Cox Crow

A Thin Glass Line

Communications Engineering & Design has a March article on the costs of pulling fiber optic cable to the home.

Despite falling prices for fiber related materials such as transceivers and optics, and plenty of raw fiber available, costs remain relatively high to deploy FTTH — from $1,800 to $2,100 per home–with an estimated return on investment (ROI) of three years to five years. With labor costs remaining stable and customer demand for new video, voice and data services still iffy, current business cases for FTTH and FTT$ are questionable.

I can give you an immediate return on your investment, albeit with a few minor conditions: I will pay the $1,800 to $2,100, plus installation fees, if you act as a common carrier.

Perhaps the business case would be more palatable if, instead of pulling wire, they, like plumbers, laid pipe. ;-)

5:33:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Speaking of meeting the author, I used to work with this guy, who now has a book coming out in October.

5:06:24 PM #

Ted Williams: Rest in Peace

4:55:26 PM #
categories: Baseball

Is there the possibility here for real-world application of a attack-resistant trust metric?

Personal advertisements are one of the few which make money. Why? They're wanted.

3:47:37 PM #
categories: Identity

Title (remember the PiL album?)

Testing category addition to items. Thanks for the pointer, Rick.

Also trying out Pepper. Pepper is a nice text editor. I've been using TextPad for some time now, not having bothered to install vim, but this looks ready to replace it.

The encoding-decoding problem also applies to the Title field. This kind of feature is one I would characterize as "too helpful." Applications that don't even try to be user-friendly avoid being too helpful, but applications that try and fail usually are. Instead of helping, they go that extra mile.

2:45:16 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Ned Ludd

Instead, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off, bleeding on everyone and making no sense.
— Janis Ian

How much leverage would take to buy Vivendi Universal and change the business model?

1:51:06 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media

Thanks, Mark!

Due to a long-standing bug in Radio, I am unable to include the full text of this post here, for fear of damaging your News page. Please click the item title to read this post safely.

Mark Pilgrim's RSS feed now differs markedly from what's on his site, to work around the feature in Radio Userland that annoyed me to no end last Wednesday. I'm glad that someone has characterized the bug; now if it could be fixed I'd be even happier.

1:46:05 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Meet the Author

Raph points out Jeff Darcy, saying that he is to protocols as David McCusker is to trees. Turns out that Mr. Darcy wrote one of the pieces of software we use. It's always nice to match a person with software.

1:10:54 PM # Google It!
categories: Note to Self, System Administration

Causality

I'm a firm believer in cause and effect. If some thing happens, then another thing caused that thing to happen. In this long weekend's case, the thing was a system reboot. This in turn caused other things to happen, which led to our being late for the party — or just in time for the food, depending on how you look at it.

But what was the thing that caused the reboot?

11:42:08 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration