Category: Computers

— Yahoo! News – Tech Titans Guarding Wi-Fi Secrets reports on second-generation WiFi access points:

Intel is taking a different approach with its “soft AP” — or soft access point — initiative. It is aiming to split an access point between Windows and a chip for 802.11 cards geared to real-time processing.

Compaq has offered a soft AP for a while, and it’s no big trick; Intel’s just has a slightly beefed-up chipset behind it, making every PC its own Access Point, and consequently building a denser mesh. That was the idea behind DCF all along. Good boys, Intel.

— The Economist does a nice survey of some emerging Wireless Data technologies, picking up where WiFi leaves off:

IT IS more than a century since Guglielmo Marconi pioneered wireless data transmission. Yet, if the current pace of innovation in the field is anything to go by, wireless technology is still in its infancy.

Inventing the 802.11 MAC protocol was the best thing I’ve done so far. One of the interesting enhancements is the use of multiple antennas, allowing data to go farther and faster:

So instead of one omni-directional antenna, many base-stations now use three-directional antennas pointing in different directions, each of which covers a 120? sector.

Multiple antennas is a trivial enhancement, most useful for base stations because in that application, and only there, increased power-consumption isn’t an issue, as it would be in laptops, for example.

Mesh networks – where every base station is not only a local access point, but a router, are a significant innovation, directly competing with DSL and cable modems for a fraction of the cost:

For providing fixed-wireless access, the mesh approach is technically superior to the traditional ?point-to-multipoint? radio approach in a number of ways. For one thing, it requires much less power. Rather than using high power to get around obstacles, mesh networks offer multiple paths from one node to another; with systems typically being self-configuring so that, like the Internet, traffic is sent by the quickest route. Also like the Internet, mesh networks are robust and can be scaled up easily.

And then we have ad-hoc networks and Ultra-Wide Bandwidth networks filling out the puzzle:

UWB marks a radical departure from existing wireless technologies because, rather than transmitting and receiving on a particular radio frequency, it involves transmitting very short pulses on a wide range of frequencies simultaneously at low power. Such pulses, which are typically less than a billionth of a second long, pass unnoticed by conventional radio receivers, but can be detected by a UWB receiver.

UWB is intriguing because it can coexist in licensed spectrum with traditional analog services, thus enabling more efficient use of bandwidth than either 802.11a or b. There’s a lot more growth in the wireless pipeline than the meager efforts underway at chip companies today, most of which are simply imitative.

Link courtesy of Letters from Exile.

— Transterrestrial Musings observes a high correlation between dodgy accounting and Andersen clients. There’s a certain irony in this, because Andersen used to position itself as the most principled of accountants, but that posture went by the wayside during the Clinton years when Go-Go was king. I heard a professor lady on the radio talk about her tenure at Andersen, who hired her to teach Business Ethics. The punch line is that she sold courses to Andersen customers, but she couldn’t get Andersen itself interested in the concept except as a profit center. It seems to me that certain prosecution for cowboy bean-counters is the cure.

— Sun accused of worker discrimination / U.S. citizen employee says he was canned in favor of foreigners

The U.S. government is looking into Sun Microsystems’ hiring practices after an ex-employee filed complaints alleging that the Santa Clara firm discriminates against American citizens in favor of foreign workers on H1-B visas.

It’s about time H1B abuse got some attention – there are entire companies in the Silicon Valley that hire nothing but H1Bs, and solely because they’re cheap and obedient workers who can be threatened with deportation if they don’t slave away for peanuts. And there are those who mix H1Bs with Americans who use the threat of layoff and transfer of duties to an H1B to better exploit the Americans. In this economy both are common, and I could name names, yes I could.

— The New York Times story on the fight between Blogistan and Blogtopia is up, at A Rift Among Bloggers

This time it is happening to Weblogs. Five years ago a few programmers pioneered this form of hyperlinked online journal, posting their thoughts on technology matters and personal musings. Later they built Weblog publishing tools for nontechies, and a vast spectrum of Weblogs — blogs for short — quietly bloomed.

As regular readers of this blog, Ken Layne’s blog, and most other popular warblogs know, the weblog was not invented by a few web elves in Frisco five years ago, it’s a form that’s as old as the web itself, if not older. What the Frisco elves created was the name “weblog” and some scripts that made archiving old updates easier. I’d hate to have to hang my technical hat on such a thin contribution, but it that’s all you’ve got, you’ve got to make the most of it.

Now that Dave Winer has drunk the Kool-Aid, he insists that there’s no rumble between elves and pundits, but rather there’s a big showdown between amateur writers and professionals. I don’t buy this polarization either, since most of the blogs I enjoy reading are written by people who have, at one time or another, been paid for their writing. That doesn’t make these people (and I’m one of them, marginally) Big Media or some such capitalistic cabal, because they’re mainly free-lancers, but it does mean that they’re able to express their ideas coherently. Dave’s Kool-Aid inspired rant against Dan Gillmor is an embarrassment to Dave’s mama, it’s so lame. And no, Mickey Kaus didn’t suddenly become a piece of dried doggy poo just because he moved his blog to somewhere within MSN. Some jealous competitors just need to get over themselves and celebrate the man’s success.

