More ronks Broadband Growth Slows A recent study by InStat/MDR says that while the number of US businesses and households with high-speed Internet access rose 50 percent this year, they expect the increase to taper off sharply: to 38% in 2003, then 23%, and down into the teens in 2005. Presently about one-sixth of American households have broadband, though 70% are able to get it; about 2/3 of the 15 million subscribers use cable modems, and the rest DSL with a small fraction using other means such as satellite. The cost ($40-50 per month) is viewed as the throttling factor; 28% of homes with incomes over $100,000 have it, but only 4% of those making less than $35,000. At the projected rates the story says less than a third of households will have broadband by 2006, casting doubt on AOL's plan to grow by offering premium content to them.

Fight Spam With Haiku Two companies are trying to create the electronic equivalent of certified mail, by striking deals with senders who agree to use their service only for good and with recipients' access providers to let the post through on faith. One company, Habeas of Palo Alto, sells a haiku poem to a sender for $200, plus a half-cent per message. The poem is embedded in the e-mail, and Habeas claims it has deals with AOL, Yahoo, and 18 others not to block such mail. Habeas says it will sue any sender who uses its poems outside of its license, which requires the licensee only send such missives to those who have agreed to receive them. (BTW another article in the paper titled "Enter Maze and Find The Opt-Out Cheese" notes that to tell mp3.com you don't want mail from them or their "partner product announcements" you have to click through 21 separate Web pages, which gives an expansive meaning to the term "agree to receive".) IronPort of San Bruno requires a similar contract with senders, and likewise negotiates with access providers to give its mail a free pass, though without poetry. The fee is not specified, but the penalties for violation are: 50 cents each for the first ten complaints, rising to a buck each for the next ten, on up to $1,000 per message. Since they do no checking, a vindictive recipient could just generate a flood of complaints, which seems to be a weak spot in the plan. IronPort says it has agreements with 700 access providers, but no big ones yet. Of course neither company's strategy addresses the zillions of real spammers offering Nigerian gold or big organs, and it's unclear how many virtuous senders will sign up to pay to do what they do for free now. Wee Circuit IBM says it has designed, and perhaps built, a transistor circuit less than one-tenth the size of the smallest transistor available today. It's nine nanometers in length; by comparison the infamous Average Human Hair is over 3,000 nanometers in diameter and could store several CPUs if you never shampooed. The Next Big Bubble? Many venture capital firms are still licking their wounds over the collapse of the dot-com industry. But some with either less scar tissue or shorter memories are rushing to fund tiny companies with weird names in the latest hot field: Wi-Fi. Although some analysts caution that the technology "is unlikely to represent more than a tiny fraction of the overall telecomm market", businesses like Boingo, Buffalo, Dlink, FatPort, HereUAre, and Surf And Sip are already lining up at the trough. from ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd. Thanks again!

Combo Phones A Drag Nokia reports lower current and anticipated sales, largely due to less than expected demand for its newer, fancier, higher-margin cell phones with cameras, color viewing screens, Web browsers, and other doodads. In what is described as a "worrying trend for the mobile phone industry", customers in areas like Africa, China, and Latin America are said to prefer cell phones they just use for, you know, talking, when the leaders of the industry want them to spend their food money on pocket mainframes. How perverse. The Unsold-Inventory Beowulf Gateway Computer has developed a new version of the "if you have lemons, make lemonade" adage. With eight calendar quarters in a row of declining sales they have a lot of PCs sitting on their shelves. So they are linking 8000 of them into a networked Beowulf-type supercomputer and renting out the claimed 14 trillion teraflop system to businesses who submit job requests and pick up output just like the old days of batch processing, except this time around it's done over the Internet instead of a counter. Noisy Refrigerator Developed This does not at first sound (so to speak) like much of an advance, especially when the unit is said to produce a volume level of around 173 decibels, which is considered pretty awesome acoustics. By way of comparison, the sound level right up next to the speakers at a rock concert is given as ~120 decibels, into the threshold of pain unless one's mental capacity has been sufficiently numbed by consumption of pre-concert anesthetics. And the story says a level of 165 decibels would cause your hair to catch fire. So far this is not a terribly useful advance. However the refrigerator research at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by Ben & Jerry's, actually uses the sound to cool the unit with