We are just getting it up and running, but I wanted to post this info and give Facebook users a chance to check it out and email me on facebook with ideas and feedback. Check it out. Here is a link

Once i get the time, im going to sell off some of my dupes from my Technology Poster Collection. Back from my reseller days in the 80s and 90s, tech companies used to create posters for retailers. MicroSolutions wasnt a retailer but i got the posters and kept them. From early Apple to Banyan , NEC PCs, IBM PCjr, I got all kinds of cool stuff. No idea what they are worth, but this will be my chance to find out and pay a commission to anyone else who wants to help sell them….

Will also sell some unique Mavs memorabilia including the only existing Rodman Jerseys from his 11 days on the Mavs. Check out the app on Facebook

There are many ways to sell your items online these days, but none as effective as RadicalBuy. It’s, easy, it’s fun, and it’s profitable. Benefits of RadicalBuy: Utilizing the millions of members on Facebook, you can list an item and have it visible to all Facebook users instantly. After you list an item, others can post your listing on their Facebook page to earn commission! For example, if you sell a watch for $100.00, you may offer anyone 10% commission to sell it for you. If someone sells your watch for you, they get $10.00. The amount of commission you offer is entirely up to you. Don’t have anything to sell? RadicalBuy allows all users to list other members items to earn commission. Simply add an item off your friend’s profile to your account and if it sells, they pay you the commission. Listing an item only takes a few minutes and you can post 1 primary photo and up to 5 additional photos at no extra charge. RadicalBuy helps you be a smart shopper by knowing who you are doing business with. Leave feedback about sellers and buyers, and read others comments BEFORE you buy or sell anything. See what others are saying about RadicalBuy. Visit the RadicalBuy forum at RadicalBuy.com.

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I love the feedback on my position on P2P traffic. The well thought out “You Suck”, ” Or “the internet isnt that way”, or “The ISP is selling me 10mbs, I can use it anyway I want”
Guess what, business models do evolve over time. You may want your ISP to be exactly how you want it to be. You may read into your experience with them anything you want. But it can and will change if the economics don’t work for them. No amount of whining about “what the internet is supposed to be” will change any of that.

You can argue about how fiber should make it all the way to your bathroom if you want, that won’t create the capital for ISPs or force them to spend it the way you want them to.

Maybe instead we should look at some realities and options.

So I’ve come up with a better way to get rid of P2P without calling for an outright disabling of the protocol. Maybe ISPs should just treat upstream bandwidth the way cellphone companies treat minutes. Give users an option on how many upstream bits they want to be able to use and during what times of day.

Charge more during prime usage times, less during off hours. For most internet users, like probably 99pct of us, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in our bills or consumption. In fact, many of us could opt for cheaper plans because beyond the family photos or videos we may upload every now and then, or the rare backup of our hard drives, most people don’t consume much outbound bandwidth at all.

Of course that probably wouldn’t be the case for users and abusers of the P2P protocol and applications. Imagine what would happen when WOW users or the rare bit torrent WAREZ or illegal music or video downloader got their bills and realized that they could either throttle their upstream bandwidth and wait forever for their goodies (if they could get them at all ), or open the throttle and watch free downloads start to cost a lot of money. Think that would be fun ?

How are they going to feel when they get a bill for upstream bandwidth for periods when they werent even downloading anything, but their PCs were busy acting as seeds for other P2P clients ? Think they will enjoy paying that bill ?

So I take it all back. DONT block P2P traffic. Just charge for upstream bandwidth usage like cellphone companies charge for minutes. That way if P2P really is more efficient, it will be a non issue. More people will use P2P and will never have to worry about their upstream bandwidth charges.

Or, if its less efficient, it will survive for applications where the owner of the application is willing to pay for the bandwidth the application consumes at both the host and destinations. It could also survive if off peak pricing for upstream bandwidth is cheap enough that its worth it to the user to pay for the bandwidth and take delivery of files during that low priced time period. A truly market solution. Imagine that.

Let the “you suck” comments begin.

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The surest way to get called names is to blog about something that people do or may disagree with. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. It can be technology, sports, dancing, TV and probably something as benign as pizza.

The Hate and Noise to Content ratio seems to be increasing daily. The reality is, there is no such thing as a widely read blog without moderated comments that is profanity or hate free. Thats a shame.

