Earth: Mostly Harmless

Grid computing and fibre broadband - Netherlands style

The Dutch are responsible for some great things. Vincent Van Gogh, Edam and of course, 2 Unlimited. It also seems that they have their eye on the ball when it comes to internet connectivity. 2200 homes and offices in the town of Almere (situated on a polder in the southern Netherlands) have been wired up by UNET and SARA for 100Mbps over fibre to the premises for the purposes of a grid-computing project. They’re hoping to sell the computing power eventually, though it will be used initially for academic and medical research.

The Almere-based initiative is a special project in four regards. First the heterogeneity of the Grid is remarkable. From the central AlmereGrid Exchange, communication will be initiated with all possible operating systems on which the connected processors are running. Second, the citizens and companies located within the Almere Fiber-to-the-Home project (Almere Fiber Pilot) will be involved. AlmereGrid will be implemented in a tight social structure which will connect the pioneers in the test-bed area. The third special project feature is strongly related with this fact. The fiber network is connecting the computers with a fixed speed of 100Mbit/s. This can be guaranteed since the SARA subsidiary in Almere and the service provider UNET are taking part as Technology Providers in AlmereGrid. The fourth feature consists in the technical but especially human enforcement of leading technology companies, which are collaborating to deploy the project.

This is the latest development in the recent trend of urban areas organising their own high-speed broadband - though unlike the steps several American towns - notably Lafayette, Louisiana - are taking, this one looks like it’s commercially-driven. BT currently has a limited trial in place of fibre to the home as part of their (admittedly impressive) 21CN strategy.

AlmereGrid, the world’s first city supercomputer, is taking shape

(Via The Register.)

Partisan Jab: DICK CHENEY’S ALIVE! - Music For America

Partisan Jab: DICK CHENEY’S ALIVE! - Music For America A nice little parody of Dick Cheney’s impersonal style and dubious corporate connections. Shame I only heard about it today! The movie is a 10.7MB QuickTime file, take a look.

Where the Hell is Matt (dancing)?

Gotta love Matt.

Where the Hell is Matt?: “Man dances his way around the world [wmv - 36MB] getting jiggy on a mountaintop, busting moves in an impenetrable forest, dodging Hanoi motorcyclists with his finely tuned moves, and, well, I wouldn’t want to give anymore away. It’s the feel good movie of the season.”

(Via MetaFilter.)

UK Broadband - part 2

A couple of days after posting my previous item about the various xDSL technologies which may or may not come into usage in the UK during this century, Slashdot posted a story announcing the UKonline 8Mbps service i mentioned. Which is all fine (though a little delayed by Slashdot standards) until people start posting the inevitable “8Mbps for £40? that’s rubbish! Here in [insert Scandanavian country or Japan here] we have a gazillion gigabit connections for which the telco pays us”. Well, not quite, but it does add insult to the ‘injury’ of the utterly shitty connections we have here. Furthermore, most of the services mentioned are symmetric (same upload and download rates), and have no transfer limits. Just a few tasters:

Expensive! (Score:5, Informative) by silverz (803241) on Wednesday January 26, @09:00PM (#11487672) That is very expensive. In Japan, for example ADSL connection from Yahoo Japan costs you about 4000 yen per month (less than 40 US dollar) for 50 Mbps ADSL. And also fibre optic connection has become very common and cheaper. For example Usen Networks (one of the provider in Japan) provides 100 Mbps fibre optic connection for only 2950 per month. I use the fibre optic that comes with 5 static IPs. And it costs me about 5000 yen per month. Download cap is totally never heard in here. As far as I know, all packages come with unlimited bandwidth.

Which isn’t too bad, as you expect that sort of thing from the Japanese. But then…

France has got UK Beat: 20Mbits/sec @ 30 Euros (Score:5, Interesting) by valmont (3573) on Wednesday January 26, @09:52PM (#11488047) (http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 20, @06:11PM) thanks for playing [adsl.free.fr]. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that’s for 30 Euros per month. The service comes with free telephony [adsl.free.fr] to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe. Once you’ve got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels [adsl.free.fr]. With 20Mbits/sec … that should do it. All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom’s been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today’s sleek freebox. Here’s a picture of it [flickr.com].

Well thanks for that. You expect that sort of thing from the Swedish but to be beaten in terms of broadband by the French? They were playing catch-up just two or three years ago, and it seems it’s now our turn…

Linux ‘Switcher’ ad

Edu’s Worthless blog links to a Flash movie parody of the Apple ‘Switch’ campaign, adapted for Linux. It’s so true…