Author: tgposzadmin

Thought provoking piece

Here is a great video at YouTube by Michael Wesch (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State university). Arjun Roychowdhury and Sunil Veluvali of CorporateRat and ElusiveCheese fame is where I noticed it first. Evidently also onAlec Saunders weblog.

This is a great piece from Professor Wesch and his group at KSU.

keep your speakers on

Currently Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction.

Vista and DRM – *updated*

Recently, Steve Gibson, Leo Laporte, and Peter Gutmann talked extensively about what Microsoft put in the base of the Vista OS.

  • For an introduction on the issue, click here or listen to a podcast by clicking here.
  • The next week, they get into the Vista details here or listenhere.
  • In the 3rd week, they wrap it up here or listen here.
  • ** Microsoft later responded in a blog post, read about it hereor listen here

I’ve just reviewed all of these sessions, and I agree with the speakers:

Two questions do come to mind after digesting all of this.

  1. Why did Microsoft do this? I mean, I wouldn’t think they would be “beholding” to Hollywood for anything, heck the other way around, Hollywood would be interested in getting to 95% of the personal computing screens.
  2. Considering all of the issues around SPAM, and related issues of identify theft, zombie PCs, etc., one would think that the same amount of effort in these latter issues would improve the situation for a very large number of users.

This work appears to do nothing except make users very unhappy, at least once they find out about it and are faced with real issues like the inability to “RIP” legally procured content that you have “fair use rights” to. Or perhaps your display manufacturer went on the “cheap” and didn’t include the licensing keys for the crypto involved. Vista supposedly will not play the HD content on a display that doesn’t “abide” by these rules. The policy that sets this thing is not in the display card or even Vista, it’s in the content itself. People are reporting in forums this simple fact: I’m putting in an HD-DVD and it’s not playing. It’s still beta, so anything might happen between now and February.

As I say, we are left with the basic issue of Why?

** Update 1/21/2007
found via boingboing, click here

“…misses the larger issue: the stark demarcation that will arise between legal vs. pirated movies. On Windows Vista, the only way to get true HD movie and TV content from your $2000 home-theater PC will be to download illegal pirated content!

I cannot believe Microsoft/Hollywood haven’t seen this coming … Blu-Ray and HD-DVD protection schemes are likely to be completely broken in a matter of months, and once that happens, the various crippled features in Vista will only affect one type of user – the law-abiding ones who would never pirate a movie. Those users will suffer, while the pirates will party on. What’s the point, Microsoft?”

Broadband Wireless – Now with WiFi!!

This week the NYTimes noted in the technology section that a company by the name of AutoNet had struck a deal with Avis to provide a wifi experience “in your rental car.”

While aimed at the business person renting a car (and perhaps specifically targeted at the person with a wifi laptop but not yet having a broadband wireless access card or tethered phone, the concept is interesting (notwithstanding the safety and legal issues involved). Interesting, because it provides local access to a “router” – this is the wifi part – and wireless “wide area network” access to the Internet.

This isn’t the first time this has been around, Kyocera has marketed a similar device for some time to the public (Link to rfwel website). People on InternetbyCellPhone (groups.yahoo.com) have been talking for quite awhile about how to do this with the basic laptop and Window’s Internet sharing feature.

More players probably means this is starting to get real. Safety issues aside, the more connected we get, the easier it will be to travel with those “connected” kids of ours.

One point… the NYT article notes Autonet as the company involved with Avis. Autonet’s website notes a Skype application of the technology (i.e. travel with your Skype client on the laptop or a Skype standalone wireless phone) make calls all day long on the wireless “data” network… This is something that the wireless carriers TOU spell out as something “not good” – not for technology reasons – really – but rather because the pricing for data plans is all messed up. Today’s plans are designed for the “occasional” data user, not a cable modem user… Perhaps more pricing plans are headed our way?

