Sunday, February 06, 2005

The Stupid Bowl. As you surmise, I'm not a fan of pro football. But last year I went to a great party at chez Templeton, where the idea was to TiVo the game, speed through the football and watch the expensively produced commercials. Much better way to spend a Sunday afternoon. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.] 9:58:04 PM    comment []

Hopeful sentiments from  hoder: Neo-cons from both sides. I have a strange feeling that Iranians and Americans will finally sit down around table and will directly start to solve their mutual problems. Many may know that Iran is already working with the U.S. in a wide range of topics especially about Iraq and Afghanistan. I sense that Iranians are ready to give up on their uranium enrichment if they are accepted in the WTO and probably some other economic incentives that Europe can offer -- or has already offered -- but without the agreement of the U.S. is impossible. The latest evidence for me was Ali Larijani's remarks yesterday. "In order to increase the country's revenue," he said to Fars news, "we have to reach the global market." Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think these Iranian neo-conservatives can break a lot of old taboos because Khamenei deeply trusts them. The taboo to directly talk to the U.S. could be on top of them. [Editor: Myself (English)] 7:50:36 PM    comment []

Another from A&L Daily -- looks like Reason mag is on the Laura-Callahan-of-Homeland-Security-got-her-PhD-from-a-diploma-mill story: You too might oversee a major Federal department with your Ph.D from a “university” in, uh, a Motel 6 somewhere in Wyoming... more» ... more» I've been following it here and wondering when or whether the mainstream press would be on this. 12:53:48 PM    comment []

BTD SUNDAY COMICS [Begging To Differ] 12:48:28 PM    comment []

Read the Fine Print. Whatever points of President Bush's Social Security privatization plan that sounded good, sounded bad when the details were filled in. [NYT > Opinion] 6:18:34 AM    comment []

MGM Grokster THoughts Part 2 - Tech, SCUSA Rock n Roll.  . . . I think there are more legal music downloads than illegal No question that music and movies are the most visible content distributed by P2P. Do we know if on an absolute basis most of that music in particular is illegally distributed.? No we dont. Its very conceivable that there are far more personal, vanity projects and independent projects that are being offered on the net than charting music. Its also probable that the most popular music that is being downloaded is being downloaded illegally. But has anyone done any analysis of the long tail vs the most popular titles ? Chris Anderson of Wired has written brilliantly about the bellcurve of content and information distribution on the net. That popular items are just that, popular. My guess however is that in absolute numbers, the long tail of the download distribution curves, both in terms of number of songs , and in number of songs downloaded, overwhelm the number of copyrighted songs illegally being downloaded. How many songs are in the catalogs of the RIAA member labels vs the number of songs on all the indie music sites on the net? Anyone have an idea? How many selfpublishing artists and bands are there offering downloads ? Want to bet A < B+C ? Thats today.Killing the golden goose of progress is what scares me more than anything about all of this P2P hating. What about future applications? . . . .  . . . Is it inconcievable that we at somepoint in the future want to submit anonymously the list and dosages of medication we are taking along with high resolution Xrays and pictures that are distributed to systems that analyze the mix looking for red flags that are then reviewed by physicians and returned, still anonymously back to us ? This type of application cant happen in a typical client server environment. Peer to Peer is a foundation for this type of application.  . . . Why would the supreme court even consider eliminating these opportunities ? I think we have forgotten that EVERY SINGLE BOOK, PICTURE and MOVIE that exists today, and has ever existed to this point in the 230 year history of this country will at one point be in the public domain. Owned , shared and enjoyed by the citizens of this country. From this day forward, the ability to generate digital content will be ever simplified and made less expensive. The amount of digital content created going forward will expand exponentially. It is the job of the Supreme Court to protect our ability to share, distribute and enjoy every single digital bit of it. That obligation in and of itself is enough of a non infringing use of P2P for it be protected forever.  . . . [Blog Maverick] 6:11:50 AM    comment []

Joel's undertaking a major server upgrade. He writes about it in his entry for February 05, 2005 and in Colo Expansion Part 1. So now for the first time ever, I'm going to publish a "live" article here. So far, I haven't done anything. If you have any better suggestions for how to do things, it's not too late for me to learn from your experience. As we go along, I might have a few questions for my readers who have experience with this stuff. Step one was figuring out what problems we're trying to solve. Here's the list: Not enough horsepower to handle the large number of FogBugz online trials we'll be hosting. FogBugz 4.0 is a couple of weeks away from shipping and that should create a flood of people wanting to take advantage of the free online trial. (By the way, if you want to beat the traffic, apply to join the FogBugz 4,0 beta.) Running an email server on Windows allowed us to save hardware, at the cost of buying a commercial email product, IPswitch IMail. We are very close to using up the maximum number of mailboxes we're entitled to create, and we'd really like to switch to a Linux mail server running qmail or Postfix. Although we have a standby server, a small Dell 750 we stuck in there last summer, we don't really have a good story for handling failures. Right now we could recover from most kinds of failures in about 24 hours, and we have to take all the sites down for about 15-30 minutes when we need to apply OS patches or upgrade the server. But Fog Creek's daily revenue has grown to the point where I'm not happy with that. Our new goal is to have no single point of hardware failure be able to bring down any of our sites, to be able to upgrade OSes without bringing everything down, and to be able to recover from very major problems in 15 minutes. And we want to have an architecture in place to be able to scale up our hardware relatively easily to meet new demand. Clear thinking and clear expression. 6:09:45 AM    comment []