2003

( I did promise to do this. )

the hydra-headed beast of stupidity that is Wired

So before Christmas, I complained about Wired basically doing a Ha Ha Fuck You MPAA article under the guise of a Christmas list. And now they publish a memo to the new head of the MPAA which among other things refutes a lot of what was said in the first article, and completely fails to understand BitTorrent.

For those of you following from the peanut gallery, BitTorrent is a huge boon to the downloadee, and not quite so much to the downloader. No matter how many people are offering Scrubs_Season_1_Episode_1_FULL.avi via their BitTorrent clients, it still has to find its way byte by painstaking byte through my 56k dialup. Which makes it no different in that respect from any of the Napster derivatives, such as gnutella, mutella, grokster, kazaa, etc. The upper limit on download speed is most likely to be your own connection. Apparently Wired's editor-in-chief believes that if more people offer the file to you, the bits get to your harddrive faster, regardless of whether you're already maxing out your dialup.

In all, the article says nothing new, other than a few things that are completely wrong, and is making me consider whether it's worth keeping Wired's RSS feed on my aggregator. Of course, it's also making me appreciate the aggregator for allowing me to prescreen crap like this without visiting wired.com...

Update: Having thought about it a little more, asynchronous broadband (i.e. your download speed is multiples of your upload speed, and more to the point of your source's upload speed) doesn't change the picture hugely; there's a certain ratio of providers-to-consumers that will keep all the pipes filled, beyond which there's no useful benefit, and that ratio doesn't help the non-broadband folks either way since even the worst broadband service has a better (stated) upload rate than the fastest dialup's download rate. I will state for the record that in my neck of the woods, any broadband is rare enough since the local telco is such a hulking dinosaur, so most people are still on 56k dialup or maybe 128k ISDN. I've no idea what the ratio of broadband to narrowband is in other places, but I think I've got a reasonably sound argument above.

math for beginners

The Archos uses a video compression standard called MPEG-4 to cram as many as 320 hours of video at near-DVD quality onto its hard drive, the company says -- the equivalent of 160 two-hour movies. (article)

As it happens, I once spent an evening in a hotel bar in Oslo drinking with an Archos salesman pitching electronic jukeboxes.

keep on rockin'

The much-mentioned-when-it-appeared Free World website, where Alan Cox was to publish full details of kernel bugs that would otherwise be in violation of the DMCA, appears to be dead. So much for that idea.

(2008 update: hey, it came back)

the web as it should be, sorta

echo "<dir>/home/waider/crossover/support/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/Fonts</dir>" >> ~/.fonts.conf

continued sweetness & light in the Gulf

I keep reading stories like this and wondering, well, which is more PR-negative: a constant stream of helicopters having accidents, as is hinted at by the repeated description of these incidents as "emergency landings" with no suggestion as to what the emergency was, or a constant stream of helicopters being shot down or otherwise forced into crashing? Note, the former interpretation appears to be the one the offical PR folk would have you believe in the case of the two choppers which collided late last year, since all eyewitness accounts of an RPG or other missile were dismissed out of hand. Note in the article the explanation for a forced landing by another plane being given as "excessive vibration in one of the engines". I mean, seriously. Is it so bad to say, "we took a hit from a missile"?