David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’ve been using Dreamhost since about October of 2007, on recommendation from a friend (actually just noticing that he was using it for his blog). I could tell that they were overselling from the start. They advertise 5TB of bandwidth per month, which is 1.92MB(15.36Mb) per second continously per ‘client’ per month. With the fact that I understand they have at least 100, if not thousands of users per server… this quickly becomes rediculous. Amazon’s EC2/S3 is $0.20USD/GB of transfer. They ‘actually’ serve that much up. 5TB/month would cost $1,000USD on EC2. Amazon’s margin on this isn’t that big. Certainly not $995 of margin on it.

Dreamhost basically sells just what their name is, a dream. It is not reality, could not be reality and will never be reality. I kind of wish I could easily set up a test to show that there is no way they could offer that bandwidth and never would. I just don’t have a connection that would be able to push that myself in order to do the transfer.

Dreamhost has given me nothing but slow speeds, much downtime and many headaches. I like the simplicity of some of their things (DNS management, 1-click installers) but honestly I need uptime and speed more than anything else.

So I am moving to Slicehost in a few days. It’s twice as much as Dreamhost for a single 256mb slice, but that should be more than enough really. It’s a known quantity and they aren’t overselling. Dan Choi is going to help me move. There might be a tiny bit of downtime over the next few days while the DNS propogates, but soon hopefully we will have a sweet and snappy site.

Tags: away, dreamhost, from, hosting, migration, moving, new, slicehost

I kinda hate Tim Ferris, author of the 4 Hour Workweek. I more hate some of the people that are overly lazy and opportunistic who think they can basically do nothing and make a ton of money. Tim is actually a pretty smart guy, and I only disagree with some of his stuff.

While I am not going to go full-scale and attempt his “distribute everything” methods, I’m going to give some of it a shot. It’s inexpensive, and it will help me clarify many of my thoughts I feel. Often I feel that the slowest thing for me is clarifying what I want to have done. I want to improve on this. I’ve already found the benefits of having a few physical things done in this way (I drop off my laundry to have it done).

I’m going to check into virtual personal assistants and some other methods. Things in my life are nuts and I need some specific method to my madness. Big business have procedures for doing things. I currently have no official procedures. I’ll be posting my attempts and results soon

Tags: distribute, lifehack, personal assistant, tim ferris, virtual, work

Netflix has announced their Roku video player. It seems to be targeted at the On-Demand and AppleTV crowd for those wanting a simple set-top box to play video instantly on. The box is targeted at $100, and watching movies is included with your standard 8.95 or above plan. A PC isn’t required to make it work and it works over any wired or wireless broadband connection.

Sounds great right? Every Netflix movie right at your fingertips would be pretty awesome right? Well, yea it would. Sadly there’s only about 10% of the Netflix catalog available. That’s kinda lame.

Well still, it’s cheaper than the Apple TV so you should be able to get the same HD goodness for less than half the price right? Unfortunately again it’s a miss. Although it has component, HDMI, and S-video out along with optical for the audio (stereo only) it only streams and outputs at 480p. That’s Wii resolution for you. The AppleTV was bashed heavily for only doing 720p and omiting the capability to playback 1080p, this is far worse.

The picture reportedly isn’t DVD quality either. I’m fine with 480p if it’s wide screen (very little widescreen content) and DVD quality, but once you introduce artifacts at that resolution things go to hell. It doesn’t actually download them to box, but rather just streams them and eats bandwidth. I like AppleTV’s capability to actually download things to the box and free up the bandwidth later.

Netflix is still missing the boat imho in their omision of Apple support in their computer-viewing option. Not everyone has a Mac obviously, but I’d actually use the service (and consider this box) if I could watch them on my Mac.

Apple got things right with the fact that you can rent movies, throw them on your iPhone and take them on the go. They still need to enable 720p movie rentals and downloads instead of keeping that as an AppleTV only feature.

These companies do need to realize that 720p is here today, and 1080p is the future. I’m really worried about the adoption of 4k video for the future. It seems that our nation’s terrible bandwidth issue is holding us back pretty severly here.

I haven’t gotten my hands on the Netflix box and likely won’t. It’s a 4.5/10 imho and simply not worth my $100. Good idea, poor implementation.

Tags: 1080, 720, apple, appletv, netflix, roku, streaming

Negroponte revealed at the OLPC MIT Media Lab event (Reported by Xconomy) that the next OLPC will be $75 and have dual screens by 2010 with the intention of being more like an eReader than a laptop. I have several problems with this and think they can do better.

