They don't have to fight tooth and nail, they've got monopoly superpower, they own the backbone and they keep it expensive through totally deceptive, yet absoultely legal means. You learn about this when you go to buy a piece to start your wireless ethernet network and their eyes roll back like a shark preparing to eat and they start rolling off these new car salesman stories about how the backbone was built with these future services in mind like video conferencing and various voice telephone service add ons that nobody in their right mind would buy for the prices they're talking about. As a prospective ISP you wonder if they're totally insane. They must realize the market isn't like they think it is, but then you realize they don't really think it's like that. It's all just an excuse to keep the backbone costs high. If you think about it you realize that these overpriced gimmicks that are never going to fly the vastly overpriced way the incumbents have it laid out can at least easily be explained to a seventy year old senator or courtroom judge. After all, that's where the game gets played. If you can win in the courts, fuck the technical stuff. You own them bitchez. And if you've already got the money, all you have to do is play dumb and wait. That's what they're doing and you'd probably do the same if you had more money and power than was good for you.
It's really just about adding costs to the backbone in any possible way to keep the small players out. ATM/Sonet add vast costs to the backbone infrastructure when you compare them to today's ethernet, but low cost is not desireable for the monopolies. They come up with any excuse not to use straight ethernet switches in place of outdated and expensive ATM/Sonet and tell you that it has to be this way for Quality of Service and anything else would be irresponsible. Arguing the other way is easy on Slashdot and very difficult in Congress or the courts.
Yeah, I thought the problem was the backbone monopoly rather than the last mile monopoly. Toys to set up far-ranging wireless networks have been around for awhile, but that cheap DS3 so you've actually got content for the network remains elusive.
Price is the problem.
Anybody could set up a broadband ISP in rural ares with DSL or Wireless if you could buy DS3 or OC3 TCP/IP bandwidth for what it's really worth using modern ethernet technology. In Canada you can buy from the government and they pass it on at cost which is cheap enough to give you good service even in rural areas.
Sadly in the States there is this massive infection of paranoia about the government which is, oddly enough, fueled by the government itself which came to power on a platform of government hatred. Talking about twisted. We need marijuana reforms so bad because everybody just needs to mellow out a bit.
The insistance that broadband has to be handled by the unregulated private sector because the government can't be trusted with our private communications is bizarre to say the least. It's particularly odd because if the government was to lay, or simply purchase existing fiber on the interstate highway rights of way for an at-cost ethernet only backbone it could simply promise the same level of monitoring on the government owned network as it currently already has over private networks. Since it's a matter of public record that private networks are fully monitored anyway in the name of national security, the government wouldn't need to have any more access to everybody's data on its own network than it already has on private ones, this would maintain the status quo and lower prices.
I can hear the argument now though --well it's not about THEM looking at my P2P pr0n downloads, it's that they'd be putting these struggling mom and pop baby bells and cable companies at an unfair disadvantage. Oh boo freakin' hoo. Finally the argument becomes --we can't have cheap broadband in rural areas because it would mean these telecoms wouldn't have a license to fuck the nation and block out anybody's attempt to start up a small rural ISP with broadband ISP grade bandwidth which is NOT a T1. That's what happens when you put government haters in charge of the government. They have to prove their point and their point was negative from the outset so if they don't fuck everything up they feel like they didn't do their job.
It is booming outside the US? Hmm. I know the focus is on Europe here, but here in Asia it's brutal. I'm a partner in a book/CD publishing company and we just lost our primary competition because the market is so bad.
These guys set up to give us a black eye as we had a pretty tasty looking market all to ourselves a few years back. So another company setup with a bigger staff and I've got to confess they had better layout and printing and other non-essential but nice features although our software was waaaay better. But just a few weeks ago they called us and told us it was over. We thought they were doing great and hurting our sales because our sales sucked too. It turned out they never had decent sales and now they've folded in what was supposed to be the big payoff time. Looks like the market is all ours again but victory is bitter at the moment and will be for at least a few years. This doesn't strike me as a time that job hopping is going to be a simple issue.
And keep in mind, IBM has made a few public reports warning people that the CMOS process is slowing down. You can just Google limits of CMOS to see some interesting reports about the rest of the decade. You may argue that hardware has nothing to do with software positions, but you'd be arguing such at your peril. Without Moore's Law to drive things, it's not like everybody's going to lose their jobs, but I don't expect the IT job market to loosen up any time soon. Have you thought about studying medicine?
Are you sure about that?
I was wondering about doing an ISP in an area that was a bit removed from a big city in California after I found that Tsunami unlicensed 5Ghz Microwave bridges were only five grand and they claimed they could do forty miles with line of sight.
So, I had my connection out to this remote community and all I needed was my connection to the fat pipes. Well that should be easy right. The Tsunami model I was looking at used a DS3 connection. So, I googled DS3 in California and found that there's only one source. Hmm, that's right, it's one of these here Baby Bell thingamajigs.
Well no problem, I was gonna pay for it. I figured I could go up to a thousand bucks a month easy and still make it profitable, maybe even two grand. After all with these 10GbE switches on dark fiber going for just a few grand how much could a measly 60Mbps cost?
The answer is five thousand bucks a month. I was astonished. How could it be so expensive when ethernet technology had dropped in price so far? The answer is easy and has been rehashed on Slashdot many times. They insist on quality of service QOS for their other services that have nothing to do with ISPs like voice and a bunch of vaporware shit they say is going to make them rich in the future. See, because of this future need to fuck everybody they use only very expensive ATM and Sonet equipment rather than these cheap fiber Ethernet switches we hear so much about.
It's not quite as simple as wireless is the answer. This is about who controls the backbone.
Maybe China's censorship of the net has just been blown out of proportion in a big snowjob by western media with an extreme paranoia about socialism.
