taxing it this way actually makes sense. If you just did a linear per-MB tax, then data-heavy applications would be discouraged. As broadband to the home expands this would undoubtedly squelch innovation to some extent.
so while this isn't a mathematically attractive way to do it, it's enacting a mechanism that makes sense, imho -- regressive taxation actually is the best way to approach data taxation
its standard-bearer seems to be Vonage, and some of the cable companies. In my area, at least, Vonage costs $30/mo and has limitations that traditional service doesn't: most notably iffy 911 service, and the fact that it'll go out whenever the broadband connection does -- which is far more frequent an occurrence than a loss of "analog" phone service.
Traditional phone service costs me $20/mo for unlimited local calls -- and I can get a line for as low as $13/mo with restrictions on outgoing calls. So the VoIP product is more expensive and less reliable -- features are great, but for myself and many others, reliability and price are probably the two biggest considerations when choosing a phone service.
And this is before states impose phone taxes (yeah I know, it makes no sense from a geek standpoint -- but the fact is phone taxes as currently written don't make any sense anyway, and it's a revenue stream that legislators are going to ensure remains available). The only way I can see this business model making sense is if Vonage is going after the bad-credit crowd -- folks who've already had their phone service shut off and are willing to spend more money on a company in exchange for the benefit of the doubt. There are other companies that do this, too. Maybe you can make money charging high rates to a clientele that's likely to default on their obligations; I don't know. But it doesn't seem like the way to popularize the technology.
But I do agree that there is little justification for the amount that artists are currently capable of earning. Call me a communist if you must, but I would be very happy to see a lot of musicians earning a good living than the current state of affairs: a very few who make exorbitant amounts of money, with the remaining majority unable to support themselves with music alone.
Is it antithetical to the American Dream to say to those dishwashers and Guitar Center clerks that no, even if you succeed wildly, you will only make a few hundred thousand dollars a year? Maybe. But frankly I don't care. If we end up with fewer 14 year olds picking up Fenders with dreams of Escalades and more picking it up because of a desire to make music I'm not going to call it a bad thing.
Besides, as things stand all but the largest acts make their money touring. Record companies provide distribution, marketing and studio time but take nearly all the profit from CD sales. In the digital age the internet can take care of distribution, word-of-mouth unrestricted by geographical space or sampling fees can be a potent marketing engine (as anyone with winamp, AIM and a college broadband pipe can attest), and cheap digital recording will put the ability to make albums into the hands of anyone with $2000 and a friend who can install Linux.
The recording industry's functions are not really needed any more -- and I suspect that the duplicitous way they approached their business and treated their customers will ensure that their demise will be surprisingly quick and violent. Small labels will exist to provide support to bands, of course, but there's no longer any reason why they can't compete with the big guys except for the big guys' anticompetitive practices.
Uh... is this not blatantly obvious to everyone else? There's nothing about port 135 that is inherently insecure. It's the applications, people. If you close off ports, application authors will just end up shoveling everything over an HTTP proxy. Crackers will still find exploits -- it'll just be on a different port.
The right solution is to get any bundled, extraneous services turned off on consumer boxes by default. I realize this may be unrealistic, but I think when it comes to internet architecture we need to approach things from an idealistic standpoint. Settling for short-term kludges like this one will result in a overly complex system with fundamental weaknesses.
Not true. Detergents, wine, clothing, movies and countless other products are targeted at adults. They are as affected by marketing and product perception as any other demographic.
Sure, older folks are affected by marketing -- but I disagree that they are AS affect. Brand loyalties are best established when individuals first begin to be consumers. If someone is shopping for toothpaste for the first time and you do a good enough job selling them Crest, they may buy it for the rest of their lives. Convincing them to switch from Crest down the road is likely to be harder. Maybe you don't have a strong toothpaste allegiance, but there are doubtless some product brands you just prefer for no real reason -- laundry detergent, batteries, film, brands of food, etc.
