Category: Computers

CommsDesign – IEEE 802.16 spec could disrupt wireless landscape

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The IEEE Standards Authority on Wednesday (Jan. 29) approved the 802.16a specification for wireless metropolitan-area networks (MANs) in the 2- to 11-GHz range, giving a seal of approval to technology that one executive said could enable a disruptive change in communications.

Sounds intriguing – as in: WiFi has some competition for its more inappropriate applications.

The blogosphere, technogeeky section, is abuzz with post mortems for AOL, most notably Doc Searls‘ and Dave Winer’s response. The thing that set the boys (are they the Cheech and Chong of the blogosphere?) off was the recent report that AOL had taken some write-downs of the value they’ve been claiming on their balance sheets for the amorphous “good will” associated with AOL and the cable properties. This doesn’t mean they really lost money:

The company reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $44.91 billion, or $10.04 a diluted share, including the $45 billion write-down.

The charge reflects an accounting rule change requiring the company to lower the value assigned to assets on its books to something closer to the market value, based on a variety of factors. But the accounting charges are largely symbolic, and investors often disregard them.

The company reported that its fourth-quarter cash flow, excluding certain special items, grew 16 percent, to $2.8 billion, on an 8 percent increase in revenue, to $11.4 billion.

So revenues are up and cash is increasing, even though earnings are basically flat. That’s not great, but it’s not exactly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy either.

The AOL/Time-Warner merger doesn’t make sense as a synergy proposition unless AOL has a way to deliver TW properties to its customers, which means broadband of some kind. AOL has tried, for many years now, to work out deals that would give them access to broadband networks, and in fact one of the prime reasons for going after TW was to get theirs. See, the other cable companies didn’t want to play with AOL, probably because they knew AOL would end up in the driver’s seat.

Given where AOL started, it’s actually hard to fault their business strategy, and anybody who can run off Ted Turner by moving CNN toward the center isn’t all bad by any measure. So maybe the question for the critics is where AOL goes from here, given that they’re a business that isn’t going to make it on “information wants to be free, man” and “copyright is theft, dude”.

Everybody says they need to push broadband, but they’re already doing that. They make most of their money from dirty chat, and they probably understand that well enough not to let it shrivel up and die. They have a portal business and a server business, acquired with Netscape, so that’s covered.

Maybe their real problem is that they don’t get Tivo, because that’s the convergence point between the net business and the media business (I think so anyway, but Tivo doesn’t get the Internet). So if you’re a TV freak and you don’t care about running your own website, and let’s face it, most people don’t want the bother, the Internet is a great way to search for shows and otherwise control your Tivo (or its more net-aware successor, like Moxi). The Tivo is a receptacle for selling movie and TV downloads, not the PC, although the PC is great for finding stuff.

So maybe what AOL/Time-Warner needs to do is forget about the Internet and broadband, and get themselves some nice Tivo-type property to really make the synergy work. Then they can upgrade the book value of their “good will” instead of sending out bad vibes and like, bumming everybody out, you know.

Jim Flowers has a special-purpose meta-blog for all the blog coverage of the Columbia mishap he can find. Pass it on.

Scott Adams is collecting links to news articles on the shuttle here.

According to an e-mail list of former NASA employees, the most likely cause is damage to the left wing on takeoff caused by debris from the external tank.

From the New York Times, Pentagon and Companies in Agreement on Spectrum:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Technology companies and the Pentagon have reached an agreement to unlock a swath of spectrum for the next generation of wireless devices, officials said today.

The companies said this would lift the popularity of high-speed wireless Internet service, a bright spot in an otherwise moribund industry.

For the military, the agreement wards off an emerging threat to their radar systems by setting detailed technical mechanisms to deal with interference.

This is good. It occurs to me that some of the spectrum below 3GHz could be legalized for WiFi without interference with other uses owing to differences in modulation. It’s a question worth looking into because lower frequencies carry high-speed data further and faster than the 5Ghz band.

MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte’s article Creating a Culture of Ideas may be one of the most fanciful things ever written on the subject of invention. It’s a paean to diversity:

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

As nice as all of that sounds, it’s about as far wrong on a factual basis as it could possibly be, considering that the nations that have produced the greatest technical innovation, and this is measurable by patents, have been those, like Japan, that do in fact pride themselves on the harmony, homogeneity, and order of their societies.

Innovation is much more a consequence of coherence in the culture of ideas than of diversity, and more often than not simply carrying the technical status quo one step further in the direction it’s already heading.

Access to information, more than anything, is the key in my book. To test these theories, conduct a thought experiment on the Manhattan Project: what were the respective roles of expertise and diversity, communication and teamwork, and could you have accomplished the same thing with a panel of ordinary citizens of diverse backgrounds.

I don’t think you could.

From the Frisco Chronicle we read Temporary workers sue HP over overtime pay

Hewlett-Packard has been accused of exploiting temporary workers by forcing them to work overtime without pay or benefits, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Some contractor persons of my acquaintance working for HP’s Video Server group in Santa Clara in 1995 were asked by their manager to work 80-100 hours a week to meet an aggressive deadline but only to bill 40 since the manager’s budget was maxed-out; she assured them that they would be paid later on by submitting invoices for hours they didn’t work. One poor sap fell for this plan, and when he invoiced them while on vacation in Israel, the company rejected the invoice and terminated his contract for misrepresentation of hours worked.