Rather than the Internet is having a capitalist affect on China, perhaps it's having a socialist affect on the West.
If my country, the US, wasn't so hypocritical about its own human rights abuses I'd tend to take it all more at face value, but it isn't. The US is full of shit in a lot of ways and I say that as a proud American. How do you reconcile a drug war against the citizenry with all this free market let the monopolies do as they please crap? That's pure bullshit and it has to change.
Anyhow, back to the topic, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and several major cities in Mainland China including Shanghai and Beijing are fully liberalizing ethernet net access this year and promising 2Megs up and down for twenty bucks a month with no restrictions. Meanwhile, PacBell will tell you that they have to charge you five grand a month to connect your wirelss net to a DS3 because they have no choice but to use ATM and Sonet. Why is that? Oh, because they have no QOS on ethernet networks and they need QOS for their value added services. And anyway, your download on Kazaa might get interrupted for a half second every other day and that would be a huge tragedy so they need to charge these outrageous prices and can't offer straight ethernet backbone service. Yeah right. Sounds like, we're incumbent because we got the money, fuck you. The American way.
Who's losing control here again?
I don't think the fact that only one developer does the work somehow invalidated the More Eyeballs notion. Development is very similar to composition. If you're writing a diary that you intend to be kept private for all times, you will use a style that may be totally unappealing or difficult for readers to understand or appreciate. If you're writing for an audiance, even if no audiance ever sees your work, you'll still write in a different manner. I think the imporatnce of the More Eyeballs notion is to maintain the notion of standards within the community that the individual should strive to attain. That's an unclear standard, but a standard of quality none the less.
Re:Not much of a threat? Maybe more of a threat...
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BPDG Not Much Of A Threat?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a fellow patriotic American I'd like to politely suggest that assuming all the important decisions about media are made by the US Congress might not be accurate.
We've recently seen China and Taiwan discussing a separate DVD standard despite the fact that this appears to be totally illegal to many American observers. Now Taiwan is following in Mainland China's footsteps by insisting on free as in both beer and speech software in the government and schools.
People in the US often talk about controlling the media in ways that might not be practical no matter what kind of rhetoric is used to justify the measures. Fox's plan is fine. They've been putting watermarks on their shows for years now and so do many broadcast affiliates. But so what? Assuming that the US walks the entire digital media world around on a chain is a feel good proposition, but certainly not a realistic description of how things work in this day and age.
And as other posters have mentioned, we --here we being all Americans-- are the government. If restrictive measures are passed that result in higher costs for products that have to be customized to suit the restrictive US market, it's going to be seen as a hidden tax and that's not gonna fly too far.
These companies would be so much better off putting up their archives on the net right now and taking just enough to keep the operation profitable while they've still got the option. Sadly it looks like many of them would rather "kill every motherfucking last one of you." It's too bad they take that approach, but if that's what they want then they get what they deserve.
I think looking more carefully at this question could be one possible answer to your problem. I built a system where an exchange of key data coming in over the net took place in a directory that was shared by a second machine on a local ethernet. The second machine was monitoring that directory a few thousand times a second for updates. When there was an update, it took the key and checked it for validity on the second machine. This seemed to simplify everything because then I just used a very restrictive firewall on the machine that did the confirmation.
I'm sure this is not the best solution and perhaps for a bank or something with mega transactions it might be too slow, but for our needs it was mucho security and it was easy and cheap. In the end security was the least of our problems, but building the system was a lot of fun.
I wrote to the mosix-list a few years ago about whether Mosix would ever help me render animations with a Windows 3D animation app under Wine. I got a reply saying that anything running under Wine would require pooled memory. Are we going to be seeing this soon because Wine has definitely improved in ways that I don't think anybody imagined in just a few years.
Same here. I was really put off by that. My Mom spent several years studying Sanscrit at UCB in the 60s and I've always been proud of the fact. Oh well, shit happens but that with the non-mention of Mozilla was enough to give up on it.
Cute.
One blurb from the PR office regarding a PR stunt and you suggest the Japanese economy is coming back?
Hey, I wish it was coming back. I moved to Asia ten years ago to take advantage of the booming economy and I really wish I could believe it was coming back, but I don't. Not at all. Not even close.
The Economist ran a special issue a few months back in which they predicted the Yen will collapse to at least 150 and maybe even 200 to the dollar by 2004. That totally trashes Americans like myself living in Asia. I sure wish it was all going to suddenly get better, but that is pure fantasy. The problems are very deeply rooted in the banking structure and the culture. It's not going to change.
Alright, this is more like it.
I think I'm starting to get it which isn't too bad since I disdained portables till I got this gig with the Pocket PC company.
The first IpaQ link I saw was obviously outdated, but handhelds.org is the scoop and a painfully obvious URL to boot. Thanks for clearing that up.
I wasn't too far off though because I notice that they are suggesting you're going to want a microdrive to take advantage of all the Linux Arm goodness out there and this current set of flash memory powered devices is going to be lacking in that respect. Add that with the knowledge that WiFi still has some issues that should be addressed real soon but not quite yet and the verdict reads: not ready for prime time --yet.
Besides, I think the OQO notion of being able to plug into an external monitor or KVM is excellent. Let's move production on those babies to China and drop the knob on the price selector. Or droolsville, how about 2X512Meg Compact Flash and dump the microdrive. Too pricey for now, but next year? Who knows.
I was lamenting along the same lines yesterday or so on another Pocket PC story and I got links to three Linux efforts for PPC, but I wasn't impresed by any of them.
The first was a page for a the earliest IPaQ running X, but the page was two years old and they had to tweak the hardware in what they themselves claimed was a fairly risky procedure just to get it to run Xcalc. So, that was more of a cool hack stunt than the KDE or Gnome distro for Pocket PC 2002 that I was hoping to find.