This is not as relevant for music, but I think it is still a factor. And I do think that if you could come up with some sort of index of consumer intelligence or ability to resist marketing, you would find that 14 year old girls score significantly lower than their parents.
The difference is that adults, as you say, have a sense of self image that often feeds on the need for individuality; contrast this with the typical teenager's want to "fit in" with his/her peergroup or the population at large.
This is an important difference, though. It promotes herding around brands. If you can sell a product to a large enough fraction of the young demographic it will attain a level of must-have cachet and spur others to buy it. In this way you can sell teenagers things that they don't even particularly like.
It does sound like the adult contemporary stations you've heard were particularly miserable. I'm thinking of ones that play some older stuff, but also mix in new material that's palatable to a lot of people (read: melodic, no swearing) -- Coldplay for example, or Melissa Carlton.
You mention new artists though, and I can't help but wonder what kind of artist you have in mind. It seems natural to assume that artists are best able to write material relevant to their own age group. With that in mind, where are the new artists supposed to come from? It's just not plausible to expect a lot of people to become professional musicians midway through their lives, attain proficiency, be original talents, and emerge as new artists aimed at your demographic. It's therefore somewhat inevitable that your options will probably be constrained to artists that have been around a while, younger bands with broad appeal, or artists that languished in obscurity for the earlier portions of their careers (see the aforementioned Lucinda Williams & John Hiatt, and throw in Steve Earle for good measure).
Or there's always world music. But you don't want to be that guy.
I mean no disrespect, but I have to say, I am honestly kind of surprised at your position, as you seem to mostly be asking for additional marketing to be directed toward you -- a sentiment I have a hard time understanding. Believe me, the music's out there -- artists like Wilco, Rufus Wainwright and Nickel Creek are examples of younger artists with no real target age -- but you will have to look.
You're not looking. Do you really feel your demographic is being ignored just because Paul Simon isn't invited on TRL when he comes out with a new album?
The fact is that older listeners just aren't as likely to be affected by marketing as kids. They're smarter, secure in their self-image, have developed brand loyalties and don't have unanimous cultural focal points like TRL (at least not any that are available for marketing purposes). All of this makes marketing to your demographic harder and more expensive. Frankly, it doesn't make sense to devote money to it.
There are plenty of great older artists out there making sophisticated, mature music -- John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams and Steeley Dan all spring to mind. You don't have to look any further than the rapidly-rising Adult Contemporary radio format, or the bluegrass fad of a few years back, for evidence of there being real music out there for a mature audience.
But frankly, if you're looking for something to speak to your age group the way Britney speaks to 18 year olds, you may be out of luck -- both because it doesn't exist, and because it'd probably be pretty intolerable. I suggest just looking for good music that isn't tied to a specific age group. NPR's occasional music features might be a good place to start.
DeBeers does indeed sell diamonds to distributors, who sell to you. Their hording drives prices artificially high, and they do their best to control all production sources.
The RIAA does not sell you CDs. They are an advocacy organization created to represent the major labels' interests. This is especially useful when those interests run contrary to those of their consumers. Just look at this thread: lots of invective directed at the RIAA; not so much at the labels that bankroll it.
Boycotting the RIAA is a laughable notion. What are you going to stop buying that they produce? Their press releases? Their legislative advocacy? They don't make much else, and I don't think either of those are particularly big earners. It's a bait-and-switch, and a rather brilliantly effective one.
In any event, the DeBeers analogy is further flawed: in the diamond marketplace you can buy from alternate sources for higher prices. In the music marketplace there is no shortage of competitive alternatives -- check the web and find some bands playing bars near you, or just download some legit mp3s from some smaller record labels and see if there's anything you like. It's not hard to find worthwhile music. It may take slightly more effort than just buying whatever shows up on TRL, but there are alternatives.
Given that fact, you can't really compare the RIAA to DeBeers. There's no monopoly in the music industry, unless you're willing to maintain that the industry has control of all the best music. And saying that would be pretty dumb indeed.
there was a/. article from IC two days ago (here).
