Tis the Season to shred some hot Christmas tunes!
Well, I see I completely slacked off and forgot to do an update during my Thanksgiving break. Oops. Sorry about that. I’m going to try and get better about doing these more often.
Thanksgiving? Delightful. Good food, we got some snow, and the Cowboys won. What else could you ask for?
Time to start looking forward to Christmas! Which, as you all know, is absolutely one of my favorite times of year. Sunday evening, mom and I put the tree up, Trans-Siberian Orchestra in the background. Now, I love Christmas music already. But TSO….they just do it RIGHT. You CANNOT beat their arrangement of O Come All Ye Faithful/O Holy Night. You just can’t. To this day, I maintain that it is the best rendition of those two carols I have ever heard. Period. I do not care WHAT you say, an incredible guitar solo is the ONLY way to perform that song!
But there’s something more immediate to look forward to, specifically, this-weekend-immediate. For this Sunday, the last of my three best friends puts a gun to the head of their bachelorhood and happily pulls the trigger. Chris. Kelley. Married.
Man I can’t believe it’s already here. But you can bet I’ll be down this weekend for it. You know, since I’m a groomsman and all. Plus we have a Bachelor Party to do and all. Mwahaha.
In other news, Mark Cuban doesn’t get it! Go figure.
Mark Cuban believes he has the answer to all of the world’s bandwidth problems: Block all P2P traffic, which mostly comes in the form of BitTorrent. Cuban wants the fastest possible internet and according to him, P2P “Freeloaders” are the worst cause, because they, the content distributors, “want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime”. Also according to Cuban, the best alternative for P2P video (and strangely enough, also audio, he claims) is Google Video. Quoting, “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?”
Well, lets start with the fact that you can’t really get AUDIO off of a Video hosting service. Let’s move on to the fact that there are plenty of things you can’t get on Google Video that P2P excels at distributing, the most notable being ISOs of your various flavors of Linux. Then there’s the fact that for the end user, a torrent, which builds the end file or files from hundreds of users who have provided the file to have bits pulled from it, is almost ALWAYS faster in the end than a download from one single server.
But the final, most hilarious thing, that completely proves that Cuban DOES NOT get it, is this. It doesn’t matter what the content is. You can have one single video. Lets say you get it via BitTorrent. Then let’s say you get it via Google Video. Lets say you do both twenty times. Guess what? The end amount of bits of data that flew over the internet IS THE SAME either way. Downloading it from one single location doesn’t magically make the file any smaller, and thus take up less bandwidth, Mark. Go take a network architecture class, please.
All right, I’m going off my geek rant for the day. Ya’ll take care.
Reading Fairy Tales Openly 
BMatt, why you write so good about the man? I’m contemplating going to Linux actually.