Category: Computers

Unstrung reports that yet another company — Airgo Networks — has a WiFi chipset for sale, after a mere three-and-a-half years of development and venture capital. Analysts are skeptical of Airgo’s chances, based on its timing relative to forthcoming high-rate wireless standards, such as 802.11n:

Ken Furer, analyst at IDC wonders whether enterprise customers are really ready for the wholesale access-point and client upgrades that would be required to take advantage of the maximum transfer speeds offered by the Airgo technology. (Products featuring the chip would be able to talk to 802.11 devices using regular ol’ chips from other vendors, but not at hyper speed).

Furer calls the Airgo silicon a “pre-n” technology, referring to the high-speed upgrade to the 802.11 standard that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) is working on (see IEEE Plots Speedier WLAN). “The market is just not ready to deal with pre-n technology,” he says. “Not with the move to dualmode [chipsets] and 802.11g that’s happening.”

Some of the engineers at Airgo are bright and capable, but the company’s managed to hit the market at the worst possible time. This is very sad.

I didn’t even know that Gray Davis was anywhere near New York, but he must’ve been. Odd.

But now we have an answer to the East-coaster who call Californians wacky for wanting to recall our governor. Suppose Black Thursday repeats periodically over four or five months; still think we’re nuts?

And besides, we didn’t elect Jerry Springer, Dennis Kucinich, and James Traficant to public office: Ohio did.

Andrew Orlowski mentions blogosphere kings Winer and Reynolds in his BloggerCon promo, Webloggers deal Harvard blog-bores a black eye. It’s classic Orlowski, quite funny (and true):

“I’m gonna pay $500 to listen to Instacracker and not insult him?” asked Steve Gilliard.

Scott Chaffin is already planning an alternative event.

Om Malik’s book on the bubble, Broadbandits, sounds moderately interesting:

WorldCom in bankrupt, Global Crossing is decimated, PSINet sold for peanuts, and Genuity sold its assets for a mere $250 million, a fraction of its one-time worth. With over 100 companies bankrupt and equal number that have shut shop, as many as 600, 000 telecommunications workers are now without a paycheck, these are staggering numbers for an industry that accounts for a sixth of the U.S. economy. But they are not as staggering as the amounts of money that hard-working employees at these broadband companies have lost.

As executives were cashing out on their own holdings, they encouraged employees to put their 401(k) dollars into company stock. The telecom industry is perhaps the worst culprit in the spate of financial dirty dealings that have been splashed across the business pages and yet the rewards reaped by the top executives at many of these failed, or failing, companies have been inversely proportionate to their decline.

Can somebody who’s read it comment on whether it’s worth the time?

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and Steven Rosenfeld of TomPaine.com are worried that capitalism is Stealing The Internet:

The Internet’s early promise as a medium where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged and the public interest can be served is increasingly being relegated to history’s dustbin. Today, the part of the Net that is public and accessible is shrinking, while the part of the Net tied to round-the-clock billing is poised to grow exponentially.

I’m going to have to hurry up and publish my critique of “The Future of Ideas” because this kind of crap gets more and more common. For the record, and because I don’t have much time today, let me remind my readers that the Internet, at the time TCP/IP was rolled-out in 1982, consisted of a half-dozen computers connected by 56Kbps modems on leased liines, and nobody was exchanging any video or audio over it. It’s become what it is today because capitalist enterprises were willing to invest money in upgrading the infrastructure, which they did on the expectation that they could make some money off it. It already costs more to get a broadband connection than a dialup, and that’s as it should be. As we go to more metered services, the richness of the overall environment will improve, not decline.

So no, the socialist vision of the Internet as something as free as air has never been true, the Internet is not dying, and we don’t need more government regulation of the Net, thank you very much.

I wish these dudes would go and find themselves an issue they can understand.

I’m posting this from my Linux box at the world headquarters of Network Strategies in beautiful downtown Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Installing Red Hat 9 was by far the easiest OS installation I’ve ever experienced, and that includes lots of OS installations.

It’s way easier than Windows, and that goes for 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, Me, and XP, although version 1.0 was almost as smooth. But it should have been, because it didn’t do anything.

