Drag = 3 wings Lift = 1 wing Transmission Mechanism = Very Heavy Support Structure = Very Very Heavy Pressure Center (Sustentation)= Shifts Vibration = More than a helicopter
Do not let all the flames fool you, this is my real experience with Svasoft:
Sveasoft is not charging $20 dollars for the binaries. The binaries are free.
Svaesoft is charging $20 dollars for access to the support forums. Nothing ilegal there. I paid $20 dollars and the support and I am more than happy with what I got.
There are two types of binaries:
1) Stable firmware is released for free in binary form, just as many Linux distributions are available for free. Yu can dwonload those right now from the Linksysinfo.org site. If you want the source code of the freely availabe stable releases you can buy it via a $50 dollar CD, if the $50 were really substantialy above the real cost of generating and shipping the CD, there would be a market of people who would profit from re-distributing that seme CD for less, as anyone can do that under the GPL terms. It happens all the time with all major Linux Distributions.
2) Pre-release bianaries are shared only with forum suscribers (but still free). Forum suscribers are allowed access to the source code (I am a subscriber and just to check I re-downloaded the latest Alchemy pre-release 5.1 10 minutes minutes ago). According to the GPL I can redistribute the binaries and the source code. Sveasoft support agreement says that if I decide to re-distribute myself I terminate my support contract (not my rights and obligations to re-distribute according to the GPL terms), and that Sveasoft has no obligation to support the people to which I decided to re-distribute.
Svasoft has not re-written a single iota of the GPL license. He only wrote the terms of his support agreement, and those terms do not contradict or oppose the GPL in any way, as the GPL does not dictate support terms. Sveasoft is respecting every letter of the GPL license.
All the fuss is being generated by people who misunderstand the GPL, the GPL does not mean free (as in bear) support, it means access to the source code and the freedom to modify, fork your own code and/or re-distribute. You have the freedom to buy support from anyone, or support that yourself, or to make money supporting it for others. You have the right to fork the code if you want and create your own distribution.
Sveasoft understood better than most the GPL and how to create a support model that does not depend on charity and where slackers do not get an absolutely free ride. Yet even slackers get a great deal from stable firmware.
He figured how to get the benefits of GPL code without many of the perils of the "tragedy of the commons".
Despite all the moaning and groaning we are hearing, this is actually a very good development for the GPL community. A sustainable model to support the devolopment of more GPL software.
People who are willing to spend time and money to debug bleeding edge software, have now found a way to build a community that supports itself and its key developer. The entry barrier is incredibly low, $20 dollars, but despite the low $20 barrier, that seems to have been enought to exclude all of those that make a lot of noise but no real contribution to the GPL community. They are mostly posting flames here and at DSL Reports, while the Sveasoft forums are getting more quiet and productive as the community is being self selected and more focused.
Real men and gals that want to support and develop the GPL commons, are very happy and working as hard as ever to develop great new features. Anyone with time and $20 dollars can join the effort.
Once the firmware is stable and debuged it will be contributed back to the greater commons. If for any reason Svasoft wanted to delay that, i am sure someone in the fourm, will decide to quit his/her support and contribute the code to the community ( I know I would), but I am also confident that Svasoft will do that, as he did very recently with the 4.0 firmware.
Do not let the noise fool you, the GPL is safe and getting stronger.
My company is currently working on a Fiber to the Home project, that does not make me an expert, I am just putting my money where my mouth is...
Adding more bandwidth does not make users read more e-mail or read more web pages, however it does facilitate sending or downloading bigger files.
The most ready use that users have for more bandwidth are audio an video, lets use an example: an average home inernet user probably downloads less than 600 MB from the internet per month, digital video of cable/DTH quality is broadcast today using MPEG-2 with a bandwidth of betweeen 3Mbps and 9 Mbps, a home watching TV form a satelite/DTH source for 5 hours per day actually uses an average of 4Mbps x 3600 sec/hour x 5 hours/day x 30 day/month/8bits/byte = 270,000 MB per month, thats 3 orders of magnitude more bandwidth than your typical internet user.
That is a lot of bandwidth for the current(and future) internet backbone, yet digital cables already deliver that kind of bandwidth to the home today (hundreds of channels, 24 hours per day), so a fiber to the home project, is nothing more than a two-way cable TV system but redisigned using 100% fiber and getting rid of the legacy coaxial cable.
A fiber to the home project (today), will thus look very much like a Cable TV system, with most of the video content being "broadcast" (using IP multicast)form a local headend, and a few video servers for video on demand. It will take many internet backbone upgrades (and many years) before a fiber to the home user in let's say Dallas can download video on demand content (with MPEG-2 quality) from a server in New York, what most likely will happen is that there will be caching server (of the Akamai type) located at the fiber to the home "headend" that will serve the content locally.
Hybrid fiber/coaxial systems must grow fiber and reduce coaxial whenever they want to provide more bandwithd (or video on demand) to the indivudual users, the same principle applies to DSL systems, if you want faster speeds, you must reduce the length of copper and increase the amount of fiber. Taking this to an extreme, why not go all the way with fiber to the home?
More bandwidth to the users creates more opportunities, and also new challenges, the internet is a big real-time experiment anyway!!!
Slashdot Mirror
When windows writes to a fragmented file system, the download rate can slow significantly.