Then some helpful individual started giving me cheerleader stuff about the Zaurus. Well it sure seems to me that the Zaurus is more about Java than what I think of as a Linux distro. Personally, I don't see any advantage to either Sun or IBM over Microsoft.
Finally someobody pointed me to Symbian which also appears to rely quite heavily on Java. Perhaps Symbian did the Zaurus software or has some licensing deal, I'm not sure. They seem to be the closest thing to Linux for a Pocket PC platform.
However, I recently did some work for a Pocket PC OEM and I researched the market in the course of that contract and learned about the OQO. This is probably going to be the Pocket PC platform killer as it's a Transmeta processor wth a micro hard drive that can run standard Linux distros and at the same time it can run XP, so Redmond likes it too. I honestly don't think the Pocket PC thing is going to work until something more like the OQO concept comes to market.
I thought one of the coolest parts of the OQO design was the external LCD monitor and keyboard. The thing is like a Pocket PC when you're really on the road, but at home or work you plug it into a monitor. With a ultra thin bluetooth DVD burner it could be the pretty rad toy. Of course price is very important. All this stuff has to get much cheaper. The Pocket PCs are so overpriced right now and that GPRS service or whatever it's called is really hard to sell as a bargain when they're charging by the meg. Oh yeah you can use Instant Messaging pretty cheap and for some people in certain types of companies that's really super special but generally speaking it's a tough sell at twenty bucks a month with bandwidth caps of a few megs when people are thinking in wi-fi terms already.
Right, MEMS in the form of DLP has been muscling in on the LCD projector market for several years and you can get them on Priceline for a little over a grand which is a lot cheaper than most comparable LCDs.
I think what Cringley sort of glazes over and gets mentioned a few posts down about lasers is a key point.
In a projector system, be it LCD or DLP the light source is just as important as the image device. The bulbs and cooling systems needed for projectors are expensive and power hungry. LED is never going to be the answer and while laser sounds great I agree with the poster below who discusses the power requirements that a scanning laser would have. The only breakthrough I can imagine in this field that might bring it into the price range of consumer electronics would be much much higher power laser diodes which simply aren't here yet although MEMS could be useful in this field as well. It's quite possible that we'll see incredibly crisp projectors cheaper than televisions are today if visible laser diode power specs continue to rise.
Until then, DLP is MEMS and it rocks here and now in terms of both quality and price point. I've seen demos of projectors that only cost a grand and look great, but I wish I could buy the DLP chips themselves with controllers on the cheap and play with different light sources. I'm sure that will be doable in time. Carbon arc would be a cool way to show some DVDs on the big white wall of the building across the street. Video could become the new graffitti.
Re:Where's the Linux competition for Pocket PC?
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WiFi & Cellular Unite
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· Score: 2
Tale a look at Pocket PCs? I work with a major Pocket PC OEM.
But that's not why I'm posting. I wanted to follow up on that Symbian link. Hey, that's actually the hot tip. Thanks.
I was making the mistake of thinking is was Ximian so I was sort of dismissing it out of hand as I was just at the Ximian site a few weeks ago and there was nothing about wireless. But Symbian, hey, they've got it goin' on. And the MS troll above should take a look as well.
Re:Where's the Linux competition for Pocket PC?
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WiFi & Cellular Unite
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· Score: 2
Well, phones are one thing, but I was talking about the Pocket PC as in the platform rather than the software because that's what Taiwan OEMs are going to crank out so that's what will become the commodity hardware and the default standard. I understand that Pocket PC is only a Microsoft standard, but it's not just a software standard. It's a quite specific hardware standard as well.
The current generation is built on StrongArm206 CPUs and the Xscale 400MHz CPUs are coming already in production so bloated software isn't really as big of an issue as it is on say a cell phone.
I think this IPaQ stuff looks very intriguing, but I'm afraid my suspicions are confirmed on further research. They've got TWM up with a few basic apps that need major tweaking just to view properly. This is a far cry from KDE or Gnome with OpenOffice Lite and Navigator for PocketLinux.
I'm not complaining. I'm just surprised nobody is more aggressive in this market as it looks like the volume is definitely heading north on these puppies and the dealing would be done as a wholesale licensing rather than retail so it should be profitable. The big question mark is, how much is Windows really charging for licenses? Who knows?
Re:Where's the Linux competition for Pocket PC?
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WiFi & Cellular Unite
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· Score: 2
Nice links, thanks for that.
I'm definitely going to follow up on this Ipaq Linux stuff. As for the Zaurus, I was under the impression that it relied on a lot of Java.
A company I work with was considering using Linux on a line of Pocket PC type devices, but they thought they needed to use a lot of Java and that the licensing costs for Java were actually expensive compared to going with MS when they added in all the in-house development they had to do.
But I must admit I didn't know about iPaq Linux. If it's less dependent on Java it might be quite interesting.
It's really too bad that there's no Linux alternatives for the Pocket PC platform because it seems like it's finally taking off. Taiwan OEMs are going nuts this year at Computex with wireless Pocket PCs and stories like this about ironing out the wrinkles in GPRS are starting to convince me this might become a significant market where I used to be convinced it was an overpriced gimmick. If the prices come down into the few hundred dollar range in the next few years these things might become ubiquitous.
Who needs Chomsky when you've got Ahfoo.
That sob story is dismissed quite easily by simply understanding the history of this great nation we call the USA.
Patents create monopolies plain and simple. That's what they're all about. In the past century, the US allowed monopolies to grow to the extent that the entire economy collapsed in what is known as the Great Depression.
Because of the lessons learned during the 1930's, tight controls were put on patents and for the great period of growth that followed World War II, these limitations on patent rights allowed such wonders as the GUI to become freely available for use by the entire public of the United States.
