I was thinking of the $100/yr range for a complete, consistent Internet presence, not for the one service. I see Dynu charges $60/yr for a complete email presence.
My other factor was that I just got burned with my old email forwarding provider, and wanted: 1 - Someone more high-profile, less likely to go away or act weird. DynDNS.org has been around a LONG time. 2 - My own domain, even if it's more expensive. Even if DynDNS.org were to go away or act weird, with a bit of effort I should be able to regain control of my domain, and take it to a different provider.
I'm phasing in, and plan to expand my services in the future, and hope to get the 'complete consistent presence.'
Unfortunately most ISPs don't qualify as much more knowledgable than most users. Therefore they'd find a cheap solution and deploy it. Period. I'm waiting fearfully for Cisco or somebody to introduce a cheap/powerful enough router or some piece of head-end gear that the ISPs will just turn on stateful packet filtering across the board, and deny all incoming connections.
And of course this still won't stop the problems, because there will still be other disease vectors besides incoming connections. So I also won't be surprised to see rate limits on outgoing email and filters on every outgoing port where the ISP provides that service in-house.
They've only begun closing down the Internet. There's lots more to go, in the name of spam, virii, and terrorism.
As for 'users capable of administering their own connection,' no way. Who evaluates? Giving every idiot who simply asks full privileges opens the floodgates, again. Probably the simplest, most likely thing would be to allow MSCEs to administer their own connections. Is that what you really wanted?
Mildly off-topic... Sometime I'd like to take a look at the most simply-caught spam. IMHO, spam would be a great way to broadcast clandesting (including terrorist) information. Nobody reads the stuff, or at least most people try not to. A little deception, a little steganography, a little encryption, a little spread-spectrum, (split/interleave the message amoung many pieces of spam) and you've got a terrific worldwide communications channel.
Kind of annoys me that they never figured out the price/volume curve. Today I think carefully before buying ANY CD. If they were half the price, I'd buy more than twice as many. If they were a fourth the price, my storage space would probably become the overriding concern.
For a small (volume-dependent) fee DynDNS.org will relay outbound mail for you with the 'MailHop Outbound' service. They will also relay inbound mail to your server (on a high port, if need be because of your ISP) with 'MailHop Relay'.
At this point, you'd probably want your DNS hosted through them, as well. On the plus side, this would give your domain a complete and consistent appearance, IP-wise. I believe at this point, you may even be able to add SPF records to your DNS entry as well. (Though I'm not sure if they do the correct thing outbound for SPF.)
The whole shebang would probably still come to less than $100/yr.
After the quoted sentence, I went on to talk about music (wo)men vs money (wo)men. That was my point, when people who only know money run the company, their tool for knowing who will sell or not will be the spreadsheet. When someone who knows music runs the company, the tools will be ears and experience, in addition to any money tools.
Why should music be different? Because they're getting away with it. The whole time they cry about their financial situation, there are TONS of money flowing around, much being wasted. A tiny fraction of that amounts to a lot of money, useful for the best legislation that can be bought.
Granting them the benefit of a doubt, you just may not KNOW if a new artist is going to sell, because there's no experience. Nor can you be timid if you're really going to PUSH a promising artist, because the chain to stardom has many links, and breaking one breaks the chain.
Putting my other hat back on... That's why the RIAA should be run by MUSIC (WO)MEN, not MONEY (WO)MEN. Somewhere, there should be someone who has a really good idea of whether or not music is going to make it, and make more intelligent decisions about contracts, promotion, and distribution. Spreadsheets just don't hack the job.
Plus another consideration - It has not normally been in their best interest to run an efficient business, especially as the CD equipment became written down. Their costs are paid by the artists, and their market got used to paying high prices. Between these two considerations, it was actually in their benefit to run inefficiently, to soak up that margin between artist and consumer in an audit-survivable way.
Not accusing you of this, but many who denigrate 'throwing money at the problem' then neglect any solution whatsoever. It leaves me with the feeling that they are willing to continue neglecting the problem, as long as they get to conserve their money. IMHO it's ridiculous to presume that any arbitrary problem can be solved without money, it's a matter of finding a good solution that doesn't waste money.
I wasn't invoking Sturgeon's Law against 'throwing money', but rather against 'warez and pr0n'. I was saying that 98+% of that high-bandwidth would be warez and pr0n, but there would be maybe 1 student every other year or so who would do something really valuable with all of that bandwidth.
I'll give them a bit longer than 30 sec, if only for high-quality artwork on the CD and in the case. I'm also presuming 'industrial-strength' stuff might be a bit slower, though hopefully writing a more reliable and longer-lasting CD.