I'll happily admit I don't frequent IC, and admit that my sample size is a bit small, but 2/2 articles that I've read exhibit the traits I described, and in spades... if that's an aberration, ok... then it's just the slashdot editors that I should be yelling at. But I have my doubts.
And really, don't you think that any article on a gaming news site taking its peers to task automatically implies that the authors consider themselves to be closer to the ideal they intend?
Well, I'll agree there are no prize pigs among those you list. But really, the only gaming sites I visit are Penny Arcade, Planet Gamecube and Blue's News. The latter two aren't great, but they're factual, focused and updated daily.
PA is the only really enjoyable game journalism I've come across (Old Man Murray excepted, of course). Tycho doesn't try to cover everything going on in the industry, and sometimes doesn't talk about games at all -- but I find two or three paragraphs of observations on recent gaming news once or twice a week is more than enough for me. His occasional comments on the state of gaming journalism are usually dead-on, as well.
"Games are a valid medium for artistic expression. As the uses of the medium become more thoughtful and sophisticated the criticism associated with it must follow."
Two sentences. I think that about does it.
The high incidence of flamebait here is because the writing in this IC article is pretentious, self-aggrandizing and drawn-out. They're taking gaming journalism in a new direction, all right -- but it's a pretty insufferable one.
hopefully chet and eric. they can continue to collect ad revenue off that site indefinitely as far as I'm concerned -- the parent of this thread was right: OMM is brilliant, and the only worthwhile critique of games journalism I've ever seen.
Really, I've wanted to claw my eyes out after every article I've read on this cursed site. How navel-gazing can games journalism get? How drawn out and mundane can an article's introductory philosophizing be made? IC attacks both these questions with the gusto and insight of an 11th-grade blogger/lit mag editor.
Please -- no more lectures on journalism. And stop confusing nostalgia for games from your formative years with Socratic ideals of gamehood.
I don't want this to just be a flame, so here's some constructive criticism:
the cliche "write write write" is indeed good advice. But then you need to edit edit edit.
If your average paragraph length is two sentences, it may owe more to a personal penchant for melodrama than to skillfully pacing readers through your world-shattering insights
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell4.htm lists 80% as the peak efficiency for H2-powered fuel cells. I've seen other./ers pointing to 80% or so for electrolysis efficiency (http://www.ise.fhg.de/english/fields/field5/mb1/p rojects/elyse/imagesites/messkurve/imagesite_js.ht ml is a graphic I got from a quick google that backs it up). Given that our cars are likely to run on it within a decade, it's looking more and more like a good energy storage medium. It'll likely be cheaper than rechargeable battery technology, have higher capacity and not suffer from the same leakage problems.
The technologies you list are great ways to produce power, but the point of the at-home power generation is to store energy for use at times of peak demand.
IANAPhysicist, but that pesky second law of thermodynamics prevents burning stuff from being very efficient. I think I heard somewhere around 30% efficiency for the best internal combustion engines. Fuel cells, I believe, are way more efficient. Plus you avoid a lot of thermal pollution -- maybe not a huge concern, but it's a bonus.
The best reason, though, is that presumably you'll have a hydrogen powered car in your garage, so you don't need to buy two separate pieces of power generating equipment. You just plug your car into cracked H2 reservoir to fill its tank, and it generates the electricity to pump back into the grid.
presumably substations would remain, so the syncing/lockout could be done there. I imagine an intelligent syncing system wouldn't be too difficult to produce and put in consumer generators. Sure, a hacker could get around that and throw bad power into the system. But unless niagra falls is in their backyard, they aren't going to have much effect.
Besides, if someone were inclined to put out-of-phase current into the system, couldn't they do it right now? And if they can't, why would this system make it possible? (I honestly don't know the answer to these questions)
I'd say the biggest threat would be that the synchronization/load balancing mechanism would probably require some sort of network communication -- and given that, a distributed attack could have some really serious consequences.
