InfoHole

BeetTV reports that JumpTV has invested $50 million in a proprietary content delivery network (CDN), because the existing CDNs “couldn’t provide what they need”.

Akamai is one of those existing CDNs. If you haven’t dealt with Akamai before the bottom line is that you pay 10x what you would if you built your own solution, but even that wouldn’t add up to $50m.

Jump TV state that they

“provides live streams of some 300 ethnic television shows from 75 nations. Expats, immigrants and foreign language speakers subscribe to the programming which is delivered to the PC. It is also a huge distributor of online sports streaming, providing some 200 sports programs from 30 nations. “

Wonderful, congratulations! But we could also say that Putfile (the site I created and sold) provides millions of video streams to every single internet enabled country on earth. Providing “300 ethnic television shows to 75 countries” doesn’t mean that you are pushing masses of traffic (X gig/sec).

The graph below compares the reach (viewers) of Putfile vs. JumpTV.

The graph clearly shows that Putfile has 4x the reach of JumpTV. Putfile doesn’t use a $50m CDN, nor a $500,000 CDN for that matter.

Out of interest I priced up a custom solution involving 10 gig/sec of bandwidth from 10 cities worldwide with 10tb of redundant data storage (about 10 times what would be required by an operation like JumpTV) just to see if I could get anywhere close to $50m.

Spec: 10 cities worldwide with 1 gig/sec premium bandwidth per city. 10 gigs/sec bandwidth with 10tb of replicated data.

Per Location:

• $20,000 colocation and bandwidth / month
• RAID 5 arrays, 10tb of fully redundant data storage. $30,000 one off cost
• Front end servers * 10 to connect to storage arrays $20,000 one off cost
• Database servers keep track of “where” data is replicated to $20,000.
• Programming $100,000 one off cost

Total cost per month: $200,000

One off hardware and software: $420,000

Cost of running for 1 year $2,820,000

I believe that the above quoted capacity is 10x what is needed, and that $282,000/year would be a more realistic running cost.

I propose that JumpTV actually purchased $49m worth of powerpoint presentations and $1m worth of CDN.

gordonrp money, technology cdn, jump, jumptv, tv, video

Firefox cache is the same thing as Internet Explorer’s “temporary internet files”, it keeps copies of webpages that you visit on your harddrive so that the page may load quicker the next time you visit it.

Even if you delete the cache each time firefox quits (tools, options, privacy tab) an expert may still be able to recover your cache data from your hard drive. You may wish to change the firefox cache location to an encrypted drive. Assuming you have setup your encrypted drive, or just want to change the location of the cache, simply do the following:

1. type about:config into the firefox navigation bar and hit enter
2. find the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, if it doesn’t exist right click anywhere and select NEW, then STRING.  Enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory in the first popup box and then the location in the 2nd popup box e.g. k:\tempintfiles. If the entry already existed simply right click on it and select MODIFY and enter your new directory path.

Now your firefox cache location has been changed! This was tested on firefox version 2.0.0.8.

gordonrp computing

With the python Bittorrent client you can seed or download multiple torrents at a time and set max parameters for the group of torrents. For example with the command below I have limited uploads to 2,000 KB/sec (~16mbit/sec).

launchmany-curses –torrent_dir /home2/torrentdirectory –save_in /home2/whereiwantthetorrentdownloads –max_upload_rate 2000 –max_uploads 1500

If you have a dedicated server with a monthly bandwidth allowance why not download some legal torrents and help seed with your excess bandwidth. This is a great way to give back to the open source community, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

Below you can see me seeding the various linux distros that I have used:

gordonrp computing

The Divx Connected, a streaming media player which can be used to play videos etc on your TV from your computer, is due to be released sometime this November.

There are already quite a few similar devices on the market like the Apple Tv, the Netgear DV8000, and of course the XBOX 360. I’ve not used the Apple TV nor the Netgear solution, but I do have the Xbox 360 and was disappointed when I found out that it only plays WMV and a few other file types but not Divx files.

The Divx Connected also offers access to Stage6, Divx’s recently launched video sharing website which is packed full of pirated movies. All in all this promises to be a great device for the home theatre.

“Why should your media be chained to your PC? DivX Connected™ is the easiest way to deliver your movies, music, photos and online services straight from your PC and the Internet to your TV.

Simply add a DivX Connected device to your home network and experience your digital media in an entirely new way: high-quality, wireless streaming directly to your living room. “

gordonrp computing

If your ISP, like mine, throttles p2p traffic and you have access to a server it may well be quicker to download the torrent on your server and then download it via http or ftp to your computer.

