The guys at O’Reilly (yes, that O’Reilly) are trying to connect an 802.11 wireless network from their offices to an employee’s house 20+ miles away, using commercial off-the-shelf hardware.
Category Archives: Technology
Cask of Amontillado?
Server Abuse
Yes, you too can take a high-end Silicon Graphics server and turn it into a beer cooler.
Terabytes on my desktop
I’m very much a technology buff. I tend to be an early adopter of many new and promising products and services. It never ceases to amaze me how fast technology moves.
I have a friend who regularly travels to Japan. I’ve been waiting for her to pick me up an unrestricted DVD-RAM that can also play regular DVDs. (Because of US import restrictions forced into place by organizations that think they control content, they aren’t easily available in the USA, but they are available at every shop in Akihabara. Welcome to the global economy.)
Now I may have to hold off. This article in Byte talks about a new gadget, called FMD-ROM has the potential to store as much as a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) on a piece of cheap removable media. Let’s see, that would hold every bit of non-motion media content that I own, all of my databases for work, and probably make a pretty good dent in my video collection. Oh yeah, and it would hold a copy or two of every MP3 that ever passed through Napster. Hmmm.
Goodbye Napster
It looks like the end is near: Napster to Begin Blocking Copyrighted Songs
[T]he wildly popular online song swap service would begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted songs this weekend as part of its effort to conform with an injunction expected at any time[…]
That doesn’t appear to have happened yet. I, and 11,104 other users, are currently connected and sharing 2,125,697 files (9,034 gigs.) And yes, I’m downloading just as fast as my DSL line can pull stuff in.
My feeling is that music sharing will temporarily devolve into a feudal model, with “guilds” of people who have similar tastes in music, banding together in a less-public venue. These guilds will continue to exist, adding and changing members, until some unifying event occurs that makes the “servent” [server-client] technology work as well as Napster does/did.
Currently it looks like that unifying event will be based on the Gnutella protocol. So far today, two different friends have sent me two different programs that both operate on the Gnutella model. One of them, Bearshare, I’ve been playing with for a while, but I haven’t tried the new beta. The other is called iMesh, and I’d never even heard of it before.
All of these programs are quirky (and let’s face it: Napster is too) but if every computer is a servent, it’s going to be darn near impossible to shut down.
The end of Napster (as we know it) is probably imminent. But if the RIAA thinks they can shut down music sharing, they need to take a lesson from King Canute: the incoming tide will not obey you when you demand that it stop.
Play Money
Would someone care to enlighten me on just where Napster plans to actually get a billion bucks?
The RIAA and the other plaintiffs may be dinosaurs, but they’re not that dumb! Maybe some teenager who’s using Napster to rip off Eminem songs will take this at face value, but will anybody else? And does anybody think the Napster subscription model is actually going to go anywhere but down the toilet? Hello! It’s about getting music that you’re not going to pay for. Deal with it.
Digicams and Ubergeeks
Philip Greenspun runs photo-net, an immense database and website of all things photographic. His travelogues are immensely entertaining, and his online textbook should be required reading for any web designer. Here is his review of the Olympus E-10 Digital Camera.