Cory Doctorow:
The Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert has gone on record as suspecting that billionaire currency speculator George Soros (who made his money on currency speculation) is a drug kingpin. Soros funds a lot of progressive causes (including a lot of drug-law and copyright-reform stuff) and has pledged his financial support to overturn the Bush presidency, so this smear is clearly political in nature:
"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years -- George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."
(via Electrolite)
The signs of trouble surrounding Microsoft's massive Longhorn development project have been building for months. But on Aug. 27 the software giant bowed to the inevitable. Rather than accept another long delay in the next version of Windows, Microsoft announced that the new operating system would be released by the second half of 2006, but in attenuated form. [TechNewsWorld]
'-- The challenge for Microsoft will be to create a compelling case for going to Longhorn now that one of its most interesting features has been removed. But the marketing folks in Redmond, Wash., have a good two years to figure that one out. --'
Expect tons of FUD and other nonsense in the next couple of years designed to round up users into the Shorthorn corral.
...John
The Power of a Blog: take one conservative Republican Representative from Virginia (a co-sponsor of the Federal Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment and representing a district that includes Pat Robertson's homebase), mix with gay sex phone lines, and you have it: his resignation, over "allegations."
Most of the attention and current criticism of America's e-voting infrastructure and technology is focused on the lack of a verifiable paper audit trail, but an equally prominent issue is the closed nature of election system certification, companies, and software.
Voxilla points us to the press release which says what we have been wanting to hear for a long time: Skype on Mac OS-X has gone beta now. "We celebrated Skype’s first anniversary on Sunday (August 29) with more than...
FCC wants the Supreme Court to reverse an appeals court ruling that could lead to heavier regulation of cable companies' high-speed Internet service, according to Reuters. FCC has asked the federal appeals court to overturn its ruling that labels cable broadband as a telecom service. Do that, kill VoIP and give Bells another 100 years of monopoly status quo. "Applying taxes, regulations and concepts from a century ago to today's cutting-edge services will only stifle innovation and competition," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in a statement on Monday. For once I actually agree with the man.
Hidden inside this CNN piece about cell phone company surcharges was a nano-expose of T-Mobile's most recent quarter. Catherine Zeta Jones' wily charms were not the only reason Germans were able to attract more customers in the last quarter and perform better than everyone else in the mobile phone business. Actually, the real reason why the "wireless company's revenues were up $1 per customer compared with the previous quarter. That was because T-Mobile, for the first time, counted as revenues two fees it tacks onto customer bills. Without those surcharges, the average revenue per customer would have dropped. The surcharges certainly make T-Mobile more attractive to investors -- they added $58 million in revenue during the quarter." These are not government mandated taxes, but instead these are just a way phone company quietly add a buck-or-two to your bill, and try and recoup normal business expenses such as "property taxes and the cost of posting their rates on the Web." Companies' advertised rates don't include extra fees. For a company like Verizon, this means about $173 million a year. Read the article for the complete lowdown.
cimmer writes "USA Today, the San Jose Business Journal and the suspiciously captivating monitor thing in the elevator are reporting the results of a survey conducted by Aon Consulting that states voluntary turnover in the tech industry is at 8.9%, 'the lowest in the history of the surveys, which date back to the mid-1980s'. Given all of the talk about an economic turnaround, are we looking at a potential tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market? Aon seems to think so. Interestingly, the results of this study are released just as CNN.com reports that personal income growth is at its weakest in two years. Also of note is a discrepancy in the reported sample size, with USA Today stating the results are based upon input from 595 companies while the Business Journal reports that over 950 companies participated."
Cory Doctorow:
Joyce Park is a coder who worked at Friendster, leading the charge to re-engineer the poky, Java-based back-end with fast PHP. She blogged about it, got slashdotted, got written up in the press -- and got fired. Even though there was nothing confidential in her blog posts, the new CEO shitcanned her.
[I]t's especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves...
Link, Link to Jeremy Zawodny's instructions for resigning from Friendster
(Thanks, Jeffreyp!)
Didion Sprague writes "News.com is reporting that XM has decided to "quietly discontinue" the XMPCR -- a tiny USB satellite radio receiver for XM radio. Slashdot readers may remember last week's story about TimeTrax -- homebrewed software that allows XMPCR users to automatically record and tag each song. Now, XMPCR receivers are going for almost $400 on ebay. The RIAA, it should be noted, claims that they weren't "behind the discontinuation of the PCR"."
Business Week in an editorial writes, "That's because the U.S. is becoming something of a broadband backwater, a place where almost no one can do what Kato and millions of other Japanese take for granted. Many Americans may think that the U.S. is making progress because the number of broadband Net links continues to climb, but that misses the bigger picture." I agree - and had made a similar argument late last year in a column for CBS Marketwatch, Broadband...what Broadband! The Koreans and Japanese are enjoying a whole new generation of broadband applications including IPTV. "Broadband is the foundation upon which entire new generations of technology will be built: full-motion video, Web-based medical care, more sophisticated Internet telephoning, and online gaming. Already, companies abroad seem to be using their robust broadband markets to gain an edge on U.S. rivals. Korea's NCsoft Corp. has come out of nowhere to become a tough contender in multiplayer online games," Businessweek writes.
Many have laughed at me for constantly harping on the point, that the axis of technology world has moved to somewhere in South China Sea. I think we sit in our ivory towers with a myopic view of the world, getting excited about WiFi. Look when there are going to be a half-a-billion people in Asia using 50 megabits per second broadband connections, some of them - lets assume 0.0001% - will figure out a new use for the speed, will write applications and decide the direction of broadband. That will result in another 0.0001% figuring out how to build new hardware to make those networks work their way. You see where I am going with it. Anyway the whole article argues, correctly about backward looking regulatory policies are to blame for US falling behind in the broadband sweepstakes. Up until the point where it starts talking about WiMAX, the greatest FUD there ever was. I think WiMAX is going to turn out to be "push" technology of the 21st century.
Mark Frauenfelder:
"Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled." Link (Thanks, Steve!)
Cory Doctorow:
Metafilter Matt has written a great roundup of DIY coverage of the RNC event in New York:
all Flickr photos tagged with rnc, rncwatch.typepad.com, Technorati search for New York City ("rnc" was too short to search), Buzznet's No RNC photostream, rnc convention bloggers, WeSeeRNC moblog, Indymedia's RNC coverage, and Google News search for rnc.