What the future will bring

I was having lunch with some of my previous work associates yesterday. We got to talking about mobile phones, the “bricks” of yesterday and the “razor” thin ones of today, and also about VoIP services (since half of us had it). This reminded me, since I’d read it sometime ago, but no longer remember who exactly coined it, that in the past, there were 3 ways to get information into your home:

  1. the phone line (which was bi-directional),
  2. over-the-air broadcast (one way) radio and
  3. broadcast TV
  4. well, maybe 4 if you count the newspaper or a magazine

Today, we still may have

  1. a phone line,
  2. the radio
  3. plus possibly also satellite radio
  4. broadcast TV may be completely replaced
  5. via cable (or satellite)
  6. but also there is a high-speed digital line that may be DSL (with the phone) or might come over the cable (with the cable TV)
  7. plus, in some areas optical fiber for the TV.
  8. Now we also have mobile cellular telephone service that’s more or less been for voice,
  9. but is also increasing being used for data as the bandwidth increases (this is where I’m working in the industry now)
  10. A few years ago there where smatterings, then rivers, now floods of WiFi and now WiMAX, or metro broadband wireless (there used to be a company just down the street that was heavily involved in just this thing in South America, because it’s cheaper to “wire” households up this way than with copper).
  11. There are plenty more fixed and mobile communications options than I can think of right now. My sisters, in rural Minnesota, get a slower speed version of broadband that’s built off antennas on top of granary elevators and mini-pizzabox sized antenna’s on their houses or in their yards. The distribution antenna works for distances up to 15-20 miles. That and power are the reasons why it’s slower speed. This was put in place because the local telco switch was running out of ports for dial-up and basic voice, back 10-15 years ago, and an enterprising young man saw an opportunity and worked it, when the REA type telco couldn’t possibly move fast enough.
  12. And there’s a chance you’re still getting a newspaper delivered, too.

The point is, the source of bandwidth pretty much does not matter any more. You’ll get your telephone service from somewhere in a network cloud, or maybe from some other network cloud if you move around. If you’re like me, you have application services that tie the endpoints together so that people calling you in one cloud don’t know that you’re answering in the other cloud.

This is largely going to be the same for your TV service. Our soldiers in Iraq, I’m told, have versions of IPTV that are more modern versions of the “triple play” that interworking of the broadband/phone/TV service, which is of course, carried on a military backbone or perhaps a leased facility back to their families here in the states. I don’t begrudge them a bit for a service such as this, but it sure heralds the future for us, doesn’t it?

Content is changing, too, newspapers are still around, but increasingly they have to pay attention to the online world. Oh, the basics of reporting and fact gathering is still largely the same, the tools are different and faster to use. Just lots more amateurs out there…

Radio, and now TV, are putting broadcasts (with and without commercials) out there for distribution via RSS or maybe forcing the website experience. Some media outlets are not getting “it” trying to force users to watch live (Nielson still has clout) in order to keep the same old revenue sources. Others ARE getting it, and that’s why there are DVD’s of whole season of TV shows, or in some forward looking markets, downloads or even feeds of shows. So, distribution models change and with it, the revenue dynamics. I freely admit I don’t have time to listen to that radio or TV show anymore in “real-time”. I want my “time-shifting” rights! So, podcasts and TiVo/MythTV – I think these are good things. Once bitten, “don’t take my TiVo away!”

In the future, it really won’t matter if the pipe is

  • FIOS (Fiber to the curb ala Verizon landline or my Dad’s cable company in rural MN),
  • EVDO Rev. A (VerizonWireless and Sprint),
  • HFC (CATV company), or
  • copper wires (traditional telco).

Telco infrastructure is getting to the point where we don’t care what it is, as long as it’s there when we want it and it’s economical enough to fit into our lives without making us think about it. Content and basic service models are increasingly looking for alternative revenue sources, rather than the basic Alfred Hitchcock “word from our sponsor” model which really just shifts costs from minutes of use (MOU) into a bundled cost of an advertised product. MOU will still be there for a while, thanks to the telcos and more importantly, the mobile phone era. But something better than the current draconian measures envisioned with DRM and lawsuits is needed.

We’ve come a long way since when I would travel and my mother used to ask me to call collect and ask for Uncle Arvin, who was never there; it was just a pre-arranged signal that I had arrived at my destination. Let’s hope the coming years see as much of a change for the better as the last few years.

Happy Holidays.

DECT News

Previously, link here, I had posted regarding DECT, or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications technology, as something that was going to come to the U.S. in a bigger way.

