Category: Computers

A couple days ago, The Fat Guy Scott Chaffin observed in the comments that George Gilder’s view of dumb networks with smart edges had hurt the industry, and yesterday, as if on cue, Gilder had an Op-Ed in the Journal, Broadband’s Narrow Minds, in which he blamed the failure of the US telecom industry on government regulations:

But all this bandwidth is useless if it is not connected to homes and offices. Deployed through the world economy and extended to final users, optical wavelength technology can still unleash the boom in broadband video teleconferencing, education, and entertainment anticipated by the stock market during the late 1990s. But to fulfill this promise, Washington can no longer treat the industry as a political cash cow or plaything. The industry’s customers and shareholders, and the nation’s economy, deserve better.

Gilder’s a weird character. He works for the ultra-conservative Discovery Institute, an organization whose chief obsession is with Intelligent Design, a great load of snake oil if there ever was one. That doesn’t prove he’s a poor prognosticator, of course, but you can decide that for yourself after looking at the next heaping morsel of snake oil goodness I’ve prepared for you.

Back in 1995, Gilder wrote an article for Forbes ASAP predicting changes to the computer industry that would come about as a result of the consumerization of the Internet. In short, he said that Marc Andreessen would be the next Bill Gates, and that Sun’s Java would make Windows and the PC obsolete. A few months ago, Andreessen quietly sold his LoudCloud web hosting service to EDS, and he’s now sunk beneath the radar. Java’s an interesting widget, but it’s most commonly used on Windows, Bill Gates is still the only Bill Gates in town, and we’re all waiting for real broadband and applications that might leverage it.

Even more interesting are the responses Forbes printed from industry figures going pro and con on Gilder’s predictions. Many endorsed his view, although most of those who did had a self-serving reason for doing so, but the genuine smart guys didn’t – that would include Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Nathan Myhrvold, and a few others. One comment from Grove rings especially true as a correction to the Intelligent Design people and others who believe in miracles:

Five years from now, my computer will still be connected to an ordinary phone line and to ISDN, but also to broadband networks via a cable modem and to an ATM network to reach other lucky computer users; and probably to do some kind of wireless connection. Ten years from now, it will be another set of communications transport media. But it will never be a single superconnection, because goodness doesn’t arrive in a single step. It comes a little at a time.

If you enjoy saying I told you so, or the view from the rear view mirror generally, this is fun stuff.

Looking backwards is probably the one thing that Gilder himself does well; Open Source libertarian Eric Raymond and others have claimed that the consumer Internet was not originally a military tool, but Gilder shows that it was a RAND employee, Paul Baran, trying to solve a military problem (second strike missile command and control) who did the seminal design work and has the papers to prove it. Gilder wrote this up in Inventing the Internet Again.

The only dispute on authorship would be that the Internet Baran envisioned was more powerful in terms of real-time and QoS than the one that was eventually lashed together by ARPA contractors with less insight into network fundamentals, excessive faith in queueing theory, and less concern for future needs.

Glenn Fleischman interviews Mr. Omninet Phil Belanger for Wi-Fi News: Vivato Unleashed and mines some interesting details about how the Vivato system works. It’s clearly a generation ahead of the other “smart antenna” systems in the works, and stands out for its combination of technology and channel marketing sense. If I were working for a company that thinks it has a smart antenna in the works, I’d be worried, but I’m not, so I’m amused at the prospect of coming trainwrecks. It’s about time Belanger had some success, BTW — he’s been slogging away at LANs since he was at Corvus in the early 80s.

David Weinberger has been thinking about the Internet, and the webheads and greedheads. He’s especially fascinated by a 20-year-old paper on network design:

I’ve been thinking about the end of the Internet. No, not its collapse, but as in the”End-to-End” (E2E) argument, put definitively by David P. Reed, J.H. Saltzer, and D.D. Clark in their seminal article, End-to-End Arguments in System Design. The concept is simple: whenever possible, services should not be built into a network but should be allowed to arise at the network’s ends.

Let me prick this bubble, if I may: the Internet was not designed correctly. This is especially true from the standpoint of real-time services, such as streaming audio and video. The fundamental problem is that the end-to-end model only works when timed delivery is not important, because it’s not able to manage the system-to-system, network-to-network, and router-to-router links that have to be managed for bandwidth to be reserved and used efficiently by real-time services. The Internet runs on telephony-based services such as ATM and SONET that provide for real-time delivery, quality of service selection, and bandwidth sensitive billing, but the Internet protocols, especially IPv4, mask access to the controls that run these links and make real-time at best a matter of faith and prayer and massively over-built datalinks.

