They leased the dark fiber, they didn't buy it, but from where I am sitting that is fairly similiar. The fiber was used to replace their OC-3 connections from data-center to data-center, apparently at a great cost reduction.
This is almost assuredly what Google is attempting.
As I recall Bank of America owns a ton of dark fiber that they use to trasmit private data because the fiber was a lot cheaper then renting capacity. That doesn't mean that Bank of America is going to be opening BOANET and giving away free Internet access tomorrow.
Probably because if their files read like every other bit of goverment writing that I have every seen, they are as good as encrypted. Especially for people that are not native english speakers.
Occasionally, it is requested that I do data transfer and backups from one system to another. The trouble comes when a user doesn't know *where* all there files are, just what programs they use. (e.g. I need all my MS Word and limewire files moved over)
It is never my intention to go rooting arount their filesystem to uncover their midget porn collection, their warez library, or anything else. However, what the hell am I supposed to do if, in transferring their files I came across something that goes way beyond my personal line, such as a DV capture directory full of kiddy porn. Should that be reported? If you report that, should you report their MP3 collection? Where do you draw the ethical line?
Fortunately, I have never experienced anything this extreme, but at the same time on quite a few systems I encounter large MP3 repositories and a bunch of porn. Doesn't freak me out, I have just as much porn and just as many MP3's, but what the hell are you SUPPOSED to do if you stumble upon your amatuer kiddy filmmaker? Where is the line between exploitation, decency, and privacy? Anyone care to fill this in. Enlighten me.
In 2015, we'll have Petabyte drives for $500. THAT is nuts.
No, the nuts part is the data we will be storing that requires petabytes! A terabyte is pretty easy to fill nowadays, e.g., photos, scans of books, online copies of (my) DVDs and CDs, but a petabyte requires a bit more imagination (with the exception of "record every aspect of my life").
I personally never visited Wired until I added it to my google homepage. Now I visit whenever a story catches my eyes (generally two to four times daily). I could definitely see google dramatically altering sites traffic.
Couldn't agree more. If you take all of these mega stores to the end there will be no more small business. Everybody will be working in a department of a Walmart somewhere making their $6.75 an hour.
The RSS feeds business model makes a lot of sense for google. A service like this can get a lot of people to set google as there homepage, and frees them from having to provide any real content, just the ability to parse RSS feeds, it also ensures that the new user almost exclusively uses google search.
For example, getting joe six-pack off of the default msn or comcast pages to google could greatly increase the bottom line of their pay per click advertising, even if each of those average users just did five or ten more google searches a day.
This is no tub girl (GIS tubgirl, very NSFW or probably anywhere, don't look at it, it will burn your eyes). I saw that for the first time when I was about 15 and if you can download and apply a game mod you can definitely find some nasty shit on the internet, including enough good porno to last a lifetime. Why bother with a game mod when you can get some steamy hardcore porn instead?
Not GPS, at least for the museum, and probably for the stadium too. It doesn't work without a view of the sky. If they set up fixed point transmitters the device could be designed to be able to triangulate it's position, that would probably be very useful for a museum tour. Of course, they could probably just use a short range wireless signal that activates the exhibit display when you are close enough.
And Anheuser-Bush should give free/hugely discounted beer to college students so they develop a taste for Anheuser-Bush beer.
Quite a few college students still buy CD's, they may be poor but they still have enough money to spend to make them a serious market. And it's not like the RIAA has a lot of competition. What else would the kids listen to, the crap on Mindawn.
Violent video games (or god forbid sexually explicit video games) and dodgeball are the biggest problems facing the American youth of today, and both should be banned immediately.
Won't someone think of the children. Thank god for Hillary.
There has been a lot of concern about DVRs destroying the advertising model TV is based on. I don't think that will happen. I did take the time to reprogram my comcast dvr remote to add the 30 second skip feature (http://dcortesi.com/2005/05/04/motorola-dct6412-c omcast-dvr-30-second-skip/) but I watch a LOT more TV now then I did before I got a DVR, and while I regularly skip the commercials, I don't every time and I'm pretty sure the extended amount of time I spend in front of the TV more than makes up for the number of commercials that I do skip.
They would do the finger scan, and if it didn't work the first time the attendant would usually just manually override the scanner and let you in without much hassle. Also, the person I was with and I have similiar hand sizes, and flip-flopped passes all week. It almost certainly isn't a fingerprint scanner, just a very rough check.
