The BITwise Blog

tranquilidad: Computer recycling?

In tranquilidad: Computer recycling? the question is raised about where to take old computers to die in a way that wont harm the environment. I faced a similar question over the summer when I noticed that I had a pile of dead 15" monitors in my basement just taking up space. I looked into recycling in Washtenaw county and I found that there is an electronics recycling facility that will take your equipment, but at a cost of $25, IIRC. Then I stumbled upon something rather interesting. It seems that Office Depot was offering free computer hardware recycling for a limited time. I was able to dump all my old monitors. I'm not sure if this deal is still in effect, but I would give your local Office Depot a call and find out.

The Distributed RSS Redux

Punch me in the face and call me a plagiarist. It seems I wasn't the only one with the bright idea of using a distributed architecture to manage RSS bandwidth. As linked to by thecrew,
this article on BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution pretty much tells the same tale (more than 9 months before I conceived the idea). The article explains it pretty simple,

Map this to RSS feeds: the more popular the feed, the more nodes on the network serving pieces of the feed. That would allow rapid downloads by many users by distributing the data across multiple sites. It's a digital Robin Hood, redistributing the wealth from the server to a network of peers. BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing of all data, so feed owners can be confident the file reaches its target unchanged.

I think thecrew kind of misses what the vision of BitTorrent represents. The author is not alone in this case. I've read much about BT on other blogs in the class and I feel that many people are getting the wrong impression. BT is not a file sharing network in the same way that kazaa is known to be. It is meerly a program designed to distribute bandwidth amongst peers, not to allow users to search through immense file collections and download files of their choice. The BT program is entirely seperate from the websites that pile torrents and trackers together and enable people to access illegal content. With all of that said, I am quite happy merging an RSS feed from a site that hosts torrents of the latest TV shows with my BT client to provide me with virtual TV on demand.

Scooping Circuits

Here in Scott's blog: Flash Drives Scott touches on flash drive technology, but my interest in his post has to do with the source of his cited article belonging to the New York Times' Circuits section. Recently I stumbled across Circuits Watch, a blog that serves to jab at the NYT's circuits section for being completely untopical to modern technophiles. In their own words,

Circuits, which appears every Thursday in the New York Times has long been the section of the newspaper techies have loved to hate, with its stale trend reports and grade-school-level Q&A columns. Despite that, almost everyone interested in the internet, computers, gadgets, video games and information age lifestyles returns each week, looking for more of the same.

“Every Thursday, I look forward to the Circuits section of the New York Times. And without fail, I’m always disappointed,” says CircuitsWatch founder Dan Ackerman. “So, instead of having the usual Thursday afternoon bitch sessions with my Buddy List, I’m sharing my not-so-expert opinion on the Circuits section with the world.”

The blog's author goes on to mock their coverage of USB flash drives, noting that flash drives have been around for years, and that floppy disks have been on the way out for almost half a decade.

So, when it comes down to it, why does the world's most read, in-depth, topical, and respected newspaper dumb down its circuits section to appeal to the average reader? I don't claim to know the answer, but I find the NYT's circuits coverage to be pretty ridiculous. If they can print news and business coverage at such an advanced comprehension level, there should be no reason why they couldn't follow with decent articles about technology. Maybe they are trying to make an underhanded statement as to the technological literacy of the average NYT reader. I mean, people are still reading the same newsprint that originated over 150 years ago right?

Triumph of the bloggers?

I woke up to this article sitting in my favorite newsfilter. It goes on to report,

To hear some press experts tell it, CBS's admission Monday that it was duped into using questionable documents about President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War was a watershed moment brought on by a small army of Internet-based commentators known as bloggers...

...Orville Schell, dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, said CBS's admission of error after days of stalling was "a landmark moment for the balance between the blogosphere and mainstream media..."

"...The Web has done one revolutionary thing to journalism. It has made the price of entry into the media market minimal. In days gone by, you needed a small fortune to start up a simple magazine or newspaper. Now you need a laptop and a modem," said Sullivan, writing in this week's Time magazine.

So there you have it, blogging has now eclipsed mass media as the source for truth in news. Seriously though, all it took were a few people with a large voice to disprove what was made out to be a presidential scandal. I think this will definately be a lesson to mass media, as they find themselve treading much more carefully in the future.

Welcome RSS to the Distributed Internet

In Bud's post summarizing Scoble's article on the increasing demand for bandwidth that RSS is generating, he says,

When people surf the web, they only visit sites they like periodically. Their frequency can be as low as a few times a week or once a month. When people use a feed reader, even a web-based one like my.yahoo, they subscribe to an RSS feed with the option to check for updates every hour, sometimes less. Suddenly, the effective number of times people visit sites increases dramatically, driving bandwidth through the roof.

Since companies have to pay for bandwidth, this can be a big problem for them

Upon reading Bud's comments and the linked article I couldn't help but think, "well this is a stupid problem, just solve it the way everyone else is solving bandwidth limiting content distribution problems." How is this, you ask? I, for one, believe the answer lies in distributed peer to peer architecture (the most common incarnation of which is BitTorrent). So a connection to the RSS feed is logged by the server which tracks all other incoming peer connections to that feed, and instead of responding with the requested XML data, it responds with ip addresses of it's closest peers that have the current data (or in the best case, the addresses of super-nodes, that can then point the client in the right direction). Yet another way in which p2p technology could be used to actually help in legal content distribution. I still yearn for the day when this kind of distributed architecture actually becomes the backend for other commonly used internet client applications (i.e. a p2p web browser).

Woe is Normalization

I can't help but notice that the whole normalization process isn't going as easily as I thought It would. I always seem to jump to defining tables in my head before I even begin to walk through the steps. Does anyone else have this "top-down" problem? I guess it just makes more sense for me working that way. I'm going to go through the examples a few more times and see if I get the hang of it.

Official Test Post

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