However, partly because of the over-dependence upon a bloated and inefficient auto industry which was, in turn, dependent on cheap oil that evaporated for political reasons, the nation's economy saw serious troubles in the 1970s.
So, in the 80's. these very cynical people called the GOP came up with this idea to change the patent laws back to how they were before the Depression --rewind the tape. Play it again Sam. AFter all, they represented the people who would get rich off of this arrangement --the already wealthy. Just like the last depression.
They created something called the CAFC and stacked it with judges who essentially had a mission to beef up patent laws which they have done quite dutifully.
And, we're seeing the first big corporate failures from gross mismanagement coming down the pipes already. Looks like the GOP got their rewind.
So, before you go crying about the poor inventors, perhaps you should consider what really made America great, a harmonious pluralism based on a sense of shared community and not this winner-take-all, fuck thy neighbor bullshit.
And besided, Fulsom Prison Blues is nothing compared to Cocaine Blues.
Early one morning while making my rounds,
I took a shot of cocaine
And I shot my woman down!
(Sung with gusto like a work song)
As far as I'm concerned when you use the word "shoot" with cocaine in the same clause, you're talking about shooting up coke with an IV needle which is way hardcore krazy kowboy stuff compared to smokin' crack. You don't have to hit a vein to smoke some crack and nothing hits the blood stream with quite the same tidal wave rush as a full syringe of coke. (At least that's what William Burroughs said, I certainly wouldn't know.)
While shooting up coke is a wild time, shooting your girl after you slam down a hit is definitely the razor's edge and must have been a helluva rush. Of course Slim Shady might have tortured her first, but Johnny was clearly selling the hardcore image if you get into some of the more obscure stuff.
This is the part that makes me assume this is all a tempest in a teapot. There's no way the US is going to get behind Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangzho and Shanghai for long. If it does happen I'll be very surprised, but somehwat amused as I reside in Taiwan and will probably be moving to Shanghai.
Here in Taiwan, we got excellent DSL service a few years back that has been nice and cheap --US$30 a month-- for the 64K up and 512down service and not a sign of data restrictions anywhere. But then the news came that the residential data networking market was being opened wide in the second half of this year meaning anybody with a GbE ethernet switch, a fiber uplink to the net and a bunch of cable will be able start an ISP in these dense urban markets that are total gravy as they're just solid 5 to 30 story buildings as far as the eye can see.
I didn't believe it at first, but then the government monopoly telecoms came up with 512up and 1.5meg down for US$40 bucks a month and I knew the rumors were no longer just bullshit, this is happening now. And data caps --ha ha ha. Yeah, you have to be able to write CDs fast enough to clean your hard drive. How's that for a cap? Good thing the 40Xs are coming out soon. Asia needs those and some fat new harddrives too bad.
So, knowing this situation to be a matter of geopolitical fact gives me a certain perspective on all these idiots from the States on Slashdot talking about how bandwidth HAS to cost a lot of money because it always did in the past and uncle Bubba will lost his job if it aint.
Hmm. Funny, it seems bandwidth only has to cost a lot of money in the US and Australia but is magically cheap in Asia. I can't imagine that's going to last and if you think this coalition of Asian nations is going to reverse course, uhm well I suppose. I doubt it though.
This, "he is not and inventor because . . . ", or "she truly was an inventor because . . " issue is coming up over and over and it points to a rhetorical fault in the original article that is so huge that it makes me question whether the author has a proper background in basic composition skills.
WTF is an inventor? This is an essential element of the author's topic that can have numerous meanings and the author never clarified what the term meant in the context of the essay. Had it been a piece of fiction, I would overlook this, but the paper is clearly intended to be read as an essay based on research.
He gets a C minus and I'll allow a re-write in the next week, but he can only go up one letter grade if he successfully completes the re-write and has it published in the New Yorker.
And Filo Farnsworth, please! That's one particularly weak example to be drawing such an enormous and vaguely stated conclusion from. I'd like to see Farraday and Bell's achievments belittled as well if the goal is to simply lash out at the notion of technical creativity. But if you're going to go that far, perhaps you ought to read a bit of Nietzche and Sartre and get a better feeling for the Nihilist tone.
It's true, security is relative just like anything else.
Here's a real world example. I had three bikes ripped off from the front of my office on a busy street in a big city over the course of a year. I tried using bigger locks and heavier chains, but the bike thieves would still get my rides.
Thinking about the problem, I realized part of the problem was that my bikes stuck out like a sore thumb on that sidewalk as nobody else parked bikes there.
So, I started parking in the university campus across the street in the bike parking racks where there were thousands of other bikes to choose from. I still used my heavy lock and since there were so many others to choose from with smaller locks I have kept my ride all year where I lost three the previous year.
Having bikes stolen and getting freeriders on your wannabee wireless ISP are at about the same level of criminal activity in terms of the money damage they're going to cause. If this is the only net access available in your part of town the risks might be significant, but if there are other sources of access I wouldn't be so overly concerned about it. Use a bit of precaution and leave it at that till you see that there really is a problem. Why waste time solving problems that don't even exist yet?
What's to stop someone from jacking into your phone box and making long distance calls? It can and does happen, but you're not concerned about it are you?
Are you sure your analogy works?
I believe what I'm implying is that the manufacturer in this case has stated that the product is viable at the price negotiated with the wholesale customer --Madison Ave which is significantly lower than what they offer it to consumers for. That's the important point as I intended it. The networks and advertising agencies negotiated their value level all by themselves. I'm not implying anything about their negotiations. I'm stating the facts as I read them.
Certainly the networks are free to charge whatever they want. I'm just pointing out that there is a vast difference in price between what they will accept as payment from the wholesale customer as a viable price for the product and what they are willing to negotiate directly with the audiance despite that fact that it could be done in an automated on-line transaction which could be argued to be just another form of wholesaling.
