Brent Laminack’s Personal Site

21April2009

Terrific Design

Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.

I recently came across this example of terrific design. Why can’t we do the same thing in this digital age?

14April2009

What’s Google Doing with YouTube?

Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.

There’s been a rising chorus lately about how Google should dump YouTube. Such as this article at TG Daily. What people are missing here is the big picture, like Google’s relationship to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. The largest expenditure for any ISP is their bandwidth charges: getting bits from the outside world. The more bits they get from the outside world, the more they have to pay. This may be per-gigabyte or peak-metered usage from their upstream bandwidth provider. What type of content consumes the most bandwidth, thus costing ISPs the most money? Video. Nothing else even comes close. One of the things Google is doing with YouTube is running up the monthly bandwidth bills of ISPs. Now Google can come along with their new datacenter in a shipping container that’s been rumored for years. Google can put these adjacent to an ISPs server room and cache all of YouTube videos there. Thus the bits for YouTube videos will flow from the ISPs server room to the customer. No outside bandwidth will be needed, thus saving the ISP major dollars. What’s in it for Google? Essentially taking over the ISPs network operations, which Google can do better and cheaper than the ISP due to pure scale. The ISP will outsource more and more operations to Google and their magic datacenter in a box. At that point Google makes a major profit. Google won’t own any ISP proper, thus won’t run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission. All they’ll be is an outsourcer, running video and content caching, email, web hosting, etc. for the ISP.

In short: Google is using YouTube to drive up the ISPs monthly bandwidth bill so then Google can ride in as the White Knight and save the ISPs a lot of money. All an ISP has to do is give Google a little money for services instead of giving the ISP’s bandwidth provider a lot of money for bandwidth.

29March2009

Terrific Robots!!

Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.

Great post at Gizmodo. Robots that truly look like they’re science fiction!!

24March2009

The Family that Works Together…

Posted by Brent under: common sense politics.

I always think of that when I go into a Chick-fil-A and see the old photo taken in the Dwarf House of the Cathy family working there. In the photo are the boys: Dan and Bubba. The caption on the photo says they “greeted and entertained guests”. Yeah, right! Then how come they’re dressed as bussers and have towels under their belts? They were working bussing tables! And I bet Truett didn’t pay them minimum wage!

Trent and Smally conducted studies of why some families are close and some not. Their conclusion was that families that work together against a common outside negative influence were closer. Through most of humanity’s existence fathers and sons, mothers and daughters have worked side-by-side againt the common evils of starvation and deprivation. Now we’re too sophisticated to allow that, and have minimum wage laws that prevent young men from working beside their fathers in the workplace. This is part of why the family structure has weakened in America. Thus I claim that eliminating the mimimum wage could be pro-family.

16March2009

Open Source Blog

Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.

I started an occasional blog about open source in the Atlanta area over at TechLinks. I’ll be drawing on the going-on I keep up with at ossatlanta.org. We’ll see if the corporate types catch on to Open Source.

11March2009

Thoughts on Abortion: Where I Get in Trouble with Everyone

Posted by Brent under: common sense politics.

Alright, with all the talk about embyonic stem-cell research, I’m going to take a stance on abortion that will get me in trouble with everyone. Here goes:

The two camps in the abortion debate are the pro-life group that says that life begins at the moment of conception and the pro-choice people that say that a person’s rights begin at the moment of birth. I’m neither. I say that whatever yardstick we use to measure the end of life should be the same as what we use to measure it’s beginning. Medical science would tell us that when a certain type of brainwave stops, a person is clinically dead.  Apparently neither side of the abortion debate has any issue with that. I say that it’s only common sense to say that, therefore, when those same types of brain waves begin, the fetus is then a person and has rights.

Now I’m in trouble with everyone, because I’m not saying that live begins either at the moment of conception or personhood at the moment of birth, but somewhere in between. Right. But as far as I can see, my argument makes sense in the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” way. We need to use the same measure for the start of life as we do for the end.