It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat.
Ah, quite the contrary. It's my (imperfect) understanding that the rate of speciation goes up when resources are limited, and goes down during times of plenty.
The theory is that differences in individuals aren't sufficient to lead to speciation until they become survival traits. In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful. But in a more constrained environment, different traits become survival factors, and individuals with specific survival traits will tend to interbreed, leading eventually to speciation.
To use a really simple example, imagine a grassland populated by browsing mammals. The population is stable, the food and water sources are plentiful, the predation is low. Now kill off all the grass. Most of the browsing mammals will die off immediately. Some of them will have the (probably recessive) trait of being able to eat something other than grass; tree bark, maybe. Those individuals will survive and interbreed. Another group of the browsers will have the recessive trait of being able to eat dead browser. Those will survive-- thrive, even, given all the handy dead browserbeast carcasses lying around-- and interbreed. Eventually the two varieties of ex-browsers will drift far enough apart that they can no longer breed to produce fertile offspring. They'll become different species.
That's a common misconception. DNA analysis is still a very haphazard process. We have tools like PCR to amplify small samples of DNA to the point where they can be analysed, but to say that one cell is enough is simply not true with current technology. You don't need much, but you certainly need many tens of thousands of cells to do a practical comparison or sequencing.
It won't be long before cheap DNA analyzers are available in every police station and hospital in the developed world, and in military bases around the world.
Actually, given the current technology and rate of advancement over the past 50 years, it'll be quite a long time before anything like that is available. Decades at least. Sorry.;-)
Why is the definition that I learned way back in junior high (that is, a group whose members can interbreed to produce viable and fertile offspring) not suitable? This definition tells us, for example, that horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) are different species. Although you can breed horses and donkeys to produce viable mules, those mules aren't fertile, so horses and donkeys do not belong to the same species.
You forgot to take into account the rate of speciation. About which we basically know nothing. Lots of theory and fossil evidence, but as to the rate of speciation occurring today, we know nothing.
Spoken like a true guy who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Companies are buying servers from Sun, IBM (their non-Intel ones), SGI, even Apple in about the same numbers that they ever were, adjusted for the total market decline. (In other words, if 1 out of 10 servers sold in 1997 was Sun, then about 1 out of 10 sold today would still be a Sun.)
There's plenty of market out there for non-Dell, non-Intel, non-Microsoft servers.
It's also a question of alignment. When getting used to a new keyboard, I often find myself hitting 'f' instead of 'd' and others. Especially in the dark.
As long as I can remember, Mac keyboards (laptops, too) have had pips on the F and J keys. Really handy if all you use is Macs, like I do now. If you go back and forth, like I used to, lt's less so.
This looks like a less attractive version of the SliMP3 player from Slim Devices.
Uh... the "SliMP3" (what the hell happened to nice names that a boy can pronounce?) is one of the ugliest pieces of kit I've ever laid eyes on. Saying that this thing is even uglier is going a long, long way in my book.
Anyone remember Apricots from the 80's ? They had an alphanumeric lcd with programmable function keys under it, neat idea, no idea why it didn't catch on.
Because the keyboards weighed 156 pounds each, and after a few hours of use the surface temperature approached the boiling point.
Doesn't really matter I think. Most people who spend a lot of time can touch type, so as long as you can find the keyboard it doesn't really matter if you can see the letters.
Quick! Which key on your keyboard has the "&" character on it? Don't look!
What about the "["? Or the "`"?
Even touch-typists need to look at the keys sometimes.
I believe acts like taping a show and giving the tape to a friend or relative are allowed by the HRRA.
I believe you are incorrect. Taping for use within the home is allowed, but giving that tape to a friend is distribution, and so is not allowed. Making a copy for a friend is definitely not allowed.
I would totally agree if he was building the whole thing from scratch, but he's not. Each site already has an existing network, presumably already set up with their own subnets, switches, etc.
Is that what it sounded like to you? I didn't get that at all. He referred to himself as "the computer guy." It sounds to me like this is obviously a one-horse operation.
Call your local telco, dude. When you buy "dark fiber" from the telco, they do not just sell you a piece of glass. They sell you a service, and that service includes repeaters and whatever else is necessary to get the light from point A to point B. When an old customer of mine bought dark fiber from Seattle to Chicago for an HD project they were working on, do you think it was one contiguous piece of glass? Hell, no. And here's another little tip, friend: it's never, ever single-mode, either. Customer equipment (as opposed to telco equipment) is nearly always multimode.