Just like with regular spammers, Verizon is discovering that suing a text message spammer doesn’t necessarily
accomplish anything (though we bet it feels really good). They just won an injunction in federal court against Jacob
Brown, who had been sending literally millions of spam text messages to Verizon subscribers, but he never bothered to
show up in court and has pretty much disappeared completely, which is a pretty good sign that he probably won’t bother
paying attention to a court order.
[Via TechDirt]
For the RFID tag to near universally replace the optical UPC code on retail items, its price will have to drop radically. As recently as just a couple of years ago, I was using 5 cents in talks I gave, as an estimate of what the cost would be by 2004. At that time, some industry pundits suggested that 4 cent chips were available then, in sufficiently large quantity. At a presentation at a NYC retail meeting this year I shocked some people when I expressed doubt about making 5 cents by next year. Now ARC advisory group says we are unlikely to make 5 cents by 2008: ....ARC Advisory Group, a research firm based in Dedham, Mass. Instead of dipping to a nickel, as some industry observers predict, the average price of a passive UHF RFID tags will drop to only 16 cents, according to recently issued ARC report entitled "RFID Systems in the Manufacturing Supply Chain." ARC found that in 2003, the average unit price of tag was 91 cents for a passive HF tag and 57 cents for a passive UHF tag. The firm expects that by 2008, the unit price will drop to an average of 16 cents for passive UHF tags ... This does NOT mean we wont see tagging much sooner. High margin goods that need to be tracked closely will be tagged much sooner. Tagging will happen on the case and pallet. Pharma is an example area, prompted by the government in the US, where consumers will start to see widespread RFID soon. Recent hacking fears will lead to delays. But their use in pharma will lead to familiarization for the public and help remove many fears of the technology. This article is a good update: RFID To Flourish In Pharmaceutical Industry A Meta Group report says RFID use in pharmaceuticals will surpass that of consumer packaged goods within 18 months. By Rick Whiting, InformationWeek, Aug. 23, 2004 Use of radio-frequency identification by pharmaceutical companies will surpass that of consumer packaged-goods makers within 18 months, predicts a new Meta Group report to be issued Tuesday. But predictions that most pharmaceutical products will be tagged with electronic product code-compliant RFID tags at the pallet and case level within three years are "overly optimistic," the report says. The "immaturity of EPC tag technology" is the limiting factor in the rate of RFID adoption, the report says. Current EPC specifications, for example, lack safeguards to prevent one chip's programming being copied onto another, a key requirement for guaranteed authentication. Such technology limitations, according to the report, reduce RFID's potential usefulness in the pharmaceutical industry to simple "track and trace" applications until EPC specifications are revised ......
Direct and Related Links for 'Can Microsoft Beat iTunes With a Store of Its Own?'
Free registration is required to read the article. “When Microsoft unveils its online music store later this week, the first song offered should be Dave Brubeck’s “It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again.” For Microsoft, taking a trail blazed by others - then trying to dominate the market - is a familiar tune. With the opening on Thursday, Microsoft will land itself in a market that Apple Computer pioneered more than a year ago with its…With all the buzz around China and Korea, many tend to overlook that India is turning into one of the hottest telecom markets on the planet. While visiting India I saw many US venture capitalists were out pitching their companies to Indian telecom giants, recognizing that growth is in Asia, and not in the US.
Last week, Susan Kalla told me she was headed to Bombay and then to Delhi for a quick visit. To me she is always a leading indicator of the next big telecom trend. While visiting India in April 2004, I met with several telecom executives who indicated that Indian telecom companies could spend nearly $10 billion a year for next several years as the country tries to build out is basic wireline, wireless and eventually broadband infrastructure. Actually I was wrong. The Indian market for equipment and services is expected to jump to $24.3 billion by 2006, up from $13.7 billion in 2001, according to telecom research firm Frost & Sullivan. The mobile infrastructure market in India hit $1.17 billion last year, Gartner said, and is forecast to grow to $1.885 billion by 2008.
I stumbled across this article on InternetNews.com which outlines the recent developments in the Indian market, and provides a good overview, on where that market is headed. In short, the article I wanted to do. In recent days, Nortel and Nokia announced deals with Indian operators worth nearly $862 million. Last week I reported exclusively that Motorola was being the "outsourcer" for Tata Telecom. While wireless gets most attention in India, I find that wireline and broadband categories get overlooked. Cisco and Alcatel, along with chinese powerhouses UT Starcom, and ZTE Corp, have done well in india. In Cisco's most recent conference call, CEO John Chambers called India "a great success story." "We put a lot of investments over the last several years, and it's growing approximately 100 percent year-over-year," he said.
Lest you think that only large mega billion dollars corporations can succeed in India, smart start-ups are finding success in India. One such company is Atrica of San Jose, California. The company makes optical and networking equipment that can be used to stream voice, video and data services over Ethernet. Almost two years ago, the company got a call from Reliance – they needed moderately priced gear for their Ethernet-based network that would eventually service over 10 million commercial buildings across India.
Nan Chan, Atrica’s vice president of marketing says, “Indians are tough negotiators who know how to watch for their own interests. A lot of people underestimate their ability and the total market opportunity.” He didn’t. Atrica worked on developing a special product portfolio for India which met the needs of Reliance, was inexpensive and still kept the company in black. It took a year, but it worked. Sales from India could be over $25 million in next couple of years.
Anyway given all the hoopla around the market, and given my contacts, I am adding a new category to keep you abreast of what's happening in india and will keep you posted of major developments.
802 Planet reports that at the annual CableLabs Summer Conference earlier this month in Keystone, Colorado, ultrawideband (UWB) chipset developer Pulse~LINK showcased its technology for cable operators.
Pulse~LINK transmits high definition television content over cable and powerline. "It transmits across the entire cable bandwidth -- not wirelessly -- showing that it coexists with the television signals that are already there," said PulseLINK representatives.
The demonstration consisted of industry standard off-the-shelf CATV equipment beginning at the “Cable Operator’s head-end” where the UWB signal was injected into a standard RF combiner, then modulated onto a fiber optic cable for transmission to a “fiber field node” where the
RF content was demodulated for transmission through more than 1000 feet of coax cable and two “field amplifiers.”
The signal was then sent through multiple RF splitters and into a “digital living room” where both the UWB HDTV broadcasts and standard cable broadcasts were displayed simultaneously.
(Continued at Daily Wireless)
David Pescovitz:
Howard Lovy's NanoBot points us to a site selling plastic model nanotube kits. They sell other fun molecular model kits too, including cocaine, caffeine, THC, and, of course, lysergic acid diethylamide.