He sued, but I don’t know what happened with the suit because this was all obviously a verbal deal. HP seems to get itself into these messes with amazing regularity, which makes you think that the HP Way is One Way, right to the crapper.

Meanwhile, back at the marketplace, HP is remains number one in network servers:

Results from a new study by research firm Gartner show that in 2002 H-P held onto its position as the No.1 computer server maker worldwide and in the U.S. Gartner estimates that H-P (HPQ: news, chart, profile) shipped nearly 1.4 million servers worldwide for a 30 percent share.

Message?

This memo posted on FuckedCompany.com – The Dot-com Deadpool speaks for itself, basically:

From: Julie Meyer
Sent: 21 January 2003 14:22
To: All staff
Subject: The final straw.

I see that whoever has been sending our confidential emails to a certain website has done it again. I am not amused by this. This is a complete betrayal of my trust, my good name and my investment in you as a team.

I will be interviewing everyone regarding this and as from now all internet access is restricted to sites on our client list only. If you want external access, please speak to either myself or Bundeep. Email will be restricted to those on the company address list and attachments will be vetted by myself. All company mobile phones will be restricted to certain numbers also due to the abuse of international calling.

This Friday a number of staff are leaving and we had planned a dinner and drinks at O’Neills. In light of these events this has been cancelled.

Let me warn you all that I will not stand for this behaviour from a team of professionals.

Julie

Somebody must have made this up, right? Nope, Nick Denton says it’s for real.

UPDATE: Now he says it’s not. OK, but how come I never heard of Julie Meyer until a couple of weeks ago if she’s the Queen of the Internet and all? Brits have an odd take on modern life.

Intel made a presentation of reconfigurable radio architecture to a forum in the Valley:

The processors are not bused, but rather are connected through a mesh that emphasizes nearest-neighbor relationships. This both offers a natural implementation for data flow organizations and reduces the power and signal integrity issues that come with long interconnect lines.

The mesh of processors is terminated on two sides by an array of I/O engines, with one array serving as an input device and the other serving as output. In front of the input processors resides a switchable array of analog front-ends — and, presumably, antennas — allowing the entire system to hop gracefully between frequency bands. Different analog front-ends provide different pre-filtering and signal capture/conversion. Behind the output array lives a collection of various media-access controller (MAC) devices.

Very cool. Expensive and complicated, but cool.

David Weinberger, David Reed, and others are on a kick to deregulate the airwaves in order to achieve greater democracy, invite the audience into the conversation, and save the world. One of the ideas in Framing Open Spectrum is on the border of rationality, although it’s awfully hard to tease it out of the rat’s nest of 60s idealism in which it’s housed: frequency-agile digital radios are capable of selecting clean portions of local spectrum, and don’t need quite all of the old-fashioned single use management that’s been the FCC’s business for lo these many years. There are still practical limits to frequency-hunting, however, and most of them have to do with the time it takes to discover clean spectrum, the responsiveness of agile radios to occasional interference, and the different needs of infrastructure devices (access points) and mobile devices.

I wouldn’t shut down the FCC just yet, but there is an argument to be made for more flexible spectrum policies, and the FCC is already on to it.

But at the same time, the ability of smart radios to recognize sources of interference and route around them to different frequencies isn’t as robust in contemporary systems such as WiFi as it needs to be in order for self-managed spectrum to work, with or without the FCC. Here’s a trivial example: A WiFi mobile system can only use the frequency selected by its Access Point. But it may find itself in a position where it can see two Access Points operating at the same frequency who can’t see each other because they’re too far apart (but the mobile node is in the middle, where the signals overlap). WiFi doesn’t provide a hook for the mobile node to tell its Access Point to shift to a different channel because of the interference it sees. So the system has a problem.

It’s a solvable problem, but not by the control procedures invented to deal with the environment assumed by WiFi’s designers when the standards were created. And if WiFi needs enhancement to work in a smart radio environment, what do you suppose has to be done to all the other RF protocols that are even more rudimentary than WiFi?

Right, we’re not there yet.

Link via Dan Gillmor.

The losing side in the Eldred case decided yesterday by the Supremes are scratching their heads and trying to understand why the court ruled that it’s OK for Congress to protect copyright:

The puzzle in the case was the silent 5 — the 5 justices who have consistently argued that Congress’s power is limited; that enumerated powers must be read in a way that makes sense of those limits. It was my judgment that those justices would apply the same principle to the Copyright Clause, or at least explain why they did not. And ever since the argument on October 9, I have struggled to imagine how they could ever write an opinion that would distinguish commerce from copyright.

Similar sentiments are expressed on Glenn Reynolds’ MSNBC blog and in various tech-topian, hippie, and Open Source sites. The issue here isn’t enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the conservative justices who sided with the majority is more likely the protection of property rights. In order to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright.

What seems to be missing in the commentary on this case is that the law in question — the CTEA — actually harmonized American copyright law with the EU’s copyright law, not an irrational thing to do in this era of global commerce.

I’ve said all along that the hippies had a weak case here, and apparently the Supremes agree with me. Now we need to get serious about a nice micro-payments scheme so that the Internet can be used to publish copyrighted works; I believe the “Information Wants to Be Free” mantra is more than anything an attempt to gloss over the weakness of the ‘Net as a tool of commerce in the small.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has the right take on Eldred, and so does Misanthropyst.