Again with Bell Labs – amazing.
The more I read about it, the more I wish I had lived in the 30’s-80’s. So many innovation under 1 roof, so much creativity. Great read.

Btw, did you get a look at this fine article – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html

Somewhat of a (realistic) ‘miracle’ indeed.

Right now ‘deep packet inspection’ is the single greatest threat to the internet as we know it today. Honestly I’m surprised that there isn’t any movements against the companies that right now are building systems to oppress, and terrorize the freedoms we enjoy on the internet.

I’m even more so ashamed that some of these companies are Canadian, and that they are doing their best to destroy freedom.

Such a sad thing, but its sadder what people will do to chase a buck.

I think that is a very interesting point, if not funny how people build walled gardens on an open infrastructure. Naturally NONE of these companies could have come to any fruition on a teleco owned ‘internet’. At the same time HTTP, is still very popular as an open protocol, with open servers on open operating systems. Maybe its the memory of $500 a share for Netscape that drives many systems to be locked off walled gardens?

Not to mention AT&T did and still does their best to suppress any new and exciting technology, if it doesn’t fall into their slow progress plans. This is another thing with packet switching has basically brought down their point to point style ATM networks. One major example is magnetic media, which AT&T had in the mid 1930’s!!! The whole era of paper tape/punch cards never needed to happen in 1st/2nd/3rd generation computers, but this technology was suppressed.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3106703?uid=3739912&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=47698710341997

“Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording”

While hosting their own server, whether from home, a collocated server, a rented VPS may be out of the technical knowledge of the majority of users, there is no reasonable limitation on how to do so (and if anything maybe it is something that needs to be better documented…?)

I’m sure the majority of Linux/BSD users don’t modify the system either, but people are inherently cheap, and well free stuff goes a long long way. Not to mention it makes commercial offerings get off their butt and become competitive. Remember the days of IE 3,4,5? big changes, and innovation and as soon as netscape collapsed IE6 just lingered for years, MS was done. It wasn’t until Firefox really hit the radar, and was actively taking share, did IE 7 get pushed out with fun things like tabs.

“Its quite simple, nobody likes a walled garden”

Unfortunately, everybody _loves_ their walled/closed garden – over 225 million iTunes account, 25 million iPads sold in a year…
And yeah, the garden is a lot larger and active than in the 80s (half a million apps in App Store, 14 billion apps have been downloaded in less than 3 years).

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/07/wwdc-highlights/
(And that’s almost a year ago)

Not to mention facebook. People need it and it’s structure, they adapt to its changes and eat it up with a smile

“The big thing about the Internet is that anyone can not only register a domain, but easily get access to server software and become their own ‘site’ on the Internet independent of what large corporations may think, or wish.”

True, but not as much as we would like to think.

Most Inet users are ‘regular’ users browsing the Web, not server/own-domain
operators. I don’t have the stats but I am sure that’s a vast majority.
Also, in addition to the walled garden section, WordPress.com is a very closed garden (and hosts about half [over 36 million] of all wordpress blogs – http://en.wordpress.com/stats/). Even bloggers who do download the open source software, don’t really change its source
Also true for blogspot.com and even Tumblr – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr – “As of February 27, 2012, Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs”

But yeah, the overall concept that the Inet and its services are more open is very true. But I, like Frank, think, again, with deepest sadness, that corporations/Big Brother will want more and more control over this out of control insanely informative beast.

Would be cool to find an excuse for my external modems!