"LSD is a strong hallucinogen. A rough form, ergotamine, which can occur in stored rye grain, is believed to have been the cause of the odd behaviour which triggered the Salam witch trials. This model of LSD can be used in conjuction with molecular model kits of other street drugs as part of drug awareness programs."
Jeffrey Citron, the maverick founder of Vonage, might be taking a page out of his online trading playbook again and using it to manage and run the fast growing, cash guzzling VoIP service provider. Bill Burnham, who used to track online trading business as an analyst before switching gears and becoming a VC draws the parallels in this excellent post.
In that industry, Ameritrade, Datek and E*Trade were able to pull away from the competition by dramatically ramping their customer acquisition spending and that appears to be exactly what Vonage plans to do in the VOIP space. In fact, the financial language that Vonage is currently using to talk about their business where they claim to be "cash flow positive before customer acquisition costs" is a carbon copy of how many online brokers talked about their own financials back in their heydays of online trading.So what does this all mean? Bill says that the cash being spent on customer acquisition is a way to "get big fast," just like in the online brokerage days. He argues that Vonage actually might be able to do well, if history is any indicator. I don't agree. Unlike the brokerage industry, here the incumbents are not sitting on their haunches, and are actually moving forward with remarkable alacrity. I think Vonage is hoping to grow really fast, go public, and perhaps cash out before people start asking those pesky questions about profits.
Looks like Verizon is dipping its toes in the fixed wireless waters. The experiment is happening in Grundy, Va. Verizon said the opportunity seemed perfect to try a small fixed wireless pilot using Alvarion BreezeAccess VL gear. Verizon will use unlicensed spectrum at 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz to connect homes and businesses in line of sight of the base station. In addition it will use 900 MHz equipment to link harder-to-reach homes without a clear line-of-sight. Several other small counties have tried their hand with fixed wireless and done well in terms of rolling out broadband in the boonies. Meanwhile Clearwire, Craig McCaw's latest project has finally gone live in Jacksonville, Florida.
The CTO of XID Technologies, a biometric security company based in Singapore, has been nominated for this year's World Technology Awards (WTA) for the development of an adaptive face recognition technology involving face synthesis. The technology, marketed under the name XID SmartID, permits for example to compare the biometric data embedded on a passport and the live data of a person at an immigration counter or passport verification booth. This face synthesis technology is currently used in Singapore, SmartID has been deployed at the Immigrant Workers Dormitory in Kaki Bukit to provide access clearance for about 6,000 workers day or night across 16 channels of entry.
ruland writes "It turns out there was a reason the hosting company CIT/Foonet was raided in February. SecurityFocus.com reports that the CEO of a web-based satellite T.V. retailer has been indicted for allegedly paying Foonet's administrator to arrange denial of service attacks against his competitors, causing outages as long as two weeks at a time, and $2 million in losses. Now he's skipped out on $750,000 bail, while the five packet monkeys who worked for him are left facing felony charges of their own."
Tim writes "New Scientist reports on a German man who had a complete jaw transplant, after having his cancerous jawbone removed nine years ago. The twist? This jawbone was grown on his shoulder, using a titanium mold, bone marrow, and recombinant bone morphogenic protein." There's also a BBC story.
An application written by an Ontario programmer has caught the attention of XM Radio and the RIAA due to its ability to save broadcasts to a PC as mp3s.
Cory Doctorow:
Pat York sez, "A guy gets his pension cheque automatically deposited into his bank account. Then he authorizes automatic withdrawals to pay his condo fees, phone, etc. Then he dies in bed. How long does it take for someone to notice that he's checked out? Two years. Even Canada Post missed it."
Xeni Jardin:
A Washington Post article covering yesterday's DoJ raids on fileswappers:
Federal agents yesterday took their first steps to go after individuals who illegally trade copyrighted music and videos over the Internet, seizing computers, software and related equipment at five homes around the country. After a months-long sting operation, FBI agents raided residences in Texas, Wisconsin and New York where people were suspected of operating "hubs" of file-sharers that were part of a system called the Underground Network. About 7,000 users connected to the network via file-sharing software known as Direct Connect, according to law enforcement officials. (...) No arrests were made yesterday, and no charges have been filed. But the raids for the first time throw the weight of the Justice Department behind what has been an intense campaign by the music, movie and software industries to curb online file-sharing that millions of computer users around the world use every day.
Link (Thanks, Thomas)
Cory Doctorow:
Ernie Miller sez, "I've started a new audio show on IT Conversations, where I'll be discussing issues of law and technology with many of the leaders in the field. You can stream the audio or download it either directly or via RSS enclosures in MP3 or AAC format. My first show is on the Grokster decision and features a panel including Fred von Lohmann, who argued the case, Denise Howell and C.E. Petit, two attorneys in IP law practice, and law professor Tim Wu of the Univ. of Virginia."
(Thanks, Ernie!)
Direct and Related Links for 'New York, Washington Lead Nation in IT Job Creation'
“The hottest high-tech recruiting markets in the United States in 2004 have shifted from the historic job-creation engines of Silicon Valley and Boston to New York City and Washington, according to Dice Inc., an online job site for technology careers. “Washington is the hottest technology market in the nation right now,” with the federal government recruiting heavily for national defense and homeland security IT projects, said Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice, based in…EWeek is reporting about a coordinated online strike against Internet servers by terrorists. Dubbed "electronic jihad, there is a good chance that it could happen sometime this week, perhaps on Thursday, according to some security experts. Lately there have been some consistent attacks on primary Internet services and the unraveling of major encryption routines are raising concerns in the Internet operator community. With all the yellow and orange alerts, e-terror is more of a clear and present danger for US. No nation on the planet is more dependent on its e-infrastructure than US. From banking to shopping, to ATMs, a lot of our machines are connected. One man worries that with too much reliance on one company's gear could be a problem. "After Cisco [Systems Inc.]'s code was leaked, their fix was to throw MD5 hashes at it," Bill Woodcock, research director with the nonprofit Internet routing education group Packet Clearing House said. "How much longer is that going to work?"
