while I was looking for images of ‘bullet trains’ on google images I came accross this odd ‘gallery’ [Mildly NSFW].
Sometimes I really have a hard time understanding other peoples fetishes. Of course I don’t have to.
I have no time to read this, but I certainly will try to see what Will Wright says about games
BlogsNow started crashing. I wonder if it is the CPU temperature. Since I am a 5000 miles away from the computer I needed something to measure the temperature. This was harder to google to than it should be. In the end it was as simple as:
yum install lm_sensors
/etc/rc.d/init.d/lm_sensors start
sensors-detect
[accept all defaults]
sensors
[will output what the machine feels like]
now I need to copy this to another machine and then I know what happens when the machine dies.
A super simple monitoring way is to create an executable cgi file in your webservers path like this:
#!/bin/bash
echo Content-type: text/plain
echo ""
date
sensors
And then you wget / cron on a different machine to get the status and pipe it to one file …
says Mark Cuban
Of course he is right. I do dissagree with the focus on the last mile. Bandwidth between one and 5 Megabit a second is actually good enough for lots of uses. The real problem will be the backbones. Right now everybody and his dog tries to get a big user base. Subsrcibers rarely change services. The more highspeed client Telco and Co rake in the better they think. Performance and price are two main criteria in choosing an internet provider.
Since Cuban kicks predictions around here are mine:
I think that most Telco’s oversold their inventory. Maybe not by todays surfing habbits. But these are radically changing. A thing called “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” will cause serious troubles. Your average Internet ISP CEO might not have a concept of it yet. He probably still mumbles ‘google google google’ every minute or so in a failing attempt to get what made these people so sucessfull. If the ISPs see it coming or not: “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” is the dragon that will burst into their board room and will bite a head or two off.
Right now a very very small minority of people subsrcibes to these media enclosure feed. Since 95% of all users do not use their internet connection 99% of the time you can seriously oversell your available back bone bandwidth. Imagine you are an airline and for whatever reason only one out of hundret passengers that bought tickets show up. You probably will reduce your prices in order to get more clients. Same happened to the ISPs.
“RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” changes that once you load videos that way. It has been around for almost two years. Tools were cumbersome but they get better. If they should become mainstream then there is simply not enough bandwidth to make people happy. The problem is that the internet will become slower. Since an ISP has to throttle it’s clients. Right now they can afford to be as fast as possible, since almost everybody only uses his bandwidth for surfing html pages and the occasional jpg or video file. It has been said that a third of internet traffic is BitTorrent. Now go on the street and ask people that you see
A. if the use the internet
B. if they use BitTorrent
Most people will say yes on ‘A’ and on ‘B’ you get a blank stare. Bittorrent is still very geekish. So is “RSS 2.0 with
media enclosures”. It is not likely to stay that way.
We will look at 2006 and sigh. Saying “Remember when you could get a FIOS with flatrate”
Almost like: “Remember when you would go to America and traded Manhattan for a couple of pearl necklaces”
It used to be to that I spend Sunday mornings with the paper. If you don’t go to church on Sundays, then you have this amazing time that you can read just for your own joy. These days it’s the internet. Of course. But I follow different stories on a Sunday morning. Today is was Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel, via Math for programmers via BlogsNow background info on this important essay from seventeen years ago. It probably is so important that I should pretend that I woul have just ‘reread’ it. But, no: Never had heard of it before. Much like a really good movie that you see for the first time after it has been out for 20 years and that you picked up via DVD it makes you feel good since there might be countless other gems out there. Burried in all that history, waiting for to come back to light much like diamonds emerge from the soil in heavy rain. The “test of time”. Or it can make you sad, since you lived without this piece for 20 years. Might have gotten hundreds of references and jokes not all or only half way. Digressing entirely here I am considering to show my seven year old son the original Star Wars movie, even though I think he is WAY to young for that. But there are so many references in the culture around him that I feel he should see it, only that he can decipher all those references. Finally the fact that an important piece went on noticed for me for so long could also have a vastly depressing aspect: How many other items are lingering out there and I never came accross them. And, at least that is a fact, I spent the last seventeens years rambling about everything, including software creation, without being able to put into a context to “Worse is Better”. Now that I have had it my coffenated head for half an hour I am almost tempted to reference to it as “WIB”.
The essay might also only intresting to me, since I was writing in Lisp seventeen years ago and switched to Unix/C. I have to correct this, since I wrote my first code for legal money in AutoLisp under AutoCAD Version 2.18. Lisp was not my choice, C was. Very much so.
Of course now we can read things like
Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.
or
The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.
with a historical perspective. 1995 and it turned out that Mr Gabriel thought to be worse would be pushed from 90% of all CPUs by something that is even worse than worse: Windows 95. Ironically Windows 95 could also be seen as Version 1.0 of a virus (real ones here) API disguised as an ‘operating system’.
… and then a fast forward to the world of software development in 2006. “totally”
maybe it’s me. sxsw of course does not suck. But I could not find a RSS feed with media enclosures.
I can not be bothered to listen to mp3’s in my webbrowser. That’s that rss 2.0 with enclosures aka podcast
is good for. Their xml file did not work with iTunes. It was quicker to write a quick scraper than to navigate their site and make a big R&D project out of it. So here it is the homemade rss feed that will work in iTunes:
Apple tells us since years whenever it feels approiate that OS X is based on unix. They are not lying of course. But there are some nasty details. One that drives me crazy right now:
Since it’s beginnings unix always supported tape drives. All of them, sometimes there were updates needed etc etc.
But data management via data tapes was always a thing that just worked. On every unix flavor I know. Actually it worked pretty much the same and usually is very reliable once you are a couple of months away of the bleeding edge and if you don’t have to battle broken hardware.
OS X is different: The parts that make tape archiving work have been removed. OS X is the only unix system where this happened. The hardware is there and it works. The software was there and it works. Just that Apple decided “No Tapes for you”. Which is super lame.
On one side Apple wants to be in the pro market. With XSan they like to become a storage vendor, and on the
other side they cripple the operating system by not creating /dev/mt/tpsXdY or /dev/nstX devices.
This is nothing less than Microsoftesc. It really is lame to break working things, just because you have decided that a couple of tape archiving software vendors is more important than the pro market. No, I can not use “retrospect” to manage a Peta Byte for the the movie that I am working on right now. The linux boxes doing the job would have not moved into this Apple heavy environment if Apple would not have broken OS X. To me OS X is only 95% unix and 5 % got soaked in Koolaid and fell apart. Tape device support is some of that. What a shame.
Looks like an interest article about Tron.
Just that I have no time to read it right now.
I let you decide what is more relevant and more interesting.
nine million million US dollars
That’s more than thousand US$ for every person on the planet. Billions of them make less than that in a year.