So the question is, is it worth it to allow unmoderated comments ? Or is babysitting comments just part of the job of bloggers ? Or are comments just a waste of time under all circumstances ?

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One thing continues to be a certainty in the technology world, NEVER challenge a sacred cow. If you do, the punches start flying. Of course the punches have to fly because the there isn’t a real response otherwise.

I’m obviously not a huge P2P fan. Gordon Haff did a far better job than I explaining some reasons why. I think there. are valid applications for P2P on private networks, but nothing on the Internet that I think is worth surviving.

My position has nothing to do with Piracy. I think the MPAA and RIAA efforts towards piracy are a joke. They spend more money and waste more government resources than should be allowed. If they spent that money and time promoting why people should go to the movies and the value of owning music, those industries would benefit far more than anything they lose to piracy.

My position is not “if it uses bandwidth, its a bad thing”. Flickr, Google Video, any host that pays for their bandwidth is all right by me. If they want to give it away, go for it. I actually think Google Video is a far better solution for audio and video distribution than any P2P solution. Google is willing to subsidize the worlds bandwidth for multimedia, why doesn’t everyone take them up on their offer ? Go for it Google.

My position is not related to the Internet backbone. There is plenty of bandwidth there and will be for the short and as long a term as I can envision.

My position is related to the last mile. P2P is so incredibly inefficient. You send and receive the same bytes , which means for the portion of the file you are a seed for, you are at least 50pct inefficient. The more often you supply the bytes on your PC to others, the more you impose on the network. If there is a failure somewhere in the chain of delivery and assembly on the destination device , the error recovery process makes things far less efficient. All consuming more and more last mile bandwidth. The bandwidth that defines how fast my internet connection is.

I think the position that “you pay for the bandwidth, so you can use it any way you want” isn’t reality and very flawed when it comes to P2P.

P2P “works” because those who install the clients are wiling to barter some of their bandwidth in exchange for getting a file that represents something of value to them. The bandwidth obviously has significant value to the person or company asking you to contribute it. That’s why torrent clients and almost every P2P client requires you to contribute bandwidth in order to receive the goodies you want.

Bottom line, you are re-selling bandwidth. For those of you who like the buffet analogy, that’s like saying you paid for the buffet, so its OK to take as much jello and mac and cheese as you can carry and walk outside the restaurant and sell it or trade it. Bizarre example, but it makes the point. Just because something is not metered and seemingly not suffering from any level of scarcity doesn’t mean it isn’t limited in availability and costly.

Because if it wasn’t costly, we all would already have 1gbs to our home via fiber or free wireless everywhere.

The reality of our bandwidth to the home scenario today is that there isn’t enough bandwidth to cure all ills. Last Mile Bandwidth is constrained and expensive to grow in multiples of what we all are ready and happily able to consume with legit applications

I personally don’t want to see my connections slow down so P2P users can resell bandwidth to someone who isn’t willing to pay for bandwidth in order to distribute their bandwidth consuming files.

but hey, that’s me.

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I’m not a Comcast customer. I happen to get service from Verizon, ATT and Time Warner at various locations where I pay for internet service.

If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:

BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime.

Does anyone really think its free ? That all the bandwidth consumed with content being distributed by P2P isn’t being paid for by someone ? That bandwidth is being paid for by consumers. Consumers who pay for personal, not commercial applications. When consumers provide their bandwidth to assist commercial applications, they are subsidizing those commercial applications which if it isn’t already, should be against an ISPs terms of service.

Thats not to say there isnt a place for P2P. There is. P2P is probably the least efficient means of distributing content in the last mile. Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as a seed and relay for P2P traffic. After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? For content distributors to avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. That makes it commercial traffic far more often than not. So make them pay commercial rates.

That will stop P2P dead in its tracks. P2P isnt so good that people will use it when they have to pay for all the bandwidth it consumes. It will die a quick death. That will speed up my internet connection.

thats a good thing.

So hang in there Comcast

Update: I wanted to offer the best alternative to P2P for audio and video….. Google Video. If you are trying to do distribution of audio or video, why in the world would you use P2P when Google Video will host and distribute it very efficiently and for free ?

To help those of you who cant understand how to distribute audio on Google Video, here is a hint: Re encode it with a little video, a couple pictures, whatever. Then it it wont be an audio file, it will be a video file.. Ta da . You get distribution by the best distribution network on the planet, for free.

m

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Of the 75 or so emails I received about Redacted, only one was so well thought out I had to post it. It came from a member of our Armed Forces. We have exchanged a couple emails and I asked him if I could post this anonymously . He presented it to his superiors , who approved the posting.