I don't know where you get your information, but you need to look again.
I'm with you, I don't have a clue what Internet Explorer has to do with this story.
Nothing, as far as I can see. Doesn't really have anything to do with spam, either, in any meaningful sense, unless "spam" now means any large-scale use of email. The CNN article says
U.S. military and other U.S. government agencies have begun a surreptitious e-mail campaign inside Iraq, CNN has learned, in an effort to get some Iraqis to defy President Saddam Hussein. [...] Thousands of e-mail messages have been sent out since Thursday, a military source told CNN. [...] The message includes instructions to the e-mail recipients to contact the United Nations in Iraq if they want to defect. [...] The U.S. military and intelligence officials were apparently hoping that the Iraqis do not realize where the e-mails are coming from.
Uh. My TiVo is connected to my TV. When I'm at home, my iPod is connected to my stereo.
And it's quite easy to use.
Yes, I'm sure it passes the mom test quite handily. "Okay, Mom, all you have to do is log in, then go to 'Start,' 'Cyberlink,' 'PowerVCR II.' Okay? Then click this button here that looks like... well, okay, it kinda looks like the Devil's ATM machine. All right, click that and then select the file you want to watch. Like if I wanted to watch an 'Oprah' episode from two weeks ago, I'd just pick '4_CH4_11_16_10_7.0000.' Got it? Mom? Mom? Where ya goin', Mom? Mommy? Don't you love me any more, Mommy? Oh, Mommy, no!"
Huh, okay I see that now. Here's why I do: type "hotmail.com" in the address bar. Enter user name and password. Get the JavaScript error. Type "hotmail.com" in the address bar again. This time I'm just asked for my password. Enter it. Get right in to my mailbox.
Try that workaround. Meanwhile, I've put in a bug report on your behalf.
From my understanding of hypothetical, those examples are real, not hypothetical, because he said his parents did watch 'The Shield' and he did watch 'Buffy the Vampire'.
That's not the hypothetical part. The hypothetical part is the aspect of his argument that says, "If, hypothetically, the old episodes were not available via reruns, then we could have used show-sharing." He's using a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate how useful show-sharing would be. My point is that hypothetical scenarios are a dime a dozen, while the real examples are much less common. My larger point, of course, is that TiVo should (or should have) avoid implementing a show-sharing feature that few people will find more than simply convenient until the legal issues sort themselves out.
Keep in mind that even HDTV only uses up to 19.2Mbps
That's only after the signal has been compressed for OTA transmission. That usually happens either at or right before the transmitter. Within a facility, you're pushing around full-bandwidth SMPTE 292M serial digital HD, at a bit rate of about 1.3 Gbps. Which is still no problem for dark fiber.
This is kind of a tangent, but the most impressive use of dark fiber I've ever heard of was a test that SGI did with the government. They leased a dark fiber link from one of the big nationwide telcos (for some reason I want to say Qwest, but I'm not sure that's right) for a couple of days and ran GSN over it. GSN runs at 6.4 Gbps. My friend was on the team, and he said they ran 790 MB/s (bytes, not bits) us OS bypass across the country for hours and hours. The network link was so fast that they could measure to an accuracy of about 2 microseconds the speed-of-light latency from Chantilly, VA, to Mt. View, CA. Pretty amazing stuff.
Everyone seems to be focusing on puting fibre switches at each location, which I think is an unnecessary expense.
Yeah, but the thing is that each site is presumably going to need a switch anyway. It's much simpler to just link the Ethernet switches together to form a single network segment across all the links than to mess with routing and whatnot on dual-NIC PC's. Cheaper, too, since, like I said, they're going to need those switches anyway.
That said, dual-NIC PC's could work. You'd have to allocate a different subnet to each site, and set up each computer on the whole network with the correct routing tables, but it could be done. I just think switch-to-switch is simpler.
I think your over-simplifying your defination of "dark fiber" since it sounds like some telcos are willing to market unused portions of DWDM as "dark fiber."