compression waves that drive metal plates attached to heat exchangers, without Freon and other CFC gases blamed for global warming which is bad for ice cream and other living things. One has even been tested on the space shuttle, where presumably the noise is unlikely to disturb the neighbors. The systems as developed are designed to confine the hubbub to the interior cooling chamber without escaping even when the door is opened, and with fewer moving mechanical parts they may be more reliable than today's standard models. Big EDS-BofA Deal The Bank of America has agreed to a 10-year, $4.5 billion contract for Electronic Data Systems to provide services to "transform" the bank's voice and data networks. Also to be transformed are 1,000 BofA employees who will be turned into EDS staff. Froogle Test Site Opens Search firm Google presently allows ads to appear next to its "real" results; now it's getting deeper into commerce with a novel sort of shopping engine at . It will show pictures of the sought product and prices for it at different sites. Sellers don't pay for placement or for click-through purchases; instead Google plans to sell ads on Froogle (this is starting to sound like baby-talk; if they ever join up with Boingo I fear for the language) the same way as on their main site. Some analysts are concerned the company may be heading for a collision with customers like AOL and Yahoo, but Google may be looking to broaden its service in preparation for a Google-Froogle IPO oobie doobie next year. http://google.blogspace.com/ WiFi On The Radar The Department of Defense has floated a proposal to restrict expansion of the "unlicensed spectrum" (frequencies that can be used without a specific permit) in the 5 GHz range, claiming it may interfere with radar. The issue if raised formally would be decided at the World Administrative Radio Conference next June in Geneva where analysts say it would lose, since that band is already used internationally without ill effects and American industry is lobbying heavily against it. With 16 million WiFi devices already in use and Intel planning to equip all its new mobile processors with wireless capability, the technology is seen as a potential savior of the sagging tech industry but vulnerable to limits on its expansion. A technique called Dynamic Frequency Selection exists to enable transmitters to avoid interference with other sources, but the Pentagon wants it beefed up to such a degree of sensitivity that companies say it may no longer work. The Pentagon's insistence on pressing ahead alone with its proposal seems to rub many in the international regulatory community the wrong way and could doom it regardless of the merits. Thanks Ron (ronks) Sipherd again. y.

Vox Populi Once upon a time the Internet was the province of academics and intellectuals who filled it with talk about, oh academic and intellectual stuff I suppose. Now one of the most popular sites is called Yahoo, and just try asking them if they have a counterpart called Houyhnhnm. (BTW I was just reading that the term "yahoo" is "compounded from two expressions of disgust, 'yah' and 'ugh' (or 'hoo') common in the eighteenth century"; now we know.) Anyway, Yahoo the Portal Of Disgust has just named the top Web pages in Britain and Ireland, "selected by a panel of expert surfers". They include PoppedClogs.com with novel obituaries of dead celebrities, the Wallace & Gromit animations site, animation site RatherGood.com, "a site dedicated to watching the recovery of a sick cat", and IUsedtoBelieve.com which lists things that people, well, used to believe when they were kids. If only Swift were alive today, what material for a sequel to Gulliver. IP Phoning Grows A recent survey says that over 10% of all international telephone traffic last year went over the Internet instead of through traditional circuit- switched phone companies. That totaled 18 billion minutes, up from less than 10 billion in 2001. Much of the volume was generated by phone-card companies who route their long-distance business over the Net, but cable TV providers (who presently have 2.1 million US local-dial voice customers) are expected to jump into the act in a big way in the next few years. Microsoft On The Move Again The company is expected to license its Windows Media Player audio and video technology to makers of consumer-electronics devices like CD and DVD players at substantially lower prices than rivals such as MPEG 4 and probably Real Player. Offering it below cost to drive out rivals would constitute "predatory pricing" especially when done by a monopolist; it will be interesting to see if MS rivals call them on it. Speaking of monopolies, MS and its ally the DOJ jointly oppose an appeal of the recent trial-court ruling in its antitrust case. The Software Industry Association and the Computer And Communication Industry Association have requested appellate review; the two new buddies oppose having to "endure further proceedings". IBM Gets Away From Hardware Moving to what an analyst calls a "focus on design and customer service" in place of boring old computer making, IBM has already sold off its disk drive business to Hitachi in a phased deal; a story in Monday's paper describes how IBM lost its edge there when it sent