One cost the RIAA complains about, that is legitimate, is the cost of distributing the recordings of CDs that turn out to be poor sellers.
Most music stores have a means to sample their catalog today, from small gizmos. That implies some form of readily accessable electronic storage. Now imagine that the record store of the future stocks only high-demand CDs, and the rest of the stock is stored, perhaps even on a cache basis. The store also has a (more expensive than consumer) machine that can burn CDs, apply high-quality artwork, print labels, and the like.
Want a high-demand CD? Pick it up, pay, and walk out with it. Want a more garden-variety CD? Find it in the catalog, listen to a sample if you wish, and order it. (deposit optional part of the business model) Browse for 5 or 10 minutes, or go to another store. Come back, pay, and take it home. Want something obscure, like the namesake of "It's a Beautiful Day"? Just like the garden-variety CD, except it may take a little longer to get the full contents into the cache from a remote server.
Oops, I should have patented this Business Method. Wonder if a/. post constitutes prior art? IMHO something this simply thought-up should NOT be patentable. Iff there's some devil in the details that's not easily worked out, THAT may be patentable.
> million monkeys Nobody ever told the REAL problem with the million monkeys experiment. You have to sift through the results. For all we know, there really IS a Shakespear somewhere on AOL, just unrecognized.
> throwing money Aaahh, the law of the excluded middle. Obviously throwing money at a problem won't solve it. So we then do the obvious, and refuse to apply any money. Simply throwing money will *probably* never work, but by the same token, most problems will not be solved *without* money. Knowing *how* to apply money, and *how much* money to apply is the hard part. Unfortunately, we're paying some people the big bucks, and they don't appear to have answers to either of those questions.
> warez, pr0n, etc For 99% of the students you're right. In any given year, the number may even be 100%. But we're playing Sturgeon's Law here. Once every couple of years, *someone* is going to do something really neat with that bandwidth, and hopefully that's worth all of the warez and pr0n.
> good deal, boats Most of the time cynicism is justified. The tiny chunk of optimist in my hopes it isn't 100%.
Regardless of what you may think of Cleveland, there are several particularly bright spots about the CWRU campus. To name a few:
* Presti's Donut shop, near the corner of Murray Hill and Mayfield. Go after midnight, when you're done studying, and the donuts for the next day are coming out. Used to be at 1:15AM you get get fresh, HOT cinnamon rolls. (may still be true, don't know)
* Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, simply one of the best in the world.
* the art museum, don't remember the exact name, right next door to Severance Hall.
and this is all walking distance from the Case campus.
Get two of those vibration coupling thingies. the ones they had 30 years ago that you could screw into a wall to turn the whole wall into a speaker. Then screw one into the bone behind each ear, to couple the sound straight into the skull. Be sure to use stainless steel or other nonreactive screws. Save on delicate-tissue surgery.
I simplify it to the point of always doing the fat and flour together alone first, then the rest of the ingredients. I don't worry too hard about flour into hot butter precisely, and things still work well. Last time instead of using butter, and instead of discarding the fat off the broth, I skimmed it and used that fat with the flour. Worked well.
1: The confidence to let meat/poultry SIT there on the grill cooking, and not keep flipping it. As a result, my grilled foods are still properly cooked, but there's less tendancy to dry them out.
2: The basic roux. Making gravy has evaded my wife for years. A few iterations and adaptations of AB's basic roux recipe, and I can make gravy that the family enjoys.
I really need to try making meringues, again. I was never happy with my results, years ago. Outer shell a bit hard, inside overcooked, airgap in between.
Of course it won't stop piracy. That merely means that the legal measures are not sufficiently draconian. We obviously need ever stronger laws until that piracy is STOPPED!
Frontline recently ran a show, "The Day the Music Died," about the demise of the recording industry at the hands of money people. (as opposed to music people) I missed it, but supposedly it is on the PBS website, though I haven't had a chance to search for it, yet. Your points highlight the rise of money people (as opposed to movie people) in the movie industry.
For that matter, perhaps we can at least partly blame the whole DMCA, copyright, etc mess on the rise of the MBA. Figure a media exec more comfortable with money and legal instruments than with the media, itself.
IMHO, this isn't limited to the media industries, to give 'business method patents' for one example.
I was recently "forced" to get IE running on the kids' dual boot Linux/Win98SE machine. My son needed to use a certain college web site, and rejected Mozilla, being "IE-only". So I visited Windows Update, since IE on the box had never been used for web browsing. Many, many updates and reboots later, he was able to do what he needed to do. After I have paid the first tuition bill and become a member of the in-crowd, I'm going to write to the college about their IE-only site, about how they're aiding and abetting a convicted monopolist with a site like that, and how they should be using w3c, webwasher, and the like to generate portable content.