It's not really my definition of "dark fiber" that counts. It's the telco's. When you buy "dark fiber" from a telco, you get a multimode fiber connection on each end. Plug each end into your equipment and you're up and running. What actually goes on in the middle is the telco's business. "Dark fiber" is a guarantee that the link will act like a continuous piece of MMF, only without all the bother associated with long MMF runs. The telco might actually sell you a piece of unused glass with repeaters already on it, or they might sell you a lambda of a DWDM fiber. In any case, you can treat it like it's just one long connection.
He hasn't even explained what sort of fibre it is! Single mode? Multi mode? Frequency division?
It doesn't matter. When you buy dark fiber from a telco, you're given an MMF connection for each end. The link behaves just like it's a nice short run of multi-mode fiber. What actually happens in between-- DWDM, repeaters, microwave links, whatever-- is irrelevant. In fact, if everything is working properly, you'll never even be able to tell that there's anything going on in the middle at all.
I guess a lot of people are confused by the term "dark fiber." It's hardly ever literally true. When you buy "dark fiber" from a telco, what you're getting is an analog optical link to do with what you will. You can run anything over it that you can run over ordinary MMF. Is it ever actually, literally, "dark?" Hardly ever.
Can he afford a fibre ring?
Read the submission again. The telco is providing these links in a hub-and-spoke topology for free. "Can he afford a fiber ring" is a completely irrelevant question.
What sort of redundancy does he need?
None. They're going to use the links for IP traffic only when they're not being used for video. It'll be an ad-hoc network.
How long are the fibre runs?
It. Does. Not. Matter.
There are plenty of solutions here - ATM between sites with LANE, GigE into some 3550s, 10baseF into tranceivers
Fortunately, the submitter gave you a hint. He said "cheapest." Would ATM with LANE be "cheapest?" Of course not. Would Cisco gear be "cheapest?" Of course not. You're not even trying to be helpful, are you?
This guy obviously doesn't even know the extent to which he's in over his head.
You're just trying to make it sound more complicated than it is. Dark fiber is, far and away, the simplest form of long-range communication known to man. Well, maybe smoke signals or cups-and-string are simpler. Shine a blinky light down one end, and it'll come out the other. The question before the group is what's the cheapest way to turn Ethernet into blinky light and back again.
Without knowing the fiber type and the length of the runs it is not possible to answer the question
You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you? When a telco sells you "dark fiber" they're either literally selling you unused MMF, with repeaters in place, or they're selling you an unused lambda. In either case, the interface to customer equipment is multi-mode fiber, and you can run anything over it that you would run over a shorter piece of fiber.
But, what are the distances? Are the runs one kilometer or are they 30 kilometers? What type of fibre is it? How may connections are there in the fibre? Has the fibre been tested(characterization) to determine dispertion levels due to fibre quality, distance and connections.
If you were pulling your own glass, those would all be relevant questions. Since these connections come from a telco, the telco takes care of all of those things for you.
Look, buying dark fiber is like buying a dry pair from the telephone company. You have a pair of wires on one and and a pair of wires on the other, and you can use them as if they were opposite ends of the same piece of continuous copper. Are they really? No. The signals on your dry pair pass through switches and muxes from here to there. But the telco guarantees that the dry pair will act like a single piece of wire.
Dark fiber is the same way. No matter what is actually between you-- DWDM mux and demux, repeaters, microwave links, whatever-- the telco guarantees that the dark fiber link will act like one long piece of MMF.
Going further, what is cheap? It's rather subjective, don't you think?
Sure, it would be subjective if he'd said "cheap." If he'd said, "What's a cheap way to built a TCP/IP network over dark fiber?" there would have been hundreds of good answers. But he didn't say "cheap." He said "cheapest." And my answer, to my knowledge, comes down as the cheapest possible way to run TCP/IP over dark fiber.
Cheap to some people means a couple hundred dollars. It's highly unlikely that he could build the network for that.
It's highly likely that he could build the network for that, if he could get ahold of cheap used 10BASE-F or 100BASE-F gear. With the current business environment, the market is positively saturated with this kind of gear for pennies on the dollar.
The poster didn't come close to providing the required information with the question and got what he deserved.
Yup. As of the time that I wrote my post, the submitter had received about a dozen smart-assed, sarcastic responses and two helpful ones. Par for the course for an Ask Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you would... hm. You could... uh... hmm. Maybe sort them by color, or by smell, or by how well they go with bearnaise sauce?