its disk R&D offshore from San Jose to Japan, and let rivals take the lead. It has also let a $5 billion contract to Sanmina-SCI to make its NetVista PCs. Now it's in a second deal for about $4 B with Sanmina to make servers, notebooks, and other desktop PCs. Unlike say Dell, IBM seems unable to make much money in the PC business with an estimated $10 million pre-tax profit on $11 billion sales. Apple Gets Away From Microsoft Or at least takes some steps in that direction, with its own free Web browser called Safari based on open-source software (Mozilla maybe?) and a $99 rival to PowerPoint called Keynote. Chairman, co-founder, CEO, chief salesman and who knows what else Steve Jobs also revealed to rapt Macworld attendees two new laptop models (with 17 and 12 inch screens) and declared that over a third of Apple computers to be shipped this year would be laptops, though analysts are skeptical that the company can make much headway against Wintel portables selling for up to $1000 less. Apple is also an object of some unwanted buzz over its patent application #20030002246 for a computer that changes color with a rainbow of LEDs on its "computing device active enclosure", described by one writer as a sort of desktop mood ring. The problem is that Apple was recently working with another company called Color Kinetics on the same concept, but backed out of a deal with it just before committing to anything; Color Kinetics has also filed a patent application (#20020113555), for "self-illuminated consumer devices" including computers. DeCSS Creator Acquitted in Norway A couple of years ago Jon Johansen of Oslo found he couldn't play his legally acquired DVD movie disks on his Linux system because decoding software didn't exist for Linux. So he wrote some, called DeCSS, to unlock the security codes that prevent copying and other access. The Motion Picture Association filed a complaint in Norway accusing him of pirating and facilitating piracy by defeating the locks. A Norwegian panel consisting of a judge and two technical experts has just ruled that Mr. Johansen's development, use, and distribution of the software did not violate the law, and that "someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film" on whatever system he wishes. Thanks Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com

Microsoft Goes Open-Source Ha ha, got your attention with that one. Actually it's true but in a very limited sense; to take advantage of it you have to be somebody like NATO or a national government. Under the new Government Security Program they can view 97 percent of the source code for Windows in the comfort of their bunkers; for the remaining super-secret 3% (the Clippy drivers, maybe) they have to go to Redmond. Microsoft will also let them use their own crypto and security code via API sockets direct to the operating system. The story says it suggests that MS is taking notice of the threat from Linux and GNU, as countries like China and Germany promote its use and emphasize its transparency. With "Microsoft security" seen as a self-contradiction on the order of "giant dwarf" or "military justice", and rumors spreading that their software includes secret back doors to permit wiretapping by the FBI or whoever, the company seems to be responding by inviting skeptical biggies to see for themselves. Of course, whether the source they will see matches the executables is another matter... In any case, this program seems to be just an expansion (or maybe only a public announcement) of earlier programs; some major customers including the US have already had a degree of access to MS source code for years as I understand. Record Companies Break With Hollywood Until recently, there were two camps battling over ways to prevent copying of copyrighted media: hardware and software makers on one side arguing that technological barricades like preventer chips would not work long-term, would make devices cost more and would slow the pace of development. And on the other, music publishers and movie makers ranting about piracy. But the music industry had a different kind of fight on its hands, since it has already faced what may be its worst threats in the form of Napster and its progeny; while the movie business with its vastly greater bandwidth and file storage requirements, and the upcoming move to digital TV, looks toward a future threat. Anyway the music biz in the form of RIAA has reached a sort of separate peace with the tech industry in the form of a loose agreement that one side will stop demanding laws to require anti-copying components in PCs and players, and the other will drop support for proposed amendments to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act which would expand the rights of end users. The agreement is so loose that Intel says it still supports the amendments but will maybe do so more quietly now, and some consumer- electronics makers say they will press on. The main effect may be to make it harder for Jack Valenti and the movie industry to muster support for more restrictive laws since one of their main allies has shown the white flag. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com for allwoing us to reprint these awesome observations of yours. I hope someones reading it!