They're not talking about running hydrogen to the home. Homes with natural gas lines could use reformers to strip CO2 off, storing the resulting hydrogen. The hydrogen could be used to run a fuel cell to power the house/charge the car/run the grid, or, if we're using fuelcell automobiles, could just be loaded straight into the car.
If you don't have natural gas, then electricity would be taken from the grid and used to drive electrolysis. Hydrogen produced by this process could be stored for loading into your fuelcell-powered car or used to run fuelcells to contribute power back to the grid.
The important idea is that the consumer has an energy buffer in their garage that presumably would be smart enough to sell energy back to the system at times of peak demand. Obviously energy will be lost with all these phase changes, but electrolysis is pretty efficient, and the benefits of having energy available on demand would be significant. I would imagine dynamic demand-based pricing would be introduced, so the system could buy energy to store when there's a surplus and power is cheap. Who knows -- maybe the overclocking crowd could buy personal power plants with hackable BIOSes and set their power purchasing thresholds lower, then throw a couple solar panels on the roof to compensate. It'd be nice to direct their boundless energies toward something that benefits society instead of just stimulating the CPU cooler and blue LED industries.
Others have brought up the safety issue -- it's my understanding that in applications like this (where weight doesn't matter), H2 safety is not as much of a concern -- saturated metal storage units are heavy but pretty safe for H2 storage; besides, the tech is being developed for automobiles right now, and most people don't get loaded and pilot their garages into phone poles with any regularity.
Even better, odds are that as cars transition to electric/hybrid/fuel cell technology, with some forward thinking a lot of this tech could be under your hood or in your garage for automotive uses already, obviating the need for heavy subsidies. Without that fact, I doubt this would be a real possibility.
does anyone out there have a good explanation of what the technology actually does? The article doesn't provide much information...
I suspect Airgo will have a tough time of it. 802.11b is really, really cheap and fairly ubiquitous. g is backward-compatible, and no consumer broadband connection can take advantage.
I suspect that the killer app for a standard faster than 802.11g will be a wifi DVR content server, and I don't think you'll see those rolled out in any significant way until Hollywood decides how they're going to keep earning money in an age when any 14 year old can steal their IP with little difficulty. I'd say 2-3 years at the earliest for a clear successor to g to emerge.
I don't think it's a lack of address space that's the problem, but it would be interesting if anyone knows whether these 800MHz applications are packet-switched or analog. If it's the latter, a change to digital technology would likely dramatically unburden the airwaves.
but hasn't private enterprise often proven its ability to manage complex systems a tad better than the government?
Like, say, with energy deregulation in California? Or privatized public schools? Or the free market for health insurance, which has left millions uninsured?
Bureacracy will inevitably develop when such systems reach a certain size, and bureacracies will inevitably suffer inefficiencies. But I don't think adding profit motive to the equation necessarily makes the systems run any better -- it just shifts the mandate of the organization to revenue generation by system maintenance, rather than purely system maintenance -- and consequently opens the door to Worldcom/Enron-type problems.
I would rather not have market forces detemining whether I get 911 service on my cell, thanks
If spectrum is reshuffled, could this be an opportunity for the wifi-friendly (but still evil) Powell to allocate more unlicensed spectrum?
Alternately, does the emergence of the interference bogeyman in such a prominent publication imply a tough PR road for more free spectrum?
Could this be an opportunity for the cell carriers operating in the 800MHz band to switch to different technologies, or roll out newer services?
Could these sorts of problems be used to get some federal money thrown toward development of software radio? would multi-format devices help avoid this problem?
As the submitter mentions, these emergency bands don't appear to be abutting or affecting the 2.4GHz range, but I imagine these issues will be relevant as wifi expands and interference problems begin cropping up.
By the way. This is the first time I hear about body odor as a side effect of creatine (among the thousands of creatine studies). I'm sorry, but that's another red flag for the study.
