I'm not sure if people like him needs anyone to feel sorry for or to even pass any judgment on him. From the article, his friends certainly didn't. They accepted the fact and that was it. He accepted the risks and knew that there's always an element of chance. His luck ran out and he's dead. There's a great deal of stoicism that I admire in people like that. If all of us waited until all the conditions were 100% right, nothing amazing will ever be achieved.
I actually use GoogleWifi as my connection at home even though it was never designed for that. They say it's an outdoors network but they give you suggestions on how to connect. I use a PepLink 200 and a flat panel antenna to connect. Initially the performance was incredible. Nearly 1 Mbps up and down. Over time it kind of degraded. I'm situated midway between two APs with lots of trees in between so it's not optimal. The connection strength varies with time of day. It's pretty bad late at night. Sometimes I can't connect at all. Rain can degrade it as well. I don't know why it varies with time of day yet. My guess is that it's when most traffic from other networks occur around those hours. 2 AM is a good time to connect.
Pros: - Free - Fast - No monthly fee
Cons: - Unreliable - High equipment cost, depending on how far from an AP you are. It costed me $250 to get started, which is 5 months of connection. Overtime, it's definitely more cost effective.
If you happen to be close to an AP, you might not even need anything extra but performance degrades quite a bit with distance and poor line of sight. I don't have LOS to the AP but the signal bounces enough that I can connect. One possible way to fix this is to involve the users. It would be nice if people who can connect reliably would open up their APs for others and relay it. Google can give out the routers on condition that you share the signal. Just an idea. I do plan on doing that as soon as I can get it all working well.
I guess the grass is always greener. I just moved to SV from Dallas and I love it here. The cost of living is a little higher but not that much worse than what it had cost me to live in Uptown Dallas. I like being able to do things outdoors here and being able to commute to work on my bike. I don't work at a startup but at a well established company so maybe that plays a part in our different experiences. Austin isn't that much cheaper than SV but you do have the no income tax advantage in TX. For me SV is perfect precisely because everything is so concentrated here. Maybe it's a difference of personality or maybe I haven't been here long enough.
I wonder if this is a move to help Novell out since they would be immune after their little deal with Microsoft. Otherwise, I think this is more FUD along the lines of SCO, which Microsoft helped finance. I'm not too worried since Linux also has its own 800 pound gorilla in the form of IBM. IBM's patent portfolio is even bigger than Microsoft's. Also I wonder how many of those patent would actually stand up in court? Someone wiser than me once commented that a patent is a silver bullet but you get only one shot. If it gets rejected in court, it's over and you can't threaten anyone else with it anymore. The best scenario for patent holders is for the other party to roll over and hand over the cash instead of actually challenging it in court.
Unlike technology we've been creating for the rest of history, technology since the invention of computers augment our thinking and decision making. Sometimes, it replaces our role as the thinker and decision maker, even when it wasn't intended or designed to be. Then when something goes wrong, it is easy for the person to blame the device instead of taking responsibility for himself. True the GPS unit told you go into the canal but it was you, the driver, who made the decision to let it be the primary decision maker. It's really easy now to ridicule these people but as our devices become smarter and we hand over more and more of our decision making over, there will come a day when it is not so obvious who's fault it is. There will come or we're already at a point when the ability of the computer exceeds our own abilities and we have to let it make most of the decisions. I remember reading about the navy trying out neural networks for recognizing threats in sonar data and it was able to do it better than even humans. In that case, if the computer makes a mistake, who's to blame for that?
Google Wifi is deployed here in Mountain View and they're also posted on street lamps. Is it just me or does this plan just not sound very impressive. Google's system is quite interesting. Every now and then there's a very massive and obvious wifi AP up high on a pole. The rest of them would be hidden inside the street lamps and all they do is relay traffic back to the other ones. This saves them from having to actually wire every lamp post.
Guys... we need some perspectives here. Forget Microsoft and VMware. The important thing here, that most of us missed, is that Jesus Christ is back and submitting articles to Slashdot.
And for the web 2.0 version, I'll make a mash-up between that and hotornot.com where the user can rate the animal on perceived taste from "Yuck" to "Let's farm these suckers" to "Will all be eaten before domestication".
