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 unusual approach to publishing a (paper book), essentially soliciting enough pre-orders to pay for the initial print run. That's probably not unusual for publishing houses, but I'm not used to seeing it from individuals. He's only looking for a bit over 400, so I figured that given his popularity he'd have that in days, but so far no. It's kind of sobering that even that low-sounding goal is a challenge. (It does suggest that the likes of unknowns like me wouldn't muster enough interest to publish on dead trees. Maybe most people don't read dead trees any more, but I still prefer them for many things.)

CNN might be using your bandwidth to publish (link from goldsquare). Keep that in mind the next time you watch something live and big.

For the locals: Temple Sinai has some interesting presentations open to the public coming up; the first (on February 18) is Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent. I'll post more about this in a few days, but if you want to go, drop me a note. This sounds like a neat series that I want to support, so unless I get flooded, I'm inclined to buy one ticket (for any of the presentations) for anyone I actually know who expresses interest.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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. :-)