If you’ve been in a computer store lately, you may have seen this wireless phone using the DECT standard. Earlier this month, there was news (link here) that some suppliers of those phones are now building wireless VoIP into them. So it’s beginning to look like (quoting the article)

  • computers still do intensive work on the Net, but
  • people will use wireless DECT phones to
  1. make IP phone calls,
  2. listen to Internet radio or
  3. check a phone directory.

These enhancements are at most a year away; streaming audio will be coming after that in 2008.

NEW ACROYMN: “CAT-iq” – Cordless Advanced Technology-internet and quality.

Gads, more and more technology – what’s a person to do… Seriously, this may have value though, if you’d rather not “boot up” the PC to do these sorts of things. If you keep the PC on all the time, well maybe not so much… On the other hand, if you have a choice between a dumb wireless phone and one that has more intelligence, without a lot of cost differential, then duh

Power Outage

This morning, we suffered a 1.5 hour power outage. It reminds me how sensitive technology is to the basics, such as electricity.

I have a UPS battery backup for my router and cable modem, since for convenience I might want to use the VoIP phone line for an hour or so, during the early part of an outage. This VoIP line is used throughout the house, but as I say – it’s a convenient to keep it running.

My burglar alarm has it’s own battery backup, so it will still work for a couple of days, dialing out on the land line.

The laptop(s) have a battery, but then they are only good for a hour or 2.

Reminds me that about a year ago, I spec’d out what it would take to go totally solar. The answer was $75k, about $20-25k out of pocket.

Oh, and Murphy was alive and kicking this morning as well. Since we have well water here, without electricity, there isn’t much water pressure to do an entire shower. I called my neighbor to hook up a garden hose to his house (something I’ve done in the past) since he has city water. But he wasn’t home.

Hey, I used to be a Boy Scout, right? Some water in the sink, boil some water on the stove (I am civilized, ok) combine in the sink and tah dah… I can at least sponge bathe and wash my hair… Water done, combined, all set to apply lather…

the power comes on.

NTP gets sued – Business Week

The company that initiated a patent battle with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is now being sued over credit for its patents.

Oren Tavory, a software developer, says he did it first. Tavory says he did much of the work developing the technology behind NTP’s patents.

Time will tell if this has any effect on things or not.

IPTV

IPTV, or Internet Protocol delivering TeleVision (and not Iowa Public Television) is supposed to be a big market. These last few years, lots of companies have been investigating and some have been actually doing something. The subscriber levels for this year, 2006, is supposed to be 8.3 million, worldwide. But, only 500,000 of these subscribers are in the U.S. That is 6.02%… A lot of these subscribers are in western Europe, with Gartner indicating 3.3 million are there, this year. Other deployments are starting in Shanghai, Guangdong, and other Chinese cities.

The market is supposed to explode. Gartner is indicating a 5 fold increase in 4 years in western Europe and others indicating a roughly 4 fold increase worldwide, over the same timeframe, to 34 million total subscribers. At the high end of the speculation, 63 million subscribers have been quoted in the press.

If the U.S. has 500,000 subscribers now, who has them? Parts of Rural America, in that there are hundreds of Independent Operating Companies (IOCs) who are running IPTV today. Places like Ramondville, Texas and Lenora, Kansas. Nearer to me; Fallon, Nevada.

Outside the U.S., IPTV is rolling along, in places like Belgium and Brazil, Sweden and Slovenia, Ireland and Italy. With price sensitive Germans, the expectation of interactivity is expected to help generate money for the carriers. In France, it’s sold in consumer electronic stores, similar to our Best Buy or CompUSA. Gartner, again, predicts that by the end of this year, roughly half of IPTV subscribers will be in France. As the other western European country’s growth catches up, France will still keep a third of these subscribers.

Why haven’t we heard about this much here?

