A Day in Paradise

Gotta see it to believe it: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Classics-Week-Chocolate-Covered-SQL-.aspx

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

… because they dive into it like this.

Image courtesy of an International PHP Magazine.

I wake up this morning, and like all mornings read my utterlyboring newsletter.

I click on the link to the story about The Bored Leg Cult (click 1). I follow the link to the Bored Leg Cult Photo Pool (click 2). I click on the Pool Members Link (click 3). I view the profile of Barry Price, which was on the first page of group members (click 4). Scroll down a bit to look at his Thailand 2005 Group (click 5). Then scroll down a bit more to find a picture of my good friend martin playing with some lizards (click 6).

Martin is selling a 130kg c-3PO on ebay, c-3PO was played by Anthony Daniels who acted in Star Wars with Garrick Hagon who was a voice actor in Balto with Kevin Bacon.

Now I’ve forgotten what this blog entry was initially about… oh well, it’s a small interweb!

So I’m all signed up for PHPVikinger and the eZpublish conferenece in June. While I’m not sure if I’ll have as much fun as AskaNinja had at Killacon, I’m sure it will be a BLAST!

If you’re wondering what I’ll be doing at the eZpublish conf, I’ve got some interesting things going on in the upcoming months (no I haven’t joined great eZpublish team). I’ve told a couple people, but things aren’t quite ready to annouce yet. Like always watch this space for updates.

Saturday I’ll be at LinuxTag, wish I could be there for more of it, but there is no LAMP Area this year, and I’ve got too much to do.

So, while signups for eZpublish conf are closed, there is still time to get into phpVikinger!

eBay: FARSCAPE: CRICHTON SIGNATURE LEATHER PANTS ORIG COSTUME (item 6611945222 end time Mar-15-06 08:18:28 PST)

Totally must-have add-it-to-my-wishlist!!! I’ve never been a fan of leather clothing, but $1,200 is a small price to pay to wear John Crichton’s pants!

I wonder how much I can get winona for?

Anything from the 2600 store will do. But on the top of the list is a 2600 Hoodie or a 1, 2, 3 year or LIFETIME subscription to 2600 magazine.

The Freedom Downtime DVD would also be cool. I’ve read all the books, seen the movie, bought the stickers, stuck the button on my site… I haven’t read Kevin’s books either, so if you want to send those please do

OK, the next thing on my list is becoming an FSFE Fellow. So much to buy, so little time!

What I need is a firefox extension which will make a blog entry with links to all of my open tabs. THAT would be great for bloggers who enjoy doing “linkdump” posts.

Anyway, I’ve been up to my neck in Excel’s statistical functions the last couple hours and wanted to jot everything down before I forget them.

Using Excel Statistical Functions
Microsoft Excel Statistical Functions
Excel statistical functions: VAR
Description of improvements in the statistical functions in Excel 2003 and in Excel 2004 for Mac
Microsoft Office Excel 2003
Excel Statistical Functions: GAMMAINV
Problems vith Statistical Functions and Large Numbers in Excel

And finally, the Open Office source file with the source of just about everything I need! Christmas!!!

To Dream is To Fly

Yay, Kaia blogs! Yet another of my good RL friends converted to blogging.

I think I’ll take this time to celebrate two years of blogging… time’s fun when you’re having flies. I’ve got some new ideas of stuff I want to do with my blog. Transform this mess into a well-oiled marketing machine. Seriously, I get a huge amount of traffic but nothing comes of it. August 2005 was my biggest month yet.

Unique visitors: 19731
Number of visits: 37351 (1.89 visits/visitor)
Pages served: 117619 (3.14 pages/visit)
Hits: 204649 (5.47 hits/visit)
Adsense Revenue: $37.12 (0.6% CTR)

Now that’s not phenominal, but not too bad for a maximum of 5-10 minutes a day (on a long post day), and this month is looking to be at least 50% more. Anyway, now I just need to find a way to use, you my dear readers, and turn all those page views into hard cold cash!

New Scientist Breaking News – ‘Worthless’ gifts get the good girls
Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken for granted.

Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially worthless gifts %u2013 such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out %u2013 is a winning courtship strategy for both sexes.

Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can ensure they are not just seducing ‘gold-diggers’ %u2013 girls who take valuable presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.

Three Column Layouts – css-discuss

A round out of all the Three Column CSS layout tutorials. I really need to understand CSS.

Another episode from the weird googleads chronicles…

Bioreclamation is a worldwide provider of biological products to life science and pharmaceutical companies. Specializing in control and disease state matrices manufactured from human and animal blood, plasma and serum, which are used in drug discovery, compound development, clinical and research diagnostics. Bioreclamtion’s products enable scientists and biomedical researchers to better understand the Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism of newly discovered compounds and the effects on disease processes.

All I can think of is they bought ads for “Monkey Farts” … now that I look at it I have another Monkey entry on the same page, so I guess people who visit my site would probably be interested in it.

Opera 10-year online anniversary party – Opera Web Browser

Get them while the Party Lasts!

GooglePark: “Scoble goes to google”

Pretty funny stuff

Wired News: Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off!

Yay, rant time… I really should calculate how long it takes me to write this and then compare it to how long it would take me to “produce” it on my “show”. This whole podcast thing is too crazy… but fun and I’m glad that people can make a living doing what they enjoy.

Since I have a couple mintues (it’s 22:49 so I’m just about to crash), I’ll go through the pros and cons of a podcast.

Bad Things

• Takes longer to produce
• Bandwidth
• No written record of what I’ve said
• Ignored by google
• bandwidth
• Can’t listen to “Democracy Now!” when creating it
• I rant too much
• Readers can’t skim through it.
• BANDWIDTH

Good things

• Can listen away from the computer
• Can include music
• Can pretend I’m a DJ
• Can Pick my toes while “producing” my “show”

Well, that’s all I have to say that.

Back to the flickr fans… very foolish. I don’t see why they can’t just create a Y! account and move on with thier lives (or lack thereof).

Speaking of Yahoo! I just installed the new google search, and the sidebar is TOTALLY AWESOME! Just when I was starting to like Yahoo. Google now just needs an MyWeb type thing and domination will be complete.