Category: Worth a Look

Briefly

  • The Future of Music: A brief but detailed history of escalating volume in the music industry.
  • Time to Close Gaps in Emergency Communications: addressing emergency communications in the context of the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
    • As one with a cell phone with a 612 area code, I’ve been wondering about the story behind the loss of service. If my guess is right and the networks were overwhelmed, I wonder if cell phone communication can meet public needs in an emergency situation?
  • White House Office of Administration Claims it is not Subject to FOIA: (via FOIA blog): “…on Tuesday, in a bid to kill a suit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department contended the office has no substantial authority independent of President Bush and is not subject to the [Freedom of Information Act] law.”

Economics of tiered vs dumb network

A neutral Net needs up to twice the bandwidth of a tiered network

This article is a bit dated, but here’s an interesting take on  the economics of tiered vs dumb network architecture:

According to Isenberg, the cheapest and best alternative is simply to build out dumb capacity: to “overprovision” by as much as 100 percent. The “bandwidth is scarce” argument plays right into the hands of the major ISPs, which can use it to start charging a premium for crucial services that run across their networks. If they simply built out the networks to the point of abundance, they couldnt make all this extra money.

Its Fair Use Day

Did ya know? Its Fair Use Day: July 11, 2007

I had no idea today was “Fair Use Day.”

As for how to make the best of Fair Use Day, founder Eric Clifford told Ars that users should “enjoy fair use in any way that you can,” but he added that “the problem is that the legal ways to exercise fair use is diminishing.”

Here’s my suggestion: spend some time browsing old 78s and cylinders over at archive.org.

Here’s the “official” blog post.