It works when the company that takes care of the fiber is owned by the city and have more goals than to make money. Just like the company that create the electricity grid. When they have goals both in terms of how many people they reach with fiber within the area aswell as making money. Then you have a way of creating fiber and an open market where any ISPs can connect to the city-wide or region-wide fiber network and sell their services. Instead of competing in regards to the physical network close to the customer they compete when it comes to redundant connections to the city, quality customer support, prices, public IPs etc. This model is used all over Sweden (and I assume other countries in europe) to provide affordable internet. There are ofcourse still areas here that are only served by a single ISP with their own network. Often there can be a combination of those monopoloy networks and open networks within a single city. Depending on when the houses where built and who the estate owner is etc. Its sometimes cheaper for a smaller estate owner to sign with a single ISP since the initial installation cost may be lower. The end customer will of course pay higher prices for the services going forward.
The electricity works the same. One company owned by the city builds the electricity infrastructure. Then you pick whatever company you want to buy the electricity from.
I can pick between 10+ companies for Internet and many more than that for electricity in my town of around 60k residents.
Works fine as long as the company that takes care of that part does its job. You do put all trust in that one company to not be a douchebag. But seems to work here. Does of course not mean that it will work everywhere.
I personally use a router box from teklager.se and they use open source schematics and bios which are actually updated. Without having done a comparison I am assuming they are a more expensive option though. It has been small, silent and stable since I bought it pre-installed with OPNSense though, so I am happy with it.
I believe I got default cron-files when I installed ZFS on ubuntu 21.04. It could be that they were created and I had to uncomment one line in a file. Then a scrub on the pools would run once a month. Then I setup email on the server and everytime a scrub is done with any errors, I get an email.
Quite easy for me to setup, even though its my first NAS that I built myself and first time using ZFS. Very surprised that LTT effed that up to be honest.
If you are interested in their story how the original client and architecture came to be and then how it changed to what it is today they have a podcast you can listen to: "Spotify: A Product Story" - https://pca.st/cbo7khrm
Just finished listening to this, thanks for the recommendation.
They spend some time interviewing Lars Ulrich of Metallica in the context of of the Napster lawsuit. He comes across in this interview as still upset at Napster for what they did, and he is at turns indignant and also emotionally wounded at the fact that they are perceived as the villains in the story. In particular he cannot seem to reconcile his belief that they, and I quote "are the most fan friendly band on this planet" with suing Napster for $100k per download in damages, a ludicrous and arrogant sum. I am not a Metallica fan and do not listen to their music (out of disinterest, not antifandom. Metal isn't my genre), but it is striking to me to see how 20 years on they still don't get it.
I watched a documentary they made about themselves... Only went there because two band colleagues ask me if i wanna come. In one scene he stands in front of a 4mx4m painting he is going to auction off. Some colors smeared over black foundation, ugly as hell if you'd ask for my irrelevant opinion. Sipping a drink he says: "Sometimes i stand here and ask myself: 'What did the artist think when he made it?'"
Slayers' drummer Dave Lombardo said about his colleague Kerry King: "He is the dumbest person i know."
You don't have to be smart, your ego problems figured out or a likeable personality to make great music.
Narcissim plays its part too. I think actually is okay to want to be admired by others by accomplishing great things. I think it is a biological urge to attract a mate. Doseage makes the poison though.
Ulrich took it personally, thinking it was somebody stealing from him. I'm convinced Metallica would have faded to irrelevance far earlier if people hadn't downloaded their music.
A lot of musicians still think this way, "I should be able to make a living from my craft and thus piracy is theft." But that's a misunderstanding, I believe -- people would still pay money for music, just like they pay money to creators on YouTube and the likes even if most of the content is freely available.
Here's a great clip (from the amazingly deep diving podcast What Had Happened Was) with El-P from Run the Jewels, et al, about why RTJ gives away their albums, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdtLTw7Xsj8.
Anything that qualitatively changes what survival means to us, will change someone. For good, bad, indifferent. For most people a combination.
A close friend gave me insight on why success changes people, after I hit a milestone that mattered to me. He told me, "You are still going to have problems, they are just going to be different problems."
Each of our moral outlooks, stability, suitability for state of life, relatability, etc., is heavily dependent on our relationship with our survival environment. And success radically changes that relationship qualitatively, when it changes it much quantitatively.
Thanks! It's great to read the backstory of how the original Spotify client came to be:
> "Not to go into too much detail here, but at the time, most of the internet was made up of “thin clients,” like web pages or Flash-based clients that ran in-browser, and used more traditional, standardized protocols like HTTPS. Seeing the limitations of that, Ludde and a team of engineers ran in the exact opposite direction, creating a stand-alone “fat client,” building entirely new protocols and hybridizing client-server and P2P technology to suit their own ends. (Check out Episode 01, “How do you steal from a pirate?”, to hear more of that nitty-gritty stuff about persistent TCP connections and how our P2P implementation saved us bandwidth cost.) It was only by rethinking every layer of our infrastructure that we were able to pull Spotify off, to create that magic moment of double-clicking on a new song and having it instantly play. And speaking of magic …"
Having been an early user of the beta I presumed it had to be driven by people with this mindset from rethinking everything from bottom up to provide the best UX possible, would really love to read more about the technology used in the original Desktop client?