But the whole premise rests upon the shaky propostion that the Slashdot editor I'm quoting was taken in context. What would be more helpful than a brief misreading of the post is if someone could remember reading the same article header and confirm or negate that the figure was $1.20 per hour of advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to fight tooth and nail, they've got monopoly superpower, they own the backbone and they keep it expensive through totally deceptive, yet absoultely legal means. You learn about this when you go to buy a piece to start your wireless ethernet network and their eyes roll back like a shark preparing to eat and they start rolling off these new car salesman stories about how the backbone was built with these future services in mind like video conferencing and various voice telephone service add ons that nobody in their right mind would buy for the prices they're talking about. As a prospective ISP you wonder if they're totally insane. They must realize the market isn't like they think it is, but then you realize they don't really think it's like that. It's all just an excuse to keep the backbone costs high. If you think about it you realize that these overpriced gimmicks that are never going to fly the vastly overpriced way the incumbents have it laid out can at least easily be explained to a seventy year old senator or courtroom judge. After all, that's where the game gets played. If you can win in the courts, fuck the technical stuff. You own them bitchez. And if you've already got the money, all you have to do is play dumb and wait. That's what they're doing and you'd probably do the same if you had more money and power than was good for you.
It's really just about adding costs to the backbone in any possible way to keep the small players out. ATM/Sonet add vast costs to the backbone infrastructure when you compare them to today's ethernet, but low cost is not desireable for the monopolies. They come up with any excuse not to use straight ethernet switches in place of outdated and expensive ATM/Sonet and tell you that it has to be this way for Quality of Service and anything else would be irresponsible. Arguing the other way is easy on Slashdot and very difficult in Congress or the courts.
Yeah, I thought the problem was the backbone monopoly rather than the last mile monopoly. Toys to set up far-ranging wireless networks have been around for awhile, but that cheap DS3 so you've actually got content for the network remains elusive.
Price is the problem.
Anybody could set up a broadband ISP in rural ares with DSL or Wireless if you could buy DS3 or OC3 TCP/IP bandwidth for what it's really worth using modern ethernet technology. In Canada you can buy from the government and they pass it on at cost which is cheap enough to give you good service even in rural areas.
Sadly in the States there is this massive infection of paranoia about the government which is, oddly enough, fueled by the government itself which came to power on a platform of government hatred. Talking about twisted. We need marijuana reforms so bad because everybody just needs to mellow out a bit.
The insistance that broadband has to be handled by the unregulated private sector because the government can't be trusted with our private communications is bizarre to say the least. It's particularly odd because if the government was to lay, or simply purchase existing fiber on the interstate highway rights of way for an at-cost ethernet only backbone it could simply promise the same level of monitoring on the government owned network as it currently already has over private networks. Since it's a matter of public record that private networks are fully monitored anyway in the name of national security, the government wouldn't need to have any more access to everybody's data on its own network than it already has on private ones, this would maintain the status quo and lower prices.
I can hear the argument now though --well it's not about THEM looking at my P2P pr0n downloads, it's that they'd be putting these struggling mom and pop baby bells and cable companies at an unfair disadvantage. Oh boo freakin' hoo. Finally the argument becomes --we can't have cheap broadband in rural areas because it would mean these telecoms wouldn't have a license to fuck the nation and block out anybody's attempt to start up a small rural ISP with broadband ISP grade bandwidth which is NOT a T1. That's what happens when you put government haters in charge of the government. They have to prove their point and their point was negative from the outset so if they don't fuck everything up they feel like they didn't do their job.
It is booming outside the US? Hmm. I know the focus is on Europe here, but here in Asia it's brutal. I'm a partner in a book/CD publishing company and we just lost our primary competition because the market is so bad.
These guys set up to give us a black eye as we had a pretty tasty looking market all to ourselves a few years back. So another company setup with a bigger staff and I've got to confess they had better layout and printing and other non-essential but nice features although our software was waaaay better. But just a few weeks ago they called us and told us it was over. We thought they were doing great and hurting our sales because our sales sucked too. It turned out they never had decent sales and now they've folded in what was supposed to be the big payoff time. Looks like the market is all ours again but victory is bitter at the moment and will be for at least a few years. This doesn't strike me as a time that job hopping is going to be a simple issue.
And keep in mind, IBM has made a few public reports warning people that the CMOS process is slowing down. You can just Google limits of CMOS to see some interesting reports about the rest of the decade. You may argue that hardware has nothing to do with software positions, but you'd be arguing such at your peril. Without Moore's Law to drive things, it's not like everybody's going to lose their jobs, but I don't expect the IT job market to loosen up any time soon. Have you thought about studying medicine?
Are you sure about that?
I was wondering about doing an ISP in an area that was a bit removed from a big city in California after I found that Tsunami unlicensed 5Ghz Microwave bridges were only five grand and they claimed they could do forty miles with line of sight.
So, I had my connection out to this remote community and all I needed was my connection to the fat pipes. Well that should be easy right. The Tsunami model I was looking at used a DS3 connection. So, I googled DS3 in California and found that there's only one source. Hmm, that's right, it's one of these here Baby Bell thingamajigs.
Well no problem, I was gonna pay for it. I figured I could go up to a thousand bucks a month easy and still make it profitable, maybe even two grand. After all with these 10GbE switches on dark fiber going for just a few grand how much could a measly 60Mbps cost?
The answer is five thousand bucks a month. I was astonished. How could it be so expensive when ethernet technology had dropped in price so far? The answer is easy and has been rehashed on Slashdot many times. They insist on quality of service QOS for their other services that have nothing to do with ISPs like voice and a bunch of vaporware shit they say is going to make them rich in the future. See, because of this future need to fuck everybody they use only very expensive ATM and Sonet equipment rather than these cheap fiber Ethernet switches we hear so much about.