4A6F656C writes "In an article on LinuxWorld.com.au, Kieren O'Shaughnessy, director of SCO Australia and New Zealand, details SCO's plans for Australia, stating that they have 'prepared a hit list' and "would approach Australian Linux users to ensure they had an IP licence." In closing, he adds 'Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix'." UnknowingFool writes "IBM's lawyers have been busy the last few days. Groklaw has reported a number of different filings. On the heels of last week's motions (1) and (2) for summary judgement, they have filed more documents. First, IBM wants large portions of SCO's testimonies striken (removed) on multiple grounds. Deep in the motion, they call out SCO to produce the 'experts' that did the code comparison analysis. If IBM wins on most of these points, SCO will have very little left in the way of legal evidence. SCO answers on IBMs 10th counterclaim. IANAL but from I understand SCO says this copyright infringment that SCO has allegedly committed on one of IBM's patents is irrelevant to the case and the court doesn't need to decide on it. So SCO is saying that they can sue IBM for infringing on their Unix copyrights and patents but IBM can't counter sue on a specific patent. IBM also filed another memo to support summary judgement. As a matter of law, SCO has to produce evidence to backup its claims. This mountain of evidence SCO has claimed all this time: If they don't produce it, the court has to rule in IBM's favor."
Whether you're spieling on about Atom APIs, Laszlo BlogBox objects or a fancy media asset management systems with sexy RIA interface - it's clear that lots of folks are figuring out where we're all going.
The ants are united in their intentions.
That's why I'm so gung ho about new kinds of micro-content. It's exactly the sort of standard that everyone can interpret their own way, add their own value added onto it - while still having the sort of infrastructure that Doc and Tom O'Reilly talk about.
It's the combinatoon of a Web OS, lots of micro-content standards and this decentralzied, mesh world at the 'edge' of the network - that will not only keep us all honest and happy - but also wealthy and wise.
USA Today has a good overview of the Ultra Wide Band war. As UWB Insider explains, it pits the Motorola backed Direct Sequence standard against the MultiBand OFDM Alliance. Consumers who are looking for "wireless USB" may find incompatibility between vendors.
"It's a civil war," says Yoram Solomon, head of consumer networking for Texas Instruments. "You have friends in the other camp, and you're willing to kill them."(Continued at DailyWireless)
While standards battles are not new, the UWB shootout has taken on the aura of a backroom political brawl, with charges of vote-buying, of bias by IEEE officials and of violations of non-disclosure deals.
This fracas also is unusual in that it pits about 170 companies, many high-tech heavyweights such as Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Hewlett-Packard, against Motorola and about 60 start-ups.
"Microsoft has turned to a Swiss telecommunication operator for the first commercial trial of its system that delivers television signals to consumers over a broadband telecommunications network, it announced this week. Beginning in September, Swisscom's Internet service provider subsidiary Bluewin will deliver 25 TV channels to set top boxes in 600 homes. During the four-month trial, testers will have access to five pay-TV channels and a video-on-demand service through the set top boxes, which also function as a digital video recorder with a live pause function, Microsoft says. Testers will have to pay for the service: $12 per month for 12 channels, or $19 for all 25, with pay-per-view films costing from $2 to $8 each. Microsoft expects the trial to result in the launch of a Bluewin TV service over ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) in 2005, it says."
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While the Segway HT hasn’t been a huge commercial success in the consumer sector, people who build robots are tricking Segways out for all sorts of things. NASA’s is taking their “Robonaut B” robotic astronaut, which can romp around the space station gripping things with its human-like hands and seeing things with its video camera eyes, and popping him onto a Segway and rolling around the joint and even the moon. Plus there’s also the SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego’s Segway RMP (Robotic Mobility Platform) project which is mainly for moving weapons and military stuff around.
The NY Review of Books examines James Wood et als book: Whats Wrong with the Rorshach?: Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test ... (subscription required) ... Hermann Rorschach invented the idea of an inkblot test in 1921, and it soon became embedded in our cultural psyche. A student of Freud and Jung, Rorschach developed a set of ten seemingly formless bisymettrical inkblots on cards, and a methodology to interpret what patients saw when exposed to the cards. The goal was to produce an experience type (Erlebnistypus) that would lead in part to a clinical diagnosis. The object was to somehow peer into the operation of the brain, without surgery and before fMRI techniques. A bit of post-victorian science-as-classification. The book portrays Rorschach as a crank and the test as deeply flawed. Most damning from an analysis point of view, Rorschach and his followers did a very inadequate validation of his classification approach. Nowhere close to statistical significance. It drips with confirmatory bias, and that bias has a strong negative slant. Yet 80 percent of clinical Phd psych programs still emphasize the slant. Why still support what seems to be pseudo-science? Under fire: The International Rorschach Society. The inkblot tests also reminds me of techniques used by research groups who use choices of pictures to reveal underlying consumer thinking. This also links to the newly emergent techniques of Neuromarketing (For recent intro see MSNBC article) There MRI techiques are used to collect patterns of blood flow in the brain after people are exposed to stimuli. These patterns are then linked linked to known behavior. Although I would hope the people developing these techniques know more about classification validation than Rorschach did, there is a clear danger of finding pattern that is not there. (Pareidolia) Also, look at the Amazon reviews of this book, this is apparently a very polarizing book among the psych community. There are other posts out there about how much is wrong with this book....
Well, well. What a surprise. The New York Times' John Markoff has the story that Microsoft has pulled out [sub req] of a UN software standards body (United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, or U.N./Cefac) for "business reasons", after a dispute over "a set of thorny issues over control of intellectual property that is being contributed to the standards-setting effort": "Earlier this year, Microsoft's participation had created controversy within the group, which is attempting to define standards for creating a new generation of Internet services to automate buying and selling through networks of computers." In an email to the group, Microsoft made clear that any prior contributions it has made are "not bound by the negotiations taking place over the control of intellectual property." The group wishes corporations who contribute technology to indemnify the United Nations against IP claims. In May, SAP also withdrew from the group. The trouble with monopolies is, they get to like it. Now, putting our thinking caps on, can anyone think of any good reason why Microsoft might not wish to contribute to a standard, if it has to give up suing the standard body over IP claims?
Why do bellheads always come across as whiny bitchy unhappy people? I mean FCC has given them their cake, and a new sterling silver set, but they still got to complain. Take for example, Lawrence Babbio, Verizon's vice chairman and president at a conference in Aspen remarked, "The FCC hasn't done their job for the last eight years." Which is why they have not rolled out high speed fiber to the home connections in the northeast. But I thought FCC gave them exclusive control over all those new lines. What's the bitching about? Have they not been getting billions in subsidies for broken promises over first ISDN and then FTTH. Never mind! "While the FCC did agree to not apply the unbundling regulations to new fiber in a decision last summer under one section of the communications act, perhaps the new fiber nevertheless would have to be unbundled under a different section of the communications act," said Randolph May, a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Now how did I know why he would say that? Well because his organization is a shill for Bells and other large phone companies. Including Verizon! But wait, there is more whining! Qwest and Verizon are complaining that FCC would hold the line sharing in place for another six months, while it works out an alternative plan. Now we know FCC is no paragon of efficency but people, we are talking about killing Ma Bell and all competition here. The faster we do it, the faster we can start gouging Americans.