The first problem being that they have a poor history of setting prices this far in advance. The OLPC was originally dubbed the “$100 Laptop” as that was the original price target. Its initial release was a buy 2, get 1 program at $400 (meaning each laptop was $200). Doubling of the price meant halfing the number of laptops that children would get their hands on. Not good. I am wondering if this new device is going to be closer to $125 or higher. They have a goal of making the original OLPC $100 in 2008. The problem is, we are nearly halfway through 2008 and we haven’t seen any movement on that.

My second problem is the screens. Did Negroponte get hooked playing on a Nintendo DS or something? They are going to use commodity portable DVD screens and somehow turn them into touch screens then for $20 each. These screens are generally very low resolution, require a lot of power for the backlights, don’t operate in non-backlit modes and hell to read text on.

Why in ~5 years since Amazon begun developing their Kindle couldn’t they get the same thing out there (without the profit) for approximately $175 or so? I’m thinking they could do it by 2010 and their ePaper looks great and lasts forever on batteries it seems.

I’m a supporter of OLPC, but I find this move to be disturbing as I find many of their moves to be lately. Why do we need Windows XP on children’s laptops in Africa? Why do they need dual screens? Why did they misjudge their pricepoints so badly before, and will they do the same again?

Tags: 100 Laptop, ds, dual, ereader, kindle, media lab, mit, Negroponte, nintendo, OLPC, screens, X1

Last night marked the opening of Boston’s Apple store on Bolyston street; the largest in the US. From what I saw on Twitter, crowds started early in the day. The building is across from the Prudential Mall and is situated between a Fidelity Bank branch and a Copy-Cop. Taking form of many of the other mega-Apple stores the exterior is of thick glass with a prominent eight foot tall Apple logo displayed on the third floor. Curiously however, is the fact that some of the other surrounding buildings also use similar glass motifs including the Fidelity’s entrance and across the street in the new hotel and condos on the top floors. I do wonder if this was intentional or simply a common design element of this decade that I am just noticing.

I arrived around 5:15pm, with the store slated to open at 6:00. Apple had very carefully planned for the crowds and had police presence helping with metal barricades similar to what they use for the Boston Marathon. These formed block long, and 15 feet wide boxes that resembled lines. These lines extended all the way down to Commonwealth Avenue and were completely full. They opened the store a few minutes early I think in order to try and shorten the lines. Apple employees from all over were there to help out in bright, colorful Apple shirts. The lines moved swiftly. That being said, I didn’t get to the front of the line until about 6:40pm.

I spoke with several people about Apple and technology in general, their thoughts on an impending and much hyped 3G iPhone and other geeky topics. At one point many of the Apple employees ran by the line giving everyone a high-five, yelling a bit cheerfully and getting everyone hyped up. There were no problems in the line and everything went smoothly. Right before I got inside I met up with my friend Selina, but she wasn’t in line so she waited for me to get out.

Upon entrance to the store you were greeted by dozens of Apple employees handing out t-shirts in these awesome little origami like boxes. As far as I saw, there were no special sales and most people weren’t buying anything much. A few Redsox players showed up at one point, and rumors about Joey from Aerosmith being there at one point were around. No Steve Jobs, but that is to be expected.

The store is pretty cool itself, but like all of the mega Apple stores it’s really just ‘more of the same’ as the smaller stores. They don’t have special products that they only sell at the larger stores, or any displays that aren’t on display at others. It’s just ‘more’. One massive highlight of the store that’s hard to explain I find, is how awesome the stairwell is. I think it’s far cooler than the stairwell and elevator of the NYC store. The fact that there’s such a great view from the windows also is pretty killer over the 5th avenue store. It feels a bit like a 3-floor version of the Soho store.

I only spent a few minutes in the store. I actually wanted to buy a screen protection film for my iPhone, but I was pressed to get back outside and make my way to POPSignal.

POPSignal was great. I met up with my friend Rich Helle and walked over to Tequila Rain. As always at these events there were great people, great conversation and much card swapping on everyone’s parts. I ran into Aaron White and pulled him back on with the super-secret project that I’ve got going on (which will be revealed shortly as soon as we have a name!) and got to talk with Mark Modzelewski who I hadn’t seen in a while. I also got a bit of time to hang out with social-media superstar Chris Brogan while on my way out. One of the unexpected twists of the evening ended with seeing Chris jokingly running away from us all the way down Landsdowne Street. Afterwards we went to Eastern Standard for a few more drinks and then settled up for the night. Overall, a great time.

This weekend I’ve got to stop by Barcamp for at least a little bit. I’m not going to be able to do the entire thing since I have some other stuff going on too, but I’ll at least make an appearance.

Tags: aaron white, apple, barcamp, boylston, chris brogan, event, grand, new, opening, party, POPSignal, rich helle, store