I see your point.
It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat.
Ah, quite the contrary. It's my (imperfect) understanding that the rate of speciation goes up when resources are limited, and goes down during times of plenty.
The theory is that differences in individuals aren't sufficient to lead to speciation until they become survival traits. In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful. But in a more constrained environment, different traits become survival factors, and individuals with specific survival traits will tend to interbreed, leading eventually to speciation.
To use a really simple example, imagine a grassland populated by browsing mammals. The population is stable, the food and water sources are plentiful, the predation is low. Now kill off all the grass. Most of the browsing mammals will die off immediately. Some of them will have the (probably recessive) trait of being able to eat something other than grass; tree bark, maybe. Those individuals will survive and interbreed. Another group of the browsers will have the recessive trait of being able to eat dead browser. Those will survive-- thrive, even, given all the handy dead browserbeast carcasses lying around-- and interbreed. Eventually the two varieties of ex-browsers will drift far enough apart that they can no longer breed to produce fertile offspring. They'll become different species.
That's the theory, anyway.
All you need is one cell for the DNA analysis.
;-)
That's a common misconception. DNA analysis is still a very haphazard process. We have tools like PCR to amplify small samples of DNA to the point where they can be analysed, but to say that one cell is enough is simply not true with current technology. You don't need much, but you certainly need many tens of thousands of cells to do a practical comparison or sequencing.
It won't be long before cheap DNA analyzers are available in every police station and hospital in the developed world, and in military bases around the world.
Actually, given the current technology and rate of advancement over the past 50 years, it'll be quite a long time before anything like that is available. Decades at least. Sorry.
Why is the definition that I learned way back in junior high (that is, a group whose members can interbreed to produce viable and fertile offspring) not suitable? This definition tells us, for example, that horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) are different species. Although you can breed horses and donkeys to produce viable mules, those mules aren't fertile, so horses and donkeys do not belong to the same species.
What's wrong with that defintion?
You forgot to take into account the rate of speciation. About which we basically know nothing. Lots of theory and fossil evidence, but as to the rate of speciation occurring today, we know nothing.
Yeah, people have been saying that same thing since, what, the late 1970's? I'm sure it's going to happen, like, any minute now.
Spoken like a true guy who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Companies are buying servers from Sun, IBM (their non-Intel ones), SGI, even Apple in about the same numbers that they ever were, adjusted for the total market decline. (In other words, if 1 out of 10 servers sold in 1997 was Sun, then about 1 out of 10 sold today would still be a Sun.)
There's plenty of market out there for non-Dell, non-Intel, non-Microsoft servers.
It's also a question of alignment. When getting used to a new keyboard, I often find myself hitting 'f' instead of 'd' and others. Especially in the dark.
As long as I can remember, Mac keyboards (laptops, too) have had pips on the F and J keys. Really handy if all you use is Macs, like I do now. If you go back and forth, like I used to, lt's less so.
This looks like a less attractive version of the SliMP3 player from Slim Devices.
Uh... the "SliMP3" (what the hell happened to nice names that a boy can pronounce?) is one of the ugliest pieces of kit I've ever laid eyes on. Saying that this thing is even uglier is going a long, long way in my book.
Anyone remember Apricots from the 80's ? They had an alphanumeric lcd with programmable function keys under it, neat idea, no idea why it didn't catch on.
Because the keyboards weighed 156 pounds each, and after a few hours of use the surface temperature approached the boiling point.
Bit of a showstopper, that.
Doesn't really matter I think. Most people who spend a lot of time can touch type, so as long as you can find the keyboard it doesn't really matter if you can see the letters.
Quick! Which key on your keyboard has the "&" character on it? Don't look!
What about the "["? Or the "`"?
Even touch-typists need to look at the keys sometimes.
I believe acts like taping a show and giving the tape to a friend or relative are allowed by the HRRA.
I believe you are incorrect. Taping for use within the home is allowed, but giving that tape to a friend is distribution, and so is not allowed. Making a copy for a friend is definitely not allowed.
the king of one group of people is having his judgement clouded by a wicked chancellor who is actually working for the evil one.
Yeah, not like that particular story element goes back to the Bible or Homer or anything.
I would totally agree if he was building the whole thing from scratch, but he's not. Each site already has an existing network, presumably already set up with their own subnets, switches, etc.