Cisco has been perhaps the earliest and strongest backer of VoIP technologies. It has worked hard to make people believe that its IP-Phones are the greatest thing, well the phone. I have seen them at work in controlled environment, and they are pretty cool. But they don't work all the time, according to this report in the Channel Insider. Actually this is a story from EWeek and is excellent piece of investigative work by reporter Ellen Muraskin.
When IBM Global IT Services announced that it was taking over for Electronic Data Systems on a major IT contract for Dow Chemical, this reporter (and others) heard a faint bell ring, launched searches into their story files and came up with the original 2001 announcement: A $1.4 billion contract over seven years to build and maintain a multinational IP network, DowNet, for 50,000 employees and contractors.Now this is one big honking project, six times the size of Cisco's next largest customer,the New Zealand Ministry of Social Policy. Anyway this was the poster child for Cisco.
Early this month, EDS and Dow said they had reached a "mutual agreement" to cancel the contract. On July 28, EDS reported a $135 million pretax termination-related charge for an unnamed client that most industry watchers believed was Dow Chemical.Bottom line, the project seems to be delayed and if you read the report that Cisco is trying hard to make sure its Call Manager IP telephony system is "da bomb."
According to a major Cisco systems integrator, Cisco's John Chambers has been negotiating hard with IBM Global IT services to keep Cisco VOIP equipment front and center for DowNet. "Cisco is standardizing on IBM servers–it's some leverage," he notes. He also reports that Cisco's unified messaging and call center adjunct projects have run up against a lot of integration problems.Anyway read this story, and my hat tip to Muraskin.
bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."
The Importance of writes "The INDUCE Act, which has been discussed many times previously, will likely be getting a lot more attention thanks to the recent Grokster decision. The Register of Copyrights, who thinks the Betamax decision should be overturned, is supposed to come up with a consensus fix to the current language of the bill by Sept. 7. So, various people are proposing alternative solutions to the INDUCE Act. C|Net reports on one coalition's version [PDF] [HTML]. However, there are also versions by Prof. Tim Wu [PDF] [HTML], IEEE-USA [PDF] [HTML] and Ernie Miller [HTML]." Read more below about the proposed "Don't Induce" act.
gtoomey writes "The UK Advertising Standards Authority has upheld complaints that Microsoft misled consumers by running advertisements claiming Linux is 10 times more expensive than Windows. The print advertisements used "independent research" to compare the cost of Linux on an expensive mainframe to Windows on a PC."
Mark Frauenfelder:
Gerry sez: "While searching for something entirely unrelated, I came across this: the original Planet of the Apes movie, reedited and reimagined as a thirty-minute episode of the original Twilight Zone. Black and white, commercial breaks, Rod Serling narration and everything.
"*Extremely* well done. I'm pretty floored. It really is a perfect fit." Link
UPDATE Cliph sez: "That fan re-edit of Planet of the Apes is excellent. The site was a bit slow to serve the file when I tried so I've made a torrent. "
Roland Tango/ Om Malik are reporting that David Sifry and Technorati have received $6.5 million USD in VC funding valuing the company at $12 million dollars. David Siftry has declined to comment: "I'm sorry, it is our policy not to...
Cory Doctorow: 
Ernest Miller sez, "Videogame character BloodRayne (a red-headed 'Dhampir' who hunts supernatural baddies for the 'Brimstone Society') will be topless in October's Playboy. According to her creators, 'This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint.'"
(Thanks, Ernest!)
This is very polarizing topic. Using under the skin RFID implants in humans. Its an approach long used in Veterinary applications. Now some devices of this type have been approved by the FDA for humans. Notable is the Verichip from Applied Digital. Good overview article in ZDNet. I have brought this topic up with a number of people closely involved with RFID in the more mundane supply-chain world, and the reaction is always strong, something like ... it won't happen ... its too invasive ... it will really spook people, etc. They are sensitive to these kinds of applications because they highlight privacy issues. Yet current passive tag technology used in these devices have read distances of only a few cm. True, the basic technology can be extended, so there is a danger that reads can be extended beyond those distances. Yes, there is a danger of mis-use, but compare it against the value of protecting health and lives. Will the use of human implantable tags out-run tagging the average item on the grocery shelf?...
David Sifry explains why he doesn't want to talk aboutthe funding he received. Sifry is being modest and I like the reasons he gives, and respect him for that. "Making a big deal about VC investments is unnecessary, it seems to me. One of the biggest reasons for the dot-com crash was an imbalance of attention: far too much on investments, and far too little on building real businesses with those investments. In our case, we're putting our investments to work building infrastructure and providing service to a population that's growing at an explosive rate. Frankly, we'd rather talk about that than about the money others have invested in us. Right now our staff is just thirteen people, all sprinting a marathon. As you probably know, our struggles have been no secret. ," he writes. David, no hard feeling, but we all wanted to celebrate your good fortune and give you a big whoop!
Look up Technorati on Technorati and read what others including (e.g. Michael Fioritto, paidContent and John Battelle have to say. Here is a link to, the story. Robert Scoble had some doubts about the deal, but Sifry almost talks. And by the way I did get a confirmation from another DFJ general partner, Andreas Stavropoulos, who wrote to me, "Om, Technorati would rather not comment about the details of its funding rounds. I can confirm that DFJ is one of the institutional shareholders of the company but that's about it."
