random bits

[cellio]

I just posted more hints for the music challenge.

A few days ago I read about a skydiver who was doing his first dive, with his instructor stapped to his back. The instructor had a heart attack on the way down. That's sad, but I must admit that my first question was: was the student's technique that scary? :-)

Real Live Preacher is taking an

Comments

[xiphias]

The Octoshape thing looks like a good thing to me -- using a distributed, peer-to-peer method of transferring data all over the place without bogging down and bottlenecking any specific part? That's what the Internet was designed to do! That seems to me to be exactly the right way to move things like live streaming video across the Internet. Far, far more efficient, far, far more effective, far fewer bottlenecks, overall costs being lower, and people actually helping people.

[cellio]

P2P has the potential to make the net scale much better, so I agree with your goal -- but a content provider who decides to do it on its own needs to disclose up front so people can opt out of paying for the extra bandwidth. (I've never watched a live stream on my computer, so I haven't seen what the dialogue looked like.)

[xiphias]

I can't imagine that anyone with a broadband connection would pay extra. The pay-per-byte things I know of are dialup. Except when you get into the mulit-gig per month range.

[cellio]

My ISP's bandwidth policy boils down to "don't be a jerk", and anyway I don't do much streaming of either audio or video, but I had the impression that some ISPs were stingy enough that "just plain folks", as opposed to people running torrent farms 24x7 or some such, were getting nailed. I thought I heard about Comcast having issues there, but I could be wrong.

But no, I don't know anyone who's paying per byte these days. :-)

[dvarin]

"Strangely, there isn't an uninstaller for the Mac version of the app. You have to manually delete the Octoshape folder."

Ehhh. Most well-behaved Mac applications are installed by copying them to /Applications and uninstalled by dragging them to the Trash. This took me a bit to get used to, but it's definitely nice to not have user apps scattering pieces of themselves all over my disk. :)

[cellio]

That's a much more civilized way to manage applications. Thanks for the tip. (Not all Windows apps even have uninstallers, and I'm sure I've got vestiges of assorted crap-ware that came pre-installed on the computer still lurking in the bowels of the machine.)

[ex_hrj]

soliciting enough pre-orders to pay for the initial print run

It's an old, established business model in publishing. I have any number of books from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were "published by subscription" and include an extensive list of all the subscribers whose advance purchase made the publication possible. It seems to have been particularly common for small-run academic publications or items published by established societies (who had a clearly identified pool of interested potential subscribers).