  1. Elsewhere, the combination of low entry prices from competitors and incumbents (like France Telecom) and the idea that content from firms like the Pay per View players are willing to embrace new distribution channels. According to Gartner, however, a lot of the subscribers captured via this aggressive pricing have yet to be completely “hooked” on the IPTV service itself, it’s simply packaged as part of their “triple play” bundle. The factors that follow contribute to situations unique to those of us here in the U.S.
  2. The phone companies, here, usually have copper, “twisted pair” for the “last mile” to your house. Running voice at 64kbps is what this last mile distribution was designed for. A pair of wires, and thus 2 possible phone lines for each house, who could want for more? A couple of decades ago, this was satisfactory thinking. DSL internet services, rolled out for the demand for broadband internet, uses this same twisted pair copper wire to get to a “DSL modem” in your house. The investment they’ve made in DSLAMs in the central office may not yet have paid off enough, for them to start to look at upgrades to this infrastructure. The newer services, such as streaming HD TV, or even a basic DVD movie compressed in MPEG2 (a popular video compression technique) is 5-7 Mbps of bandwidth that will obviously put a strain on this kind of infrastructure. So, either they must add hardware in the “last mile” part of the network, to enhance and strengthen signals to go farther or stay stronger or they must go to something the industry calls Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). Verizon calls this FiOS, or Fiber Optic Services, and they are pretty much ready to push the button. Very expensive stuff, but the market is seeing some action here from these smaller operators, the IOCs, rolling out fiber. In Sanborn, MN, where I grew up, Cable TV (which is also the phone company in Sanborn) service was so troublesome with an aging HFC network, that about 5-6 years ago, the Cable company dug up all of the streets and laid fiber to everyone’s house. My dad has fiber at his back door. Sanborn, MN – population 434. No IPTV yet, but he certainly has a pipe large enough if and when they finally offer such a service. A bigger population area, different fiscal issues, but as operators such as Verizon are demonstrating, not necessarily impossible to solve.
  3. The U.S. legacy cable operators, the MSOs, have been delivering your standard TV over coax cable and this is called Hybrid/Fiber Coax or HFC (From the head-end to your neighborhood, it’s fiber, to a device on a telephone pole or in a vault, appropriately called, the “fiber node” and then it’s coaxial cable to your house). All of the channels are “broadcast” in separate frequency channels along this infrastructure simultaneously. Telephone service and regular internet service to your “cable modem” is delivered similarly, in a channels right alongside the video. Digital TV is delivered right down these same channels, encoded in something called QAM, decoded by your digital set-top-box. There is a lot of money invested here in this infrastructure and it is not yet financially compelling for the MSOs to change.
  4. Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006 – Specifically, this is the house version of the major overhaul of the last Telecom bill. The senate had it’s own involvement in the issue, but basically, we have a lot of rule making to be done before it’s clear who/what/where/when money will be made by this or that operator, distributor, content provider, etc. – too many rules, it’s hard for anyone to predict and thus only agile companies, ready to move after rulemaking, will gain rewards.
  5. Telephone companies have never delivered TV content before. Sure, some are supplementing their voice and internet offerings with satellite TV, but let’s face it, they are just putting their name on the satellite TV offering from another company. Licensing, broadcasting, distribution rights – well, the MSOs have a lead in this space.
  6. The MSOs and satellite companies offer premium content right now, some of it in High Definition, or HD. To compete, and IPTV offering must be better than the MSOs level of the playing field. Better technologically: Effectively, it must be better than what European and Asian operators are delivering in the early MPEG2 encoding technology. It’s almost expected now, that a true offering must be multiple HD streams, each 12-20 Mbps – not 5-7 Mbps. They also must offer DVR or “TiVo-like” services, either home based or network based, for the streams coming into the home or the movie libraries the carrier is involved with. Sometimes it is barely likely that 5 Mbps is getting down to you, must less multiple HD TV streams. The “broadcast flag” issue over who owns the right to push advertising at you and force you to watch it (also tied into the Senate bill) may hinder IPTV’s acceptance, particularly if it screws up who can and cannot produce the devices that will “play back” IPTV. Better services: Interactivity (think sports betting in some countries) may be key for adoption, something that is harder to do in today’s world (not to mention that gambling is a real political problem here in the U.S.). The success of SMS texting linked to reality TV has shown the desire for the public to interact, paying real money, but with SMS the revenue is going to a wireless carrier, not necessarily the IPTV carrier. So, interactivity within the platform (think “Deal or No Deal” kinds of interactivity.)
  7. Finally, distributing this streaming mess of bits around the house to what ever device needs it, The HDTV set, a desktop computer, a 2nd TV set, a laptop computer. Should this be Ethernet? Or Ethernet over Power cabling? Or WiFi? It’s this last point that a small company, named Ruckus Wireless, with several announcements this last week, is becoming a key player. They secured $16 million in additional financing from telco and electronics company’s VC arms. They also announced shipping wireless product for reliably delivering these video streams within the house, thus eliminating the potential wiring mess a consumer or professional installer would have to undertake. A lot of their technology is involved in the dynamic tuning aspect of the antenna systems. Essentially, they “beam” the bits to the TV set, instead of 360 degree broadcast to everyone nearby, because the antenna system locates the remote station and “locks on”. Problems with walls and beams are resolved in this manner. Essentially, Ethernet performance, without the physical cable. Ruckus has indicated that industry-wide there is an approximate cost of $400-500 for a 3 room install as part of IPTV launching. This is per subscriber.

