June 18, 2004
WTFone?
I've spent much of the last 24 hours trying to figure exactly what was causing my IBM ThinkPad T-40, with its 802.11a/b/g card, to hook up with any of four Wi-Fi access points detectable from my desk (three here and one next door), and yet to exchange no data whatsoever. Oddly, it worked yesterday when a techie friend improved it; but when it got back on my desk the suckage set back in.
Then tonight I showed my seven-year old boy KStars, and a mess of cool stuff on the Web, through the Netgear Wi-Fi access point that sits beside his bed (near an Ethernet outlet patched through to the hub in the wiring closet). Everything worked perfectly. But back on my desk: suckage again.
Then I looked at my desk phone, a Panasonic KX-TG4000B, and saw it has an antenna: it's wireless too. Then I looked in the manual and saw it bragged about being a 2.4 GHz system. Then I moved the laptop a few feet away, and it worked fine.
At the Panasonic site for the unit, there is a popup window that appears when you click on the "(FHSS) Frequency Hopping Digital Spread Spectrum" (it's linkproof). The text says, "This system randomly changes transmission frequency several times per second without causing cross-talk, enabling the use of multiple handsets. FHSS technology also enhances security due to the changing of frequencies." Well, whatever it does, you don't want a wireless laptop next to it.
Posted by dsearls at 03:58 AM | TrackBack
June 17, 2004
Putting the Public in Radio
My post about radio yesterday spawned more conversations that make me think that audio is a simple network service. And that's what it will be in the long run, when what we call "radio" today will be an anachronism, like steam ships and flintlock rifles.
I just got off the phone with Doug Kaye, whose collection of IT Conversations only gets better and better. (Not sure if the conversatoin he just recorded wth me will advance that trend, but we'll see.) The last thing Doug and I talked about was our common background in radio. Doug was at KALX at Berkeley when it was a 15-watt FM campus station that also broadcast through the dorms on what was called "carrier current" transmission on the AM band. With carrier current, the electrical system of the building serves as an antenna. I imagined that lots of these transmitters must still in the basements of dorms across America. Then I remembered the name of the company that made most of them: LPB, for Low Power Broadcasting. I just looked on the Web and, sure enough, they're still alive, selling transmitters. Amazing.
Anyway, on a less than entirely unrelated matter, Big Rick takes exception to KQED/88.5, the giant public radio station in San Francisco, horning in on the turf of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, which operates two stations there, KXJZ/88.9 and KXPR/90.9 (plus two others in Groveland and Tahoe City). Public radio tends to be a college thing, or a regional thing. NPR and PRI may be national program sources, but "NPR stations" are not run by NPR. They're run by local outfits like KQED and CPR.
So anyway, KQED, which is the most popular public radio station in the country, reaching over 745,000 listeners per week, and which is grandfathered with a way-above-the-limit 110,000 watt transmitter atop Mt. San Bruno (giving it the biggest FM signal, by far, in Northern California, and quite audible in Sacramento) went and bought a small FM in North Highlands, a Sacramento suburb, renamed it KQEI, and began simulcasting from there. KQEI's signal isnt' the equal of KXPR or KXJZ, but it's big enough.
The whole move was, like, very not done in public radio. It violated the collegial spirit behind the implicit territoriality of the nonprofits that own the stations.
Rick's problem is with a lack of original local programming. Why have yet another station broadcasting All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Car Talk and the rest of the standard lineup of national shows? Well, because they're popular, and help raise the money that ends up paying for them. Call the cycle vicious or virtuous, it's still a cycle. And, after 25 years or whatever, it's getting old.
What's new is public stations buying other public stations. KQED paid $3 million in a sealed bid for the station, beating Capital Public Radio's offer. The station had been KEBR, one of many owned by Family Radio, a worldwide religious broadcaster in Oakland, CA. Family Radio continues to serve large regions from its flagship station, KEAR, plus a huge portfolio of other stations and translaors (which rebroadcast originating stations on other channels). It According to this story from February, 2003, KQED is committed both to expansion and to local programming on KQEI. We'll see about the latter. About the former, public radio stations have been eating the dust of religious broadcasters for a long time.
