Category: Computers

Is NetBSD better than Linux? Some people think so, which would be kind of funny for all the companies who’ve stalled new features for a year because they’ve been migrating products from VxWorks to Linux.

What do we mean by better? Here’s a clue:

While NetBSD uses the GNU toolchain (compiler, assembler, etc), and certain other GNU tools, the entire kernel and the core of the userland utilities are shipped under a BSD licence. This allows companies to develop products based on NetBSD without the requirement to make changes public (as with the GPL). While the NetBSD Project encourages companies and individuals to feed back changes to the tree, we respect their right to make that decision themselves

That’s a very big deal. It also emulates Linux and is extremely portable. See BSD forums.

We’re swimming in GPL routers today, with The Click Modular Router Project:

Click is a modular software router originally developed by MIT LCS’s Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group, with significant contributions from Mazu Networks and the ICSI Center for Internet Research. Click routers are flexible, configurable, and easy to understand. They’re also pretty fast, for software routers running on commodity hardware; on a 700 MHz Pentium III, a Click IP router can handle up to 435,000 64-byte packets a second.

…and the Shortcut Router:

This software is a routing daemon designed expecially for wireless rooftop networks.

A wireless rooftop network is a network where there are several hosts connected by wireless (wi-fi, infrared, laser) links to form a mesh. Host part of this mesh cannot move because the wireless hardware (antenna, laser receiver, etc.) is firmly posed on rooftop or on ground.

The working principle is simple: each host gets an unique IPV6 address that represents its latitude and longitude; to build a route from A to B software choose the A neighbour nearest to B and moves to it, and so it goes until B is reached.

…and of course, WISP-Dist:

WISP-Dist is an embedded Linux distribution for wireless routers, but can be used for other purposes as well. Entire system fits in 8 MB flash/16 MB RAM. The goal is to create an open, customizable and easy to use solution for wireless routers. Development was sponsored by ThunderWorx.

Swimming is perilously close to drowning sometimes, so anybody who’s compared these things is welcome to leave comments on their experience with them.

Once upon a time, a popular saying displayed in engineers’ offices said: “Good, fast, cheap – pick any two”. Clay Shirky applies it to media diversity and comes up with this:

What is clear, however, is a lesson from the weblog world: inequality is a natural component of media. For people arguing about an ideal media landscape, the tradeoffs are clear: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two.

This is good example of trying to stretch a metaphor so far it becomes a force-fit. “Equal” isn’t consistent with either “Free” or “Diverse”. We aren’t built equal, we’re just assumed to be for legal purposes because any other assumption makes things too complicated and strange.

Shirky points out that blog popularity follows a power law, which annoys the “Emergent Democracy” buffs to the max, but it’s worse than that: as weblogs evolve from their birth in social relevance after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve begun to see more group blogging, which takes power law concentrations to a new level. If one bright person is hundreds of times more interesting than your typical mediocre person, than surely a whole group of interesting people is exponentially more interesting than a dull individual. One of the many keys to Reynolds’ success is the large number of folks who send him links from around the globe at all hours; basically, Instapundit is a group blog with a strong editor.

So equality of readership certainly isn’t going to happen in the Blogosphere, and certainly never would in the mediasphere without some heavy coercion.

If you examine the social malaise at a larger level than media and tech, it’s hard to miss the fact that government attempts at legislating equality in various forms are behind a large number of them. The schools haven’t served the mentally retarded (or “the developmentally challenged” or whatever we’re calling them this week) very well, so we mainstream them and drag down the whole curve by failing to educate everybody else. We increase equality by hurting high performers.

Now most of us who aren’t retarded understand that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are two different things, but in practice outcomes are used to measure opportunities because any other measure is too complicated. So somehow we need to purge the vocabulary of “equality” as a goal.

