Richard Bennett

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.

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.