Tuesday, March 11, 2003

World Of Ends and the End Of That World There is a small text making the rounds of the net called World of Ends subtitled What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.. I have read it and I find it hopelessly naïve. It should be subtitled What the internet should be and isn't. For example, the article talks about how all the closed IM systems (MSN, AOL, Yahoo!) are less valuable than an open conterpart (like Jabber). He says that Microsoft et al should realise this. They do realise this, but they also realise that a closed system is more valuable if you control it. A dictatorship is the best of models, as long as you are the dictator. Historically technology companies have at all times paid lip service to standardization while trying to steer the market towards their own proprietary solutions. Of course, this might make a worse system for users, but it is better for the company.  A different view of the current state of the internet is offered by Jonh Perry Barlow in this interview. 11:42:42 PM    comment []

More satyre On the whole Iraq affair: The Proof of Iraq's mischief SADDAM: FOR $30 BILLION, I WILL ATTACK MYSELF Other Operation Infinite Purity The bit about it being a gateway sin is especially funny. In fact, I am have just skimmed the whitehouse.org site but it looks very good. Actually, I came to it because of a report of Cheney's attempt of shutting it down. 11:41:43 PM    comment []

Saturday, March 08, 2003

We Want Placebo Now If I could, I would write satire. I really do think that satyre gets often closer to the truth than real journalism. 6:13:50 PM    comment []

Fly UI Brilliant. I saw one of these at Amsterdam not so long ago and didn't really understand. 6:13:31 PM    comment []

Thursday, March 06, 2003

Stalin Stalin died 50 years ago today and newspapers are full of reports. Normally they touch on the view of the regime by some in the left (from the 1930s fanatism through today's often ambigous condemnation). I thought of an article I read a long time ago on the net (and which google helped me find today) which lays a good case against today's standard extreme-left view of Russia's Revolution. That view being the one which says The Revolution was good and Lenine was a good man, then came Stalin and ruined it for all, the article I speak about deals with the question of whether Stalinism was implicit in October?. 11:46:39 AM    comment []

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Which Price is Right? This is a slashdot front story and it has some interesting things in it. The following paragraph is a little gem: Monroe tells a pricing story that shows how even the simplest situation can confound accepted wisdom about prices. "A company is making two versions of the same product," says Monroe. "One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they're essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95." Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It's also the lower-profit product. "Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it's essentially the same thing, but a fancier version. And it's much higher priced: $34.95." For our original company, asks Monroe, "what becomes the best-seller? Why, the $18.95 version, of course." The slashdot discussion includes another interesting link to an article on Wal-Mart's power. It is normally known in Europe that prices here are higher across the board than in the US. The traditional explanation is higher taxes and a different employment policy, I will start adding Wal-Mart to that answer. 8:46:06 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry The above is a great article with some ideas where the telecom area may be headed. The article does point to some important ideas. First, a concentration should be expected for the telecommunication area. There will be one network: the internet. There will not be a network for telephone, another for radio, another for television, another for internet. Nothing of this is new, but it is still to be accomplished because of the the last mile problem.Another problem is that you'd always need to keep a more or less intact telecom structure for the ideas in the article (VoIP is nice except that if your IP acess is still from good old telecom they will charge you for it). Negroponte suggests that WiFi could be used in a DIY fashion where little pods communicate with eachother. It is a nice idea except that: WiFi is very broadband, but it does not have the raw power of fiber. It can sound a lot if you are thinking of reading your text email, but if start thinking of watching more than one HDTV on your home, it doesn't look as much There will be holes in the structure which must be filled by wire. A very basic example is intercontinental communication. So, you'd still need to access normal wired internet. I was thinking of having a customer built last mile. It should be the users themselves who owned and controled the piece of fibre which goes into their homes. With the exception of big companies it has always been the big corporations which controled this piece of very important wiring. Why? Because it is difficult for individual to understand the issues involved and to coordinate amoung themselves how to do this. The big companies provided this planning. In exchange they demanded money (which is Ok) and control (which is not). For the companies this created the last mile problem. I had a great example of the last mile problem some time ago. I was returning to Vienna from Lyon. I took a plane from Lyon to Amesterdam, then another to Vienna, then a bus into the city centre, then a subway to the station near my house. Where it got difficult was the small distance between the subway and my house which I had to walk. This is because it is possible to build an internation mass transport network, but users will always walk the last few metres. With telecom it is easy to build an internation fibre optic network, but how do you get it to every home? My answer is: don't. Build interface points (which need to be little more than an underground box with wires coming in and out) around the city and let everyone pay to connect there. This should be done by people themselves in a self-organised fashion. Of course, there is a need to regulate how this happens. In the same way there is legislation about everything else that goes into a building and comes out of it as well as how the several inhabitants work with themselves, add this extra point: sharing the telecom infrastructure. This does not eliminate telecom companies. On the contrary, it needs them. I just pushed the interface points from the door of my house in to the middle of the street. There the information which comes from the general network goes into the telecom network and vice-versa. I also don't eleminate telecom competition, I encourage it. Any company should be allowed to offer internet access from these points. In Europe, although the telecom market is still open to everyone, there is still no real competition because it is not easy for the new companies to overcome the complete domination that the existing monopolies enjoy over the last mile. Probably, there will be even technical solutions where some members of a building can use one ISP and others another based on incoming IP or diferent qualities of access. 8:30:25 PM    comment []

Saturday, February 22, 2003

On Copy Protected CDs Last weekend, I was at Fnac. I had sampled the new DePhazz CD through internet downloading of a few tracks and I had decided to buy it. I had picked up the CD and was walking through store when I noticed a little sticker on the cover of the CD: Copy Protected CD: plays on CD-Audio Players and MS-Windows enabled PCs. Well, since I do not have a Windows PC and often my laptop is the only CD-Playing device, it is generally useless for me that piece of plastic. Today, I was in the store listening to the new CD of Massive Attack and it had the same sticker! This leaves me the following possibilities: Changing my computer system Getting software which plays the CDs anyway in other operating system. If we take the example of DVD Region codes and DeCSS this software will be hunted by copyright-cops and is probably illegal in the USA. Getting the songs from file-sharing networks and burning myself a CD. Because, the tracks are all on Kazaa. Anyway, in one week I saved 38 € in CDs. 1:30:57 PM    comment []

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Introduction to the European Union Like its sister site slashdot.org, kuro5hin has some good stories and always very bad comments. This small introduction to the European Union is worth a read. 11:28:30 AM    comment []