Lots of Silicon Valley dudes live double lives, using Solaris or Linux at work, and then regressing to Windows at home because the computer’s shared and Windows used to be so easy to install, manage, and use. But that era is rapidly coming to an end, if it’s not ended already.

And since this is a computer I put together out of old parts laying around, if my packet-scheduling kernel doesn’t work right away, nobody cares but me.

Rob Flickenger, a sysadmin for O’Reilly who doesn’t make his living writing code, thought he caught Linksys shirking the GPL, except he didn’t:

As far as I can tell without having exhaustively looked at every piece of available code, Linksys appears to be trying to comply with the terms of the GPL (as I understand them anyway), and putting many customizations into BSD code, which doesn’t require source distribution.

This is really disappointing to Mr. Flickenger, because he so wanted to stomp one of them capitalist enterprises that was dumb enough to use GPL’ed code.

There’s an interesting remark from Brett Glass in the Flickenger’s comments section, to wit:

This whole affair demonstrates the true nature of the GPL. It’s designed to sabotage businesses. In particular, it’s intended to strip them of the ability to add unique value to their products — which, in turn, is an essential element of success. VA Linux had to drop out of the hardware business because they couldn’t get a competitive edge — which happened, in turn, because they embraced GPLed code. Linksys, if the GPL zealots have their way, will go the same route.

Linksys was foolish indeed to use GPLed code at all. Instead, they should have used BSD-licensed code, which is friendly to programmers and to the businesses which issue their paychecks. The BSD and MIT licenses, as well as other truly free licenses, promote innovation and allow programmers to be rewarded for innovating. The viral, spiteful, anti-business, anti-programmer GPL does the opposite.

Is GPL “viral and spiteful”? Clearly, there’s a lot of spite on Flickenger’s part, but that’s just a personal issue, not a legal one. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using GPL’ed code, as long as you don’t actually need to modify it. For everything important, there’s the BSD license.

Following up on findings generated from Original Internet Architecture (demonstating that mediocre programmers in a snit-fit could design network architecture), researchers have learned that baboons can program Visual Basic and XML:

Research by scientists suggests that higher primates represent certain kinds of knowledge internally by discrete symbol structures, called scripts. This research tends to support the hypothesis that primates can program. Other scientific research also supports the idea that primates may be used for routine programming, such as maintenance and report writing, within 10 years.

The implications of McAuliffe’s work has wide scope, and may effect software developer education, open source programming, H1-B visas, and commercial software testing. The research is already making waves in the business community. Some early adopters– and even some venture capitalists– are funding business models based on so-called ‘primate programming’. One such firm is the VC-backed startup Primate Programming Inc. It remains to be seen how effective the exploitation of this research will be in the marketplace.

Primate blogger types: read the whole thing.

Verizon’s acting like the Internet bubble never burst, according this article in Bidness Week that was linked over at Hit and Run:

“When you’re the market leader,” says Seidenberg, “part of your responsibility is to reinvent the market.”

At the heart of this reinvention is the most ambitious deployment of new telecom technology in years. Verizon plans to roll out fiber-optic connections to every home and business in its 29-state territory over the next 10 to 15 years, a project that might reasonably be compared with the construction of the Roman aqueducts. It will cost $20 billion to $40 billion, depending on how fast equipment prices fall, and allow the lightning-fast transmission of everything from regular old phone service to high-definition TV.

No “World of Hippies” propaganda, just the facts.

Tim Oren’s funded a company that builds a GPS-guided automated tractor used, in part, by organic farmers:

Part of the plantings at American Farms are certified organic, and the GPS system was originally bought for them, exploiting the reduced till concept for weed control and making it safe to leave irrigation piping in place while tilling, due to the greater precision. If your image of organic veggies involves aging hippies working their few acre truck farm, think again. What I saw was industrialized organic farming, 40 acres of raised bed lettuce ‘garden’ at a go, plowed and planted automatically under the control of Silicon Valley gadgetry, guided by Defense Department GPS satellites.

“Reduced till” means shallow tilling, preferred by organic farmers because it doesn’t bring so many weed seeds to the surface, it isn’t so hard on your worms, it reduces topsoil erosion, and is all-around a good deal, except it requires some precision, hence the farmbot.

This is some cool shit, in other words, doing well by doing good.