Category: Computers

Seeing this at inappropriate response:

Many Snappy Returns. A rousing albeit belated Happy Blirgday to Dr. Frank. The one true frabjous original real blogs o’ war. Accept no substitutes.

reminded me that I’m chapped at this John Little character who stole the name of Dr. Frank’s blog and registered it as a domain, which he now uses for his own blog (not linked here on principle.) The blog itself isn’t offensive, but stealing the name “Blogs of War” is. Little, having benefitted from stealing Dr. Frank’s name, should now give it to him and go get his own. This kind of behavior is not acceptable, and it gives War Bloggers a bad name.

BTW, happy birthday, Dr.

Supernova 2002 (mentioned by Denton) looks weird. It’s one of those big picture convergence conferences where the big picture ends up being too big to talk about, so it degenerates into a discussion of very little things (like the Tivo boss insisting that his customers are all happy as clams, both of them).

Seems to me that digital rights is one of the main barriers to convergence, and it won’t be lifted without some heavy compromise. Yet the advocacy groups that are supposed to be representing the computer industry, like EFF and CDT, are anti-compromise.

Grim prospects, no film at 11:00.

Click here for the Supernova group blog.

The WaPo has a long series of articles on the Bubble.

Rapid rise in broadband connections

More than 1 in 4 of U.S. households that go online — and more than 1 in 3 in California and other Pacific Coast states — now do so with a broadband connection, according to a report released Wednesday by market research company Gartner Dataquest.

Based on a June survey of 45,000 households, the study found that the rate of broadband Internet use in the United States has nearly tripled since a previous survey in February 2000, with an average monthly growth rate of 9 percent. During the same 28 months, the total of U.S. households that go online by any means — broadband or dial-up — increased by an average 1 percent per month.

Cable remains the dominant broadband technology, increasing its share from 49 percent of broadband households to 54 percent between the two surveys. DSL adoption, however, grew nearly twice as fast, increasing that technology’s share from 19 percent to 34 percent. ISDN, an older technology that served almost a third of all broadband households in the earlier survey, dropped to just 8 percent.

Consumer demand for broadband will lead the tech industry out of its slump.

Here are the VC numbers that were the subject of controversy when the Univ. of Texas decided to release them. Frankly, I don’t see what the big deal is. The funds started before 2000 have made money already, and the others haven’t. Given that there hasn’t been a favorable climate for IPOs since 1999, I don’t see this as proof of VC ineptitude, which isn’t to say that most VCs aren’t inept, just that this small slice doesn’t prove it.

Mercury News | 10/05/2002 | FINANCIAL RESULTS

FINANCIAL RESULTS

The University of Texas has released financial results of its investments in some Silicon Valley venture firms. However, the internal rate of return, or IRR, should not be compared across funds in their early stage (see footnote.)

Fund manager	Year*	IRR
Advanced Technology Ventures	2001	-33.07%
Band of Angels	2000	-23.23%
Crescendo Ventures	1997	25.33%
Foundation Capital	2001	-28.35%
Hellman & Friedman Investors	1992	24.97%
Lighthouse Capital	2001	-13.89%
Morgenthaler Mgmt Partners	1990	27.53%
Morgenthaler Mgmt Partners	1998	-7.04%
Morgenthaler MgmtPartners	2000	-24.01%
Morgenthaler Mgmt Partners	2001	-14.66%
Prospect Venture Partners	2001	-24.37%

The Internal Rate of Return is the compounded annual rate of return since a fund’s inception. IRRs usually are negative for the first few years until start-ups begins to make money. IRRs take into account both actual money returned and the remaining value of the portfolio as estimated by venture firms. However, venture firms often differ in how and when they report data, so IRRs should not be compared across funds in early stages.

*Vintage year
Source: University of Texas Management Co.

A Tale of Evil Venture Capital, and a Fair Start-Up

“If you ask a V.C. what value they add, and you get them after a few drinks, they’ll say, `We replace the C.E.O.,’ ” he said. And that, he indicated, does not vary with the economic climate.

This cute story courtesy of Nick Denton, who knows a thing or two about VCs.

Extreme shares hit record low amid revenue doubts

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 27 (Reuters) – Shares of battered network equipment maker Extreme Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:EXTR – News) fell to a record low on Friday and closed down almost 40 percent on the week as investor concerns about its revenue goal heightened, according to analysts.

That had to hurt.

Mercury News | 09/26/2002 | H-1B issues going to court

For years U.S. engineers have grumbled that foreign engineers on work visas were getting their jobs. Now, for the first time, U.S. workers are filing formal complaints with the government and in court, charging that foreign guest workers are replacing them during the downturn.

The complaints contend that citizens were either laid off or not hired in favor of foreign workers on temporary H-1B visas. H-1B workers are supposed to fill only those jobs left vacant by a shortage of skilled U.S. workers.

While the previous griping was often dismissed as racial backlash, the new complaints spring from across the tech workforce — from men and women, white and non-white, native-born Americans and naturalized citizens. And labor lawyers researching the cases are finding something that stuns them: The H-1B rules give citizens almost no protection from being replaced by a foreign worker.

I don’t expect anything to happen in these court challenges, but next year would be a good time to prevail upon Congress to reform the H-1B program.

Just for fun, take this little test: name the two states with the worst business climate, and then the two with the best. When you’ve made your picks, check the survey in today’s Wall St. Journal by clicking “MORE…”.
Continue reading “Business climate”

The PhotoLink II protocol developed by Stan Fickes, Tom Kurata, and myself in 1991 for Photonic Corp. in Los Gatos was much of the basis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the standard used by all WiFi LANs. The key elements of our protocol — acknowledgements, fragmentation, encapsulation, hidden-node protection, and either centralized or distributed operation — are in the standard.

Greg Ennis, an old buddy from the IEEE 802.3 low-cost LAN wars of the 80s and technical director of the WiFi Alliance, tells me that the standard was based on something called DFWMAC that he, Phil Belanger, and Wim Diepstraten devised in 1993. (The name is an inside joke, from a side comment the committee chair made about wishing the principals would meet some place like the DFW airport and resolve their differences.) There was considerable interchange between the DFWMAC guys and we at Photonics; we gave Greg our protocol specs.

The backgrounds of all these folks were pretty similar as well: Phil was known as “Mr. Omninet” back then, because he was the champion of the Corvus LAN that was the first real commercial success in the field of twisted-pair LANs. Photonics’ hardware engineering director was a co-worker of Phil’s at Corvus. Wim was with NCR’s networks division in Holland, people that I had worked with closely in the development of the 802.3 StarLAN standard (NCR Holland eventually became AT&T, then Lucent, then Agere, and is now Proxim).

Greg was the 802.3 task force chair for PC Network while the StarLAN activity was going on, and later a consultant to Tandem, the company I worked for during the StarLAN standards development. His marketing director at Sytek, the PC Network company, was at Xircom when they developed their wireless product.

Any group of bright people with the appropriate background would have developed a protocol similar to DFWMAC at that time. Virtually all the protocol’s underpinnings can be found in Ethernet, AppleTalk, ARCNet, Omninet, Token Ring, and StarLAN provided you keep the relevant bits and toss the rest. Greg, Phil, and Wim combined the best ideas available at the time and had the persistence to get it through the committee, no mean feat in itself.

A couple of good articles on DFWMAC are here and here.