Internet visionaries sold the world a total load of crap.

Procrustes Stretched

And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
Dec 1, 2008
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Positively 4th Street
Internet visionaries sold the world a total load of crap.

My Turn: The iPad, Kindle, and Free Content - Newsweek

Here is a link to one article, (by an old snot nosed kid - visionary) who exemplifies the type I hold in contempt and always have. Whether is be the latest blogging software, web 2.0, social networking, json, dynamic web...blah, bla, blah...

I guess my contempt is really for those who believe their own bullshit and those who constantly buy into it.

The Future Won’t Be Free
Unfortunately, as we've seen since, for companies whose core product is content—like every newspaper and magazine you read, including this one—the idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap. We persuaded executives to compete with themselves online by setting up Web sites that offered for free the same content their staffs labored so strenuously to produce and sell in their print publications. The theory was that companies were supposed to make back the money by, uh, "monetizing the attention economy," or some other similarly vaporous concept, that meant either charging customers later on, or selling advertisements, or both.

the irony: I'm linking to free content. ;/)
 
Is Laser the Future of Internet Connectivity?...

Laser-Beaming the Internet of the Future
October 15th, 2015 - Several tech companies are looking at laser or a combination of radio and laser technologies to take Internet connectivity the next level.
Spearheading the effort are Google and Facebook. Google, which is deploying helium balloons in the stratosphere to provide Internet connectivity in remote areas as part of Project Loon, wants to use radio or laser to enable its balloons to transfer data in areas that are far from ground relay stations. Facebook wants to launch drones that use laser beams for high-speed Internet connectivity in remote regions. The idea is that the drone closest to urban areas would use laser to connect to the Internet and then pass along the connection to drones flying over rural area. “Both Google and Facebook think that if they can these aircraft in the stratosphere, roughly 20 kilometers above the Earth, they could kind of function like aerial cell towers and spread the connections more easily and without having to figure out the power and the cabling and everything on the ground,” said Tom Simonite – the San Francisco Bureau Chief of the MIT Tech Review..

RTX14X8W_Lasers-974x636.jpg

A visitor takes pictures with her mobile phone in front of laser beams and a projected image of the Arc de Triomphe, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China​

Facebook, in particular, is very interested in using laser to transfer data. “They claim to have set a new record and made the fastest laser data transfer ever,” said Simonite. “And I just think it shows that they are taking it seriously and are trying to push the technology forward.” Other companies are coupling laser technology with radio redundancy to deliver uninterrupted Internet connectivity in inclement weather. In that kind of situation, Simonite said both laser and radio connections run in parallel, so that the laser can pick up any slack in case of radio interference. “They’re extremely fast,” he said, “but if anything gets in the path of the beam, the signal is blocked.” If the laser cannot travel in a straight line, the radio side would cover the deficit. “So it’s like a redundancy thing so that they always have a connection that’s live,” he said. But the need to use both radio and laser simultaneously can be limiting, said Simonite. He said “lasers can be used to fuller potential” with project like the ones Google and Facebook are undertaking.

Lasers can emit light that can be modulated at very high speeds and can carry more than a petabit of data per second. A petabit is 1,000 terabits. A terabit equals a mind-boggling one trillion bits. The average U.S. Internet connection speed topped 11.7 megabits per second in the last quarter of this year, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report. Globally, Internet speeds vary, depending on equipment and region. Used in communications, they typically operate at 850 and 1550 nanometer wavelengths or colors of light, which are invisible to the human eye. The technology is promising for developing countries and in parts of the world where laying cables is difficult, where cables are easily damaged, or in rural areas where labor and materials tend to be expensive. Simonite said governments and cellular carriers now want to push their coverage into new, unsaturated regions. “And it looks like this technology could help maybe with that in places where the regular way of connecting up cell towers with cables and so on doesn’t really work so well,” added Simonite.

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