EDIT: Currently listening to “How do you steal from a pirate?” which is providing a more detailed backstory on the origins of Spotify:
Sounds like Ludde Strigeus, the creator of µTorrent was the key hire to make the original Desktop Client UX possible whose Desktop & P2P expertise was able to convince the rest of dev team to go down the path they did. Some interesting insights, they used Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3 using a custom designed TCP protocol because they were better able to strip packet bits down to transport just the audio bits required for playback.
> Michelle: The thing that happened that was kind of pure magic in that meeting was that [Daniel] did a comparison. He started playing a song on the software, and the song played so quick, so instant … I mean, I don’t know if people remember, but playback was slow back then. Even if you had an MP3 on your computer, and you played it via, you know, Winamp, iTunes, this was faster. And we were like, “You have the files on your computer, right?” And he was like, “No, it’s in the cloud.”
I had the same initial experience where I was blown away at how instant and responsive it was, at first I didn't believe it and thought it was doing some sort of pre-caching magic where it'd start downloading before selecting each song. So ran lots of tests where I did first time searches and immediately scroll to songs down the list of search results (to bypass any caches) and could see that it was indeed pulling traffic in real-time, the time from click/scrubbing to audio playing was just unbelievably fast.
Yes, I miss this so much, I actually stopped using Spotify about 6 years ago. This might be nerdy, but the feeling of instant playback was just great.
This Electron crap is really a race to the bottom, so you can hire the cheapest college drop-outs to cobble together some JavaScript to add feature number 1001.
On another note, this ludde guy is one of the few rock stars in IT to me. Had a lot of fun on ScummVM, played OpenTTD to death, used µTorrent in College, you name it...
It's probably easier for various teams not to break things, and it provides a more widely known environment (the browser essentially) to ensure that new hires can be pretty productive.
I definitely miss native apps, but I understand why they're less common now.
> It was only by rethinking every layer of our infrastructure that we were able to pull Spotify off, to create that magic moment of double-clicking on a new song and having it instantly play. And speaking of magic …
This reminds me of a conference that John Carmack gave (in 2019?) where he goes over how [the occulus team] got input latency down to a manageable amount on modern hardware.
It's an interesting data point that both these efforts to produce "magic" required an in-depth "rethinking" of many of the underlying stack layers.
I just want to add some more information about this.
First of all, even if municipal broadband in different forms are very common here in Sweden, its not the only option. There are some areas of cities or certain estate owners that have deals with ISPs where they install the fiber and have exclusive right to sell broadband services. This can happen in cities with municipal broadband, so different areas of a city can have different providers.
The most common form of municipal broadband here is that the company that manages the water and electricity in the city (a company owned by the city but are run to make a profit) also installs fiber cables (is a network operator). They are going to dig up streets anyway, right? I have never seen a fiber cable above ground in my life here. They manage the cables and install switches etc to get the signal from the customers home to a central location in the city where it can be handed over to the ISPs. The company is not an ISP and does not sell any services in the network, but they allow any ISP that want to sell services with their infrastructure to do so. More and more this is done by standardized APIs (since one ISP can sell services within many different fiber networks), but also more manually with web portals for smaller companies or for troubleshooting etc. The ISP usually pays the network operator for number of subscriptions and/or changes done (connections/disconnections etc). The ISP can then sell services to customers and compete with the others both on price but also on how good their support, bundles etc are. That means that in a medium sized city (for Sweden at least... ~150k residents in my hometowns municipality) there can be up to 20 different ISPs that you can choose between and compare in a portal. All with the same cables and one ethernet jack in the apartments (or a fiber box in houses). Any ISP can deliver the service within a few minutes. So while the municipality has a hand in the fiber market they are not a competitor to the private companies, they simply enable the ISPs to compete in an open market to the benefit to the customers. The same model is used for electricity aswell. One fee goes to the municipal company that manages the physical infrastrcuture and the electricity meters while the cost of the actual electricity used go to the private company you have a contract with. This is the Open Acces Network model and is very common here in Sweden. There are also open networks operated by private companies. For example both Telia (which is both a network operator and a big ISP, previously state owned now privateized) and Telenor (the same deal but from Norway) operate both open networks and "closed" networks (where they have a monopoly).
There is also another, less common, model where the municipality has created a separate company that places physical fiber cables under the streets but does not offer an active network (dark fiber). This model is used by Stokab in Stockholm and was in part created to prevent too many distruptions by private companies constantly digging up the streets. Then all ISPs can rent fiber on equal terms.
tl;dr: Fiber cables are in many places in Sweden handled like a utility and private ISPs can all use them to sell their services to customers on equal terms which create competition that is great for the end user.
The electricity works the same. One company owned by the city builds the electricity infrastructure. Then you pick whatever company you want to buy the electricity from.
I can pick between 10+ companies for Internet and many more than that for electricity in my town of around 60k residents.
Works fine as long as the company that takes care of that part does its job. You do put all trust in that one company to not be a douchebag. But seems to work here. Does of course not mean that it will work everywhere.
edit: Seems to work in some parts of the US aswell: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/open-infra-inc-got-i...
https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/10/19/open-access-fiber-net...
An old PDF with some interesting facts, even if they are outdates by now: https://www.ssnf.org/globalassets/in-english/facts-and-stati...