It's not quite as simple as wireless is the answer. This is about who controls the backbone.
Maybe China's censorship of the net has just been blown out of proportion in a big snowjob by western media with an extreme paranoia about socialism.
Rather than the Internet is having a capitalist affect on China, perhaps it's having a socialist affect on the West.
If my country, the US, wasn't so hypocritical about its own human rights abuses I'd tend to take it all more at face value, but it isn't. The US is full of shit in a lot of ways and I say that as a proud American. How do you reconcile a drug war against the citizenry with all this free market let the monopolies do as they please crap? That's pure bullshit and it has to change.
Anyhow, back to the topic, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and several major cities in Mainland China including Shanghai and Beijing are fully liberalizing ethernet net access this year and promising 2Megs up and down for twenty bucks a month with no restrictions. Meanwhile, PacBell will tell you that they have to charge you five grand a month to connect your wirelss net to a DS3 because they have no choice but to use ATM and Sonet. Why is that? Oh, because they have no QOS on ethernet networks and they need QOS for their value added services. And anyway, your download on Kazaa might get interrupted for a half second every other day and that would be a huge tragedy so they need to charge these outrageous prices and can't offer straight ethernet backbone service. Yeah right. Sounds like, we're incumbent because we got the money, fuck you. The American way.
Who's losing control here again?
I don't think the fact that only one developer does the work somehow invalidated the More Eyeballs notion. Development is very similar to composition. If you're writing a diary that you intend to be kept private for all times, you will use a style that may be totally unappealing or difficult for readers to understand or appreciate. If you're writing for an audiance, even if no audiance ever sees your work, you'll still write in a different manner. I think the imporatnce of the More Eyeballs notion is to maintain the notion of standards within the community that the individual should strive to attain. That's an unclear standard, but a standard of quality none the less.
As a fellow patriotic American I'd like to politely suggest that assuming all the important decisions about media are made by the US Congress might not be accurate.
We've recently seen China and Taiwan discussing a separate DVD standard despite the fact that this appears to be totally illegal to many American observers. Now Taiwan is following in Mainland China's footsteps by insisting on free as in both beer and speech software in the government and schools.
People in the US often talk about controlling the media in ways that might not be practical no matter what kind of rhetoric is used to justify the measures. Fox's plan is fine. They've been putting watermarks on their shows for years now and so do many broadcast affiliates. But so what? Assuming that the US walks the entire digital media world around on a chain is a feel good proposition, but certainly not a realistic description of how things work in this day and age.
And as other posters have mentioned, we --here we being all Americans-- are the government. If restrictive measures are passed that result in higher costs for products that have to be customized to suit the restrictive US market, it's going to be seen as a hidden tax and that's not gonna fly too far.
These companies would be so much better off putting up their archives on the net right now and taking just enough to keep the operation profitable while they've still got the option. Sadly it looks like many of them would rather "kill every motherfucking last one of you." It's too bad they take that approach, but if that's what they want then they get what they deserve.
I think looking more carefully at this question could be one possible answer to your problem. I built a system where an exchange of key data coming in over the net took place in a directory that was shared by a second machine on a local ethernet. The second machine was monitoring that directory a few thousand times a second for updates. When there was an update, it took the key and checked it for validity on the second machine. This seemed to simplify everything because then I just used a very restrictive firewall on the machine that did the confirmation.
I'm sure this is not the best solution and perhaps for a bank or something with mega transactions it might be too slow, but for our needs it was mucho security and it was easy and cheap. In the end security was the least of our problems, but building the system was a lot of fun.
I wrote to the mosix-list a few years ago about whether Mosix would ever help me render animations with a Windows 3D animation app under Wine. I got a reply saying that anything running under Wine would require pooled memory. Are we going to be seeing this soon because Wine has definitely improved in ways that I don't think anybody imagined in just a few years.
Same here. I was really put off by that. My Mom spent several years studying Sanscrit at UCB in the 60s and I've always been proud of the fact. Oh well, shit happens but that with the non-mention of Mozilla was enough to give up on it.
Cute.
One blurb from the PR office regarding a PR stunt and you suggest the Japanese economy is coming back?
Hey, I wish it was coming back. I moved to Asia ten years ago to take advantage of the booming economy and I really wish I could believe it was coming back, but I don't. Not at all. Not even close.
The Economist ran a special issue a few months back in which they predicted the Yen will collapse to at least 150 and maybe even 200 to the dollar by 2004. That totally trashes Americans like myself living in Asia. I sure wish it was all going to suddenly get better, but that is pure fantasy. The problems are very deeply rooted in the banking structure and the culture. It's not going to change.
Alright, this is more like it.
I think I'm starting to get it which isn't too bad since I disdained portables till I got this gig with the Pocket PC company.
The first IpaQ link I saw was obviously outdated, but handhelds.org is the scoop and a painfully obvious URL to boot. Thanks for clearing that up.
I wasn't too far off though because I notice that they are suggesting you're going to want a microdrive to take advantage of all the Linux Arm goodness out there and this current set of flash memory powered devices is going to be lacking in that respect. Add that with the knowledge that WiFi still has some issues that should be addressed real soon but not quite yet and the verdict reads: not ready for prime time --yet.
Besides, I think the OQO notion of being able to plug into an external monitor or KVM is excellent. Let's move production on those babies to China and drop the knob on the price selector. Or droolsville, how about 2X512Meg Compact Flash and dump the microdrive. Too pricey for now, but next year? Who knows.
I was lamenting along the same lines yesterday or so on another Pocket PC story and I got links to three Linux efforts for PPC, but I wasn't impresed by any of them.
The first was a page for a the earliest IPaQ running X, but the page was two years old and they had to tweak the hardware in what they themselves claimed was a fairly risky procedure just to get it to run Xcalc. So, that was more of a cool hack stunt than the KDE or Gnome distro for Pocket PC 2002 that I was hoping to find.