Is that what it sounded like to you? I didn't get that at all. He referred to himself as "the computer guy." It sounds to me like this is obviously a one-horse operation.
Call your local telco, dude. When you buy "dark fiber" from the telco, they do not just sell you a piece of glass. They sell you a service, and that service includes repeaters and whatever else is necessary to get the light from point A to point B. When an old customer of mine bought dark fiber from Seattle to Chicago for an HD project they were working on, do you think it was one contiguous piece of glass? Hell, no. And here's another little tip, friend: it's never, ever single-mode, either. Customer equipment (as opposed to telco equipment) is nearly always multimode.
I don't know where you get your information, but you need to look again.
Nothing, as far as I can see. Doesn't really have anything to do with spam, either, in any meaningful sense, unless "spam" now means any large-scale use of email. The CNN article saysIf you ask me, this is a great idea.
Does your TiVo act as a jukebox as well?
Uh. My TiVo is connected to my TV. When I'm at home, my iPod is connected to my stereo.
And it's quite easy to use.
Yes, I'm sure it passes the mom test quite handily. "Okay, Mom, all you have to do is log in, then go to 'Start,' 'Cyberlink,' 'PowerVCR II.' Okay? Then click this button here that looks like... well, okay, it kinda looks like the Devil's ATM machine. All right, click that and then select the file you want to watch. Like if I wanted to watch an 'Oprah' episode from two weeks ago, I'd just pick '4_CH4_11_16_10_7.0000.' Got it? Mom? Mom? Where ya goin', Mom? Mommy? Don't you love me any more, Mommy? Oh, Mommy, no!"
It seems to be both more and less complex than that. See my post here for an explanation of my workaround.
Huh, okay I see that now. Here's why I do: type "hotmail.com" in the address bar. Enter user name and password. Get the JavaScript error. Type "hotmail.com" in the address bar again. This time I'm just asked for my password. Enter it. Get right in to my mailbox.
Try that workaround. Meanwhile, I've put in a bug report on your behalf.
From my understanding of hypothetical, those examples are real, not hypothetical, because he said his parents did watch 'The Shield' and he did watch 'Buffy the Vampire'.
That's not the hypothetical part. The hypothetical part is the aspect of his argument that says, "If, hypothetically, the old episodes were not available via reruns, then we could have used show-sharing." He's using a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate how useful show-sharing would be. My point is that hypothetical scenarios are a dime a dozen, while the real examples are much less common. My larger point, of course, is that TiVo should (or should have) avoid implementing a show-sharing feature that few people will find more than simply convenient until the legal issues sort themselves out.
Keep in mind that even HDTV only uses up to 19.2Mbps
That's only after the signal has been compressed for OTA transmission. That usually happens either at or right before the transmitter. Within a facility, you're pushing around full-bandwidth SMPTE 292M serial digital HD, at a bit rate of about 1.3 Gbps. Which is still no problem for dark fiber.
This is kind of a tangent, but the most impressive use of dark fiber I've ever heard of was a test that SGI did with the government. They leased a dark fiber link from one of the big nationwide telcos (for some reason I want to say Qwest, but I'm not sure that's right) for a couple of days and ran GSN over it. GSN runs at 6.4 Gbps. My friend was on the team, and he said they ran 790 MB/s (bytes, not bits) us OS bypass across the country for hours and hours. The network link was so fast that they could measure to an accuracy of about 2 microseconds the speed-of-light latency from Chantilly, VA, to Mt. View, CA. Pretty amazing stuff.
Everyone seems to be focusing on puting fibre switches at each location, which I think is an unnecessary expense.
Yeah, but the thing is that each site is presumably going to need a switch anyway. It's much simpler to just link the Ethernet switches together to form a single network segment across all the links than to mess with routing and whatnot on dual-NIC PC's. Cheaper, too, since, like I said, they're going to need those switches anyway.
That said, dual-NIC PC's could work. You'd have to allocate a different subnet to each site, and set up each computer on the whole network with the correct routing tables, but it could be done. I just think switch-to-switch is simpler.
I think your over-simplifying your defination of "dark fiber" since it sounds like some telcos are willing to market unused portions of DWDM as "dark fiber."
