a 1 GByte news archive available here, with browsing, searching, archive downloading, etc. This archive is only a few newsgroups big currently, but will be expanded if users are intrested.
Several months ago I saw that Deja.com was not providing an open access to Usenet and programmed a solution for it. My project is hosted at sourceforge..
My girlfriend has started a company for it and we now try to keep this free service in operation. Our operational costs are $90/month and we need a few daily visitor to break even. The advertisement income would cover our hosting cost. The advertisements are not yet on-line, but will need to be soon.
In the spirit of Open Source the full Usenet archives can also be downloaded.
Check out the open source usenet archive. If you would like to contribute source code to this Open SOurce project, or want to run your own deja.com-like server, please send me and e-mail.
MP3, Quake, LCD are ALL planned for the LART future. Here at the university we have permission to build the ultimate Linux wearable and get paid with a Ph.D. for it.
Within 1 month we hope to have MP3s playing to the speakers. We estimate that with advanced techniques such as voltage scaling (I wrote the driver and will release it soon) the power consumption will be about 300 mW. With some good bateries you will get a few hours of music out of a LART.
Quake is a different story, as said 3D stuff is heavy on the processor, but more importantly a good color LCD is very expernsive in terms of power. We have a 6 W color LCD...
We estimate that a single LART can be equiped with a wireless link of 5 Mbps using advanced stuff like OFDM software radio. We are building a radio frontend for it now.
If you want to build your own LART, read the mailinglist. Building is possible, but getting the parts is next to impossible.
Just my 5 eurocents, Johan.
Filtering fat Internet pipes is perhaps feasible, but doing it provides not real benefit for the ISPs. Is the music industry preasure big enough to block parts of the Internet? Shouldn't we look at things in perspective: they just getting in panic mode now that the Napster phenomenon and other threaths are here to stay.
Try to predict the infuence of Napster technology, compression, and Terabyte storage on the future of the music industry. Their future looks grim. Now it is possible for consumers to store 12 audio CDs/ CDrom. With recordable DVDs and the AAC compression standard the audio track/disc are raised to more then 2500... Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc. Just imagine the impact on the music industries business model.
The ambitious goal we should set for ourselfs is: Unlocking the knowledge of humanity.
A far more sophisticated system is need then napster to acomplish this. Such a system was first discussed by V.Bush in 1945. Napster is only about sharing standard mp3 files. UseNET is also all about distribution of information. Napster is dedicated for MP3, where UseNET allows distribution of text, audio, CDROM images, etc in all forms. The current traffic volumes are around 1 GByte / day ! Compared to this volume Napster is small, yett Napster is more usefull then the special news clients that gather all MP3s from a binairy newsgroup.
A very important feature lacking in both Napster and UseNET is advanced review and moderation. Slashdot is an example of how review should work: by the people and for the people. When the produkt is becoming more diverse the need for distingtion increases. The MP3 files of Napster are fairly standard. Only the quality of the encoder matters if you rip directly of the CD. For images things become more tricky. The resolution can be checked by simple scripts, but the overall image quality must always be rated by the users. The description, quality and content of video can be entered by the user colectively. Shashdot proves that a review mechnisms on text work effectively and gems of information can be distinghished. This information is the greatest challange. Currently there are tutotials for mastering the art of C, C++, java, perl, php3, etc. programming. It would be a great leap if such writings could evolve from the work of several people on the Internet, each contributing the unique piece of knowledge and experience they own.
We therefore need to add rating and review mechanisms to the open source Napsters that distribute the knowledge and information of humanity. The mechanism of karma, and score's for the content need to be refined for the various types of information.
With such a mechanism copyright issues are no longer relevant and information can flow and evolve freely. To pay the people for their work it must be possible to send small amount of money directly to the people, instead of the big amount of money that is currently asked by the media industry. This small transfer of money should be optional.
Just my 5 eurocents,
Johan.
Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.
Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.
The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...
Just my 5 eurocents...
Johan.