BusinessWeek columnist Stephen Wildstrom recently wrote a piece called A Big Fly in the Open-Source Soup that concluded, "The future of commercial open source might be considerably brighter if Linux and other programs went to a more commerce-friendly license with fewer complexities and ambiguities than the GPL." At the risk of offending a great many NewsForge readers, I am going to say that I don't disagree with him. Not because of the alleged complexity or ambiguities of the GPL -- it's a piece of cake compared to a typical proprietary EULA -- but because I don't understand what he means by the term "commercial open source." If he had simply said "open source" -- or used the more definitive phrase "free software" -- I would reject his position outright. Updated:
Take one part wireless, shake it with equal amount of security and you have the recipe for a cocktail venture capitalists can't resist. Cranite Systems and Vernier Networks both recently raised VC dollars. Cranite which develops security software for wireless local area networks, snagged $10 million while Vernier focuses hardware closed its series D round at $12 million. It just got last tranche of $2 million but fell short of its round target of $15 million, according to Venture Wire. Vernier was founded in March 2001 and was a spin-out of Packet Design which still holds a stake. Hitachi Ltd. and ITX International Holdings also are investors in the Mountain View, Calif., company, VW says. RCR Wireless News has a nice round-up of recent wireless funding madness. Recent fund raisers include Spotwave Wireless, July Systems, Figure 8 Wireless and Cypak. As I had noted following my chat with Bob Metcalfe, Wireless is the new platform, and most VCs are jumping in head first to get in on the action. As they say, sometimes too many cocktails can leave a nasty hangover. (I linked to my story on the coming wireless boom from July 2003)
Last week, analyst firm KMI Research came out with a report predicting that after being stalled for years, the optical networking market is going to change gears, and predicted that the market would grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2009. This market, which includes SONET, SDH, DWDM, DXC, and OXC products, hit $7.6 billion in 2003 and should reach $15.3 billion in 2009. They were quite bullish about the prospects of the long haul optical gear market. Fast forward a couple of days and Ciena and Sycamore Networks report their earnings, with a bit more pessimistic point of view. Sycamore on the conference call pointed out that it had hired an investment banker to explore strategic options.
This despite the news that Sycamore had beaten Ciena and Nortel and snagged Sprint as a customer. This along with their GIG-BE win, the company's products have been selected for two of the most important contracts out there. "Despite these successes," Pacific Crest Securities analyst Tim Daubenspeck told the Daily Deal that "finding a buyer could be tough for Sycamore. It's a small company with essentially one product and a ton of cash. Someone might buy them for the cash and the value in their technology, but then again I don't know of anyone who would want to enter that market."
Sycamore has had tiny bit of good news, but things are getting downright depressing for Ciena. Light Reading is speculating that the downturn may cost CEO Gary Smith his job. "I'd say he's got one more quarter to go," says one investment source who holds no Ciena shares. "One more quarter of disappointment and the sh*t really starts to hit the fan." Smith might pay the price for a broader market problem.
eBay has just announced that during a 180-day pilot it will allow digital music files for download. "Pre-approved" resellers will be able to offer downloadable music within auctions at eBay. Is this the beginning of a legal secondary market for...
...has evidently been broken by two companies that make and sell DVD chips to companies that make products that (take a breath) have features that fail to hew to Hollywood's standards for copy "protection." So the MPAA is suing.
As John Borland points out, the suits have nothing to do with copyright law. To avoid the kind of lawsuits that destroy companies like 321 Studios, the chipmakers essentially 1.) asked Hollywood for permission to make the chips, 2.) agreed to make them in the Hollywood-approved way, and 3.) signed on the dotted line. It's a lot cleaner than squabbling over messy, intractable stuff like arguments for "personal" or "fair use" of digital media.
The robotics actuality is pretty rich these days. Besides the fighting robots of Robo-One and the flying microrobots from Epson (the best picture is at Ananova), here are some the latest intriguing news in robotics. In Japan, Yoshiyuki Sankai has built a
A new worm has been discovered that is able to take over your webcam.
Cory Doctorow: Jefferson sez, "This paper won the Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI-04 (Amer. Assoc. for AI's National Conf.) in July. In a nutshell, they took the trace from a person carrying a GPS unit around with him for a month. With no hand labelling of the data, they were able to build a model of the person's travel behavior including frequent destinations (work, home, grocery friends homes), and modes of transportation (bus vs. walking). With new data, the model can predict, on-line, the traveler's most likely destination, and detect 'unknown activities' (e.g. strange behavior)."
(Thanks, Jefferson!)
Xeni Jardin: 
Huge online collection of old postcards from the late 19th century and early 20th century. I spent hours last night noodling through the ones from Guatemala, Nigeria, Hawaii, and Tahiti -- but the gallery includes many more countries. Looks like they're for sale, too. In the "Guatemala" batch, I found three Mayan girls from the early 1900s; I love this postcard of two Mayan men from Solola, from the same period. Then, there's "Visiting a Vietnamese Penal Colony, Wish You Were Here!" How cool is it that the site allows you to search by topical themes like dromedaries, chiromancy, and prostitution? In the latter, I found this totally bizarre image of a sex worker's flea-bitten thighs, and the haunting postcard portrait of an anonymous Algerian prostitute, shown at left.
Link (Thanks, Carl!)
Ernie Miller is interviewed over at O'Reilly and (no surprise) provides plenty of excellent answers to the question.
Here's just one:
Koman: So, assume that this was passed. How debilitating a hit would it be to technological innovation?Miller: It's hard to overestimate it, to be honest. It would be incredibly debilitating to investment and innovation across the board, to anything having to do with the Internet, anything having to do with computers and the ability to copy. First of all, there's no clear boundary as to what is legal and what is not. There's no bright line defense. As long as they can provide some evidence that a reasonable person could think some technology was intended to induce infringement, then the lawsuit has to go all the way to the jury. You can't get it dismissed very easily. That's very expensive.
There's no limitation on who can be sued. Not only can the company making the device be sued, but under the Induce Act they can sue the company that invested in the company, they can sue the company that provides parts and supplies to the company, they can sue business partners, they can sue the advertising agencies. If you come up with something that's a really wonderful, neat new product but Hollywood won't like it, who's going to do business with you, who's going to invest in you? It's going to be incredibly difficult to do business, and that's going to dry up investment to no end. It's scary how far-reaching this is.
Cory Doctorow:
As a requirement of its price-fixing settlement with the Feds, the RIAA is obliged to give thousands of CDs to public libraries. However, as has been noted, the CDs they're sending around are worse than shit: hundreds of copies of the years-old Whitney Houston single of the Star Spangled Banner, that species of kidney.
Jenny Levine (AKA the Shifted Librarian) works at a library where the RIAA care packages have started to come in. She reports on the contents thereof:
Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them.
Intermec, which acquired much of IBM's RFID IP , has some 140 RFID patents and outlines how it plans to manage them. The RFID blog provides some commentary on this and implications for EPCGlobal. You would wonder if IBM regrets selling much of their RFID IP to Intermec, though they remain partners. For a less than up to date review, see a history of RFID....