The Penguin And The Crystal Ball As Linux World (opening this week in New York) becomes more of a confab for suits than open-source revolutionaries, articles are appearing on the future of the free operating system. Not so much for the user desktop, still owned by The Giant Of Redmond and The Feisty Midget Of Cupertino, but for servers and other back-office operations. The consensus seems to be that Linux is a credible competitor and serious threat in the short term to proprietary Unix versions as represented by H-P, IBM, and Sun; in fact both H-P and IBM are promoting Linux on their hardware at the expense of their own brand's OS which they may drop in time. Sun is seen as too tied to Solaris to abandon it and may be most at risk from the Linux trend. Online broker E*Trade for example says it explored Linux two years ago but found it initially "too risky"; then when it saw H-P and IBM moving there it recanted and converted about 2/3 of its data center to $4000 Intel/Linux machines from $200,000 Sun systems. Its chief technology officer claims the company saved $13 million in expenses last year alone from the move, though it has not yet gambled on moving its crown jewels - the customer and trading databases - over. Probably because of the cost of converting apps, a concern everywhere, which leads some to speculate the movement will be gradual and associated with new ventures. To sum up, a Goldman Sachs report titled "Fear The Penguin" concludes "All of Unix is more at risk than Microsoft's Windows in the next few years. But what is really at risk is the concept of a proprietary operating system. And that has to affect Microsoft." Non-Instant Non-Messages A recent study by Keynote Systems of San Mateo says that 7.5 percent of text messages sent via cellphone were not received within 2 minutes, and 5% never got to the recipient at all. Unplugged Colleges A series of surveys over the last 3 1/2 years shows the percentage of full- time college students with cellphones rose from 29 to 70, and at Columbia University where traditional long-distance service is centralized, revenue has fallen by half since 2001. As a result some places are throwing in the towel, yanking the cord, [insert metaphor of choice here], and removing wired phones for student and faculty use entirely from their buildings. ronks thank you!

c Multipath For Higher Bandwidth Most city dwellers are familiar with multipath distortion; the muddling of radio and TV signals as they bounce off buildings on their way to the receiver, leading to ghosts and echoes. Bell Labs researchers have found a way to use multipath for higher transmission speeds to wireless devices. Called "Blast", the technology grew out of a review of bandwidth limits in the writings of telecomm pioneer Claude Shannon. The reviewers noticed that his studies all presumed a single transmitter and receiver; to generalize the theory they tested dividing the data into multiple streams (sounds a bit like packet switching) that were picked up by antenna arrays and reassembled at the destination. To their surprise, they discovered that reflections of the waves actually improved the capacity of the system, apparently by creating additional temporary virtual transmitting antennas. Prototypes of Blast chips have been demonstrated running over 3rd-generation (3G) wireless networks at 19.2 megabits a second, close to 8 times faster than the present limit of 2.5 Mbits/sec. The limiting factors are (1) the need to space the antennas at least half a wavelength apart, not a major hurdle at the high frequencies used by cell phones and PDAs, and (2) the processing power - and electrical power - required to reassemble the incoming signal, which becomes hard to fit in a handheld device for more than four streams. Another concern is the slow adoption of 3G nets in the United States, which are essential for Blast; but once they are deployed, only the base stations and handhelds need to be modified for Blast. Of course, finding people outside New York City who can talk at 19 megabits/second may be a challenge.. Freedom Of Expression On Trial Literally. An Iowa professor named Kembrew McLeod says he registered trademark rights on the phrase "freedom of expression" in 1998 and is threatening to sue AT&T for using it in ads that offer free long-distance calls as a bonus for signing up with them. 54-Gigabyte DVDs On The Horizon A new technology called "Blu-ray" sponsored by a consortium including Hitachi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony and others uses the shorter wavelength of blue-violet lasers to store data at higher densities on an DVD-type disk. It is said to have the potential of holding more than 11 times the data of today's 4.7-gigabyte DVD disks, and is presently targeted at high-definition TV video. One such disk could hold two hours of HDTV, or 13 hours of standard video, and who knows how many copies of the Library of Congress. The units may become first available in 2004, and in affordable quantities three or four years later. To Pursue Personal Interests The co-founder of Broadcom, Henry T. Nicholas III, is described as "a man of large appetites" who "bragged about his all-night drinking parties, had a 15,000 