It's not really my definition of "dark fiber" that counts. It's the telco's. When you buy "dark fiber" from a telco, you get a multimode fiber connection on each end. Plug each end into your equipment and you're up and running. What actually goes on in the middle is the telco's business. "Dark fiber" is a guarantee that the link will act like a continuous piece of MMF, only without all the bother associated with long MMF runs. The telco might actually sell you a piece of unused glass with repeaters already on it, or they might sell you a lambda of a DWDM fiber. In any case, you can treat it like it's just one long connection.
He hasn't even explained what sort of fibre it is! Single mode? Multi mode? Frequency division?
It doesn't matter. When you buy dark fiber from a telco, you're given an MMF connection for each end. The link behaves just like it's a nice short run of multi-mode fiber. What actually happens in between-- DWDM, repeaters, microwave links, whatever-- is irrelevant. In fact, if everything is working properly, you'll never even be able to tell that there's anything going on in the middle at all.
I guess a lot of people are confused by the term "dark fiber." It's hardly ever literally true. When you buy "dark fiber" from a telco, what you're getting is an analog optical link to do with what you will. You can run anything over it that you can run over ordinary MMF. Is it ever actually, literally, "dark?" Hardly ever.
Can he afford a fibre ring?
Read the submission again. The telco is providing these links in a hub-and-spoke topology for free. "Can he afford a fiber ring" is a completely irrelevant question.
What sort of redundancy does he need?
None. They're going to use the links for IP traffic only when they're not being used for video. It'll be an ad-hoc network.
How long are the fibre runs?
It. Does. Not. Matter.
There are plenty of solutions here - ATM between sites with LANE, GigE into some 3550s, 10baseF into tranceivers
Fortunately, the submitter gave you a hint. He said "cheapest." Would ATM with LANE be "cheapest?" Of course not. Would Cisco gear be "cheapest?" Of course not. You're not even trying to be helpful, are you?
This guy obviously doesn't even know the extent to which he's in over his head.
You're just trying to make it sound more complicated than it is. Dark fiber is, far and away, the simplest form of long-range communication known to man. Well, maybe smoke signals or cups-and-string are simpler. Shine a blinky light down one end, and it'll come out the other. The question before the group is what's the cheapest way to turn Ethernet into blinky light and back again.
Without knowing the fiber type and the length of the runs it is not possible to answer the question
You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you? When a telco sells you "dark fiber" they're either literally selling you unused MMF, with repeaters in place, or they're selling you an unused lambda. In either case, the interface to customer equipment is multi-mode fiber, and you can run anything over it that you would run over a shorter piece of fiber.
But, what are the distances? Are the runs one kilometer or are they 30 kilometers? What type of fibre is it? How may connections are there in the fibre? Has the fibre been tested(characterization) to determine dispertion levels due to fibre quality, distance and connections.
If you were pulling your own glass, those would all be relevant questions. Since these connections come from a telco, the telco takes care of all of those things for you.
Look, buying dark fiber is like buying a dry pair from the telephone company. You have a pair of wires on one and and a pair of wires on the other, and you can use them as if they were opposite ends of the same piece of continuous copper. Are they really? No. The signals on your dry pair pass through switches and muxes from here to there. But the telco guarantees that the dry pair will act like a single piece of wire.
Dark fiber is the same way. No matter what is actually between you-- DWDM mux and demux, repeaters, microwave links, whatever-- the telco guarantees that the dark fiber link will act like one long piece of MMF.
Going further, what is cheap? It's rather subjective, don't you think?
Sure, it would be subjective if he'd said "cheap." If he'd said, "What's a cheap way to built a TCP/IP network over dark fiber?" there would have been hundreds of good answers. But he didn't say "cheap." He said "cheapest." And my answer, to my knowledge, comes down as the cheapest possible way to run TCP/IP over dark fiber.
Cheap to some people means a couple hundred dollars. It's highly unlikely that he could build the network for that.
It's highly likely that he could build the network for that, if he could get ahold of cheap used 10BASE-F or 100BASE-F gear. With the current business environment, the market is positively saturated with this kind of gear for pennies on the dollar.
The poster didn't come close to providing the required information with the question and got what he deserved.
Yup. As of the time that I wrote my post, the submitter had received about a dozen smart-assed, sarcastic responses and two helpful ones. Par for the course for an Ask Slashdot.