IANAL but I think you're referring to common carrier status, which telcos and ISPs have, which would become questionable if they start shaping traffic inviolating of net neutrality. In any case, YouTube doesn't fit under that and IIRC publishers or facilitators of copyright infringement can be sued for damage. The example my law professor used is if created a venue where everyone comes and infringed on copyrights, you can be sued, especially if you profit off of it, which Youtube certainly does. This case certainly has merits but I don't know how much merits it has.
Google must have known about the consequences of buying YouTube though. I hope their legal team are as good as their engineers.
It will be interesting how these cases play out because they're relatively pioneering. In one sense, YouTube is benefiting from the infringement but those cases are a minority of their revenue. It is also extremely difficult to police their content.
"As with every piece of software, it'd be perfect if it wasn't for the users."
That's the wrong attitude to take when considering software. The user is a fundamental part of the software. Without considering your audience, you cannot write good software. If Digg doesn't match its audience, which it apparently can't when taken to the extreme, then it is not good software. A lot of people criticize Windows but you have to give them credit for who they target as their audience. Likewise for Linux. It's great for its original audience of techies but have had a lot of trouble expanding to the desktop. Neither Windows nor Linux are perfect and apparently neither is Digg because there are certain cases or groups that they cannot handle well. That's almost a fact of life and as a software engineer, you can decide whether to fix it or just say "won't fix".
How do you view the risk of Oracle buying you out? It seems that they bought InnoDB to fight the growth of MySQL since it takes MySQL one step closer to enterprise level DB. With the IPO, they could just buy you guys outright and put an end to a large part of the open source DB threat. I guess in that case we can always fork...
We know there are both supply and demand for high speed Internet connections. Supply and demand applies to services as well. T1 is a service and there is certainly an inventory, even if we assume it is no physical. T1 is a line. There's a port on a router somewhere. There is a finite amount of T1s in the world. There is most definitely an inventory. Inventory doesn't apply in the case of information, which is not the case here. T1s carry information but are not information themselves.
If we assume that T1 and DSLs/cable are the same thing to the buyer, then the cost is totally pointless. If company A can offer a high speed connection to me at $29/month and company B can offer the SAME at $1000/month, I'm going to go with company A. I don't care that it costs company B $950/month to supply that service. This is the exact principle that leads to a less efficient product or means of production being driven out of the market. Since T1s aren't dying out, we know that our assumption about T1 = DSL is incorrect. Therefore there must be a differentiating characteristic.
That analogy doesn't work. Price is determined by both supply and demand. If there is a large supply of essentially the same thing for less, there's no reason why the price wouldn't drop. The cost to the manufacturer or provider doesn't determine the market price. Take for example, if you do a piss poor job of coding a program to play Tetris and it costs you 10 years to do it, you're still not going to be able to sell that game for more than what's available on the market. The author's real question isn't why the price is high but rather what differentiates a T1 from the more consumer, cheaper connections that allows it to be unaffected by the prices in those markets.
Still, even if he is the sole author of it, he has a moral obligation to inform the stake holders, which includes the users, of the license change. Let the users then make an informed decision about what to do.
Since when have private individual have an explicit exception to the law? The members of the RIAA and MPAA are corporations, thus making them individual under the law. Fine, if they get an exception like that, I want an exception for me to the tax laws and all the criminal codes. Just me though because I'm that special.
Get charged with selling drugs to little kids, then as a deal to avoid jail time and fines, you get punished by having to give free samples of the drug to those kids. Worked for Microsoft in the US...
Well, if you believe what most economists believe, which is things like pollution is considered externality and the cost of production, then air pollution would fall under commerce. This is especially true considering the fact that you can trade carbon credits and can actually monetize carbon or the lack of carbon emission.
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I'm not sure if people like him needs anyone to feel sorry for or to even pass any judgment on him. From the article, his friends certainly didn't. They accepted the fact and that was it. He accepted the risks and knew that there's always an element of chance. His luck ran out and he's dead. There's a great deal of stoicism that I admire in people like that. If all of us waited until all the conditions were 100% right, nothing amazing will ever be achieved.