Regarding diversity, again there is a distinction to be made between diversity of ownership and diversity of thought. When the FCC rules forbade newspapers from owning TV stations, we tended to get fairly homogeneous opinions from newspapers and TV, and even newspaper monopolies in most cities. I think this is due to the overhead of running either a newspaper or a TV station, and the fact that high-overhead organizations can’t afford to alienate potential customers; when everybody’s reaching out to everybody, all the appeals sound the same.

But when you allow organizations to own TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers, they can probably go after specific market segments, just as niche publishers can go after small audiences due to low overhead. The concept is serving a narrow market well rather than serving a broad market poorly, and all of us high-tech people know that works.

So yeah, in the long run de-regulation will bring more diversity of opinion to media, but it won’t advance the cause of ownership diversity. But who said everybody’s entitled to his own TV station? If we had a real-time Internet, that would be possible, but we aren’t there yet, even if the FCC’s new rules are a step in the right direction.

UPDATE: Check this for some confirmation on the goal of heavy media regulationsists; can you spell “silencing conservatives?”

In one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe books, there’s an observation that the VCR is a time-saving device because it watches TV shows for you; once they’re recorded, you don’t have to bother watching them. Simon Dumenco (“dumenco” means “dumb ass” in some Indo-European languages) rips off this riff and writes a column extending the principle to Tivo and blogs:

The blog thing, especially, was key. Because I didn’t have to read, in long form, the endless pontificating about Tina’s TV debut either (it’s a bit like not even bothering to read book reviews but still being able to talk about books). In the same way I delegated the task of watching Tina’s show to my TiVo, I delegated the task of forming an opinion about it to media-news blogger Jim Romenesko (www.medianews.org) — who, come to think of it, had delegated the task of actually thinking and writing about Tina to the assorted opinion-makers he’d linked to and summarized.

You should at least give credit where it’s due in these cases, as I will to Doc Searls, the peace-mongering gynecologist on whose blog I found Dumenco’s article linked.

And speaking of credit, Professor Randy Barnett on Volokh echoes our take on the Times under Raines, but he’s clever enough to have thought of it on his own, even if he is handicapped by being a libertarian.

Dan Gillmor’s off-hand reference (“Palm frittered away its long lead, giving Microsoft and the Symbian alliance the time to catch up and in many ways surpass the pioneer”) sent me searching for info on Symbian, which turns out to be the OS of choice for mobile phones, especially those with 3G. Now there’s been a lot of wailing about the imminent demise of 3G thanks to the WiFi bubble, but early returns don’t support that thesis:

“M1 says its customers did not like the Wi-Fi service because it is not really mobile since users must stay within a coverage area 50-100 metres of the hotspot,” we learn. MobileOne will instead invest $150 million on 3G next year.

Beset as it is by technical problems, and suffering from dot.com-sized expectations, 3G has a compelling reason to roll into the market because it gives the operators fourfold efficiencies over the 2G digital networks. They can close off the old transmitters, and save themselves a lot of money. In the UK, the 3 network is branding itself by offering the cheapest calls of all.

No blog, or Pringle Can, can counter the harsh economics: public Wi-Fi doesn’t pay.

So it’s deeper and deeper into the doo for Palm.

UPDATE: Distinguished Valley Old Fart Tim Oren says it’s all over but the shouting.

The big buzz today is over the Palm merger with Handspring, a deal that’s a standout because it re-unites a couple of people (Donna Dubinsky and Eric Benhamou) who seriously dislike each other and combines two money-losing companies. So why do it? The obvious reasons are economies of scale, shared channels, blah, blah, blah, but I think the real reason to do it now is this:

Palm, which also announced that it has finalized plans to spin off its PalmSource software division, will purchase Handspring in a stock deal.

Emphasis added. Palm will own a bunch of PalmSource stock and have members of the board, and without the merger Handspring would have had nothing. So now Handspring not only has a cleaner sales channel, they also have a hand on the tiller of Palm OS, not a bad thing to do in these days of WinCE and Linux. Which brings us to the question of how long it’s gonna be before we have combo PDAs and cell phones that run license-free embedded Linux.