Then some helpful individual started giving me cheerleader stuff about the Zaurus. Well it sure seems to me that the Zaurus is more about Java than what I think of as a Linux distro. Personally, I don't see any advantage to either Sun or IBM over Microsoft.
Finally someobody pointed me to Symbian which also appears to rely quite heavily on Java. Perhaps Symbian did the Zaurus software or has some licensing deal, I'm not sure. They seem to be the closest thing to Linux for a Pocket PC platform.
However, I recently did some work for a Pocket PC OEM and I researched the market in the course of that contract and learned about the OQO. This is probably going to be the Pocket PC platform killer as it's a Transmeta processor wth a micro hard drive that can run standard Linux distros and at the same time it can run XP, so Redmond likes it too. I honestly don't think the Pocket PC thing is going to work until something more like the OQO concept comes to market.
I thought one of the coolest parts of the OQO design was the external LCD monitor and keyboard. The thing is like a Pocket PC when you're really on the road, but at home or work you plug it into a monitor. With a ultra thin bluetooth DVD burner it could be the pretty rad toy. Of course price is very important. All this stuff has to get much cheaper. The Pocket PCs are so overpriced right now and that GPRS service or whatever it's called is really hard to sell as a bargain when they're charging by the meg. Oh yeah you can use Instant Messaging pretty cheap and for some people in certain types of companies that's really super special but generally speaking it's a tough sell at twenty bucks a month with bandwidth caps of a few megs when people are thinking in wi-fi terms already.
Right, MEMS in the form of DLP has been muscling in on the LCD projector market for several years and you can get them on Priceline for a little over a grand which is a lot cheaper than most comparable LCDs.
I think what Cringley sort of glazes over and gets mentioned a few posts down about lasers is a key point.
In a projector system, be it LCD or DLP the light source is just as important as the image device. The bulbs and cooling systems needed for projectors are expensive and power hungry. LED is never going to be the answer and while laser sounds great I agree with the poster below who discusses the power requirements that a scanning laser would have. The only breakthrough I can imagine in this field that might bring it into the price range of consumer electronics would be much much higher power laser diodes which simply aren't here yet although MEMS could be useful in this field as well. It's quite possible that we'll see incredibly crisp projectors cheaper than televisions are today if visible laser diode power specs continue to rise.
Until then, DLP is MEMS and it rocks here and now in terms of both quality and price point. I've seen demos of projectors that only cost a grand and look great, but I wish I could buy the DLP chips themselves with controllers on the cheap and play with different light sources. I'm sure that will be doable in time. Carbon arc would be a cool way to show some DVDs on the big white wall of the building across the street. Video could become the new graffitti.
Tale a look at Pocket PCs? I work with a major Pocket PC OEM.
But that's not why I'm posting. I wanted to follow up on that Symbian link. Hey, that's actually the hot tip. Thanks.
I was making the mistake of thinking is was Ximian so I was sort of dismissing it out of hand as I was just at the Ximian site a few weeks ago and there was nothing about wireless. But Symbian, hey, they've got it goin' on. And the MS troll above should take a look as well.
Well, phones are one thing, but I was talking about the Pocket PC as in the platform rather than the software because that's what Taiwan OEMs are going to crank out so that's what will become the commodity hardware and the default standard. I understand that Pocket PC is only a Microsoft standard, but it's not just a software standard. It's a quite specific hardware standard as well.
The current generation is built on StrongArm206 CPUs and the Xscale 400MHz CPUs are coming already in production so bloated software isn't really as big of an issue as it is on say a cell phone.
I think this IPaQ stuff looks very intriguing, but I'm afraid my suspicions are confirmed on further research. They've got TWM up with a few basic apps that need major tweaking just to view properly. This is a far cry from KDE or Gnome with OpenOffice Lite and Navigator for PocketLinux.
I'm not complaining. I'm just surprised nobody is more aggressive in this market as it looks like the volume is definitely heading north on these puppies and the dealing would be done as a wholesale licensing rather than retail so it should be profitable. The big question mark is, how much is Windows really charging for licenses? Who knows?
Nice links, thanks for that.
I'm definitely going to follow up on this Ipaq Linux stuff. As for the Zaurus, I was under the impression that it relied on a lot of Java.
A company I work with was considering using Linux on a line of Pocket PC type devices, but they thought they needed to use a lot of Java and that the licensing costs for Java were actually expensive compared to going with MS when they added in all the in-house development they had to do.
But I must admit I didn't know about iPaq Linux. If it's less dependent on Java it might be quite interesting.
It's really too bad that there's no Linux alternatives for the Pocket PC platform because it seems like it's finally taking off. Taiwan OEMs are going nuts this year at Computex with wireless Pocket PCs and stories like this about ironing out the wrinkles in GPRS are starting to convince me this might become a significant market where I used to be convinced it was an overpriced gimmick. If the prices come down into the few hundred dollar range in the next few years these things might become ubiquitous.
Who needs Chomsky when you've got Ahfoo.
That sob story is dismissed quite easily by simply understanding the history of this great nation we call the USA.
Patents create monopolies plain and simple. That's what they're all about. In the past century, the US allowed monopolies to grow to the extent that the entire economy collapsed in what is known as the Great Depression.
Because of the lessons learned during the 1930's, tight controls were put on patents and for the great period of growth that followed World War II, these limitations on patent rights allowed such wonders as the GUI to become freely available for use by the entire public of the United States.
However, partly because of the over-dependence upon a bloated and inefficient auto industry which was, in turn, dependent on cheap oil that evaporated for political reasons, the nation's economy saw serious troubles in the 1970s.
