Internet

Couldn't pass up passing this along:

Looks like the Internet has reached self-consciousness.

And hey! This is my first blog in a while. Weeeeee!!!

Alex Russell posted his slides about which he used at EuOSCON. On slide 19 he has a table listing the TCP init times on a couple of cellular networks:

Alex focuses on HTTP since calling him a maestro at JavaScript is an understatement. Obviously this is an issue for the subject of his presentation: mobile AJAX. There is an obvious solution to sending little snippets of XML without the TCP overhead: a better protocol.

I could name at least one that could deliver for AJAX along with providing a feature set required for cell phones. I'll leave it to you to guess.

It looks like I'm now quotable. Alex Mauer's home page contains something that I came up with, most likely during a late night chat. The quote is: "information is a free whore on the internet".

Om Malik has commented on SkypeOut going free along with the purported Vonage IPO. One part is worth commenting about:

The buzz on the Street is that the Vonage IPO is on the rocks. They HAVE to raise money or they are in a world of hurt. Their investors don’t want to put another penny in and the company seems to still be bleeding cash, $75 million in the first quarter of 2006.

It's obvious where the money is being burned: marketing (and possibly flying out to many potential employees, I included).

I can't go a day without seeing a Vonage TV commercial or ad banner. I even saw an ad banner for developers yesterday on Slashdot. There was even a brief shot of their Indy car on the local news during coverage of the Indy 500.

Yes, they're sponsoring a fucking Indy car. That's where the money is being burned.

They really need to start reading the books by Seth Godin, the guy who's managed to successfully market a useless site. Of all the big Internet companies/sites, there are very few if any that I can think of that have used a marketing campaign such as Vonage's. All of them have been based on some variation of word of mouth, having a product people talk about, or requiring my friends use it too. Sadly, being "the Internet phone company" just isn't one of them.

I was just flagging a lot of spam and came up with an idea that could help solve this problem. Basically it involves having my mail server ask the supposed sender really sent that message. It's really a lot like Jabber's reverse domain look up, but on a per-message basis. Email (sendmail, qmail, and friends) really needs this.

CNet just ran an article about the cable companies' day in Washington. While I sympathize with statements like "I don't think the government should be coming and telling us how we can work that infrastructure, simple as that", the cable and phone companies' arguments still smell of bullshit.

That's because I'm over on one of their networks and Google is way over on some body else's. How exactly do the operators of my network extort money from a customer on someone else's network without pissing off the guy in the middle?

I can see it now:

Midnet

One of customer's is reporting that their site is being blocked on your network

AT&Time Warner

Yeah, they were using to much of our bandwidth because our users really really like them. We asked them to fork over some money before we restore service.

Midnet

Yeah, but you agreed that between us, whoever had the most data coming out of their network would be the ones paying that month.

AT&Time Warner

Umm...

Midnet

I just paid you for all that data my users sent. Now you go and block data coming out of my network, charge me for it, and extort my customer to pay you even more!

AT&Time Warner

Ain't this a happy little game? [Thinks: Thank god none of our users produce content.]

I was reading an Ask Slashdot question about VoIP. I also got a magazine a few days ago that I suspect the questioner may receive due to his timing. I can't get my head around why people want to use VoIP in manner just like POTS in which you pick up a phone and dial. I can look at how I use[d] my cell phone to make calls. I'd scroll through a bunch of names and hit call.

I see two possible futures: Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek. Both are in star ships, but the former had your typical land lines and the latter had communicators that everyone carried.

The question I'll pose is: what future do you dream about?

I just read the story about the man who will save/destroy the Internet. I'm still unsure if his job is even worthwhile, but this quote is worth commending:

"We won’t have any voting here, we will work by consensus. If there is a split, it will not make the final agreement. Where there is no agreement, the effort will have to be to convince each other."
-- Masood Khan

Suppose an actual government worked that way. No law gets passed without 100% yay votes from everyone. I can only guess what laws would be the result: no killing, no stealing, and no kidnapping? Even with those I'm sure some people would vote no, and they would then end up getting killed (null vote), their ballot stolen (it now says yay, here), or kidnapped so they can't vote (we'll let you go if you vote yay).

If only governments actually worked that way, and this system might scale up extremely well.

Back on Wednesday I attended a meeting put on by IUPUI's Microsoft user group. One of the things they covered was the new one click install feature of .NET 2.0. While taking another free BrainBench test, I started thinking about how all the benefits of this feature could be done in X11. Surprisingly this could be done very simply.

In a world where we're not paranoid, the only thing the web server would need to do is start the application with the proper DISPLAY after I followed a start link. Unfortunately things aren't that simple. I would need to submit my X server's magic cookie hash to the web server. Then the web server could tell the client app all it needs to know about the server.

Although this all starts with stuff we already have, and it's pretty simple to get going there are some problems. Try throwing in actual encryption, NAT traversal, and file access. Yeah, that's all a problem, but on the bright side Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS X all support X. That's better than .NET 2.0.

Problems aside, what do we get? We get all the benefits that centrally hosted web apps have and all the benefits that actual desktop apps have. All that without having to invent anything new, or running a program in a sandbox.

Why couldn't Microsoft have thought of that?

I was applying for a job and got this (emphasis mine):

Under Executive Order 11246, the federal government requires [company name] to report the sex and race/ethnic origin of its applicants for employment. Your submission of any of the information requested is voluntary, and your decision not to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. Your cooperation is appreciated.

It then goes on how they don't discriminate. My question is why does the federal government want this information? My only guess is that it's to make the companies provide the data that could be used against them if they don't meet some quota.