square foot estate, a Lamborghini Diablo Roadster and kept a personal trainer on 24-hour call". Broadcom makes specialized communications processor chips for cable modems, TV set-top boxes, servers and the like; its stock has declined from $273 a share 29 months ago to a recent low of less than $15. He abruptly announced during an telephone earnings report conference this week that he is leaving the company to pursue his divorce full-time. Work can be such a distraction... Signs Of Hope Disk storage manufacturer EMC reported a slight upturn in sales; combined with positive results from rivals Storage Technology and McData, some analysts see a mild rebound in IT spending this year. EMC quarterly sales were actually down 2 percent from a year ago, but rose 18% from the previous quarter; it lost $70 million net, but excluding one-time restructuring charges it showed an operating profit of $53 M. More Signs Of Hope In a rare display of bipartisan unity, the US Senate unanimously approved limits on the government's Total Awareness Project that would bar it from "scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial, and travel companies here and abroad". Least Important Fact Of The Week The CEO of Amazon.com announced that since his company began offering apparel last November, it has sold 31,000 pairs of underwear and that "briefs outsold boxers but not by a statistically significant amount." Now we know. iThank you Mr. Ron Sipherd for the great news feed!!!!!

ronks The Next Big Thing, Chapter MDCCCLXVIII Venture capitalists, start your wallets: "Web Services" is hot. For some reason this is said to be symbolized by the fact that Microsoft just changed the name of its upcoming product from Windows .Net Server 2003 to plain Windows Server 2003, though they say it's only a clarification. Anyway, the battle lines are forming for what vendors think will be a major upheaval in how people and businesses use their computers, emphasizing machine-to- machine transactions. On the home side, the concepts sound a little silly and like a Web version of "Modern Times": somebody's computer negotiates unaided with his doctor's computer to set up an appointment (probably 3 AM on a Sunday when the largest block of free time is available on both sides), or the dutiful child's PC orders flowers for Mother's Day every year regardless of her demise. Businesses though may have an actual use for it to handle back-office stuff like inventory management and claim processing. In hopes they do, Microsoft is moving to link it all to Windows; the other side, basically everybody with IBM Websphere in the lead, is striving for a more neutral concept of middleware based largely on Java that would defeat the MS strategy to lock in customers to one line of software and run on a variety of operating systems. Walk This Way Researchers at Georgia Tech and England's University of Southampton are testing ways to identify individuals by their gait, or distinctive way of walking. For example they have determined that "women sway their hips more than men", a fact evidently unknown heretofore. While security types are interested in using it as a potential means of spotting bad guys (and hip- swinging bad women presumably too), the technology has a ways to go. For one thing, at present it requires that the suspect first be recorded walking through a lab while wearing metallic sensors on his butt, and even then he can only be spotted if he is observed solo and not in a crowd. And it appears the system can be fooled by adopting a different gait such as springing into the air every three steps, though a person seeking to avoid notice may prefer something more subtle. Remarkably the BBC story at does not once mention John Cleese and his Ministry Of Silly Walks. Sims Bore Game maker Electronic Arts is in general having a good year: Harry Potter, NFL football, Lord Of The Rings, and something called Medal Of Honor Frontline added to an overall total of over a million sales in the last quarter. But their most highly publicized effort, Sims Online, in which people pay $40 upfront and $10 a month to chat and carry on with other subscribers in real time, seems to be a dud with only 82,000 members. Reviews from users have not been good. One posted on Amazon that she was "bored to tears", and while she tried "leaving the game running while I went off to do other things around the house" to see if something interesting would happen while she was away, she eventually went back to her offline version after concluding the online form "has all the fun of watching your screen saver". The Last Big Thing Coffin salesmen are going online, after some initial hesitation and despite some states' laws that restrict sales to licensed funeral homes. Memorial Concepts Online and Funeral Depot (I am not making this up) offer theme coffins, such as one with an auto racing motif and another "done up like a special-delivery package and stamped 'Return To Sender'". ronks