He is a hell of a guy.

Subject: This soldiers perspective on the Redacted issue.

Sir,

I doubt that you will read or see this email, as I have to imagine
you receive thousands of emails a day. And while I figure mine will
just be lost in the flood, I happened across the story about you and
Mr. O’Reilly and the controversy over the movie Redacted, and could
not help but say something. I did not leave a comment on your blog as
I do not want my feelings on the matter to appear anywhere other than
in your inbox. The fact that I’m in the military could make my feelings on
this matter a banner to wave in the argument about this film. I hope
you can forgive me this small indulgence.

To introduce myself, I’m a soldier who was recently wounded in Iraq;
hence why I am in the US and have time to send you this email. Right
now I am still recovering from my wounds, their related complications, and further
surgery. I became aware of the current situation between yourself and Mr. O’Reilly by a
link to your blog on a newsfilter I read called Fark and read through your entries to
see what had occured.

I want to begin by saying that I am not an expert on Iraq, I can only
speak about what happened to me and what I have experienced. But I
think that Bill’s (his first name is faster than endlessly typing
O”Reilly) argument is flawed on a few levels. First of all, what happened in
the Mahmudiyah “incident” has already happened, and the news has
already been widely disbursed through the Arab press. Nearly every
house we ever drove by, even mud huts in rural areas in Baghdad, had
satellite dishes on them. So I would have to imagine that this movie
is not going to provide a shocking revelation to the average Iraqi.

From my experiences, they’ve already formed their opinions of us and
very little we do or say is going to change their minds. One movie,
regardless of its subject matter, is not going to overcome their
personal feelings about things like Abu-Ghraib, the criminal acts
discussed in Redacted, their fears about security and lost loved ones.
I was in Iraq when Insurgents ambushed an American convoy and
kidnapped American soldiers, claiming it was in revenge for what had
happened in Mahmudiyah, so I cannot honestly imagine that his case for
the movie helping motivate terrorists is correct. I think Bill has put the
cart before the horse to try and make a point, but thats standard
practice for idealogues on both sides of the fence, Michael Moore does
the same thing all the time, so does Ann Coulter, and the list goes
on.

Now, I have not seen Redacted, nor do I wish/plan to. I’m all too
familiar with Iraq and the experience thereof, and I don’t want to see
someone who has never been there try and distill it into a film,
regardless of his motivation. In an effort to at least have some
slight idea of what I’m talking about, I did some research, read plot
summaries from objective sources, etc. I do have some concerns about
the film, but they’re not that it will provide idealogical support to
terrorists. I think we do enough of that on our own with our popular
culture, decadent society, and past mistakes in foreign policy. What
does worry me about films like Redacted is that people in America will
watch them and use isolated incidents to color their entire view of
the military and its service in Iraq. When you look at what we’ve done
there, the military has accomplished amazing things and done a lot of
good. But mistakes have been made and criminal actions that have been
committed (and harshly punished) are all that we ever hear people talk
about on TV, in film, and in print media. There aren’t many movies
about guys who die trying to bring freedom to an oppressed people
without ever getting to meet their children, or about how hard and
tirelessly soldiers work over there to try and do a thankless job,
while the media back home paints the war as lost and their efforts as
futile. But, I would never go so far as to advocate boycotting a film
or piece of literature just because I do not agree with what it says
or because I’m afraid of what it might cause. Free Speech is part of
the constitution I am sworn to defend, and there is no stricture in
the first amendment about liking what everyone says. I just wish
someone would tell the stories of the good things, too.

So, don’t worry about Bill. He’s just doing his job, and imagining
that he should always make sense is an exercise in madness. Sometimes he’s on
point, and sometimes he’s way off base. I think this is one of the
latter. For that matter, Brian De Palma is just doing his job too, no
matter how I feel about what he made or what he has to say. If I was
in your position, I would just cut my losses and walk away. Nothing
you can do or say will get him off your case.

