Snaps for Dreamhost

A few years back a friend of mine sent me a referral code for a hosting company I hadn't heard of called "DreamHost" - the deal got me a year of hosting for around $20 - too good to pass up for many reasons. One was that I was tired of hosting my own domains and many others on my own home machine, it was just too stressful every time I had an outage or went on vacation. More to the point I lived in fear of one of my hosted domains getting slashdotted. Another was DreamHost offered ridiculously high storage and bandwidth quotas compared to anyone else. Most importantly they let you have several domains hosted where others would charge you extra per month for more than once.

So I went with them and never regretted it since. I'll admit it, they are kind of folksy - a kind of neighborhood hosting that has whacky deals and funky outages. For a while I was down for two days due to a power outage in LA, but you know it wasn't my problem. And then they removed the limit on the number of domains you could host with an account, well why not - so long as you keep within the bandwidth and storage limits what do they care? And then they started raising those limits seemingly almost every month. Before I knew it I was enjoying 10GB of storage and several hundred GB per month of bandwidth - then eventually it was 200 GB of storage and 1,000 GB of bandwidth - at that point I really didn't care any more.

Another great feature of DreamHost was their very genorous referral scheme which is exactly what got me into them in the first place. At that time and to this day if you successfully refer a new customer to DreamHost you can collect up to $97 in referral fees, or a 10% one payment on their renewals for life and 5% on their referrals renewals for life. That policy still stands to day and yes it really works - since June 2005 I've only paid $20 in hosting fees and since then I've referred to them a dozen or more customers and still have $40 left over for this years renewal.

The most recent really great thing I've found out about DreamHost is they give completely free top tier hosting to any organization that is a 501c3 tax exempt charity. As it happens I am a webmaster for such an organization and had been hosting their site with DreamHost since 2005. Now I have been able to provide DreamHost with the 501c3 notificaiton from the IRS and all our hosting is free for life. We also score a ridiculous 500GB of storage and goodness knows how many terrabytes of bandwidth per month. We even get free VPN access and I think dedicated IP addresses. Sweet! As the title says snaps for DreamHost

Okay so what is bad about DreamHost? Well I have to admit their email set up really quite funky - especially in regard to spam filtering. It just doesn't work they way I want it, and the way it should work, and sharing a website between several users doesn't work the way it should either. Yes they also do maintenance at the darnedest of times and have had their fair share of technical issues along the way. But these are really small beer compared to the deal you are getting.

In the mean time if you are interested in some cheap and plentiful hosting why not check out DreamHost and if you want a healthy $50.13 off any plan over $50 a year then enter the discount coupon JLDA at checkout time.

Astronomically good software

By chance I was looking at the new Dell forum called Idea Lab, mostly because it seems to have been overrun with Linux zealots who seem very interested in telling Dell all about the benefits of open source software and Windows-free and pre-installed Linux systems. Not that I'm against any of that - I am wondering what Dell is thinking right now, probably having daily meetings on how to quietly bury the idea lab without anyone noticing is my guess :-)

But one of the upshots of this was I noticed a post from someone who wanted pre-installed Open Source software on even Windows based machines, instead of proprietary stuff like MS Office. A couple of the applications they mentioned were Stellarium and Celestia. Being a bit of an astronomy nut in my youth (I used to have a telescope and go stargazing) I went off to check out these applications because, shame on me, I'd never heard of them before.

Lets just say I was very surprised to find that both apps were both amazingly, nay astronomically (pun intended) good software. The both gave different but beautiful perspectives on the night sky and universe, and even better had very professional and high quality ports for the Windows platform as well as Linux, and run on MacOS. Even if you are not into astronomy I think these are Google Earth level "awesome" apps that are a "must have" for any self respecting computer owner who wants to show non-techies the wonders of modern desktop computer power.

Copyright and the garden of good and evil

It seems to me that Microsoft is planting its stake firmly in the ground and declaring Google, Apple and Linux as the evil copyright infringers and infringing wannabes. Naturally that makes them the self proclaimed good guys with lots of moral and DRM high ground between them and the swamp of infringement below.

While I'm general in favor of copyright and abide by it (except to overcome the lame restrictions of broadcast TV distribution) I do think that the fair use doctrine is a good thing and DRM is only good so long as it works and permits fair use.

Going forward, in this copyright battle of good vs evil I think something will have to give. We currently have two entrenched camps of extremists - the death or glory hacker s and crackers who will try, and continue to succeed, in cracking any DRM out there. Then there are the obsessive RIAA and MPA zealots who will protect, litigate and prosecute until there isn't a single unprotected illegal copy of anything out there, and all people are wired at birth with a DRM encrypted digital connection right into their eyes and ears.

In between them there is a vast majority of people who will mostly pay a fair price for content - and often significantly more, and will mostly not bother to copy music any more than they need to. And we will entertainment artists who are mostly not making a mint like the big buys and will mostly not lose a mint due to lack of DRM. In fact if the anti-RIAA anti-DRM propoganda is to be believed they might even stand to gain by getting more liberal distribution and representation on more equable terms leading to more bang per buck for them. That should be good times all round no?

Of course its going to be a long and bloody war getting there but at least its good to know where Microsoft stands, in case we didn't already know.