Thanks again, Ron Sipherd, ronks@well.com for the good stuff. Electropants According to Dr. Michael Shur of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "The clothing we wear doesn't contain electronic elements." Besides physics, he appears to specialize in Discovery Of The Blindingly Obvious; anyway, this is changing as companies like DuPont makes yarn with conductive fibers, and even a metallic form of bulletproof Kevlar called Aracon. First applications have been in the military, where a shirt can function as a less conspicuous and more convenient radio antenna, and bulletproof garments come in handy. Civilian uses seem a bit more of a stretch (stretch fabric, get it, um never mind). Some prototypes include a built-in warmer for football games like a wearable electric blanket; car upholstery that senses the occupants' weight and tunes the air bags to match, and a T-shirt that detects the wearer's heart rate and temperature. One proposal is to build radio receiver circuits into a shirt, with the radio buttons being you guessed it; and an MP3 player incorporated into a jacket and hood. Still to come is a power source, such as solar cells woven into the fabric; as Dr. Shur further observes, "people wear their clothes all day." New Day For Sun? Sun Microsystems has not been a sunny place lately: its stock is down from $64 a share less than two and a half years ago to $3.07 Friday, and it lost a record $2.28 billion in the last quarter. It is considered uniquely vulnerable to the challenge of GNU and Linux because of the degree to which it relies on a proprietary form of Unix, compared to IBM and H-P who are promoting the open-source alternative. This week the company is expected to announce a major initiative with the snappy name of N1, described as a "technology [that] links servers, storage systems, software and networking so the parts can be centrally managed". The goal is to shed its image as a seller of server and peripheral hardware, and compete with IBM, H-P, and others as a full-service general supplier of hardware, software and services for data centers of all sizes. Financial analysts don't argue with Sun's proposed strategy; one called it "absolutely the right thing to do", but notes that Sun's rivals have such a head start in the field that it may be too late for it to catch up. Push And Pull It has long (at least in Internet years) been recognized that TV viewing is qualitatively different from Web browsing. Both involve staring at a monitor but TV is essentially passive while perusing the Internet is typically more active, with the user choosing to visit a site. Advertising has not always been aware of the difference, assuming that what works for couch potatoes like a bunch of dancing frogs telling you to drink more beer naturally translates to an audience of sophisticated, intelligent, hip consumers like ourselves. Pop-up and pop-under ads are an example of how to infuriate a segment of the surfing audience. Some designers are now pursuing a "pull" strategy for their Web sites in place of the TV-style intrusive "push" approach. Microsoft Network seems to be one: according to the "chief media revenue officer" at MSN, they are creating custom solutions for clients such as Lexus.msn.com that try to provide value in various ways along with the opportunity to click on product-info links. MSN's Lexus site is said to focus on "Luxurious Living" lifestyle data like guides to hotels, high-tech homes, and farmers' markets. (I see jet-setters filling their SUV with fresh rutabagas and driving back to the Ritz to have them artfully prepared.) Other similar approaches are taken by subscription sites: the Economist waives its $70 annual fee to users who agree to get e-mail from Oracle, and some place called salon.com offers access to its paid sections to users "who agree to interact with an ad from Mercedes-Benz". Bye Bye, Bulb? Solid-state lighting, typically bright LEDs, is showing up in traffic lights, brake lights, exit signage, and flashlights, and analysts speculate it will start to expand into significant roles in home and office lighting within about four years. Its present drawback is price; most LED devices cost about 40 to 100 times as much as an equally bright incandescent bulb. But they draw only one-fifth the electricity and last about ten times longer and when they start to go they do so gradually rather than burning out at once. In addition, many devices consist of a hundred or more LED units, so even if a few fail the stoplight or whatever still works. The DOE estimates that wide adoption of LED light in the next twenty years could save US users overall about $100 billion annually. Another potential for the technology is mood lighting on a major scale; with simple chips driving the lights, they can vary the intensity and the hue of the units, possibly mitigating the effects of decreased winter sunlight and the constant sameness of institutional lights in offices and nursing homes. Theaters have already adopted LEDs for dramatic effects on the stage and in outdoor marquees. One company even claims to have keyed room lighting to a Star Trek computer game so when the Enterprise passes through a red nebula, so do you. Gosh. However, even more futuristic lighting technologies are in development that may give LEDs some competition by 2007; chief is "organic light emitting diodes" or OLEDs that can be manufactured as continuous polymer sheets at less cost than individual LED lens units.