Additionally, it seemed that the biggest issue with the scanner was not getting your fingers all the way into the device. If they weren't pushed all the way in, with the webbing between your index and middle fingers hitting the stopper peg, it didn't register. We kept trying to put our finger tips on the scanner assuming it was a finger print scanner, but it seems its main function is to check finger length. Of course, this is just an observation I made, I have no idea how the thing actually works.
The stuff that was used on me was not the stuff pictured in the article. It was black and white, not color, and is probably stuff that hasn't been released yet. It wasn't a plastic, but it may have been a plastic embedded in regular paper for all I know. Whatever it was, it came from someone who was working in the devlopment of digital paper, so I wouldn't be suprised if it exists but hasn't been anounced. This was only about three months ago, and there was no sleight of hand involved, it was real technology, I have been told that. Just not exactly how, for all I know it was a custom engineering job, it wouldn't be the first time this guy dropped a ton of money on a stupid prank. Further, believe it or not, my tinfoil hat is on.
A friend of mine played a trick on me with an electronic paper prototype. He was able to get a hold of a prototype (he works in the industry, and is very wealthy) and had someone use it on me when I signed a contract. It felt enough like real paper that I didn't notice, I read the contract, it was sitting on a metal clipboard type thing, and I signed and initialed in the appropriate places. A second later, when the contract was in the other person's hand, I saw the wording and the numbers change.
Needless to say, I flipped out. Things like $1,000 changed to $1,000,000 among other things. Assuming that wasn't a totally different technology, the bastard refused to tell me how it was done, but did come out and say it was just a joke, this stuff has some very serious potential to be misused in a major way. In retrospect, I hadn't slept for close to 48 hours due to an unrelated matter, so that may have dulled my ability to recognize that it wasn't a standard piece of paper.
Car navigation sets with the two channel display technology make a lot of sense. The driver could still use the GPS, while the front seat passenger watches a movie.
I just tried Napster again yesterday for the first time in over a year, but it still suffers from all of the problems that I had with it last time.
The catalog is incomplete, to really replace Limewire, it has to offer ALL of the songs I want. That includes some pretty obscure songs. Basically, my personal library is 1,500 songs or so off of Limewire. Napster's whole library seems to show about 750,000 songs. The legal library is 500 times the size of my own, but I don't like one in every 500 songs, probably only 1 in 1,000, if that, so there are huge gaps.
DRM sucks. It basically turns digital music into something that can only be effectively used while sitting right in front of the computer. I want a standard format (MP3) that I can burn to standard audio CDS, use on my Rio MP3 player, and burn to data discs that will work in an mp3 cd player, or my set top dvd player. DRM makes much of this impractical. Of course there is the argument that everybody would just steal the MP3's provided by the service. But why bother. If they cost $1 each, and I could do whatever I wanted with them, and they were good quality, not to mention legal. I wouldn't hesitate to skip the Limewire hassle and just by directly from them.
And where in the hell is the quality that was supposed to be associated with the pay services. What is stopping Napster from offering up the songs at 512k instead of the paltry 128 that they seem to be using now (yeah, wma makes a difference, but I still want bigger files). I would be happy spending even $2 per song for 512 DRMless MP3's that are legal. Instead, the stuff Napster sells sounds the exact same as the MP3's that came off of Napster 1. Not what I was expecting. I want 14mb downloads at 5mbps+/second, and why not, except for the size I can get everything else off of Limewire.
Further, I have to boot into Windows to use Napster or itunes (not counting pymusique). I don't like doing that, and I really can't play drm'd wmas under linux.
Limewire is still the best option. It's fast for a Java Application, it runs on anything with a virtual machine, can easily max out my download bandwidth, and I can use the files however I want. Of course, most of the files aren't legal, but the legal files can't do what I want so what good are they?
It's nice to see so many people interested in this. I have been on the development team and would just like to let you all know where this project is headed.
We are currently working on a matching server to hook people up to each other. The software is highly stable and fast. I just finished a 3xbox game less than a half hour ago. Pings were about 150ms, and there was NO lag.
We are also working to implement chat. Expect another release in the next couple of days.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case I am now well ahead of the pack as I read neither the articles or the comments.
Should have included this in my post.
s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1813919,00.a
12-city dark fiber network
They leased the dark fiber, they didn't buy it, but from where I am sitting that is fairly similiar. The fiber was used to replace their OC-3 connections from data-center to data-center, apparently at a great cost reduction.