I suspect the body odor issue may be because the study used vegetarians. I've heard vegetarians say that once they stopped eating meat they started noticing an unpleasant odor from those who do. Perhaps the creatine is responsible -- in any event, I've never heard of creatine making you stink, either.
Slashdot Mirror
so while this isn't a mathematically attractive way to do it, it's enacting a mechanism that makes sense, imho -- regressive taxation actually is the best way to approach data taxation
Traditional phone service costs me $20/mo for unlimited local calls -- and I can get a line for as low as $13/mo with restrictions on outgoing calls. So the VoIP product is more expensive and less reliable -- features are great, but for myself and many others, reliability and price are probably the two biggest considerations when choosing a phone service.
And this is before states impose phone taxes (yeah I know, it makes no sense from a geek standpoint -- but the fact is phone taxes as currently written don't make any sense anyway, and it's a revenue stream that legislators are going to ensure remains available). The only way I can see this business model making sense is if Vonage is going after the bad-credit crowd -- folks who've already had their phone service shut off and are willing to spend more money on a company in exchange for the benefit of the doubt. There are other companies that do this, too. Maybe you can make money charging high rates to a clientele that's likely to default on their obligations; I don't know. But it doesn't seem like the way to popularize the technology.
Is it antithetical to the American Dream to say to those dishwashers and Guitar Center clerks that no, even if you succeed wildly, you will only make a few hundred thousand dollars a year? Maybe. But frankly I don't care. If we end up with fewer 14 year olds picking up Fenders with dreams of Escalades and more picking it up because of a desire to make music I'm not going to call it a bad thing.
Besides, as things stand all but the largest acts make their money touring. Record companies provide distribution, marketing and studio time but take nearly all the profit from CD sales. In the digital age the internet can take care of distribution, word-of-mouth unrestricted by geographical space or sampling fees can be a potent marketing engine (as anyone with winamp, AIM and a college broadband pipe can attest), and cheap digital recording will put the ability to make albums into the hands of anyone with $2000 and a friend who can install Linux.
The recording industry's functions are not really needed any more -- and I suspect that the duplicitous way they approached their business and treated their customers will ensure that their demise will be surprisingly quick and violent. Small labels will exist to provide support to bands, of course, but there's no longer any reason why they can't compete with the big guys except for the big guys' anticompetitive practices.
Anyone agree, or am I spouting gibberish?
The right solution is to get any bundled, extraneous services turned off on consumer boxes by default. I realize this may be unrealistic, but I think when it comes to internet architecture we need to approach things from an idealistic standpoint. Settling for short-term kludges like this one will result in a overly complex system with fundamental weaknesses.
Sure, older folks are affected by marketing -- but I disagree that they are AS affect. Brand loyalties are best established when individuals first begin to be consumers. If someone is shopping for toothpaste for the first time and you do a good enough job selling them Crest, they may buy it for the rest of their lives. Convincing them to switch from Crest down the road is likely to be harder. Maybe you don't have a strong toothpaste allegiance, but there are doubtless some product brands you just prefer for no real reason -- laundry detergent, batteries, film, brands of food, etc.
This is not as relevant for music, but I think it is still a factor. And I do think that if you could come up with some sort of index of consumer intelligence or ability to resist marketing, you would find that 14 year old girls score significantly lower than their parents.
This is an important difference, though. It promotes herding around brands. If you can sell a product to a large enough fraction of the young demographic it will attain a level of must-have cachet and spur others to buy it. In this way you can sell teenagers things that they don't even particularly like.
It does sound like the adult contemporary stations you've heard were particularly miserable. I'm thinking of ones that play some older stuff, but also mix in new material that's palatable to a lot of people (read: melodic, no swearing) -- Coldplay for example, or Melissa Carlton.
You mention new artists though, and I can't help but wonder what kind of artist you have in mind. It seems natural to assume that artists are best able to write material relevant to their own age group. With that in mind, where are the new artists supposed to come from? It's just not plausible to expect a lot of people to become professional musicians midway through their lives, attain proficiency, be original talents, and emerge as new artists aimed at your demographic. It's therefore somewhat inevitable that your options will probably be constrained to artists that have been around a while, younger bands with broad appeal, or artists that languished in obscurity for the earlier portions of their careers (see the aforementioned Lucinda Williams & John Hiatt, and throw in Steve Earle for good measure).