Probably not too long, and now that we have Linux-based video phones, they just might be pretty interesting gadgets:

Support is included for all key IP-based communications protocols including SIP, MGCP, and H.323, as well as quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms such as VLAN and ToS settings. Additionally, suport for standards-based provisioning processes (HTTP, SNMP, TFTP, FTP, and Telnet) is expected to simplify the deploying and managing of large numbers of devices via remote automatic firmware upgrade, parameters configuration, and IP address management.

Interesting, and complicated.

This deal sounds reasonable:

1. Bandwidth. MCI is over there installing mobile phones. It would take nothing — nothing — for them to bring Inernet POPs to a handful of locations in the major cities at the same time. If I were running MCI, I’d do it as a mitzvah, considering the hell my company had caused the world. But a foundation could underwrite this as well.

2. Computers. My commenter is right: Lots of companies — Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, Gateway, Microsoft, Intel — can afford to donate machines. It won’t take many, just a few hundred.

3. Tutor. Iranian webloggers needed Hoder to explain how to blog. Salam Pax could do likewise.

4. Space. The U.S. and British military should find space for temporary Internet cafes that could be used by servicemen for X hours a day to email home and by Iraqis most of the day to exercise their newfound free speech.

5. Guru. Somebody needs to bring this together, getting companies and foundations to donate bandwidth and machines and getting the government to facilitate this (and see that it is in America’s interest to encourage such free speech). I’ll volunteer. So will many others, I’m sure.

Now, for somebody to whip it all into shape. Hmmm….

The Register says Atheros is shipping its third gen WiFi chips:

WLAN chip maker Atheros today became the first to market with 802.11g product based on the final draft – version 8.2 – of the standard when it announced it has begun shipping its third-generation, AR5002 family of client and base-station Wi-Fi silicon.

The AR5002 line provides dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networking based on 802.11b, g and a, through two-chip solutions (a MAC/baseband part plus a radio chip).

Maybe we should start a pool on who buys them – Intersil, Broadcom, Intel, or TI?

More at Unstrung:

“We’re not a small startup anymore,” says Li. “We hit cash-flow positive sometime ago.” He just shook his head when Unstrung asked about the possibility of his company being acquired. Instead, the company is still talking about an IPO when market conditions are right.

A recent comment of mine that WiFi chipsets aren’t a good bet for investors raised a few eyebrows, but facts are facts. See The Register for the lowdown on current pricing trends for WiFi chips:

The price war is being driven by the entry of new chip makers, primarily in Taiwan. Acer Labs and SiS have begun sampling 802.11b chipsets, while VIA’s networking chip subsidiary will put its own product into mass production in July. Almost all of the newcomers are looking to compete on price. The established players are being forced to do the same.

The need to maintain sales once faster, compatible and at last genuinely standard 802.11g parts come on stream is likely to keep prices down. TechKnowledge reckons 802.11g chips will hit an average $9.68 by the end of the year, just over half the $18 they commanded last year.

Countering the price decline is the fact that many 802.11b chipset vendors buy third-party radio transceivers to connect to their own MAC chips – the parts that handle the network protocols. A limited number of RF chip makers is keeping prices more stable, but again, a number of Taiwanese vendors are believed to be getting reading to enter that market and will drive down the price of RF chips and thus the cost of 802.11b chipsets as a whole.

You generally find opportunity to innovate in the production of IEEE standards only at the system interface and on the analog side, and sometimes with power management, but even those areas are effectively overmined.

A couple of days ago, I claimed Lawrence Lessig had censored a comment I left on his blog. He protested that he’d done no such thing, and in fact allowed me to leave the comment. So I do believe Prof. Lessig is telling the truth and I misconstrued a software or network problem as censorship.

I was wrong to impugn Prof. Lessig’s honor, and I apologize.