Monthly Archives: December 2004

Don’t forget about spectrum, Dave.

Dave tells Doc Searls to “forget about spectrum” saying that its “such a 20th Centurey concept, that in the age of podcasting, spectrum is infinite and costs $35 a year from Network Solutions.”

Dave seems to be forgetting that transit for those podcasts, especially the last mile, isn’t necessarily a sure thing. Companies are jockying for control of the internet infrastructure, and they aren’t all believers in transparent networks. Some of them want to set rates depending on the value of the payload, rather than just its size, just as the railroads set different rates for iron ore vs finished goods.

The mobile phone companies already do it. The rates they charge for SMS is much higher per bit than they charge for voice, and they are already working to control the endpoints by making it difficult to access any content or applications that they don’t get a kickback on.

More open spectrum makes it practical for people to continue to route around such damaged pieces of the Internet infrastructure and can only help insure vital grassroots movements like Podcasting.

Allocating more open spectrum, and encouraging technologies and policies that treat spectrum use as something other than a zero-sum game should be paid attention to, and can only help us get away from bottlenecks on expression.

Christmas Trees, the lurking evil

This morning NPR and the TV News carried a story that Federal authorities in the United States are concerned that terrorists might be planning to use lasers crash airliners by blinding their crews during landings. The stories mention a case where a Delta pilot reported eye damage while being exposed to a laser beam while landing in Salt Lake City.

More distressing is what the reports dont contain. It’s well known in some circles that terrors have designs on using weather control to wreak havoc on our nation. Others are working on animal mind control to turn our pets against us.

However the greatest risk during the Christmas season, when most God-fearing households in the nation bring pine and fir trees into their homes, is plant control.

In the early 1990s, Ben Edlund produced a documentary showing successful efforts of a shadowy figure he called El Seed, to corrupt vegetation into a ruthless army of destruction.

The documentary ended with the defeat of the plant army at the hands of US friendly forces, but El Seed’s whereabouts were unknown. Now, US officials now believe that El Seed is traveling under the name of Al Sayed, and has been mentioned in numerous Al Qaeda intercepts. They believe he has been perfecting a new, more robust, technique of plant control in the desert climate of the Middle East, and is now prepared to unleash the lush vegetation we’ve invited into our living rooms upon us.

Administration officials are at loose ends on how to thwart the attack without causing a widespread panic which could ruin the Christmas shopping season and wreak catastrophe among major Republican contributors like Hallmark, Wall Mart, Target, Circuit City, and 3M, who makes the Scotch-brand tape used to seal the wrappings on 89% of Christmas presents during the holiday season.

Hauppage MediaMVP

As I mentioned earlier, I’m looking to replace my livingroom PC with something cheaper, quieter and more compact, which will still let me play back dowloaded video and, ideally, control my PC based PVR software.

The first thing I looked at was the Hauppage MediaMVP. I’ve had my eyes on this device for a while because it was relatively cheap (less than $100) and had an SDK, which created the potential for people to create software to use it as the front end for PC based media applications.

Sure enough, there is now a plug-in that allows people to use the MediaMVP as a front-end to most of the features of SageTV. Very cool. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t support MPEG4 encoded videos natively. Hauppage provides PC side software to transcode on-the fly, but image quality suffers, plus, its a kludge. Furthermore, the SageTV plugin doesn’t support any sort of transcoding.

In the long run, I hope that Hauppage will start using a chip that supports MPEG4 natively, which seems possible, given how MPEG4 support is finding its way into more and more cheap DVD players.

For now though, I’m going to have to keep looking.

Livingroom Computing









So, I’m launching a blog category to document my investigations.

Slapnose: The next Einstein…

Noting that the Congress cut funding for the National Science Foundation at the same time it increased funding for abstinence education, and found more money for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Anthony comments that “the next Einstein is not likely to be an American.”

Of course, the last Einstein wasn’t exactly an American either. But that only illustrates a larger point: Not only did the US benefit from providing the support necessary to train the best and brightest of our native born to be the scientific, technical and industrial leaders of tomorrow. We also benefitted greatly by attracting the best and brightest from other countries fleeing mediocre institutions and oppressive governments.

How much longer is that going to last with Bush and his kind diverting money from programs like the NSF, which among other things, really helped make the Internet mainstream by funding internet availability to all undergrads in the early 90s, in order to fund mis-guided and mis-managed wars, and in order to pour tax dollars into the coffers of fundamentalist pig-brained religious organizations?