This is almost assuredly what Google is attempting.
As I recall Bank of America owns a ton of dark fiber that they use to trasmit private data because the fiber was a lot cheaper then renting capacity. That doesn't mean that Bank of America is going to be opening BOANET and giving away free Internet access tomorrow.
Probably because if their files read like every other bit of goverment writing that I have every seen, they are as good as encrypted. Especially for people that are not native english speakers.
Who in there right mind would spout made up "facts" on Slashdot. Half of the reproducible studies get shot down as flawed in some way or another.
Well talk about a breath of fresh air in the tech sector.
Although they probably won't follow through on that.
rabble rabble rabble rabble
rabble rabble rabble
rabble
Obligatory South Park reference.
Yes, please don't tell that about the safe haven.
I do on-site computer support for a living.
Occasionally, it is requested that I do data transfer and backups from one system to another. The trouble comes when a user doesn't know *where* all there files are, just what programs they use. (e.g. I need all my MS Word and limewire files moved over)
It is never my intention to go rooting arount their filesystem to uncover their midget porn collection, their warez library, or anything else. However, what the hell am I supposed to do if, in transferring their files I came across something that goes way beyond my personal line, such as a DV capture directory full of kiddy porn. Should that be reported? If you report that, should you report their MP3 collection? Where do you draw the ethical line?
Fortunately, I have never experienced anything this extreme, but at the same time on quite a few systems I encounter large MP3 repositories and a bunch of porn. Doesn't freak me out, I have just as much porn and just as many MP3's, but what the hell are you SUPPOSED to do if you stumble upon your amatuer kiddy filmmaker? Where is the line between exploitation, decency, and privacy? Anyone care to fill this in. Enlighten me.
In 2015, we'll have Petabyte drives for $500. THAT is nuts.
No, the nuts part is the data we will be storing that requires petabytes! A terabyte is pretty easy to fill nowadays, e.g., photos, scans of books, online copies of (my) DVDs and CDs, but a petabyte requires a bit more imagination (with the exception of "record every aspect of my life").
Think of all that porn, maybe even in 3D by then.
I personally never visited Wired until I added it to my google homepage. Now I visit whenever a story catches my eyes (generally two to four times daily). I could definitely see google dramatically altering sites traffic.
Couldn't agree more. If you take all of these mega stores to the end there will be no more small business. Everybody will be working in a department of a Walmart somewhere making their $6.75 an hour.
The RSS feeds business model makes a lot of sense for google. A service like this can get a lot of people to set google as there homepage, and frees them from having to provide any real content, just the ability to parse RSS feeds, it also ensures that the new user almost exclusively uses google search.
For example, getting joe six-pack off of the default msn or comcast pages to google could greatly increase the bottom line of their pay per click advertising, even if each of those average users just did five or ten more google searches a day.
This is no tub girl (GIS tubgirl, very NSFW or probably anywhere, don't look at it, it will burn your eyes). I saw that for the first time when I was about 15 and if you can download and apply a game mod you can definitely find some nasty shit on the internet, including enough good porno to last a lifetime. Why bother with a game mod when you can get some steamy hardcore porn instead?
Not GPS, at least for the museum, and probably for the stadium too. It doesn't work without a view of the sky. If they set up fixed point transmitters the device could be designed to be able to triangulate it's position, that would probably be very useful for a museum tour. Of course, they could probably just use a short range wireless signal that activates the exhibit display when you are close enough.
And Anheuser-Bush should give free/hugely discounted beer to college students so they develop a taste for Anheuser-Bush beer.
Quite a few college students still buy CD's, they may be poor but they still have enough money to spend to make them a serious market. And it's not like the RIAA has a lot of competition. What else would the kids listen to, the crap on Mindawn.
Violent video games (or god forbid sexually explicit video games) and dodgeball are the biggest problems facing the American youth of today, and both should be banned immediately.
Won't someone think of the children. Thank god for Hillary.
Laugh
It's not because they don't card enough. I get carded for everything from spray paint to paint balls at walmart.
There has been a lot of concern about DVRs destroying the advertising model TV is based on. I don't think that will happen. I did take the time to reprogram my comcast dvr remote to add the 30 second skip feature (http://dcortesi.com/2005/05/04/motorola-dct6412-c omcast-dvr-30-second-skip/) but I watch a LOT more TV now then I did before I got a DVR, and while I regularly skip the commercials, I don't every time and I'm pretty sure the extended amount of time I spend in front of the TV more than makes up for the number of commercials that I do skip.