If you actually read this, I apologize for the length and for my
occasional rambling. I’ve got a lot of time to think these days and
very little outlet for it. I just wanted to let you know what I
thought, without having it in a public forum. Thank you for your time.
—

Patriotic dissent is a luxury of those protected by better men than they. -Anon

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Can someone please explain to me how and why Devin Harris is not even on the All Star Ballot ? I don’t know who actually puts the ballots together. Supposedly its a bunch of media members ( which may be all the explanation I need) who decide who is on or off. No matter, its a sure bet none of them has a future as a GM in this league.

Devin may not put up the gaudiest numbers game in and game out, but is there any question he is the best defensive point guard in the NBA ? Is there even a close second ?

Devin can stay in front of the quickest points in the league. Does a good a job as anyone getting over and around screens and defending the pick and roll and can guard bigger two guards when we need him to.

Can you name any other point guard who is quick enough, smart enough and willing enough to get in front of the likes of Tony Parker or Allen Iverson and take a charge like Devin does ?

It takes a lot to amaze me. Leaving Devin off the ballot amazes me….Hopefully NBA fans and coaches will be smart enough to recognize the mistake and vote him on to the All Star and All Defensive teams this summer…

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To say Mr OReilly has had it in for me the last month or so would be an understatement. Every day he seemed to take pride in calling me every name in the book and questioning my patriotism. I’ve already covered my feelings on that subject in blog posts here and here. I’ve talked about what I, or anyone can do to serve their country here.

What I was curious about was whether this really was important to Mr OReilly, or whether he was just a ratings whore and would say whatever he needed to say to get more people to watch.

I needed to design a very simple test to determine Mr OReilly’s motivation. It occured to me to see if FoxNews would take an ad for the movie Redacted.

I had someone call FoxNews and tell them specifically, unequivocally that we wanted to run an ad for the movie Redacted. The same movie Bill OReilly was so upset about.

They said no problem. Do you want to run the ads in both the live show and the repeat ?

Our first reaction was that this was just the sales department and at some point , someone at FoxNews would step in and stop the ads from running. The call to say they were stopping the ads never came.

The ad ran in both shows. Here is a link with Bill’s smiling face at the end.

So Mr OReilly , the king of the OReilly Factor, the man who called this movie Anti American and said erroneously it could cause harm to American Troops, was willing to overlook those points and take our money to promote the movie.

We aren’t talking about an ad in a show that Mr OReilly has an interest in. This is an ad in the TV show that bears his name. This is a show that he controls from top to bottom. He knowingly took multiple ads for a movie that he he hasnt seen, but believes to be vile. What does that say about Mr OReilly

Of course Mr OReilly can make the argument that he is not involved in the sale of ads, he leaves that to other people. OK, but lets think about the scenario at Fox News if that is the case.

If Mr OReilly doesnt know about the ads, I would think that the people at his show would know and care about his positions, wouldnt you ?” So the question is, do they know that Mr OReilly is all about the money first , last and every bit in between and thats why they took the ad ?

Or is it that they know exactly what Mr OReilly stands for and hate him for it, or could care less what he thinks and they took the ad to spite him ?

Is it that no one involved with Mr OReilly actually watches the show ? Which is why after the ad ran in the live show, no one caught it and had it replaced in the replay ?

its about responsibility Mr OReilly.

And while Im on the subject of Mr OReilly and his ethics, let me add a couple thoughts:

In response to Mr OReilly’s comments that “he is going to be my worst nightmare”. Well you have succeeded Mr OReilly. The people who take you literally took it upon themselves to call my businesses with bomb threats, threaten employees, myself and others with physical harm and wish every manor of death , injury and illness on us all. They also managed to fill up the telephone lines of the Fallen Patriot Fund so that we couldn’t conduct business, and maybe its coincidence, but the fund’s website went offline for the first time ever yesterday.

What say you Mr OReilly

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This Thursday at the American Airlines Center, the Mavs and the Texas National Guard will present “The Great GreenOut “

As with the Seats for Soldiers program and many other events and programs that the Dallas Mavericks and all of our companies do on a regular basis, we take pride in supporting those those who support this great nation of ours, without exception.

If you happen to be going to the game on Thursday, make sure to put on your shirts and wear them with pride !

m

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This Thursday at the American Airlines Center, the Mavs and the Texas National Guard will present “The Great GreenOut “

As with the Seats for Soldiers program and many other events and programs that the Dallas Mavericks and all of our companies do on a regular basis, we take pride in supporting those those who support this great nation of ours, without exception.

If you happen to be going to the game on Thursday, make sure to put on your shirts and wear them with pride !

m

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