If the connection-oriented, end-to-end services provided by TCP had been implemented at the network layer instead of at the transport layer, the Internet would be poised to gracefully carry the next generation of services. But it wasn’t, so it’s not, and IPv6 doesn’t fully remedy the deficiencies. Don’t hold up any engineering exercise done twenty-five and thirty years ago as state-of-the-art, and don’t try and build a model of human morality on it – it’s a losing proposition.

John’s Jottings tells how to install a WYSIWYG edtor for Movable Type. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks cool.

This just in:

Google, which runs the Web’s premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

Silicon Valley – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal

Wow.

My immediate reaction is to say a quick RIP for Nick Denton’s nascent blog indexing company, as his services will no longer be required.

UPDATE: Denton’s partner, the ubiquitous “megnut”, says on Metafilter that they’ll not be affected by Booger:

As the co-founder of “Nick Denton’s blog indexing company” (and the co-founder of Pyra Labs) I can tell you this isn’t RIP for what we’re doing and building. You can read more about the Lafayette Project here but we’re not building weblog search, and never had any intention of going up against Google, even before this deal was announced.

Clicking through to her blog, she describes a “best-of-the-blogs show”. Daily Bloggie Awards? Well, different strokes and all that.

Sifry’s Alerts: Breaking the (power) law deals with modifying the Technorati equations to filter out power law effects. It’s interesting, but I suggest a further refinement (in the comments) that will help us find blogs with high signal-to-noise ratios.

EE Times – Sun employs startup’s technology in server blade processors

SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems Inc. hopes to leapfrog competitors such as IBM and Intel in the emerging area of server blades by launching multicore microprocessors that can handle as many as 32 separate threads. The technology will form the basis of new Sparc processors that will be discussed when Sun discloses its processor road map late this month.

These would be the first multi-core, multi-thread CPUs in the business, if Sun can pull it off. It’s not clear how register-sharing is going to work, and if it’s actually manufacturable, but it sure sounds neat.

via Hack the Planet.

Business 2.0 points out that the rise in Big Brother snooping on employee e-mail and web surfing has been accompanied by in increase in absenteeism:

First, while employers have increasingly been taking the Big Brother approach, thanks to software that tracks Internet usage and even lets the boss read a worker’s e-mails, the proportion of absenteeism attributable to personal needs has also been on the rise — almost doubling in 2002 to 21 percent. Notice the lesson here: If you don’t want your people missing work to take care of personal business, maybe it would be better to let them take care of some of that business at work.

The first rule of management is trust, not snoop because you can. Somebody should pass this on to John Chambers.

Dan Gillmor has some good comments on the demise of one of the major manipulators behind the tech bubble:

There’s something hilarious, in a sick kind of way, about Credit Suisse First Boston’s move to put on leave Frank Quattrone (Mercury News), the supernova investment banker who brought so many riches to the bank and himself over the past few years. This outfit has been defending its man to the hilt, but the odor around him may be getting too strong.

I little more of this action and Silicon Valley might return to being a haven for innovation and not just hype.

So it looks like we were right about damage to the tiles from pieces of foam splitting off the Shuttle’s fuel tank; that’s the avenue that NASA is pursuing now. So the question is why this foam had never been a problem before, but it turns out foam has plagued NASA for 5 years

As recently as last September, a retired engineering manager for Lockheed Martin, the contractor that assembles the tanks, told a conference in New Orleans that developing a new foam to meet environmental standards had “been much more difficult than anticipated.”
The retired Lockheed engineer, who helped design the thermal protection system, said the switch from a foam based on Freon — also known as CFC-11 — has “resulted in unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight.”

In fact, he noted, the hits to Columbia on that 1997 mission, the same one Katnik studied, forced NASA to replace nearly 11 times more damaged tiles than it had after a previous mission that had used Freon-based foam.
Lockheed spokesman Harry Wadsworth said Monday that the company was referring questions to NASA. “I cannot talk about any past problems with foam or the history of foam,” he said. “We’re not talking about the investigation.”

Despite the concerns, NASA has never described the foam problem as a potential catastrophic threat, but considered it enough of an issue to warrant a series of tests.

In 1999, the Southwest Research Institute, a non-profit laboratory in San Antonio, Texas, fired insulating foam fragments from a compressed-gas gun into thermal tiles and recorderecorded the results with digital cameras. After the Columbia crash, NASA asked the institute not to release those results. The space agency also has tested the foam in wind tunnels and aboard a research jet.

So concerns about the effects of freon on the ozone layer lead directly to the crash of the Shuttle, apparently. You’d think NASA would be able to get some kind of a waiver on this stuff.