Wow – slashdot’s 10th birthday was yesterday. I believe I started reading slashdot in ‘98. Ahh nostalgia – CowboyNeal poll options, Russian reversals, Beowulf clusters of this and that.
Slashdot, even though you’ve been somewhat upstaged by other linklogs in the recent past, you still hold a dear place in the heart of this geek and many others.
Happy Birthday!
This is primarily for my own reference. To get a monospaced font in gmail, add this to your firefox userContent.css file:
div.msg div.mb {
font-family: monospace !important;
font-size: 12px !important;
}
textarea.tb {
font-family: monospace !important;
font-size: 12px !important;
}
td.ct {
font-family: monospace !important;
font-size: 12px !important;
}
I just read a rather lengthy discussion on reddit about current US broadband speeds and how they’re lagging way behind most all of the asian and EU markets. They quote the average broadband (download) speed in the US as 1.6 Mbps. Japan – 61 Mbps. South Korea – 45 Mbps. Sweden – 18 Mbps.
At first glance, this looks like a huge disparity. After thinking about this for a minute, though, I started wondering what the big deal is. Sure – it would be awesome to be able to say that I had a 61 Mbps internet connection to my house, but honestly, how much of that 61 Mbps are you able to use? At home, we currently have 6 Mbps cable internet service from comcast, and at work, we’re on a full-duplex fractional DS3 (10 Mbps) from TWTelecom. No matter whether I’m at home or at work, I’m rarely able to saturate the connection. 99% of the time, I find the bandwidth bottleneck to be on the other end of the pipe (or somewhere in between).
Another thing to add to this discussion: a huge majority of the content on the internet is hosted in the US. This means that when some dude in Tokyo wants to surf Youtube over his pimpin’ 61 Mbps internet connection, the traffic has to traverse the Pacific over cramped fiber trunks – he’d be lucky to get 2 Mbps over those connections.
So – my question remains…why the big push for faster broadband speeds? Until hosting companies and the internet backbone carriers upgrade their network to push more data, it really doesn’t matter.
Am I being naive or is this somewhat correct?
I’m working on getting an asterisk phone pbx set up in our Budapest, Hungary office. I needed to test things tonight, so I place a few test calls. Here’s the call flow in a nutshell:
And it worked – caller ID and everything :-)
Okay – I admit – that’s quite geeky, but hey, I had to provide some exposure to the near Rube Goldberg machine required to make this call work :-)
First…whomever decided to change Daylight Savings Time (cough, cough, ***head_jerk_towards_washington***) needs to have a stern talking to. I’ve always thought that DST was stupid, and now added on top of that is the fact that poor Sysadmins like myself all across the country are having to scramble to get their systems patched to reflect the changes. Ugh.
Second…because someone at the RIAA didn’t think they were making enough money already, they recently convinced the Copyright Royalty Board to push through a drastic increase the royalty rates for small independent internet radio stations. This increase, which amount to over 100% of the annual revenues of most internet radio stations, will undoubtably serve to kill off all current internet radio stations as well as prevent future stations from starting. Bill Goldsmith, the owner/operator of one of the stations I’ve been listening to for 5 years now, Radio Paradise, has taken the helm on this issue and is advocating on behalf of the hundreds of other internet radio stations that will be affected by this change. Bill has posted a blog entry, where he, in a very detailed post, outlines the details of this decision. It’s not a short entry, but it’s well worth your time. Please go read it.
After you’ve read the synopsis, do something about it. Bill laid out several recommendations as to what you can do to help prevent this. Those recommendations are here. Me personally? I signed the online petition, sent emails to my representatives (Coleman, Klobuchar, and Bachmann), and sent them all snail-mail letters this morning. If you care at all about this, I’d really appreciate if you’d take a few minutes to do the same. The RIAA has pushed consumers/musicians around enough…it’s time to play hardball.
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