Chris Anderson of Wired has a new book (Free: The Future of a Radical Price) and interesting article, Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity. Anderson points out that the price of computer processing, bandwidth, and hard-drive storage have dropped, and continue downward, such that the effective cost of providing those services are near zero. (Indeed, the billing components are more costly than the actual services.)
When your phone company tells you that your voicemail inbox is full, that’s artificial scarcity—it costs less than a nickel to store 100 voice messages, and the average iPod could store more than 100,000 of them (voice messages are recorded at lower quality than music, so they take up less space). By forcing subscribers to spend time deleting voicemails, the phone companies were saving a little on storage costs by spending a lot of consumer time. They managed the scarcity they could measure (storage) but neglected to manage a much more critical scarcity (customer goodwill). No wonder phone companies are second only to cable TV companies in “most hated” rankings.
What does this mean? Tech is really about opportunity and access, not the pipe we are limited to use. Our current national debate about broadband is about the screwdriver, not what that tool will allow us to create. That’s a significant difference. This is a debate about existing telecom and cable providers managing scarcity, as opposed to giving us access to manage our own abundance.
DRCN, Design of Reliable Communication Networks, will be held in Washington DC on Oct. 26-29, 2009. This is the group’s seventh conference, first time in the United States.
About the conference:
DRCN 2009 is a well established forum for scientists, engineers, designers and planners from industry and academia who have interests in reliability and availability of communication networks, end systems and related topics. From equipment and technology for survivability to network management and public policy, through theory and techniques for survivable and robust network and application design, the aim of the conference is to bring together people from those disciplines in a lively forum. We hope you will join us in Washington, D.C., USA during October of 2009.
At this point they’re calling for papers (limited 8 pages, to be published in IEEE Conference Proceedings) by April 1, and proposals for tutorials by May 15.
From New Scientist: Copper coated, frequency-tuned, AND lets GSM and 3G cell phone signals through…
A type of wallpaper that prevents Wi-Fi signals escaping from a building without blocking mobile phone signals has been developed by a British defence contractor. The technology is designed to stop outsiders gaining access to a secure network by using Wi-Fi networks casually set up by workers at the office.
Did I mention that you can turn the wallpaper on and off? How fashionable.
Pirates, perverts and porn. Starting with the link to a NY Times article from last week, “The Internet’s Wilder Side”, that “emphasized IRC’s notorious reputation to a generally uneducated audience,” this article posed the question of direction for the IRC. Like so many tools, IRC is helpful for making quick contact, keeping in touch (important for isolated and work-at-home projects), and otherwise being social…
‘IRC should provide a way for people to meet and talk with people around the world without leaving their homes,’ Ryan Gluesing, who goes by the handle boyeh, tells me. ‘Instead, it has evolved like the rest of the Internet, now a place full of pornography and illegal file sharing.’
Heard from your bank lately? The mail really, really looks like it’s from the bank. But do you think for one moment that the bank will feel responsible if you click on the scam email and confirm your bank details, then loose all of your funds to an outside trickster?
Typically, phishing scam e-mails appear to have been sent from the victim’s bank, and contain a link to a fake version of the bank’s Web site and instructions to log on to the site to verify their credentials with the bank.
Rob Forsyth, managing director at anti-virus vendor Sophos, believes that the techniques used by online confidence tricksters in the latest Westpac e-mail indicate the scheme is reaching new heights of sophistication.
According to Sophos the scammers have become better impostors, incorporating phrasing and wording into the email that the bank’s customers would be familiar with from previous authentic advisories it had issued such as: ‘Westpac will never ask for your personal or login details by e-mail’ — even though it then proceeds to direct the reader to do just that.
IBM has been developing a new analytical search engine that connects what people are saying, publishing, and doing. It sifts through gigabytes of web-based data to “discover patterns that even the most dedicated librarian can’t find.”
Now IBM has begun licensing the technology to create “buzz reports” for corporate clients. WebFountain scours Web logs, chat rooms, newspaper stories and every other source of information to determine whether the chatter about a new product is good or bad; is a certain rock group on the way up or a one-hit wonder?
WebFountain extracts the information to draw conclusions about associations between different people or words.
“We help you understand the data,” Gruhl says, noting that a gas-station company used the tool to discover that customers cared not only about the price of gas and free car washes, but about safety and whether they were likely to be mugged while pumping gas.”
There are some good approximations of Microsoft Office replacements (most notably Open Office), but no one has offered a revolutionary replacement to the ubiquitous office suite of programs until now.
Instead of using separate programs, everything you can do with NBOR – including features and functionality not found anywhere else – is performed in the same environment, called Blackspace, at the same time using one intuitive set of graphic tools, called Universal Tools(TM), which are based on familiar objects and ways of doing things we learned as children.
Using Universal Tools in Blackspace, you’re free to work in your own space in your own way with your own style of doing things. You are free to think and realize your own creativity in ways that have simply never been possible before. You are free from being told how you must work. You are free from windows, pull-down menus, screens filled with icons that you don’t understand, results that seem to come from out of nowhere, strict protocols that often make no sense, and rules that you can never fully remember.
The battle heats up for alternative phone services (here, VoIP). While some cable companies are surprisingly slow to change, Time Warner is ready to knock on the doors of their cable customers.
Time Warner Inc.’s cable unit announced that it has inked arrangements with Sprint and MCI to offer VOIP service to millions of cable subscribers nationwide. The arrangements with the two long-distance carriers involve long-distance traffic, operator-assisted and 911 calls and voicemail. The deals also spell a direct assault on rival cable companies angling to use the Internet to handle calls and to Baby Bells that are losing market share to the growing technology.
Israeli firm has developed a processor that uses light to perform calculations–8 trillion arithmetic operations per second! Not expected to be seen in home computers any time soon, however.
He believes EnLight will be useful across a broad range of applications, from military projects to compressing high definition video images. Sariel acknowledges that Enlight ‘is not a general purpose processor like a Pentium’. Instead, each processor will be custom-built to perform a specific set of tasks, and will not be programmable.
Much research has been done to try to exploit the much faster speed at which light travels compared to electronic signals, but most commercial work in this area has focused mainly on optical interfaces. These devices allow fibre optic and related systems to communicate with traditional electronic systems.
A civil liberties watchdog group is expressing concern over the San Francisco Public Library’s plans to track books by inserting computer chips into each tome.
They say the chips will be deactivated when they leave the library so as to prevent outside tracking, but EFF (the civil liberties group mentioned above) is concerned that reactivation will be the next social challenge. Then what happens?
Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings. — Walt Disney