Thanks ronks! The article on Connectix says they are also writing code to allow a single Intel box to run multiple servers such as Win 2000, Unix, and Linux. That might be a draw for MS, though I think they would prefer to drive out the competition; maybe they will buy the company and kill the project. Price Caps Are Off DSL Service Yesterday was not FCC chairman Michael Powell's day. In months of debate over new rules on how much the local phone companies can charge third-party providers, he wanted to take the lid off local voice service and keep it on high-speed broadband access. He lost on both counts. With caveats for the usual exceptions, footnotes and complexities of the bureaucratic decision, it seems to mean that the owner of the lines from home or office to the phone company's exchange (the "central office") can charge as much as it wants to somebody like Covad, who then sells it to an ISP like Earthlink. The article says Covad charges the ISP about $30 a month and Earthlink bills the end user around $50; that will likely increase in a kind of domino effect as Covad has to ante up more to the phone company. The new rules will not affect ISPs who buy broadband direct, such as AOL and MSN; but they and the cable companies can't help but notice the price increases all around them and think about hitching a ride on the gravy train. Imitation Of Life, At A Price Meanwhile for the unwashed masses who use dial-up connections, ESPN is offering a new service to bring TV-quality animation to a monitor near you. Called ESPN Motion and taken from ESPN owner Disney, it is intended to deal with the problem that over POTS, live action looks like someone "performing in a badly dubbed foreign film". It requires special downloaded software, which retrieves A/V film clips from ESPN during the day while connected and stores them on the users' hard drive for showing at local channel speed. However; the clips are preceded and/or followed by mandatory viewing of 15 to 30-second commercials. The premise seems to be that some advertisers won't pay for Web ads unless they effectively mimic television; but others observe that users don't access the Web passively the way they watch TV. The fat lady has yet to sing on this marketing ploy.

Ronks rocks. He reeally does! Another Month, Another Restatement At least this time it's not somebody's bogus revenue figures. When Jupiter Media Metrix collapsed last June, they sold off part of their Web-site audience measurement business to ComScore; but archrival Nielsen got the tracking software which they claimed patent rights to. Somewhere in the shuffle ComScore ended up undercounting visits, especially by viewers at work whose companies frown on letting them install tracking software. ComScore now says the most popular sites like About.com, EBay, Lycos, and so on had 20-25 percent more viewers in the last three months of 2002 than they thought; e.g., 56 million instead of 44 M for about.com. They still have a credibility problem though, largely because their numbers vary widely from Nielsen's (107 M Yahoo viewers vs. Nielsen's 81 M for example), leading many to disregard them both except as gross approximations, especially since both companies refuse to allow audits. Still, the effect of this whole dust-up may be largely internal: as one analyst observes, "Stock prices are no longer tied to the number of visitors you have. Now investors have this little idea of being profitable." Coke Issues Own Debit Cards The company says "Coca-Cola has built incredible relationships with its customers by being more than just a beverage provider; we have an obligation to help them solve their business problems." Incredible indeed; except they don't mean customers like you and me, they mean restaurants. Many have hourly staff with no bank accounts, making it hard to pay them via cheap funds transfer, so Coke is offering an ATM card that takes payroll deposits, issued via Citibank; it will split the transaction-fee revenue with Citi, thus helping Coke with some business problems of its own. Broadband Sellers Gear Up After FCC Decision Now that the FCC says phone companies can charge ISPs more for high-speed DSL access, hardware suppliers like Cisco, Intel, and Juniper are salivating at the prospect of a boom. The theory seems to be that since they can raise prices, the phone companies will rush to install more broadband routers and other gear; exactly how rising prices will translate to more end-user demand is not mentioned in the euphoria. The phone companies themselves, though active sellers of the Kool-Aid to the FCC, appear less ready to drink it: SBC for example is looking to buy DirecTV satellite operations, a direct competitor to DSL. Age-Old Principle Rediscovered Glenn Argenbright, CEO of security consultant Saflink, on customers' habits in purchasing access-control biometric recognition equipment: "Good-looking devices outsell ugly ones regardless of reliability; it kills me." Rockin' Ronks.