My kids tend to keep the machine on Windows, largely because they can do what they need there, plus play games. After this experience, I cautioned my son to avoid IE because of future security problems, even if it is currently fully patched. His response... IE is a *pig* compared to Mozilla.
There have been some interesting developments very recently in solar cells. "Legacy" solar cells have all been single band-gap, which in practice means that they can only convert on frequency of light into electricity, and efficiency drops off as you deviate. Until recently, efforts have been focused on reaching the theoretical maximum efficiency for that bandgap, and to make them as cheap as possible.
The new development is in splitting the band-gap, so energy conversion can happen at two (or more) frequencies. In the case of the double-gap materials, the immediate effect was to double efficiency.
Who on Earth wouldn't have guessed this one was going to happen? Isn't this just like antibiotic resistance, only the application is even less controlled?
I've heard a few other theories about precocious (I hope I spelled that right, but I guess this is/., where few know the difference between 'loose' and 'lose'.) puberty, one rumor, one fairly solid.
The wild rumor is that the plasticizers used in ordinary recycle#2 food packaging, like milk jugs, has molecular features that somehow resemble estrogen, and are able to bind to some of the same receptors in the body. So it's somewhat like oral dosages of estrogen for all of us.
The fairly solid one is that fat isn't just inert mass - it's more like an organ, secreting hormones - such as estrogen. The place I read this predicted earlier puberty in heavier girls. More recently, I read something about other hormonal secretions from fat that may act to shorten lifetime in ways other than just encouraging a sedentary lifestyle.
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I was thinking of the $100/yr range for a complete, consistent Internet presence, not for the one service. I see Dynu charges $60/yr for a complete email presence.
My other factor was that I just got burned with my old email forwarding provider, and wanted:
1 - Someone more high-profile, less likely to go away or act weird. DynDNS.org has been around a LONG time.
2 - My own domain, even if it's more expensive. Even if DynDNS.org were to go away or act weird, with a bit of effort I should be able to regain control of my domain, and take it to a different provider.
I'm phasing in, and plan to expand my services in the future, and hope to get the 'complete consistent presence.'
Unfortunately most ISPs don't qualify as much more knowledgable than most users. Therefore they'd find a cheap solution and deploy it. Period. I'm waiting fearfully for Cisco or somebody to introduce a cheap/powerful enough router or some piece of head-end gear that the ISPs will just turn on stateful packet filtering across the board, and deny all incoming connections.
And of course this still won't stop the problems, because there will still be other disease vectors besides incoming connections. So I also won't be surprised to see rate limits on outgoing email and filters on every outgoing port where the ISP provides that service in-house.
They've only begun closing down the Internet. There's lots more to go, in the name of spam, virii, and terrorism.
As for 'users capable of administering their own connection,' no way. Who evaluates? Giving every idiot who simply asks full privileges opens the floodgates, again. Probably the simplest, most likely thing would be to allow MSCEs to administer their own connections. Is that what you really wanted?
Mildly off-topic... Sometime I'd like to take a look at the most simply-caught spam. IMHO, spam would be a great way to broadcast clandesting (including terrorist) information. Nobody reads the stuff, or at least most people try not to. A little deception, a little steganography, a little encryption, a little spread-spectrum, (split/interleave the message amoung many pieces of spam) and you've got a terrific worldwide communications channel.
This looks like copyright, not patent violation.
(I know, it's a *tiny* excerpt, fair use....for now.)
Kind of annoys me that they never figured out the price/volume curve. Today I think carefully before buying ANY CD. If they were half the price, I'd buy more than twice as many. If they were a fourth the price, my storage space would probably become the overriding concern.
Listen to THAT, you idiot RIAA executives!
Strong wording is fully deserverd. IMHO, too much of American business wants everything to be S.E.P., and is pursuing legislation to make it so.
(S.E.P.: Douglas Adams HHGttG reference, Somebody Else's Problem)
For a small (volume-dependent) fee DynDNS.org will relay outbound mail for you with the 'MailHop Outbound' service. They will also relay inbound mail to your server (on a high port, if need be because of your ISP) with 'MailHop Relay'.
At this point, you'd probably want your DNS hosted through them, as well. On the plus side, this would give your domain a complete and consistent appearance, IP-wise. I believe at this point, you may even be able to add SPF records to your DNS entry as well. (Though I'm not sure if they do the correct thing outbound for SPF.)
