boingboing.net's excellent tribute

No, it’s not the iPad, the iPhone, or even the iPod. It’s definitely the Mac. Steve Jobs real gift to the world was bringing the Mac to the market in 1984. The Macintosh was a major step in making personal computers pleasant and easy enough to use to gain mass market appeal. If the Mac hadn’t been released then, the industry, our industry, would not be where it is today. You likely would not be reading this, you would not be on Facebook or Twitter, you wouldn’t know many of the people you know, especially those met online.

The Mac was never the market leader, but it’s existence opened peoples eyes. Computers HAD to be easy to use like the Macintosh, cryptic commands typed into dark screens weren’t going to cut it. This changed the game, the competition released competing products and the personal computer industry as we know it was born.

That’s was what Steve did. He didn’t invent anything brilliant. He took fantastic people and technologies and integrated them into products that created market sectors that didn’t exist. He took huge gambles, that industry experts almost always said would not pay off. Sometimes they didn’t. But others really did change the world. I know it’s trendy to hate Jobs, Apple, heck, anything popular with hipsters. Just don’t forget the value of what Jobs accomplished with his much too short life. Certainly the world would look very different today if the modern computer as we know it was still sitting in the halls of Xerox and the labs of Universities for another 5 or 10 years as everyone continued to type cryptic commands into their terminals…

Rest in peace Steve, you changed my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

I know I’m WAY behind on blogging. I really hope I’ll find some time ASAP. I wanna talk really quickly about Mac OS X 10.7.

First the good. The UI changes are great. I have always been a fan of tiny widgets and maximizing screen real-estate. In 10.6 and prior, I went to great lengths to shrink every font and widget. In 10.7 theres no need. Scroll bars are tiny and automatically fade out, you can full screen most apps, fonts and widgets are just smaller. Fantastic. New UI animations and transitions are everywhere and delay things a bit, hopefully there will be a TinkerTool or similar to disable them. They’re short and tolerable but as an example, I am typing a character or two into the ether when switching spaces during the animation.  I’m not really into the LaunchPad paradigm, but the MasterControl look works for me. Mail.app’s new UI is fantastic, iCal’s is a bit over the top. Mail.app’s performance (specifically around large operations and anything RSS related) is a complete train wreck. I expect a patch soon. Reverse scrolling took less than a day to adjust to (I am an iPad/iPhone user though). Autocorrect is a nice addition. The new Finder is great, Safari updates seem good, heck even the Terminal.app updates are nice! Grab an updated version of TerminalCopyOnSelect and away you go.

10.7 is a huge update, in the way 10.5 was to 10.4, and at $29. If Mail.app’s performance is fixed I’ll likely be very happy.

Here’s a very WTF bug though. I ran into it last night and figured it was just me, or I’d boned something up. I have a bunch of shell scripts that do SSH port forwards for accessing network appliances and infrastructure behind lock and key. Half of them stopped working on me, failing to resolve their respective hosts. How strange. Amusingly Brandon was complaining of basically the same problem this morning so we decided to take a look.

Some how OS X’s resolver library is no longer checking any hostname with a dot in it against the /etc/resolv.conf search directive in 10.7. Seriously. Let’s say I have a server called admin.omghi2u.com. My /etc/resolv.conf (and OS X network control panel) contain omghi2u.com in the search field. Surely, we can resolve (ping, ssh, web browse, whatever) to ‘admin’ since it can match that as admin.omghi2u.com. Cool. Now normally, in UNIX (heck even Windows land!) if I had admin.tor.omghi2u.com and admin.chi.omghi2u.com, simply hitting ‘admin.tor’ or ‘admin.chi’ would match the omghi2u.com hostnames. Not the case in 10.7. Something is clearly broken in the resolver in libSystem. Oddly despite being linked to the same library, the host command still functions properly… Maybe the search logic is handled by the command itself…

While it’s a simple bug fix, its an annoying oversight on Apples part. Breaking basic UNIX networking functionality is kinda shameful.

UPDATE (JULY 26th): Head over to Brandon’s site for a fix!

So this isn’t my idea, a new idea, original in the slightest. In fact Ars Technica had a good write up about someone hacking into a site and pointing it at the ICE takedown page last night. Sure enough, if you can find a domain seized by ICE (googling the take down message will accomplish that) you can get the IP they use, and sure enough they don’t used named virtual hosts. Any hit to 74.81.170.110 will respond with the take down message.

Despite what many of the people commenting on the Ars article think though, it’s not a case of ICE being sloppy or behind the “HTTP/1.1 times”. They seize upwards of 100 domains at a time, it’s far easier to just force a TLD to point a target domain at their nameservers and move on. Basically, ICE has configured their bind install to respond with 74.81.170.110 for *any* query. So anything pointed to ns1/ns2.seizedservers.com will respond with the takedown message automatically. No messing with any configuration, apache, bind or otherwise on their end, efficient! That’s pretty clever, whether or not you agree with what they accomplish.