I actually use GoogleWifi as my connection at home even though it was never designed for that. They say it's an outdoors network but they give you suggestions on how to connect. I use a PepLink 200 and a flat panel antenna to connect. Initially the performance was incredible. Nearly 1 Mbps up and down. Over time it kind of degraded. I'm situated midway between two APs with lots of trees in between so it's not optimal. The connection strength varies with time of day. It's pretty bad late at night. Sometimes I can't connect at all. Rain can degrade it as well. I don't know why it varies with time of day yet. My guess is that it's when most traffic from other networks occur around those hours. 2 AM is a good time to connect.
Pros:
- Free
- Fast
- No monthly fee
Cons:
- Unreliable
- High equipment cost, depending on how far from an AP you are. It costed me $250 to get started, which is 5 months of connection. Overtime, it's definitely more cost effective.
If you happen to be close to an AP, you might not even need anything extra but performance degrades quite a bit with distance and poor line of sight. I don't have LOS to the AP but the signal bounces enough that I can connect. One possible way to fix this is to involve the users. It would be nice if people who can connect reliably would open up their APs for others and relay it. Google can give out the routers on condition that you share the signal. Just an idea. I do plan on doing that as soon as I can get it all working well.
I guess the grass is always greener. I just moved to SV from Dallas and I love it here. The cost of living is a little higher but not that much worse than what it had cost me to live in Uptown Dallas. I like being able to do things outdoors here and being able to commute to work on my bike. I don't work at a startup but at a well established company so maybe that plays a part in our different experiences. Austin isn't that much cheaper than SV but you do have the no income tax advantage in TX. For me SV is perfect precisely because everything is so concentrated here. Maybe it's a difference of personality or maybe I haven't been here long enough.
I wonder if this is a move to help Novell out since they would be immune after their little deal with Microsoft. Otherwise, I think this is more FUD along the lines of SCO, which Microsoft helped finance. I'm not too worried since Linux also has its own 800 pound gorilla in the form of IBM. IBM's patent portfolio is even bigger than Microsoft's. Also I wonder how many of those patent would actually stand up in court? Someone wiser than me once commented that a patent is a silver bullet but you get only one shot. If it gets rejected in court, it's over and you can't threaten anyone else with it anymore. The best scenario for patent holders is for the other party to roll over and hand over the cash instead of actually challenging it in court.
Unlike technology we've been creating for the rest of history, technology since the invention of computers augment our thinking and decision making. Sometimes, it replaces our role as the thinker and decision maker, even when it wasn't intended or designed to be. Then when something goes wrong, it is easy for the person to blame the device instead of taking responsibility for himself. True the GPS unit told you go into the canal but it was you, the driver, who made the decision to let it be the primary decision maker. It's really easy now to ridicule these people but as our devices become smarter and we hand over more and more of our decision making over, there will come a day when it is not so obvious who's fault it is. There will come or we're already at a point when the ability of the computer exceeds our own abilities and we have to let it make most of the decisions. I remember reading about the navy trying out neural networks for recognizing threats in sonar data and it was able to do it better than even humans. In that case, if the computer makes a mistake, who's to blame for that?
Shit! It did? Be right back.
Google Wifi is deployed here in Mountain View and they're also posted on street lamps. Is it just me or does this plan just not sound very impressive. Google's system is quite interesting. Every now and then there's a very massive and obvious wifi AP up high on a pole. The rest of them would be hidden inside the street lamps and all they do is relay traffic back to the other ones. This saves them from having to actually wire every lamp post.
Guys... we need some perspectives here. Forget Microsoft and VMware. The important thing here, that most of us missed, is that Jesus Christ is back and submitting articles to Slashdot.
Did anyone else read the Wired Article about how the CIA got some Americans out of Iran using a fake cover story about producing a Sci-Fi movie in Iran? After the Iranians took our embassy during their revolution, they hired a bunch of rug weavers to reassemble our shredded documents according to article. Wonder how successful they were...
And for the web 2.0 version, I'll make a mash-up between that and hotornot.com where the user can rate the animal on perceived taste from "Yuck" to "Let's farm these suckers" to "Will all be eaten before domestication".
Maybe they forgot to salt the password first before hashing?