Only in the last few years have public broadcasters like KQED become hip to the possibility of what can be done with translators, for instance. They're a great way for noncommercial stations to broadcast outside their home coverage areas (commercial stations are not allowed the same privilege). Unfortunately for public radio, most translator possibilities have been discovered and squatted upon by religious broadcasters, which are far more resourceful about low-budget engineering. There are also opportunities on AM, especially for a station like KQED, which broadcasts mostly spoken programming. Look at KEBR, for example. Family Radio remains on the air in Sacramento on 1210 AM with 5000 watts by day and 500 at night, using two different transmitters. AM stations sell cheap these days.
Public radio broadcasters could leapfrog religious broadcasters (and commercial broadcasters too) by moving into an area where channels aren't scarce and competition isn't a zero-sum game: the Internet. They can do this two ways: 1) by broadcasting in MP3, which is the only popular open format; and 2) by pioneering the use of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a perfect companion for information radio, because it infoms listeners, or devices that serve listeners, or software on those devices, about the content of broadcast programs. And since countless blogs and other journals are in positions to serve as sources of broadcast information — to be stringers, as it were — information stations like KQED could obtain a torrent of local and timely material from out in the listeners' world.
As Feedster's Scott Rafer tells Harold Check in therssweblog, "In aggregate, what RSS covers out there is much closer to accurate, not in the individual posting, but overall, than any single news outlet going to be." So why not aggregate RSS feeds? Why not become a clearing house inside a new broadcast regime in which anybody can send out signals (which, in a way, RSS notifications are) to anybody?
Craig Burton has been saying for a long time that it's better to concieve of the Internet as a collection of services, than as a system of pipes and protocols. What kinds of services does "public" radio provide? Don't just ask listeners. Listen to what they're saying, out loud, through their own RSS feeds.
Posted by dsearls at 11:10 AM | TrackBack
June 15, 2004
Foxy browser
I started playing around with FireFox. Now I'm hooked. It rocks on Linux and OS X. I haven't tried it on Windows yet (which I have, as a dual-boot on an IBM T-40 laptop — Emperor Linux's Toucan), but I'm sure it's fine there too.
One of the ironies of the browser "business" is that it was ephemeral at best. True, Netscape collected an income for awhile as a harvest of good will toward a company that users (many of whom wanted to be customers) genuinely loved. It sold its browser (called Navigator, at least for awhile — I forget) on the public broadcasting model. You could also get it for free, but they preferred that you pay for it. When Microsoft nuked that model by giving Internet Explorer away, and making the browser better than Netscape's, the business was gone. My pricing away its business competition, Microsoft also removed a primary incentive to improve the browser.
Now we're seeing the same thing with Apple and Safari. When Apple came out with a free open source-based Safari, Microsoft saw a familiar strategy and had no taste for playing the Netscape role in a game Microsoft invented. So it dropped work on the next-generation IE for OS X. I know people who worked on that browser and said it was going to be a killer product — one that leapfrogged Microsoft's Windows offering (there's your intra-company competition). But alas, OS X users are stuck with a now-ancient (and terminal) version of Internet Explorer. And Safari has improved little since it was introduced in January 2003.
Meanwhile, Mozilla, open sourced by Netscape in Spring of 1998 continues to improve, now as the lean and mean FireFox (which also has a killer logo, methinks).
Okay, I just rebooted the T-40 into Windows and installed Firefox there too. It looks great and runs fast. I just went to IT Conversations and started listening to recordings there, and it works fine. So much for the torture test.
And now I'm back in Linux, where Firefox is very much at home doing the same things. Nice.
So, an appreciation to the folks there. Where pure business motivations fail, it's nice to depend on the hackers, scratching everybody's market itch, to get the job done.
I'll be reporting at greater length on Firefox, and the differences between laptop platforms, at Linux Journal soon.
Posted by dsearls at 09:42 PM | TrackBack
Radio means business
When I spent some time in the Washington D.C. area this Spring, I found the most compelling stuff on the radio wasn't talk, or sports, or news, or even my usual morning favorites, NPR and Howard Stern. It was WCSP, better known as C-SPAN radio. In other words, the station I liked best on radio was one I skip right past when I'm channel-surfing on television. Interesting, no?