Guangdong, a fast growing province of China is gearing up to become an important sourcing base for a myriad of VoIP products. The region is home to more than 50 manufacturers who are churning out VoIP products in China. (Other VoIP manufacturing bases in China are around Shanghai and Beijing!) One of the mainstays of the region is ZTE Corp., a name many Americans are familiar with. A large portion of the equipment is meant for export, but seems like a lot of Chinese companies and consumers are buying up VoIP gear. Growth of broadband in China is one of the reason for growing popularity of VoIP in CHina.
Late Friday, the FCC released details for its interim rules covering UNE-P pricing. According to these rules, the RBOCs freeze wholesale rates for a six month period and after this period, if finalized rules are not in place, Bells are allowed to raise the as much as 5% for existing customers and even higher for new ones. Chairman Powell wants to have final rules in place in a timely fashion and has already scheduled a vote for the finalized rules at the committee's December meeting. AT&T's decision to quit from the consumer market says that the FCC favors the RBOCs in regards to UNE-P. In a statement, AT&T the company most hurt by this decision said: "Unfortunately, the order approved by the majority of the Commission does little to protect and preserve consumer benefits and the existing competition in today's consumer markets. Through this continuing uncertainty, only one thing is clear, if the Commission does not meet its now self-imposed deadline to craft permanent rules, the Bell companies will be free to squeeze its dwindling number of competitors by charging "market-based rates" -- code for whatever price the Bell companies want to charge -- for facilities that are essential to preserve competition for small businesses and consumers." Actually I could not have said it better myself.
Yahoo, Google and other major web sites have been hit with a lawsuit saying they carry online gambling ads in violation of California law. This comes after two of the major search companies earlier this year made moves that were supposed to remove online gambling ads entirely.
The robotics actuality is pretty rich these days. Besides the fighting robots of Robo-One and the flying microrobots from Epson (the best picture is at Ananova), here are some the latest intriguing news in robotics. In Japan, Yoshiyuki Sankai has built a robot suit, called Hybrid Assistive Limb-3 (or HAL-3), designed to help disabled or elderly people. In the U.S., Ohio State University is developing a robotic tomato harvester for the J.F. Kennedy Space Center while Northrop Grumman received $1 billion from the Pentagon to build a new robotic fighter. I kept the best for the end. A Californian counselor has just patented the ten ethical laws of robotics. A good read for a Sunday, if you can understand what he means.
Alien54 writes "Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. (link includes a picture of samples) Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (see also: A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761). Scotty would be pleased."
Ernie Miller has a comprehensive round-up on the decision, plus additional analysis of its possible impact on --you guessed it -- the push for the Induce Act.
Later: Fred von Lohmann has more @ Deep Links:
The Ninth Circuit's ruling in MGM v. Grokster today clarified four points of incredible importance to innovators of all stripes, including peer-to-peer developers:(Continued at Copyfight)
- The Court made clear that, for purposes of the "Betamax defense" announced by the Supreme Court in 1984, the important question is whether a technology is merely capable of a substantial noninfringing use, not the proportion of noninfringing to infringing uses. The opposite rule, urged by the entertainment industry, would kill off new technologies prematurely, as infringing uses tend to be common until the incumbent entertainment industries adjust their business models to take advantage of the new opportunities created by the new technology. (When there were no pre-recorded videocassettes, the VCR was doubtless used for more infringement than it was after there were Blockbusters on every corner.)
- The Court also explained that, in order to trump the Betamax defense, a copyright owner must show that the technology developer had (1) knowledge of specific infringments (2) at a time when it could do something about those infringements. The entertainment industry, in contrast, had argued that it should be enough to simply deliver a pile of "infringement notices" to the technology developer after the fact. Such a rule would have imperilled all kinds of companies. (Imagine Xerox receiving a pile of infringement notices about photocopiers that it had sold the year before -- should it be liable for infringing activities at every Kinkos in America?)
Nintendo has been granted a patent for online gaming. Reading the patent description, the description looks a lot like the Xbox Live.
Cory Doctorow: 
This 1924 photo from the archive of the Canon City, Colorado library archive shows a whole troop (gaggle? fewmet? murder?) of Klansmen riding a Ferris-wheel.
(Thanks, horhayole!)
Cory Doctorow: 
Ever since I signed up for some Flickr photo RSS feeds with keywords like "Graffiti" and "Tokyo," I've gotten a steady stream of pix taken by folks around the world. Some days, there's a serious jackpot, as today, with all these great pix of graffiti in Manhattan by someone called "Ninjin" and this sweet Tokyo skyline photo. Producing these little highlight posts is slightly labour-intensive, so I dunno how often I'll do them, but today it was worth it. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).
Grokster has won MGM v. Grokster. (By Grokster I mean “Streamcast & Grokster,” hereinafter)
Analysis
The Ninth Circuit has decided that, on the facts developed, Grokster-style P2P technology is an easy case under Sony. For those unfamiliar with Sony, that decision held VCR manufacturers are not liable for copyright infringement practiced by owners of VCRs. The Court ruling recognized, in other words, that the P2P filesharing technology in programs like KaZaA falls into the same category as typewriters, photocopiers, VCRs, and pencils. All are tools that whose usage is not supervised by the manufacturer, that can be used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. All are tools that do not attract copyright liability for the manufacturer.
The opinion turns on facts rather than law. Two crucial factual findings accepted by the Court are basically the case. First, the court concludes that P2P is “capable of substantial non-infringing use”:
“A careful examination of the record indicates that there is no genuine issue of material fact as to noninfringing use. Indeed, the Software Distributors submitted numerous declarations by persons who permit their work to be distributed via the software, or use the software to distribute public domain works. [Example of popular band Wilco, who became successful via the P2P music distribution] … In short, from the evidence presented, the district court quite correctly concluded that the software was capable of substantial non-infringing uses and, therefore, that the Sony-Betamax doctrine applied.”
The second factual matter is whether Grokster “contributed” to infringement by its users. The Court found that Grokster does not provide the “site and facilities” for infringement:
“[Grokster et al.] are not access providers, and they do not provide file storage and index maintenance. Rather, it is the users of the software who … create the network and provide the access.” This, of course, is the major factual distinction from the Napster case, as Napster did provide an index and servers that were the “site and facilities” for infringement.
With these two factual findings in place, victory under Sony follows directly. The design of KaZaA with Napster in mind, and the successful development of these facts by Grokster’s lawyers at the EFF (Fred von Lohmann among them), is why Grokster won.
