This is so true. The fastest way to send a lot of data from point A to point B is not via the net.

I still remembered that pointless story (Ok, maybe I just don't see his point) my prof told in the first day of computer networking course. He asked something like "How to send a lot of data down the road to another computer?" The answer turn out to be copy the data on tape and carry the tape by walking.

The math of sending 1GB, in today's standard:

By internet: assumpting DSL (~150KB/sec for me), 1000MB = 1000000KB / 150 = ~6666 sec = 111 minutes

By walking the DVD: burning DVD ~ 20 minutes, walking 15 minutes (~1 km in city), total 35 minutes! (or 5MB/sec!!!!)

Of course, this depends on how much data you are sending and how far you're sending it to.

It must be the best kept secret on the net about how to have great throughput. hehehe

新無線通訊

Just saw ana, and others mentioned olso is creating a sticker map. So, here I pitch in my 0xdeadbeef color scheme button.



Nucleus also has some buttons, here I pick one.



In process of making the button, saw this button maker. Cool.

See: olso's sticker map

Finally find some time to fix my NTP setup to sync the clock on all my machine. It's broken for quite sometimes that require manual action during summer time clock change....

It doesn't seem like an very interesting read, but it points at the new economy surrounding syndication technology.

It's a shift from poll to push in information access technology. We no longer need to go poll all websites manually and see what's new. Now we get notify (the push to us) as new information available (Ok, I know it's still a polling scheme in the backend, but to the user's it's push to us as it's available...).

Thanks to the advance on the Internet, we (almost) no longer have the bandwidth problem we run into in the mid 90's that killed the first generation of push technology (still remember pointcast, castanet, etc?). And today's new push technology is smarter and light-weight.

It allows us to have a system that bring to our attention information that we interested in. My Feed of Feeds currently only present me with all the new post, but I can hack it with a small engine that go through the in-coming bits and flag the one I might want to read ASAP. It can even sent it to me ASAP via SMS and such so I can take action if needed.

Interetsting, eh?

Vote with your feed | Steve Gillmor's Inforouter | ZDNet.com

Indeed, the internet changed everyday. Nice little summary, it's like a little mirror. Things are getting more "social" everyday; social bookmarking, group this and that. It's all about linking.

I still remember before the days of WWW, there is also a thing called BBS. 2400 baud is fast back in those days. UNIX is for rocket scientist. email is transport via UUCP. telnet is cool. Linux is at 0.9x. Slackware is distributed on 30+ diskettes. Redhat 3.0.3 on CD.

::littleoslo:: Have We been Heard?

With cheaper/bigger pipe and stroage, it's soon for new types of channel appears for movie distribtuion.

A DVD is about 4.7 GB is size (yes, there are dual-layer out there, but let's left it out of this discussion). With all the trailers, special features, I'm sure the actually movie size is about say 4GB. There is already 4GB flash card out there. Ans yes, they are expensive and all. But price will drop and size will grow. We'll soon able to get a movie on USB key drive. As far as I know, movie downloaded via BT, even in good quality, usually under 2GB....

The idea Jason mentioned about using USB keys drive for netflix rental looks really interesting. Renting movie on USB key drive from Blockblaster? Cool!

Bottom line, DRM is still a big issue, and I guess users (including me...) still not buy in to the idea of giving up the idea of owning 'em if you pay for it (especially when it's $20 a copy).

Cutting edge obsolete technology (kottke.org)

Related:
The Future of Cable TV in the BT World
Renting My TV Programmes

I still remembered when I first start playing around with friendster, it got quite slow that I often give up. This happens even at night (I guess it's day on the flip side of earth, eh). Later, it gets better as things speeded up. Some rumor was flowing around about it moved away from java to PHP. This article confirmed that.

So, bad design does hurt bad in this case, so it seems, mainly database bottleneck.

Techworld.com - Friendster scales the network with open source

p.s. LAMP == Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP == The Open Source killer web app platform