So, quite a lot that has to come together before you can literally sit down in your favorite chair, flip on the HD to watch your favorite game over an IP infrastructure. Except, if you are in Wyoming or Kansas.

Saving a Single Life – Asteroids??

About 11 years ago, Gregory Benford, noted science fiction author and physicist (on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine) wrote in a column that saving a single life in 1995 dollars would cost

  • $200, in third world countries (usually due to malnutrition)
  • $75,000, in advanced nations (cancer screening)
  • $120,000, in USA (highway safety agencies, better highway dividers, easier on-ramps, etc.)
  • $1,000,000, in USA (to avoid one case of deadly lung disease by having better air pollution controls)
  • $5,000,000, in USA (to eliminate natural radioactivity in drinking water, which is why we don’t do it)
  • $2,500,000,000, in USA (for nuclear plant safety)
  • For about 600 times the cancer screening rate, or $50,000,000 per year, killer asteroids could be identified and eliminated from threatening the earth.

This last point has always intrigued me, particularly when that Bruce Willis movie came out a couple of years ago.

The ABC Science Show had an interview with Sima Adhya, a space mission scientist at QinetiQ in Great Britain. This interview aired September 23, in which the asteroid proposition was again discussed, but in more current terms and with some ideas about how to actually do something like this, Hollywood not withstanding.

A link to the transcript and podcast of that broadcast is herehttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1744501.htmand herehttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/ssw_20060923.mp3

The European Space Agency is planning to send two spacecraft in about 5 years to an asteroid about 30 million miles away. It will take another 5 years after launch to get to the asteroid. So from Benford’s earlier notation to now, 11 years passes. In 10-11 more years we shall find out some other things about this particular issue.

The plan is to have one spacecraft go into orbit around the target asteroid. It will be in charge of measuring the mass, density, finer details on it’s speed and direction, and other information about the asteroid. The second spacecraft (which will be about the size of a refrigerator) will crash into the asteroid (about 100 meters long) while the first one will watch, taking even more measurements.

In this David and Goliath move, scientists are hoping to alter the orbit of the asteroid by a very, very small amount. According to this interview, the expectation is a few millimeters per second, but at 30 million miles away, this event and the alteration will add up over time and distance. If the asteroid were indeed on a collision course with the Earth, such a minute adjustment in direction would allow the asteroid to miss the Earth completely.

As a prototype proposal for activity they are actually proceeding with, I’m impressed with the European scientific community.

But more to the point, if this works, then obviously real money estimates will come out of the exercise. Ultimately we may see if Benford’s estimates were in the ball park or not. Commercial interests might include reduction of risk on the part of the insurance industry. I’m sure they’d rather fund a space flight so that in 5 years a killer asteroid might be deflected and thus reduce to nil any claims at all from such a tragedy.

Perhaps the biggest problem is convincing anyone to actually do the kind of follow-up activities needed. The odds of an extinction level event are so small, and because of this, it is assumed that these odds are zero, when in fact they are just very close to zero. My sense is that this low risk will always be weighed against actually doing something.

Of course, the other thought is that we would rather be living here without a dinosaur type extinction event, no matter what, than try to live here after one…