The court writes with a self-consciousness of the effects of copyright for innovation policy. It, in other words, writes in Silicon Valley language rather than Hollywood. The word “piracy” is not in the opinion, nor is “stealing.” Instead, words that could have been penned by Schumpeter: “the introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through established distribution mechanisms.” Does it matter in the long run if the recording industry is hurt? Not really, suggests the court: “history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karoke machine, or an MP3 player.”
The opinion is not without its weaknesses, particularly with a view to Supreme Court review. The most obvious weakness relates to the “blind eye” or “willful blindness” issue. On one account, Grokster escaped liability because it deliberately created a P2P network over which it had no control over specific file transfers. If it is trivially easy to create a network that makes it easy to stop copyright infringement, cannot Grokster be accused of trying to make an “end run” around the law, or making itself “willfully blind” to the infringements it is contributing to? This is the more important of two crucial differences with the Aimster decision penned by Judge Posner. Posner said in dicta that “One who, knowing or strongly suspecting that he is involved in shady dealings, takes steps to make sure that he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings is held to have [knowledge sufficient for copyright infringement.” Arguably – constructing a system that deliberately left Grokster uninformed and incapable of stopping infringement – is what Grokster did here.
It’s a weakness because the Ninth’s circuit treatment of this issue is cursory: “There is no separate ‘blind eye’ theory or element of vicarious liability…” If this case makes it to the Supreme Court, I would expect everything to turn on this issue. Grokster, of course, can argue that making itself “willfully blind” is actually a better P2P design, and not just a ruse to get around copyright infringement.
But let’s return to the end result. The sale and design of P2P filesharing technology has just been legalized in California. Whether legalizations spreads depends on Supreme Court cert. policy (more on this latter), and that place called Congress and its Act called Induce.
Xeni Jardin: BoingBoing reader Darren says:
"Jill Greenburg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though, she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities. The portraits express an amazing range of emotion, and are way more interesting that your average celebrity pic."
Link to Jill's website, with photos of monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates. You may also recall that totally gorgeous cover she shot for Wired Magazine's September, 2003 issue (The New Diamond Age): Link. LA-dwellers: the monkey images and other new works will be on exhibit starting October 23 at Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire.
We've been spending a good deal of time thinking and speaking about BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) these past few months. AMC member Guy Albanese sent in this article from USAToday.com The author, Andrew Kantor, makes some valid points about the technology and it's interesting reading.
The big idea is to use BPL for the backbone and then, because the big technological BPL hump is post step-down transformer where the signal is hard to control, use a WiFi or WiMax hub/repeater on the pole. This is truly the best of both worlds. Lots of electrons available for the backbone and plenty of coverage for the last half mile that has heretofore been a phone and cable company dominion.
So, how important is a valid BPL/WiFi combo plan to us domestically? Let's see, DSL is only a valid broadband solution if you are less than 18,000 from a switch. Let's just say that there are a bunch of phone customers that are more than three miles from a phone company switch. Cable modems don't have the same kinds of distance limitations, but you do need a cable. However, basically everyone in America has AC power and almost every household is within WiFi or WiMax range of a step-down transformer.
(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)
There's a whole bunch of 1954 songs like "Earth Angel" that go into the public domain in Europe this year. The record industry will try to have the EU extend its copyright laws to match US. "Sincerely", 54 was a great year!
An anonymous reader writes "There are tantalizing hints, via The Inquirer, and other tech news sites, that the BBC may extend its multicast streaming services to non-UK citizens, for material where rights allows. There's details about how ISPs may peer to join the multicast trial network on an official BBC page." We previously covered the BBC's multicast streaming of the Olympics, unfortunately not available in the U.S.
Nielsen NetRatings is reporting that broadband connections for the first time reached 51 percent of the American online population at home during the month of July, as compared to 38 percent last July. Sixty-three million Web users connected to the Internet via broadband during July 2004 as compared to 61.3 million accessing the Internet through narrowband. [TechNewsWorld]
'-- "Despite a plateau in the growth of U.S. Internet access, we've seen continued high double-digit growth in users' broadband access," said Marc Ryan, senior director and analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings. "We expect to see this aggressive growth rate continue through next year when the majority of Internet users will be accessing the Internet via a broadband connection." --'
...John
The creator of Linux says "I can't be nasty" when leading the open-source movement since it's all built on trust and teamwork[OSNews]
'-- I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge. --'
...John
As my colleague Glen Robinson wrote in the 1990s, the transformation of the FCC from the 1960s-to 1990s was “one of the stunning achievements of modern public policy,” accompanied by “the transformation of a staid and stagnant industry into the most dynamic and rapidly growing industry in the modern economy.” As he argues, it “did not come about through technology alone; it came about by rethinking notions about natural monopoly, economies of scale and scope--concepts near and dear to the ancient regime.”
Where are we today?
Direct and Related Links for 'Are you sick of Google yet?'
Are we sick of Google yet? Expect to get even sicker as the Google IPO becomes an exercise in futility for the company and the investment community at large. The reason why this has turned into a laughable fiasco is because the investment bankers, the brokers, and the middlemen have decided to queer this deal in any way they can. Nobody who got rich during the dot-com era wants to see the model for the…Direct and Related Links for 'Recover From a Bad SP2 Install'
“SUMMARY This article discusses how to use the Automatic Recovery feature to restore your computer to its previous configuration if the installation of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is not completed successfully and you cannot start your computer. Follow these steps if your computer does not start correctly after you try to upgrade your computer from Windows XP to Windows XP SP2. This article also discusses how to collect information about the Windows…"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft." - Bill Gates
The Microsoft Corporation generates a wide variety of perceptions around the world. The general public appears to perceive Microsoft as the software company, the main source of computer functionality. Software developers often have a very pro- or anti-Microsoft stance. Direct competitors to Microsoft usually see them as ruthless and dangerous. Other software companies sometimes see them as a necessary evil; they don't like them but need them to survive. Many nations do not like relying on a foreign corporation for a substancial part of their technical infrastructure. Therefore sentiment is often more anti-Microsoft in non-U.S. governments.
San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, which houses the largest collection of Asian art in the Western world,is testing a Web site that will display digital photographs of paintings, sculpture, and other artistic creations worth a total of almost $4 billion. The site runs on SUSE Linux and IBM's iSeries hardware.
Researchers at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center estimate that an unprotected PC will be compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the Internet, down from an estimated 40 minutes last year. The estimate is based on observations of...