The whole shebang would probably still come to less than $100/yr.
Spiffy.
Too bad I've only been to California three times, and there are no plans on the forseeable horizon to go again.
The next part is the network to the backup library, so the kiosk can be considered a cache instead of the complete library.
After the quoted sentence, I went on to talk about music (wo)men vs money (wo)men. That was my point, when people who only know money run the company, their tool for knowing who will sell or not will be the spreadsheet. When someone who knows music runs the company, the tools will be ears and experience, in addition to any money tools.
Why should music be different?
Because they're getting away with it. The whole time they cry about their financial situation, there are TONS of money flowing around, much being wasted. A tiny fraction of that amounts to a lot of money, useful for the best legislation that can be bought.
Granting them the benefit of a doubt, you just may not KNOW if a new artist is going to sell, because there's no experience. Nor can you be timid if you're really going to PUSH a promising artist, because the chain to stardom has many links, and breaking one breaks the chain.
Putting my other hat back on...
That's why the RIAA should be run by MUSIC (WO)MEN, not MONEY (WO)MEN. Somewhere, there should be someone who has a really good idea of whether or not music is going to make it, and make more intelligent decisions about contracts, promotion, and distribution. Spreadsheets just don't hack the job.
Plus another consideration - It has not normally been in their best interest to run an efficient business, especially as the CD equipment became written down. Their costs are paid by the artists, and their market got used to paying high prices. Between these two considerations, it was actually in their benefit to run inefficiently, to soak up that margin between artist and consumer in an audit-survivable way.
Not accusing you of this, but many who denigrate 'throwing money at the problem' then neglect any solution whatsoever. It leaves me with the feeling that they are willing to continue neglecting the problem, as long as they get to conserve their money. IMHO it's ridiculous to presume that any arbitrary problem can be solved without money, it's a matter of finding a good solution that doesn't waste money.
I wasn't invoking Sturgeon's Law against 'throwing money', but rather against 'warez and pr0n'. I was saying that 98+% of that high-bandwidth would be warez and pr0n, but there would be maybe 1 student every other year or so who would do something really valuable with all of that bandwidth.
I'll give them a bit longer than 30 sec, if only for high-quality artwork on the CD and in the case. I'm also presuming 'industrial-strength' stuff might be a bit slower, though hopefully writing a more reliable and longer-lasting CD.
How about this as a model for the music store?
/. post constitutes prior art?
One cost the RIAA complains about, that is legitimate, is the cost of distributing the recordings of CDs that turn out to be poor sellers.
Most music stores have a means to sample their catalog today, from small gizmos. That implies some form of readily accessable electronic storage. Now imagine that the record store of the future stocks only high-demand CDs, and the rest of the stock is stored, perhaps even on a cache basis. The store also has a (more expensive than consumer) machine that can burn CDs, apply high-quality artwork, print labels, and the like.
Want a high-demand CD? Pick it up, pay, and walk out with it.
Want a more garden-variety CD? Find it in the catalog, listen to a sample if you wish, and order it. (deposit optional part of the business model) Browse for 5 or 10 minutes, or go to another store. Come back, pay, and take it home.
Want something obscure, like the namesake of "It's a Beautiful Day"? Just like the garden-variety CD, except it may take a little longer to get the full contents into the cache from a remote server.
Oops, I should have patented this Business Method.
Wonder if a
IMHO something this simply thought-up should NOT be patentable. Iff there's some devil in the details that's not easily worked out, THAT may be patentable.
> million monkeys
Nobody ever told the REAL problem with the million monkeys experiment. You have to sift through the results. For all we know, there really IS a Shakespear somewhere on AOL, just unrecognized.
> throwing money
Aaahh, the law of the excluded middle. Obviously throwing money at a problem won't solve it. So we then do the obvious, and refuse to apply any money. Simply throwing money will *probably* never work, but by the same token, most problems will not be solved *without* money. Knowing *how* to apply money, and *how much* money to apply is the hard part. Unfortunately, we're paying some people the big bucks, and they don't appear to have answers to either of those questions.
> warez, pr0n, etc
For 99% of the students you're right. In any given year, the number may even be 100%. But we're playing Sturgeon's Law here. Once every couple of years, *someone* is going to do something really neat with that bandwidth, and hopefully that's worth all of the warez and pr0n.
> good deal, boats
Most of the time cynicism is justified. The tiny chunk of optimist in my hopes it isn't 100%.