UPDATE: Gallagher wasn’t talking about Dr. Frank, but about Max Power, whose real last name is Frank. Ken thinks the Gallagher article was pretty good, even though the dude largely ignored what Ken told him over the phone and went with some more inflammatory comments from Ken’s blog a while back. It seems odd that Gallagher didn’t get the fact that the root of the conflict between Blogtopia and Blogistan is political.

Blogtopians, to the extent that they have politics, are left-wingers, generally subscribing to a doctrine of anti-Americanism that’s not far from Chomsky — fear of large businesses, belief that Colonialism caused all the Third World’s problems, distrust of the Right-Wing bias they believe is inherent in media, and belief that we have to understand the Root Causes of terrorism (American wealth and power) before we defend ourselves. The pride of ownership issue is a smokescreen, and it’s not even factually grounded. It’s a shame that Gallagher didn’t pick up on this, but he was writing for the NY Times, so he may not have been allowed to discuss it.

— Amy Langfield’s New York Notebook

Six people were arrested in South Africa over the weekend on suspicion of being involved in the infamous “Nigerian” e-mail and letter fraud.

Damn – I was counting on that $5M for my retirement.

— A writer, a weblog, her opinions: Yourish.com does a good and proper rant about reverse text blogs:

There is a really good reason why reverse type is not used in the print industry except as captions, pullquotes, and short bits of text: It is unreadable in the longer form.

This has been one of my favorite hobby horses for years: so many website designers seem to strive for unreadable sites. Coming from a typesetting background like Yourish (and yours truly), this is abomination.

Strive to set your blog apart with content, not with insane graphics (unless, like Laurence Simon, your insane graphics are part of your charm.)

— I’ve noticed an increase in Nigerian spam recently. Bienvenue sur Emmanuelle.net has the lowdown:

Merci bien, Yves. En fait, je d?couvre que l’excellent site Hoaxbuster a recens? diff?rentes arnaques africaines en fran?ais. Aux Etats-Unis, les internautes ont une certaine affection pour les messages nig?riens. Le site Snopes a rassembl? un dossier complet.

Check it out if you’re into Urban Legends. In related news, the old saw about Bill Gates giving you money if you forward junk e-mail is still around — I got it from one of my starving children yesterday.

— Doc Searls, the Linux dude, reports that Scripting News is taking dead aim on Glenn Harlan Roberts, who’s apparently been pounding his chest again about traffic:

Someday Glenn Reynolds will be shocked to find out that he’s not the darling of the bigpubs anymore, then someone else will be blustering how they made him obsolete. It won’t be any more true then than it is now.

I hate to see all this animosity between people like Winer who’re obsessed with technology, and I mean that in a good way, and people like Roberts who’re obsessed with, um, other things. But one of the inevitable, recurring developments in tech-driven media is the emergence of massive ego after an accident of history puts a good-enough guy in the right place at the right time. If there was a way to bottle that and sell it, I’d be rich.

Winer does see one benefit to the rise of technically illiterate blogs — he’s not hated quite so much by the tech crowd any more, and given that he’s actually quite bright, it’s good that techies can work with him without being too put off by his personality, or more accurately, lack thereof.

It’s inevitable that technologies leave the tech reservation as soon as they’re sufficiently useful, often to the annoyance of their creators. But the interesting development in blogging today is the emergence of what I call “cross-over bloggers.” These are the rare people literate in both tech and the fuzzy realm of politics, public policy, and culture. There was a huge increase in their visibility post-Sept. 11, and it’s pretty much a given that many such people are blogging now, or will be shortly. This promises an interesting evolution for the culture as a whole.

I suppose Eric Raymond might be considered a cross-over blogger, since he’s involved in open source software, the second amendment, and the Playboy philosophy. But given the fringe nature of his doctrines, he doesn’t rate very highly on either the tech scale or the culture scale. There are others who make a more nuanced mesh, like Steve Den Beste, Bill Quick, Bjorn Staerk, and Charles Johnson, so it’s not impossible to beat the C. P. Snow rap that tech and the humanities are separate worlds.

UPDATE: Winer and Harlan Roberts kissed and made-up on the phone, so all’s peace and love again at the antipodes of the blogosphere, not that their hassle was ever really the point.

continued yesterday on Nick Denton’s blog. I wonder why he brings this subject up over and over and over again? It’s not for the traffic, obviously.

Speaking of traffic, NZ Bear has hit upon a new way to drive traffic to your blog: post a completely ridiculous ranking of blogs, based on an allegedly objective measure; when your method is criticized, make it even worse. It’s a pretty funny exercise.