Tag: Internet

The fall of free web services?

In recent news YouTube have reported they are removing copyrighted music from their service, Last.fm are starting to charge for their on-line radio station and FileFront just reported they have decided to close their servers. Is it the beginning of the end of the legally free on-line services we see? Granted illegal(?) services like thepiratebay.com and similar networks still flourish despite being subject of a legal action in Sweden. With the recession of the world economy these services have a hard time to find investors that have money left to spend. Many times I’ve though to myself how these business can ever make money being almost totally free. Is the user demographics and associated commercial a high enough source of income to fund the large systems needed to host these popular services?

Someone once said that while we are all on the Internet today they prediceted that in the future we will be part of different sub-networks with login and identifications. The main infrastructure of the Internet will simply be left as an “illegal wasteland” of the digital era in which you only move about with caution.  This makes me think what if we are at the turning point right now? With the free services on decline this might be the time that more traditional business models starts to act on the Internet. Services like Spotify is an example of what I mean. A service that uses the Internet as infrastructure but is charges for access where you are no longer an anonymous user.

Last year I posted about Jeff Bezoz talking about the future of the Internet on TED. This talk is several years old and highlights the enormous potential for invention on a new medium like the Internet. Today we have alot of new technology based on the Internet as a service, his pioneering talk turned out to be sign of things to come. Today we have much higher ground to build business on the Internet from and with the well funded free services going down there should be much potential new business oppertunities.

Twenty years ago the Internet was mostly for Universities. Ten years ago the dotcom-boom came and passed. Today we stand on top of all the technology and business knowledge of the Internet and there simply have to be alot of oppertunities.

IIS easy restart

One annoying thing about the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is that it’s quite a few clicks in order to restart it through the normal GUI. If you use it as a development environment and happen to make an infinite loop or some other bad thing it’s annoying to have to go through all those steps every time.

To save some time here is a simple tip, since the IIS run as a normal service simply make a file called “kick iis.bat” (at least that is what I call it) and enter the following:

net stop w3svc
net start w3svc

This should work for the standard installation of IIS. This will take the server down and then back up again, faster than the GUI just double click the file. I keep it on my dekstop… that might give you an idea of how often I trash the IIS hehe.

Firefox 3.0 follow up

After a few weeks of Firefox 3 usage I must say I now do not miss Internet Explorer at all. With the add-ons available I’ve managed to customize my web browser exactly how I want it (only a few innovative ideas I have myself are missing).

It’s proven it’s stable and fast, I’ve used it on a mixture of laptops and operating systems (Ubuntu 8.04 and several Windows versions) and everywhere it has worked as perfect as could be expected.

As I earlier argued it has several advantages over Internet Explorer and I will now go in depth on one of the advantages: AddOns.

Firefox AddOns are programs that extend the functionality of the web browser and I will rank the best I’ve come across so far.

Recommended addons
Everywhere I install Firefox I always install 2 particular AddOns, Adblock Plus and NoScript. These two make surfing the web safer and faster and despite NoScript requering some interaction when visiting new sites I do not find this bothers me at all. The ad-blocker works fantasticly with the EasyList subscription that contains some standard filters for ads.

After the two “essential” Addons I usually pick up the IE Tab addon.  With this addon you can choose to open sites or links in a tab that is powered by Internet Explorer. You can also write a filter so that some pages (like Windowsupdate.com, Microsoft.com and such) are always opened in IE Tab, this saves you from having to switch browser for sites programmed entierly for Internet Explorer.

If you not only just surf the web but also use FTP the FireFTP addon is worth a look. While being far from the best FTP client I’ve seen it gets the job done and is very easy to use.

Del.icio.us have been a great tool for bookmark handling and the latest installment of a Firefox addon does not dissapoint. Easy interface and installation, though a word of caution: if you run NoScipt make sure to have del.icio.us on the whitelist for scripts or the installation will fail.

Those where my recommendations for now, since I’m soon on a holiday I don’t think I will have time to check out all the developer addons available but I sure will when I get back to work.

Featured picture on Wikipedia.org

Lone HouseTodays featured picture on wikipedia.org is a lone house in sunset. Now there is nothing special about the picture in itself other than that it is pretty beautifully set. What is special about it to me is that it was rendered using an open source 3D rendering software called Blender. Images like these used to be rendered by Silicon Graphics dedicated machines running programs nobody would ever have access to, at least not outside of very large companies. Now I’m not saying it’s easy now, but at least it is possible, for almost anyone to start using software to create whatever comes to mind. This can be programming, music, art or possibly just about anything else that people can think of using the computers and Internet for. This is a time of great oppertunities and I hope that everybody who has an idea can use the tools available and create something that will be in museums or history books in one hundred years.

Jeff Bezoz talking about the Internet

I stumbled upon a great site with lots of great talks, TED Ideas Worth Spreading. I could probably watch these for hours but one of them caught my eye and that was Jeff Bezoz talk about the Internet. I think it’s a very inspirational talk he has, he compares the Internet revolution with other “similar” events in the recent human history such as the gold rush and the home electricity.

We are at the dawn of a new age, let’s figure out how it works!

Spiders

It’s amazing really… I post an entry in my tech blog and just a few minutes later no less than 9 spiders have visited my page and index whatever I have to say. Before a human eye reads what I have to say several computers have allready checked and categorized everything. It’s really mind boggling when you think about how the Internet works and how all things interact and adapt. Think if the Internet did not exsist and someone asked you to construct it… and build it. The technology is one thing but the amount of hardware world wide supporting it is certainly not cheap. We as a human race might finally have created something larger than life, let’s see if it turns out it was a good or bad move 🙂