Of course it does allow for some good pranks. Point your domains at 74.81.170.110, tell your friends you’re in legal trouble, good times ensue. For more fun, change someone’s local resolvers to ICE’s name servers, see how long it takes them to realize they haven’t actually taken down the entire internet.

Who knows, maybe parking everything there will stop all the electronic and postal spam sent to my multitude of vanity domains…

Twitter really sucks. The Lotus Evora S on the other hand, looks awesome.

UPDATE: Even worse. Twitter enforces the SLIGHTLY LONGER length of the t.co URL, causing me to actually LOSE 2 chars from my own shortener. Ridiculous…

I was reading an EFF article advocating free open wifi for all and it got me thinking. When did people get the idea that internet should be free? Certainly it wasn’t from working at an ISP, getting peering, negotiating bandwidth pricing, buying gear, leasing fiber… Having done all of the above, let me rant! (Ok so I’m ranting about broadband quotas and torrent throttling like always)

Let’s say I buy a full non-burstable gigabit link from one of the cheaper telcos like Cogent or Level 3. Depending on your market, you will end up paying $4-8/megabit for it. Thats not including termination, port fees, the hardware required to route it, cost of transport (i.e. your fiber conduit rental) , etc and those things can certainly add up to 5-20% of the total cost, but for the sake of simplification we’ll ignore them. 1 gigabit, when run to the horrible limit (resulting in very unhappy customers) is 328, 718 gigabytes/month of actual data moved, and frankly is a lot of traffic in any sense. (Lets leave peering out of this discussion, the larger an ISP the more of their footprint they can get through peering, but it really doesn’t help the independents and even mid-sized guys without international fiber to meet in lots of POPs and IXs)

Now presume I don’t want to oversell it what so ever. I want to sell enterprise grade DSL to businesses who demand a reasonable 10mbps guaranteed. This is a very common scenario. If I split my gigabit link up to 10megabit customers, the most I can fit on it and guarantee their performance is 100 customers. If we take our cost to buy just the transit, ignoring any of the related costs, we’re going to run $40-80/customer. Tack on termination of the DSL/cable (hardware, very expensive), lines to the customer (very very expensive) and of course support, you are looking at easily 2x that cost. While a business will have no trouble stomaching this cost+ profit for us, a consumer obviously will not.

This is where over-selling comes in. If I assume that my 10 megabit users will use roughly 50 gigabytes per month of data, that means I can fit in 6400 subscribers onto that link. (Nobody would run their links at 100%, this would add at least 20-30% to the total cost of bandwidth to buy overhead, but we’ll ignore it for simplification sake) 6400 subscribers, each now are only using a dollar or so of our transit, and with support, hardware and line costs fixed, we can sell the service for $40, cover our costs and make profit. Yes profit. People seem to forget, a company needs to make profit or its share holders will terminate them. Profit is not evil or crooked.

This all worked great in the early 2000s. Bandwidth was cheap, space and power to build telecom sites was cheap, and fiber transport was nearly free. Bandwidth is still cheap, but everything else has gone up an arm and a leg. None of that really matters though, because the real problem is that we don’t use the internet like we did 10 years ago. Who can stand to watch Youtube or Netflix at less than 720p? How many households have a kid (adult) running BitTorrent all the time? And really, who wants a sub-25 megabit link nowadays?

Providers cannot oversell at the levels they did even 5 years ago. While we may say boo hoo why do I care what XYZ evil company makes (not fair, remember these are people working like anyone else), remember we also want startup and new ISPs to compete. They have it even rougher as their cost/subscriber is higher.

Basically it comes down to this. The cost to provide internet, in North America, has not gotten massively cheaper, but per capita we are using much much more. In order for providers to maintain their levels of overselling they are imposing quotas and throttling p2p. People hate quotas and DPI, but trust me, people hate rate increases more. Yes it would be totally cool if we all had gigabit fiber to the doorstep, but sadly this is a huge undertaking, and companies like Rogers or Bell is going to invest in it, wide spread, only to have the government force them to let other providers use the links/equipment at cost. It’s not in the private sector’s best interest to do this. (typo fixed ;) thanks everyone!)

So yea, we have out dated infrastructure since we put it in much earlier than say Asia and Europe. I think, the real solution is for the government to step in and use tax dollars to improve it (OMG, I can’t believe I said that) if we really want deregulated residential internet. Run fiber to the homes, maintain it, charge providers at-cost to use it, and yea we’ll have great competitive internet again.

Yes I advocated for publicly funded internets, I must need coffee.