Video is Not Killing the Internet.

One thing that really stuns me is how often it gets said that video is killing the internet, with the justification for this claim being that it's now a much larger fraction of the bandwidth than "anything else".

It's a much larger bandwidth, BECAUSE IT IS LARGER.

If I spend an hour reading text on the web, it's unlikely that I will use up more than perhaps 100k of bandwidth. If I spend that same hour watching video, 100M is more like it. If something takes a thousand times more bandwidth to consume, it would have to take up a tenth of a percent of the time to be taking up exactly as much bandwidth.

If it were taking up 90% of the bandwidth, that's less than one percent of people's online activity. A projection from Wired a ways back showed web use decreasing to a "depressing" 23% Oh yeah. Video is slaughtering the text internet alright.

It's a wonder you're reading this at all.

Superheroes Everywhere

One thing I've been noticing is that I'm friends with a lot of people I really have to classify as Some Kind of Superhero.

I feel, on a daily basis, that I must have somehow landed myself in the middle of one of those circles of friends you read about in the history books as being "the masterminds behind the Enlightenment" or "the Founding Fathers of the United States". And increasingly, I think perhaps I am. But that's not what's amazing.

IT IS HAPPENING MORE THAN ONCE, RIGHT NOW.

In fact, it's happening hundreds, thousands of times, in different sectors and in different arenas as distances evaporate. Core teams are self-assembling into groups of visionaries who will change the way the world works, from one viewpoint. But instead of defining a whole age for the whole of "civilized" mankind, each one will be hammering away at some aspect of the whole.

Look around you. You're probably surrounded by superheroes too.

Look again-- THE SOFTWARE IS NOW DIAMONDS

Very impressive showing by Ubuntu on the basic scientific use front. Octave is absolutely delicious in that you can just bloody do things. I *might* drop Scilab but Octave isn't quite so shiny on my Win7 lappy.

And of course, Scilab has an Ubuntu release that runs pretty well (once you get OpenGL working, of course.)

Don't get me wrong, there's still a small stack of stuff that I still can't get working under Ubuntu, but that stack is SHRINKING. And it's small enough now that I DON'T need Windows for everyday work.

Also, Ubuntu is totally rocking my sound card already. Bravo, Open Source, bravo.