They would do the finger scan, and if it didn't work the first time the attendant would usually just manually override the scanner and let you in without much hassle. Also, the person I was with and I have similiar hand sizes, and flip-flopped passes all week. It almost certainly isn't a fingerprint scanner, just a very rough check.
Additionally, it seemed that the biggest issue with the scanner was not getting your fingers all the way into the device. If they weren't pushed all the way in, with the webbing between your index and middle fingers hitting the stopper peg, it didn't register. We kept trying to put our finger tips on the scanner assuming it was a finger print scanner, but it seems its main function is to check finger length. Of course, this is just an observation I made, I have no idea how the thing actually works.
The stuff that was used on me was not the stuff pictured in the article. It was black and white, not color, and is probably stuff that hasn't been released yet. It wasn't a plastic, but it may have been a plastic embedded in regular paper for all I know. Whatever it was, it came from someone who was working in the devlopment of digital paper, so I wouldn't be suprised if it exists but hasn't been anounced. This was only about three months ago, and there was no sleight of hand involved, it was real technology, I have been told that. Just not exactly how, for all I know it was a custom engineering job, it wouldn't be the first time this guy dropped a ton of money on a stupid prank. Further, believe it or not, my tinfoil hat is on.
This stuff is scary.
A friend of mine played a trick on me with an electronic paper prototype. He was able to get a hold of a prototype (he works in the industry, and is very wealthy) and had someone use it on me when I signed a contract. It felt enough like real paper that I didn't notice, I read the contract, it was sitting on a metal clipboard type thing, and I signed and initialed in the appropriate places. A second later, when the contract was in the other person's hand, I saw the wording and the numbers change.
Needless to say, I flipped out. Things like $1,000 changed to $1,000,000 among other things. Assuming that wasn't a totally different technology, the bastard refused to tell me how it was done, but did come out and say it was just a joke, this stuff has some very serious potential to be misused in a major way. In retrospect, I hadn't slept for close to 48 hours due to an unrelated matter, so that may have dulled my ability to recognize that it wasn't a standard piece of paper.
Car navigation sets with the two channel display technology make a lot of sense. The driver could still use the GPS, while the front seat passenger watches a movie.
I just tried Napster again yesterday for the first time in over a year, but it still suffers from all of the problems that I had with it last time.
The catalog is incomplete, to really replace Limewire, it has to offer ALL of the songs I want. That includes some pretty obscure songs. Basically, my personal library is 1,500 songs or so off of Limewire. Napster's whole library seems to show about 750,000 songs. The legal library is 500 times the size of my own, but I don't like one in every 500 songs, probably only 1 in 1,000, if that, so there are huge gaps.
DRM sucks. It basically turns digital music into something that can only be effectively used while sitting right in front of the computer. I want a standard format (MP3) that I can burn to standard audio CDS, use on my Rio MP3 player, and burn to data discs that will work in an mp3 cd player, or my set top dvd player. DRM makes much of this impractical. Of course there is the argument that everybody would just steal the MP3's provided by the service. But why bother. If they cost $1 each, and I could do whatever I wanted with them, and they were good quality, not to mention legal. I wouldn't hesitate to skip the Limewire hassle and just by directly from them.
And where in the hell is the quality that was supposed to be associated with the pay services. What is stopping Napster from offering up the songs at 512k instead of the paltry 128 that they seem to be using now (yeah, wma makes a difference, but I still want bigger files). I would be happy spending even $2 per song for 512 DRMless MP3's that are legal. Instead, the stuff Napster sells sounds the exact same as the MP3's that came off of Napster 1. Not what I was expecting. I want 14mb downloads at 5mbps+/second, and why not, except for the size I can get everything else off of Limewire.
Further, I have to boot into Windows to use Napster or itunes (not counting pymusique). I don't like doing that, and I really can't play drm'd wmas under linux.
Limewire is still the best option. It's fast for a Java Application, it runs on anything with a virtual machine, can easily max out my download bandwidth, and I can use the files however I want. Of course, most of the files aren't legal, but the legal files can't do what I want so what good are they?
It's nice to see so many people interested in this. I have been on the development team and would just like to let you all know where this project is headed. We are currently working on a matching server to hook people up to each other. The software is highly stable and fast. I just finished a 3xbox game less than a half hour ago. Pings were about 150ms, and there was NO lag. We are also working to implement chat. Expect another release in the next couple of days.