Regardless of what you may think of Cleveland, there are several particularly bright spots about the CWRU campus. To name a few:
* Presti's Donut shop, near the corner of Murray Hill and Mayfield. Go after midnight, when you're done studying, and the donuts for the next day are coming out. Used to be at 1:15AM you get get fresh, HOT cinnamon rolls. (may still be true, don't know)
* Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, simply one of the best in the world.
* the art museum, don't remember the exact name, right next door to Severance Hall.
and this is all walking distance from the Case campus.
Get two of those vibration coupling thingies. the ones they had 30 years ago that you could screw into a wall to turn the whole wall into a speaker. Then screw one into the bone behind each ear, to couple the sound straight into the skull. Be sure to use stainless steel or other nonreactive screws. Save on delicate-tissue surgery.
I simplify it to the point of always doing the fat and flour together alone first, then the rest of the ingredients. I don't worry too hard about flour into hot butter precisely, and things still work well. Last time instead of using butter, and instead of discarding the fat off the broth, I skimmed it and used that fat with the flour. Worked well.
1: The confidence to let meat/poultry SIT there on the grill cooking, and not keep flipping it. As a result, my grilled foods are still properly cooked, but there's less tendancy to dry them out.
2: The basic roux. Making gravy has evaded my wife for years. A few iterations and adaptations of AB's basic roux recipe, and I can make gravy that the family enjoys.
I really need to try making meringues, again. I was never happy with my results, years ago. Outer shell a bit hard, inside overcooked, airgap in between.
Of course it won't stop piracy. That merely means that the legal measures are not sufficiently draconian. We obviously need ever stronger laws until that piracy is STOPPED!
Frontline recently ran a show, "The Day the Music Died," about the demise of the recording industry at the hands of money people. (as opposed to music people) I missed it, but supposedly it is on the PBS website, though I haven't had a chance to search for it, yet. Your points highlight the rise of money people (as opposed to movie people) in the movie industry.
For that matter, perhaps we can at least partly blame the whole DMCA, copyright, etc mess on the rise of the MBA. Figure a media exec more comfortable with money and legal instruments than with the media, itself.
IMHO, this isn't limited to the media industries, to give 'business method patents' for one example.
I was recently "forced" to get IE running on the kids' dual boot Linux/Win98SE machine. My son needed to use a certain college web site, and rejected Mozilla, being "IE-only". So I visited Windows Update, since IE on the box had never been used for web browsing. Many, many updates and reboots later, he was able to do what he needed to do. After I have paid the first tuition bill and become a member of the in-crowd, I'm going to write to the college about their IE-only site, about how they're aiding and abetting a convicted monopolist with a site like that, and how they should be using w3c, webwasher, and the like to generate portable content.
My kids tend to keep the machine on Windows, largely because they can do what they need there, plus play games. After this experience, I cautioned my son to avoid IE because of future security problems, even if it is currently fully patched. His response... IE is a *pig* compared to Mozilla.
Perhaps you miss *no comment*'s point. With most distributions, you can defer a lot of learning until later. Many times these days, later never comes.
With Gentoo, you really don't have the opportunity to defer a lot of learning. You need it just to get up and running.
Of course a diligent sysadmin *will* do the learning, but *no comment* advocates Gentoo as a not-so-gentle prod.
There have been some interesting developments very recently in solar cells. "Legacy" solar cells have all been single band-gap, which in practice means that they can only convert on frequency of light into electricity, and efficiency drops off as you deviate. Until recently, efforts have been focused on reaching the theoretical maximum efficiency for that bandgap, and to make them as cheap as possible.
The new development is in splitting the band-gap, so energy conversion can happen at two (or more) frequencies. In the case of the double-gap materials, the immediate effect was to double efficiency.
Not here yet, but a very important step.
Who on Earth wouldn't have guessed this one was going to happen? Isn't this just like antibiotic resistance, only the application is even less controlled?
I've heard a few other theories about precocious (I hope I spelled that right, but I guess this is /., where few know the difference between 'loose' and 'lose'.) puberty, one rumor, one fairly solid.
The wild rumor is that the plasticizers used in ordinary recycle#2 food packaging, like milk jugs, has molecular features that somehow resemble estrogen, and are able to bind to some of the same receptors in the body. So it's somewhat like oral dosages of estrogen for all of us.
The fairly solid one is that fat isn't just inert mass - it's more like an organ, secreting hormones - such as estrogen. The place I read this predicted earlier puberty in heavier girls. More recently, I read something about other hormonal secretions from fat that may act to shorten lifetime in ways other than just encouraging a sedentary lifestyle.
Shades of "Brazil"