Repeat the test after a disk defrag and the download rates will improve significantly.
Drag = 3 wings
Lift = 1 wing
Transmission Mechanism = Very Heavy
Support Structure = Very Very Heavy
Pressure Center (Sustentation)= Shifts
Vibration = More than a helicopter
Nice Try!!!
Money for support and the code is free
Do not let all the flames fool you, this is my real experience with Svasoft:
Sveasoft is not charging $20 dollars for the binaries. The binaries are free.
Svaesoft is charging $20 dollars for access to the support forums. Nothing ilegal there. I paid $20 dollars and the support and I am more than happy with what I got.
There are two types of binaries:
1) Stable firmware is released for free in binary form, just as many Linux distributions are available for free. Yu can dwonload those right now from the Linksysinfo.org site. If you want the source code of the freely availabe stable releases you can buy it via a $50 dollar CD, if the $50 were really substantialy above the real cost of generating and shipping the CD, there would be a market of people who would profit from re-distributing that seme CD for less, as anyone can do that under the GPL terms. It happens all the time with all major Linux Distributions.
2) Pre-release bianaries are shared only with forum suscribers (but still free). Forum suscribers are allowed access to the source code (I am a subscriber and just to check I re-downloaded the latest Alchemy pre-release 5.1 10 minutes minutes ago). According to the GPL I can redistribute the binaries and the source code. Sveasoft support agreement says that if I decide to re-distribute myself I terminate my support contract (not my rights and obligations to re-distribute according to the GPL terms), and that Sveasoft has no obligation to support the people to which I decided to re-distribute.
Svasoft has not re-written a single iota of the GPL license. He only wrote the terms of his support agreement, and those terms do not contradict or oppose the GPL in any way, as the GPL does not dictate support terms. Sveasoft is respecting every letter of the GPL license.
All the fuss is being generated by people who misunderstand the GPL, the GPL does not mean free (as in bear) support, it means access to the source code and the freedom to modify, fork your own code and/or re-distribute. You have the freedom to buy support from anyone, or support that yourself, or to make money supporting it for others. You have the right to fork the code if you want and create your own distribution.
Sveasoft understood better than most the GPL and how to create a support model that does not depend on charity and where slackers do not get an absolutely free ride. Yet even slackers get a great deal from stable firmware.
He figured how to get the benefits of GPL code without many of the perils of the "tragedy of the commons".
Despite all the moaning and groaning we are hearing, this is actually a very good development for the GPL community. A sustainable model to support the devolopment of more GPL software.
People who are willing to spend time and money to debug bleeding edge software, have now found a way to build a community that supports itself and its key developer. The entry barrier is incredibly low, $20 dollars, but despite the low $20 barrier, that seems to have been enought to exclude all of those that make a lot of noise but no real contribution to the GPL community. They are mostly posting flames here and at DSL Reports, while the Sveasoft forums are getting more quiet and productive as the community is being self selected and more focused.
Real men and gals that want to support and develop the GPL commons, are very happy and working as hard as ever to develop great new features. Anyone with time and $20 dollars can join the effort.
Once the firmware is stable and debuged it will be contributed back to the greater commons. If for any reason Svasoft wanted to delay that, i am sure someone in the fourm, will decide to quit his/her support and contribute the code to the community ( I know I would), but I am also confident that Svasoft will do that, as he did very recently with the 4.0 firmware.
Do not let the noise fool you, the GPL is safe and getting stronger.
My company is currently working on a Fiber to the Home project, that does not make me an expert, I am just putting my money where my mouth is...
/8bits/byte = 270,000 MB per month, thats 3 orders of magnitude more bandwidth than your typical internet user.
Adding more bandwidth does not make users read more e-mail or read more web pages, however it does facilitate sending or downloading bigger files.
The most ready use that users have for more bandwidth are audio an video, lets use an example: an average home inernet user probably downloads less than 600 MB from the internet per month, digital video of cable/DTH quality is broadcast today using MPEG-2 with a bandwidth of betweeen 3Mbps and 9 Mbps, a home watching TV form a satelite/DTH source for 5 hours per day actually uses an average of 4Mbps x 3600 sec/hour x 5 hours/day x 30 day/month
That is a lot of bandwidth for the current(and future) internet backbone, yet digital cables already deliver that kind of bandwidth to the home today (hundreds of channels, 24 hours per day), so a fiber to the home project, is nothing more than a two-way cable TV system but redisigned using 100% fiber and getting rid of the legacy coaxial cable.
A fiber to the home project (today), will thus look very much like a Cable TV system, with most of the video content being "broadcast" (using IP multicast)form a local headend, and a few video servers for video on demand. It will take many internet backbone upgrades (and many years) before a fiber to the home user in let's say Dallas can download video on demand content (with MPEG-2 quality) from a server in New York, what most likely will happen is that there will be caching server (of the Akamai type) located at the fiber to the home "headend" that will serve the content locally.
Hybrid fiber/coaxial systems must grow fiber and reduce coaxial whenever they want to provide more bandwithd (or video on demand) to the indivudual users, the same principle applies to DSL systems, if you want faster speeds, you must reduce the length of copper and increase the amount of fiber. Taking this to an extreme, why not go all the way with fiber to the home?
More bandwidth to the users creates more opportunities, and also new challenges, the internet is a big real-time experiment anyway!!!