I said yesterday I'd talk more about network services. What we're seeing here, I think, is a difference between the information service we call radio and the entertainment service we call television. I could go into that a little deeper, but I think the implications cover the matter pretty well.
Now let's compare broadcast radio with the online variety. Obviously, online radio hasn't evolved to the point where you can get it in your car. (Although I recently found that I could stay with a broadcast from the excellent Radio Paradise while driving a couple of blocks in Los Altos, California — I suppose because buffering masked the transitions from one hot spot to another, of which there are plenty in this upscale Silicon valley town.) So business leads the list (with 30.1%) of elsewheres that people, according to this survey by the RRadio Network. Misc. comes in second (22.1%) and , and "just listening" come in third third (18.1%).
Many years ago, Larry Josephson, the best morning radio personality in human history, told me "radio is personal," adding "that's it." Maybe, now that online radio is at least real enough to survey, it will finally succeed where broadcast radio has failed its original but rarely acknowledged mission.
Posted by dsearls at 03:41 PM | TrackBack
June 14, 2004
Deep perspective
Got an email this morning asking if my interest in geology had ever drawn me to Frenchman Mountain, over which the Sun rises, east of Las Vegas. Truth is, I hadn't noticed much more than the fact that Frenchman Mountain is there.
What's unusual about Frenchman Mountain, it turns out, is its exposure of The Great Unconformity, which is the boundary between the often pretty layered sandstones that make up so much of the West's dramatic landscapes — especially its brightly colored canyons and rock formations — and the much older and mostly dark basement rocks on which they began layering about 550 million years ago. The basement rocks are upwards of 1.7 billion years old. Even though in most expsures they were beveled almost flat by erosion long before the first extant sedimentary layers were deposited, these basement rocks are what remains of old mountain ranges about which relatively little is known. These are the same basement rocks exposed as Vishnu schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and elevated as many of the mountain ranges and peaks of Colorado.
An unconformity is a zero where history used to be. It's many volumes of history that have long since been lost forever.
There used t be a program on TV called Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (woops, turns out there still is). In it the host, Marlon Perkins, would always compare something in wild nature to the benefits of Mutual of Omaha insurance. Just as the nutcrested bloodwrench protects her chicks from predators, Mutual of Omaha protects its clients from unfortunate but unpredicable events in everyday life... So, in the manner of Marlon, I'm about to use geology as a metaphor for computing history.
Because, while all of computing history is known to us, we sometimes act like it isn't. By which, I mean, we forget.
So I'll bring back to our collective attention two foundational developments in our industry that have largely been forgotten.
The first is when Ethernet father Bob Metcalfe convinced Xerox (which owned the Ethernet patent), Digital Equipment Corp. and Intel to release Ethernet to the world as an essentially free standard. (It was more complicated than that, I know, but let's not digress more than I am already.) This allowed Bob to make his business bones with 3Com, and for Ethernet to serve as the most useful and ubiquitous base networking protocol. What mattered here was the freeing of Ethernet, which allowed countless companies to make money selling stuff that used Ethernet, rather than by selling Ethernet itself. The unconformity here continues to reveal itself every time somebody asks how it's possible to make money selling something universally useful (the Internet, Linux, Python, USB, whatever) that's free.
The second is when Craig Burton and others at Novell saw the potential for selling networks as services, rather than as "pipes and protocols." That was the genius of Netware, which began by providing file and print services over anybody's hardware and software, finishing a job that Metcalfe started, which was discrediting the belief that the networked world needed to be a skyline of self-contained silos built on foundations of proprietary networks and operating systems that, like everything above that depended on them, barely interoperated with anything outside themselves.
I believe right now we're on the threshold of finally coming to a full understanding of A) why free stuff creates and sustains whole markets; and B) that what we call the Internet is actually a growing collection of ubiquitous available services, each based on an idea, a standard or a technology that is essentially free.
In a less wordy way, I'll use my guest time here at the Standard to talk about that, and point to other people and places that say all this stuff better than I.