Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Texans Support Boca Chica Beach Spaceport
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Ariane 5ECA carrying JCSAT-13 & Vinasat-2 successfully launched to earth orbit
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Japan Continues Role in International Space Station Operations with Cargo and Astronaut
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Tractor Beams: Almost Real!
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Magnificent timelapse from Electro-L No. 1 Russian geostationary weather satellite
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Bandwidth caps change behavior, discourage use
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Georgia Tech and Microsoft have released a study that confirms what most of us already knew: bandwidth caps discourage people from using broadband productively. Bandwidth caps are great for inflating the profit margins of the incumbents when someone runs over their limit and starts incurring more charges, but if you want your business community and your work from home business start ups to be as productive as possible, saddling them with outdated 20th century infrastructure that limits what they can do is not the way to go.
Design Nine helps our clients build modern broadband networks that can deliver as much bandwidth as any business or home-based worker might need--affordably. It's not that hard, but it does require the right business model, the right long term financial plan, and a network architecture that can deliver Gigabit bandwidth affordably without crippling economic development.
On the new judges
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012China May Launch Shenzhou 9 in Mid-June with First Female Taikonaut to Tiangong 1
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012EmergencyEmail.org Weather Alert Forecast for 5/15/2012 8:15:00 AM
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012My Heart Bleeds
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012‘We Can’t Drill Our Way To Oil Independence’
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012You Don’t Have To Be Bright …
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Virginia Spaceport Gains $19-million in Budget
Monday, May 14th, 2012Soyuz TMA-04M in Orbit; Set to Dock at ISS
Monday, May 14th, 2012Astronauts Suni Williams and Joe Acaba Talk About Riding Soyuz and Baikonur Cosmodrome
Monday, May 14th, 2012Build the Starship Enterprise by 2032?
Monday, May 14th, 2012PeekYou tries to aggregate even more “private” public information
Monday, May 14th, 2012Peek You is an information aggregator service that tries to pull together as much publicly available information as possible about someone and package it up neatly. Many of the items it will list take you directly to other sites that provide even more information. The service tries to list all of the available social media connections as well (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.). The service also calculates a PeekScore, which is some kind of weighted value between 1 and 10 that is supposed to indicate how important you are in the online universe. I suspect most of us are going to end up on the low end of the scale. If you want to be nosy, this is a great service. I would expect that advertising and/or fees will eventually be used to support the cost of providing.
No one can afford to have every service as a subscription
Monday, May 14th, 2012Adobe has announced Muse, "...a program for creating web pages without hand coding." Great. Except it costs $14.99 a month, or buy the CreativeCloud package for $49.99 a month. We're in the midst of a bubble where lots of companies think they are going to make lots of money by selling software as a service. But this bubble, like all bubbles, is unsustainable. No company or individual can afford to be paying what quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars a month for "cloud" services. It just does not scale. And expect many many disasters when most of these companies go out of business and a) you find that your data was stored in a proprietary format that cannot be easily moved to some other software, or b) all your data is just plain gone when the company goes belly up.
The cloud is extraordinarily useful for many kinds of applications, but there are two big assumptions: the network will always be there to access your data, and the company will always be there so you can access your data. As for the former, if some rogue state detonates an EMP device over the U.S. that takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If a major solar storm/EMP takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If you cloud company goes out of business, what do you do?
Backups, backups, and backups. Some of those backups need to be under your direct control. If all your backups are in the cloud and you can't access the cloud, what do you do?
We're building a house of cards here, and placing entirely too much trust in cloud-based services.