I have just installed the official Bittorrent client on Centos. Installation was as easy as “yum install bittorrent”. Be sure to open up port 6881-6889 on your firewall, and if you’re running APF firewall remove those port numbers from the BLK_P2P_PORTS setting in conf.apf.

Once installed I was able to download the latest CentOS distro in a matter of minutes and then download it via my home connection at 400KB/sec (much better than the throttled p2p home speed of 10KB/sec).

Usage of the bittorrent via the command line was like so:

bittorrent-curses –max_upload_rate 3000 –max_uploads 500 CentOS-5.0-i386-bin-DVD.torrent

As you can see I limited my upload speed to 3MB/sec (24mbit/sec) . You should make sure to limit your upload speed in accordance with how much bandwidth your server is allowed to use, especially if you are going to leave it running over night.

An ideal solution might be to have your torrents download on your server and use a cron job to automatically rsync your torrent download folder to your home network daily or hourly as desired. Infrant NAS units have rsync on them by default which means you don’t even need to setup rsync or a linux server on your home network.

gordonrp computing

I just found ClusterSSH, and I wish I had found it earlier. ClusterSSH allows you to send the same commands to multiple SSH connections / servers at the same time. This would of been really useful in the past when I have previously installed firewalls and security updates to 20 odd servers separately.

Usage: host:/# cssh one two three

This will provide you with one console to enter commands to the three connected SSH hosts.

gordonrp computing

The UK is proposing to bring in a flat rate capital gains tax (CGT) at 18%. The base CGT tax at current is 40% but there is relief for certain assets and holding periods. One such relief is “business taper relief”, which incurs a 50% relief for all business assets held for 1 year, and a 75% relief for business assets held for two or more years. Thus a small business owner who sold his business after two years would receive 75% relief on the CGT tax yielding a only a 10% tax.

With the new proposal in place there is to be no more taper relief. The sale of business, and other, assets will be taxed at 18%. This may not seem tragic to you but bare in mind a sole person who has slaved 100 hours a week and invested all of his life savings into starting up a business, has paid ~20% corporate tax on all earnings, and then up to ~40% personal income tax on any salary that he wishes to take whilst running the business.

This will affect me greatly, in July 2006 I founded a new company (a shell essentially) OBDTech Limited which I would use to develop my next business or idea as soon as I was ready to.

One of my proposed business plans involves generating £1.6m yearly revenue and a target sale price of £5m after three years of operation. The UK government would of received the following taxes from my operating the business in the UK:

• Corporate tax over three years = £960,000
• Income tax on 5 salaries totalling £200,000 for three years = £180,000
• VAT (sales tax) over three years = £840,000
• 10% CGT tax when the business sold = £500,000

Total tax: £2,480,000. This business would of kept 5 employees in full time employment.

My post tax gain from selling my 51% of the business would of been £2,295,000. With the new proposal in place I would receive £2,091,000 a post tax difference of £204,000.

This increase of 8% tax on my final earnings is enough to make me consider relocating myself and/or the business outside of the UK, potentially losing the UK £2,480,000 in tax revenue. I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs are thinking along the same lines.

Related articles:

• Tax move ‘a blow to entrepreneurs’
• Entrepreneurs feel hammered again
• The impact of capital gains tax changes
• John Redwood’s Views

gordonrp money

Apparently wordpress thought that it would be a good idea to limit thumbnail generation to pictures less than 3 megapixels in size. Having worked with GD a lot I can not think why anyone would need to impose such a limit.

How to fix it:

Open admin-functions.php in the /wp-admin folder.

Search for an occurance of wp_thumbnail_creation_size_limit, it will return something like “$max = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_creation_size_limit’, 3 * 1024 * 1024, $attachment_id, $file );”

Simply replace the 3 (megapixels) with any number you like, e.g. “$max = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_creation_size_limit’, 13 * 1024 * 1024, $attachment_id, $file );”

gordonrp computing

Infrant, recently purchased by netgear, make some great NAS units. I use them in both a datacenter and home environment. All of the units have been running for several months under heavy usage without any downtime or other issues.

The Readynas 1100 is a 1u rackmount unit. On, most racks you can actually get two of these NAS units per U by racking them back to back. Each unit takes up to 4 drives and has RAID 1, RAID 5, and X-RAID. The units support rsync, ftp, http, NFS, and many more protocols.

The Netgear ReadyNas NV+ is a free standing unit, ideal for home or office use. I have one of these setup in RAID5 for home use.

Highly recommended.

gordonrp computing

I visited San Francisco for the first time in January 2007, below is a video of the cab ride from the airport into the city. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to take any more/better video, I’ll get some on my next trip.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

gordonrp Uncategorized