Wireless Neighborhood Networks in Canada

Anonymous the younger writes "Cringely once again has another column, this time with a company in Canada that does neato stuff with Open Source."

India has Wireless Neighbourhoods too ...

[Gopal.V]

India has a prototype wireless phone system in the Kuppam Wireless Telephone [tenet.res.in] System... I don't know if it's open source or not ... (from what I see, politics drives towards expensive solutions). Has all the stuff WiFi for 3.2 lakh people, VoIP phones , the works ... from HP

Cringley article mirror at Mirrordot.org

[UnderScan]

http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/2f31d8cc49919cc72 84b7d708fe73c52/index.html [mirrordot.org]

From http://www.mirrordot.org/about/ [mirrordot.org]
Erik and Jay are the geeks behind this site. MirrorDot started with us simply doing a proof-of-concept project to see if we could create a system to automatically mirror any Slashdot-linked pages and ensure the content would remain available, even if the original site got clobbered - trying to solve the Slashdot Effect. The project worked, so we decided to make it available in September 2004 for anyone to browse and use.

Is MirrorDot perfect? No way - far from it. :) Nonetheless, we found it to be useful and hope others will too. MirrorDot is currently considered in a "beta" stage, so if you find any broken stuff on this site, please let us know.

Re:Lazy Leeching Neighbors

[Mordaximus]

Perhaps if the neighbors were up to the challenge (and didn't cancel their cable) they could even grab episodes of their favorite shows to share.

No they couldn't. What Andrew does is legal, because he buys the channels from The National Programming Service just like a cable provider would. If his neighbours recorded off of consumer sources and shared it, there would be legal problems.

Re:Please.

[danknight]

Yeah, Id be interested to know how many TeraBytes is server has :) I have just under 1/2 TByte raid and already just about filled it with movies and tv and I'm only talking about 15 Movies and a few hundred tv shows

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to do something different. I have EVERY episode of the simpsons, futurama, family guy and good eats on a small set of DVD's (About 7 episodes per DVD) and several movies.

These are DVD's that will play in a DVD player, no they are not at a stupid 8Mbit bitrate, they are at a slightly better than SVHS bitrate which is better than the broadcast TV I recorded them from.

Why is it that Videophiles think they need to record tv at 22Mbit per second in 96Kbps 5 channel sound?? it looks no better than by 300 megabyte 1/2 hour show at a low bitrate (that is still higher than Digital Cable or DSS sattelite) .5Tb?? tiny but enough to hold at least 20 full length movies + 200 1/2 hour TV shows.

Minor Issue

[Mortanius]

No one can watch every episode of the original Star Trek series in the order in which they were broadcast in one weekend, it's a temporal impossibility. Even if you say each episode was only 40 minutes long, 80 episodes @ 40 minutes each is 3,200 minutes, compared to 2,880 minutes in two days. (Although I'll shoot myself in the foot and say that if you consider the weekend to start at 5pm on Friday, that adds another 420 minutes, giving you time enough to watch all the episodes with 100 minutes for bathroom breaks and such. But still. :-P)

Also, anyone else notice that IE has trouble selecting text on that page? It always selects, for me, everything from the top of the page down to where the cursor is. Annoying. (And yes, Firefox does just fine. Unfortunately I have to use IE at work.)

Personal servers the next step?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the original story:
"...Open Source software is leading to digital devices being used in large volumes in ways their designers never envisioned. This takes control of the network out of the hands of the providers and into the hands of the users."
I believe, the next step is to free the users from providers whom store their personal data and even serve their e-mail and that's already happening. With products like The Net-Box [axentra.com] it is now possible to have your own email,file,calendar,bookmark server in your own home without worrying about free-service policies changing that will restrict the way you access your own data.As a matter of fact Axentra [axentra.com] the creator of the Net-Box is in Canada and uses Open Source [axentra.com] as well!

Re:zaurus 6000 distro...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um http://pocketworkstation.org/
and/or http://people.debian.org/~mdz/zaurus/