Or there's always world music. But you don't want to be that guy.
I mean no disrespect, but I have to say, I am honestly kind of surprised at your position, as you seem to mostly be asking for additional marketing to be directed toward you -- a sentiment I have a hard time understanding. Believe me, the music's out there -- artists like Wilco, Rufus Wainwright and Nickel Creek are examples of younger artists with no real target age -- but you will have to look.
You're not looking. Do you really feel your demographic is being ignored just because Paul Simon isn't invited on TRL when he comes out with a new album? The fact is that older listeners just aren't as likely to be affected by marketing as kids. They're smarter, secure in their self-image, have developed brand loyalties and don't have unanimous cultural focal points like TRL (at least not any that are available for marketing purposes). All of this makes marketing to your demographic harder and more expensive. Frankly, it doesn't make sense to devote money to it. There are plenty of great older artists out there making sophisticated, mature music -- John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams and Steeley Dan all spring to mind. You don't have to look any further than the rapidly-rising Adult Contemporary radio format, or the bluegrass fad of a few years back, for evidence of there being real music out there for a mature audience. But frankly, if you're looking for something to speak to your age group the way Britney speaks to 18 year olds, you may be out of luck -- both because it doesn't exist, and because it'd probably be pretty intolerable. I suggest just looking for good music that isn't tied to a specific age group. NPR's occasional music features might be a good place to start.
The RIAA does not sell you CDs. They are an advocacy organization created to represent the major labels' interests. This is especially useful when those interests run contrary to those of their consumers. Just look at this thread: lots of invective directed at the RIAA; not so much at the labels that bankroll it.
Boycotting the RIAA is a laughable notion. What are you going to stop buying that they produce? Their press releases? Their legislative advocacy? They don't make much else, and I don't think either of those are particularly big earners. It's a bait-and-switch, and a rather brilliantly effective one.
In any event, the DeBeers analogy is further flawed: in the diamond marketplace you can buy from alternate sources for higher prices. In the music marketplace there is no shortage of competitive alternatives -- check the web and find some bands playing bars near you, or just download some legit mp3s from some smaller record labels and see if there's anything you like. It's not hard to find worthwhile music. It may take slightly more effort than just buying whatever shows up on TRL, but there are alternatives.
Given that fact, you can't really compare the RIAA to DeBeers. There's no monopoly in the music industry, unless you're willing to maintain that the industry has control of all the best music. And saying that would be pretty dumb indeed.
The computer virus analogy is unusually good as electronic:biological analogies go. Let's not overextend it.
And really, don't you think that any article on a gaming news site taking its peers to task automatically implies that the authors consider themselves to be closer to the ideal they intend?
PA is the only really enjoyable game journalism I've come across (Old Man Murray excepted, of course). Tycho doesn't try to cover everything going on in the industry, and sometimes doesn't talk about games at all -- but I find two or three paragraphs of observations on recent gaming news once or twice a week is more than enough for me. His occasional comments on the state of gaming journalism are usually dead-on, as well.
Two sentences. I think that about does it.
The high incidence of flamebait here is because the writing in this IC article is pretentious, self-aggrandizing and drawn-out. They're taking gaming journalism in a new direction, all right -- but it's a pretty insufferable one.
my mistake entirely
hopefully chet and eric. they can continue to collect ad revenue off that site indefinitely as far as I'm concerned -- the parent of this thread was right: OMM is brilliant, and the only worthwhile critique of games journalism I've ever seen.
Please -- no more lectures on journalism. And stop confusing nostalgia for games from your formative years with Socratic ideals of gamehood.
I don't want this to just be a flame, so here's some constructive criticism:
Damn. I guess that was a flame after all.