IANAL but I think you're referring to common carrier status, which telcos and ISPs have, which would become questionable if they start shaping traffic inviolating of net neutrality. In any case, YouTube doesn't fit under that and IIRC publishers or facilitators of copyright infringement can be sued for damage. The example my law professor used is if created a venue where everyone comes and infringed on copyrights, you can be sued, especially if you profit off of it, which Youtube certainly does. This case certainly has merits but I don't know how much merits it has.
Google must have known about the consequences of buying YouTube though. I hope their legal team are as good as their engineers.
It will be interesting how these cases play out because they're relatively pioneering. In one sense, YouTube is benefiting from the infringement but those cases are a minority of their revenue. It is also extremely difficult to police their content.
"As with every piece of software, it'd be perfect if it wasn't for the users."
That's the wrong attitude to take when considering software. The user is a fundamental part of the software. Without considering your audience, you cannot write good software. If Digg doesn't match its audience, which it apparently can't when taken to the extreme, then it is not good software. A lot of people criticize Windows but you have to give them credit for who they target as their audience. Likewise for Linux. It's great for its original audience of techies but have had a lot of trouble expanding to the desktop. Neither Windows nor Linux are perfect and apparently neither is Digg because there are certain cases or groups that they cannot handle well. That's almost a fact of life and as a software engineer, you can decide whether to fix it or just say "won't fix".
How do you view the risk of Oracle buying you out? It seems that they bought InnoDB to fight the growth of MySQL since it takes MySQL one step closer to enterprise level DB. With the IPO, they could just buy you guys outright and put an end to a large part of the open source DB threat. I guess in that case we can always fork...
Best of luck! You guys are amazing.
We know there are both supply and demand for high speed Internet connections. Supply and demand applies to services as well. T1 is a service and there is certainly an inventory, even if we assume it is no physical. T1 is a line. There's a port on a router somewhere. There is a finite amount of T1s in the world. There is most definitely an inventory. Inventory doesn't apply in the case of information, which is not the case here. T1s carry information but are not information themselves.
If we assume that T1 and DSLs/cable are the same thing to the buyer, then the cost is totally pointless. If company A can offer a high speed connection to me at $29/month and company B can offer the SAME at $1000/month, I'm going to go with company A. I don't care that it costs company B $950/month to supply that service. This is the exact principle that leads to a less efficient product or means of production being driven out of the market. Since T1s aren't dying out, we know that our assumption about T1 = DSL is incorrect. Therefore there must be a differentiating characteristic.
That analogy doesn't work. Price is determined by both supply and demand. If there is a large supply of essentially the same thing for less, there's no reason why the price wouldn't drop. The cost to the manufacturer or provider doesn't determine the market price. Take for example, if you do a piss poor job of coding a program to play Tetris and it costs you 10 years to do it, you're still not going to be able to sell that game for more than what's available on the market. The author's real question isn't why the price is high but rather what differentiates a T1 from the more consumer, cheaper connections that allows it to be unaffected by the prices in those markets.
List of sponsors: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR009 64:@@@P
I wonder how much donations from companies these guys get.
Out of control or beyond THEIR control?
Damn dude, leave some for the rest of us. Now how am I going to get my comment modded up?
Still, even if he is the sole author of it, he has a moral obligation to inform the stake holders, which includes the users, of the license change. Let the users then make an informed decision about what to do.
Uh... not sure about that but California law legalized marijuana but Federal courts said Federal law trumps it.
That's right by where I get my groceries... Kind of sad that I never noticed.
Since when have private individual have an explicit exception to the law? The members of the RIAA and MPAA are corporations, thus making them individual under the law. Fine, if they get an exception like that, I want an exception for me to the tax laws and all the criminal codes. Just me though because I'm that special.
I got one that's even better:
Get charged with selling drugs to little kids, then as a deal to avoid jail time and fines, you get punished by having to give free samples of the drug to those kids. Worked for Microsoft in the US...
Well, if you believe what most economists believe, which is things like pollution is considered externality and the cost of production, then air pollution would fall under commerce. This is especially true considering the fact that you can trade carbon credits and can actually monetize carbon or the lack of carbon emission.