So, in the 80's. these very cynical people called the GOP came up with this idea to change the patent laws back to how they were before the Depression --rewind the tape. Play it again Sam. AFter all, they represented the people who would get rich off of this arrangement --the already wealthy. Just like the last depression.
They created something called the CAFC and stacked it with judges who essentially had a mission to beef up patent laws which they have done quite dutifully.
And, we're seeing the first big corporate failures from gross mismanagement coming down the pipes already. Looks like the GOP got their rewind.
So, before you go crying about the poor inventors, perhaps you should consider what really made America great, a harmonious pluralism based on a sense of shared community and not this winner-take-all, fuck thy neighbor bullshit.
And besided, Fulsom Prison Blues is nothing compared to Cocaine Blues.
Early one morning while making my rounds,
I took a shot of cocaine
And I shot my woman down!
(Sung with gusto like a work song)
As far as I'm concerned when you use the word "shoot" with cocaine in the same clause, you're talking about shooting up coke with an IV needle which is way hardcore krazy kowboy stuff compared to smokin' crack. You don't have to hit a vein to smoke some crack and nothing hits the blood stream with quite the same tidal wave rush as a full syringe of coke. (At least that's what William Burroughs said, I certainly wouldn't know.)
While shooting up coke is a wild time, shooting your girl after you slam down a hit is definitely the razor's edge and must have been a helluva rush. Of course Slim Shady might have tortured her first, but Johnny was clearly selling the hardcore image if you get into some of the more obscure stuff.
This is the part that makes me assume this is all a tempest in a teapot. There's no way the US is going to get behind Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangzho and Shanghai for long. If it does happen I'll be very surprised, but somehwat amused as I reside in Taiwan and will probably be moving to Shanghai.
Here in Taiwan, we got excellent DSL service a few years back that has been nice and cheap --US$30 a month-- for the 64K up and 512down service and not a sign of data restrictions anywhere. But then the news came that the residential data networking market was being opened wide in the second half of this year meaning anybody with a GbE ethernet switch, a fiber uplink to the net and a bunch of cable will be able start an ISP in these dense urban markets that are total gravy as they're just solid 5 to 30 story buildings as far as the eye can see.
I didn't believe it at first, but then the government monopoly telecoms came up with 512up and 1.5meg down for US$40 bucks a month and I knew the rumors were no longer just bullshit, this is happening now. And data caps --ha ha ha. Yeah, you have to be able to write CDs fast enough to clean your hard drive. How's that for a cap? Good thing the 40Xs are coming out soon. Asia needs those and some fat new harddrives too bad.
So, knowing this situation to be a matter of geopolitical fact gives me a certain perspective on all these idiots from the States on Slashdot talking about how bandwidth HAS to cost a lot of money because it always did in the past and uncle Bubba will lost his job if it aint.
Hmm. Funny, it seems bandwidth only has to cost a lot of money in the US and Australia but is magically cheap in Asia. I can't imagine that's going to last and if you think this coalition of Asian nations is going to reverse course, uhm well I suppose. I doubt it though.
This, "he is not and inventor because . . . ", or "she truly was an inventor because . . " issue is coming up over and over and it points to a rhetorical fault in the original article that is so huge that it makes me question whether the author has a proper background in basic composition skills.
WTF is an inventor? This is an essential element of the author's topic that can have numerous meanings and the author never clarified what the term meant in the context of the essay. Had it been a piece of fiction, I would overlook this, but the paper is clearly intended to be read as an essay based on research.
He gets a C minus and I'll allow a re-write in the next week, but he can only go up one letter grade if he successfully completes the re-write and has it published in the New Yorker.
And Filo Farnsworth, please! That's one particularly weak example to be drawing such an enormous and vaguely stated conclusion from. I'd like to see Farraday and Bell's achievments belittled as well if the goal is to simply lash out at the notion of technical creativity. But if you're going to go that far, perhaps you ought to read a bit of Nietzche and Sartre and get a better feeling for the Nihilist tone.
It's true, security is relative just like anything else.
Here's a real world example. I had three bikes ripped off from the front of my office on a busy street in a big city over the course of a year. I tried using bigger locks and heavier chains, but the bike thieves would still get my rides.
Thinking about the problem, I realized part of the problem was that my bikes stuck out like a sore thumb on that sidewalk as nobody else parked bikes there.
So, I started parking in the university campus across the street in the bike parking racks where there were thousands of other bikes to choose from. I still used my heavy lock and since there were so many others to choose from with smaller locks I have kept my ride all year where I lost three the previous year.
Having bikes stolen and getting freeriders on your wannabee wireless ISP are at about the same level of criminal activity in terms of the money damage they're going to cause. If this is the only net access available in your part of town the risks might be significant, but if there are other sources of access I wouldn't be so overly concerned about it. Use a bit of precaution and leave it at that till you see that there really is a problem. Why waste time solving problems that don't even exist yet?
What's to stop someone from jacking into your phone box and making long distance calls? It can and does happen, but you're not concerned about it are you?
Are you sure your analogy works?
I believe what I'm implying is that the manufacturer in this case has stated that the product is viable at the price negotiated with the wholesale customer --Madison Ave which is significantly lower than what they offer it to consumers for. That's the important point as I intended it. The networks and advertising agencies negotiated their value level all by themselves. I'm not implying anything about their negotiations. I'm stating the facts as I read them.
Certainly the networks are free to charge whatever they want. I'm just pointing out that there is a vast difference in price between what they will accept as payment from the wholesale customer as a viable price for the product and what they are willing to negotiate directly with the audiance despite that fact that it could be done in an automated on-line transaction which could be argued to be just another form of wholesaling.
But the whole premise rests upon the shaky propostion that the Slashdot editor I'm quoting was taken in context. What would be more helpful than a brief misreading of the post is if someone could remember reading the same article header and confirm or negate that the figure was $1.20 per hour of advertising.