How to fix Wikipedia

Did you know that Wikipedia is broken? Well if you listened to the chorous of people saying how unreliable, incorrect and generally bad Wikipedia is you might believe it. Then again for the average person on the Internet Wikipedia looks like an omniscient god-send as a first base for researching things. To me, raised on the scientific method, knowing how Wikipedia was created and how it is maintained I'm fully aware of its problems - I'm willing to take it all its information with a grain of salt. But I realize that not everyone is so well informed as to Wikipedia's failings.

The real problem is though, not that Wikipedia is incorrect in places - how ever many that may be - but that even if it was objectively correct in every way, researched and tested to the highest degree beyond perhaps even what a "well respected" document like the Encyclopedia Britannica might be, even then people will dispute its contents. Mostly the problem is that "truth" is largely a subjective notion. People either just believe other people's "truths" - facts presented to them as "true" by others, or try to derive their own truths based on their own interpretation of "facts". Consequently what is regarded as "true" and encyclopedia worthy information is going to vary from person to person.

Some people try very hard to research, cross-reference and document the origin of the facts the present but as time passes, and knowledge becomes second hand that is more and more quite impossible. Indeed if Wikipedia were to present only information backed by that highly cross referenced and researched information it would a) probably not contain a lot of the information it contains now, b) be largely useless to the population at large who just wants a quick low down on a topic.

My suggestion is - let it be. Wikipedia can continue to be what it is - a big global repository of information - but it should cease to be, or pretend to be, some single definitive arbiter of "the truth".

How can that be?

Well day in day out people are submitting edits and new articles to Wikipedia. Day in and day out editors are hard at work mostly moderating that information to conform to their notion of what "good information" and "correct information" is. Maybe we should just remove the editors and let the information be free.

"Okay" you point out, "wont that just result in the happy slander/free-for-all graffiti wall that other open forums turn into?".

Well, yes it would except for one detail - I suggest that somewhat like the Slashdot and Digg community methods, Wikipedia add dynamic filters that filter what you see for each article based on who you trust. It should also maintain all edits as their own branches of the big bad information tree independently so everyone can see the information just as they want it - if they want to. All minority opinions can be maintained and viewed intact by those minorities, but the majority opinions will dominate and be virtually impossible to subvert by minority doodling, graffiti or "griefing" as it is called in Second Life.

It is my assertion that pretty soon after creating such a system the ability of self-trusting mobs to create majority versions of Wikipedia articles will dominate. Yes for some articles there may be two, three or even more major branches in the information tree yielding radically different versions of articles - and each of those may have many, many minority branches. But because we would each select who we trust as arbiters of truth (rather than self elected arbiters of truth making that selection for us) we would only see those opinions that are important to us. Even better no information would be hidden - at each point we would be alerted to and able to view any of the other versions of the document. Further more the trust circles and communities formed by authors and writers of documents would self define reflect all the major belief systems and philosophies we already have in society.

One of the major branches would naturally those people who seek to find a very objective and factual version of information (that would be "scientific") - that would be the version I would select as my "default" view for Wikipedia. Others might select a "mystical" or "spiritual" view. Or they might select "scientific" plus a few variation in certain places. Or they might select just based on what some well respected peer of theirs has deemed to be their view. At each point in the Wikipedia experience I would be able to make changes myself and rate with my "trust" other edits.

Beneath the surface of majority views many more minority opinions would certainly exists and flourish - perhaps bubbling to mainstream over time, who knows what mob rule or time will bring?

Well, that is my idea - in essence Wikipedia can be all things to all people as a real "tree of knowledge" and better for it. Everyone will get what they want, no information will be edited out of history, just buried into obscurity - rather like ancient ruins. Best of all I think with the editing history that is maintained by Wikipedia we could probably go back and reconstruct a genuine tree of knowledge instead of the well edited slice of knowledge that it is now.

Unethical? Maybe. Uneconomical? No way

Tony Long of Wired can complain all he wants about how unethical selling your soon to be vacant anyway parking spot is, but the reality is that its exactly what cities want - the biggest buck for their parking spot. The only problem here is the money is going to the person who last used the spot, and not the city. If you think about it, they guy who just paid $20 to get a prime location downtown spot at rush hour might be real happy to sell it for anything close to $20 - heck maybe even more. The upshot is it doesn't cost him anything more than the difference, that could even be a profit.

So, there seems to be nothing to stop a spiraling private war of parking spot prices while Cities continue to get the parking meter average, if that. Its only natural to expect that cities around the government will soon consider if they too can make parking prices an auction based revenue center. After all, basic economics says that if there is demand and all parking spots are occupied then the price could be way higher than the nominal parking meter fee. Anything up to and beyond standard parking lot fees (after all, who the heck wants to turn down a conveniently located on-street spot for a parking structure spot and then have to walk blocks to their destination).

So Tony, no matter how unethical you think it is, trust me, its only a matter of time before cities start trying to tap into this potentially very lucrative market for auctioned on-street parking, vs. fixed rate limited availability spaces. But rest easy - the money will go back into city coffers unless they just sell off the rights to some private corporation for a fixed fee - hey nothing like ditching the responsibility for employing all those parking enforcement officers in exchange for revenue.