80% is a peak theoretical figure for electrolysis efficiency. Real world numbers are currently significantly lower.
The technologies you list are great ways to produce power, but the point of the at-home power generation is to store energy for use at times of peak demand.
The best reason, though, is that presumably you'll have a hydrogen powered car in your garage, so you don't need to buy two separate pieces of power generating equipment. You just plug your car into cracked H2 reservoir to fill its tank, and it generates the electricity to pump back into the grid.
Besides, if someone were inclined to put out-of-phase current into the system, couldn't they do it right now? And if they can't, why would this system make it possible? (I honestly don't know the answer to these questions)
I'd say the biggest threat would be that the synchronization/load balancing mechanism would probably require some sort of network communication -- and given that, a distributed attack could have some really serious consequences.
If you don't have natural gas, then electricity would be taken from the grid and used to drive electrolysis. Hydrogen produced by this process could be stored for loading into your fuelcell-powered car or used to run fuelcells to contribute power back to the grid.
The important idea is that the consumer has an energy buffer in their garage that presumably would be smart enough to sell energy back to the system at times of peak demand. Obviously energy will be lost with all these phase changes, but electrolysis is pretty efficient, and the benefits of having energy available on demand would be significant. I would imagine dynamic demand-based pricing would be introduced, so the system could buy energy to store when there's a surplus and power is cheap. Who knows -- maybe the overclocking crowd could buy personal power plants with hackable BIOSes and set their power purchasing thresholds lower, then throw a couple solar panels on the roof to compensate. It'd be nice to direct their boundless energies toward something that benefits society instead of just stimulating the CPU cooler and blue LED industries.
Others have brought up the safety issue -- it's my understanding that in applications like this (where weight doesn't matter), H2 safety is not as much of a concern -- saturated metal storage units are heavy but pretty safe for H2 storage; besides, the tech is being developed for automobiles right now, and most people don't get loaded and pilot their garages into phone poles with any regularity.
Even better, odds are that as cars transition to electric/hybrid/fuel cell technology, with some forward thinking a lot of this tech could be under your hood or in your garage for automotive uses already, obviating the need for heavy subsidies. Without that fact, I doubt this would be a real possibility.
i said eom dammit
I suspect Airgo will have a tough time of it. 802.11b is really, really cheap and fairly ubiquitous. g is backward-compatible, and no consumer broadband connection can take advantage.
I suspect that the killer app for a standard faster than 802.11g will be a wifi DVR content server, and I don't think you'll see those rolled out in any significant way until Hollywood decides how they're going to keep earning money in an age when any 14 year old can steal their IP with little difficulty. I'd say 2-3 years at the earliest for a clear successor to g to emerge.
I don't think it's a lack of address space that's the problem, but it would be interesting if anyone knows whether these 800MHz applications are packet-switched or analog. If it's the latter, a change to digital technology would likely dramatically unburden the airwaves.
Bureacracy will inevitably develop when such systems reach a certain size, and bureacracies will inevitably suffer inefficiencies. But I don't think adding profit motive to the equation necessarily makes the systems run any better -- it just shifts the mandate of the organization to revenue generation by system maintenance, rather than purely system maintenance -- and consequently opens the door to Worldcom/Enron-type problems.
I would rather not have market forces detemining whether I get 911 service on my cell, thanks
- If spectrum is reshuffled, could this be an opportunity for the wifi-friendly (but still evil) Powell to allocate more unlicensed spectrum?
- Alternately, does the emergence of the interference bogeyman in such a prominent publication imply a tough PR road for more free spectrum?
- Could this be an opportunity for the cell carriers operating in the 800MHz band to switch to different technologies, or roll out newer services?
- Could these sorts of problems be used to get some federal money thrown toward development of software radio? would multi-format devices help avoid this problem?
As the submitter mentions, these emergency bands don't appear to be abutting or affecting the 2.4GHz range, but I imagine these issues will be relevant as wifi expands and interference problems begin cropping up.