Fabrics Woven From Nanotubes Scientists at universities in Dallas and Dublin have developed a technique for constructing extremely strong thread from carbon nanotubes, which normally are less than .00005 inches long. Even a petite size garment needs longer threads than that, and these have been spun to lengths of up to 100 yards, enough for an XXL. The news article suggests fancifully that with their electronic properties they could be woven into a bulletproof shirt that plays MP3 files and acts as a cell phone. On the other hand, someone wearing a shirt-phone that played music might need for it to be bulletproof. In any case, these threads now go for $15,000 an ounce, pricey even by the standards of Paris couture. Everybody seems to be suing everybody today: Connecticut Sues Oracle; Oracle Sues PeopleSoft and JD Edwards PeopleSoft was suing Oracle already, so they don't make the marquee, but that was with the claim that Oracle's hostile buyout offer was "diabolical" and a "sham" meant to destroy competition from PS. (You know, with that beard of his Larry Ellison does look a bit like Mephistopheles; I wonder..) Oracle is suing PS on behalf of PS's own stockholders who it says were deprived of the opportunity to vote when PS made the JDE takeover a cash deal. Connecticut, which is a couple of weeks away from turning on a $100 million PeopleSoft application and is unhappy about Oracle's stated plan to kill PS software, is suing Oracle for violating state antitrust laws, claiming the number of vendors for enterprise software would effectively be reduced to two with Germany's SAP the only comparable rival. Private Groups Sue Microsoft Massachusetts is not entirely alone as a plaintiff in the MS antitrust case. The Computer and Communications Industry Association (which before it took on communications used to be the CIA, much to the confusion of many) and the Software and Information Industry Association filed anti-MS friend-of-the- court briefs at the original trial(s) and received permission from the judge to oppose the settlement before the appeals court. MS is arguing they lack standing to object, apparently because they merely represent rivals crushed by the monopolist and are hence of no account legally. Spam On Senate's Plate Again For the third time in four years, Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden have introduced a bill to curb the excesses of unsolicited commercial e-mail. This year's edition appears stronger than before, and the opposition to it weaker, giving it a better chance of becoming law. The Commerce Committee unanimously approved the bill which would declare a Federal crime the use of fraudulent or deceptive return addresses and false headers or subject lines. It would also outlaw the robotic harvesting of addresses, and this year's bill prohibits dictionary attacks, hijacking other computers to send mail, and opening large numbers of false e-mail accounts; and it requires the sender to provide a physical mail reply address, offer an opt-out mechanism, and label the mail as an ad. Businesses who knowingly employ spammers to promote their products or services would also be held liable. The bill would allow states "to enact and enforce their own antispam legislation". While the Commerce Committee bill declares violations a misdemeanor (though with up to a year in jail), the Judiciary Committee may beef up the penalties. Besides growing clamor among the public to Do Something, former opponents are coming around to see its value; a spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association gets the Quote Of The Day award for his "We can't communicate with our consumers because their in-boxes are full of Nigerian widows and body enlargement stuff." Thanks Ron!

Sun 1, Microsoft 1, Java 0 A Federal appeals court yesterday held that Microsoft did not have to include Sun's version of Java software with Windows but that it could not include its own either. The decision reversed a lower court's ruling that MS as an OS monopolist needed to bundle Sun's Java lest it "tip" the market toward its own .NET standard, saying that while a "serious danger" of that existed as the trial court found, it did not threaten the "immediate and irreparable harm" needed to justify an injunction. But it held Microsoft's own version of Java probably violated Sun's copyright and could not be bundled with Windows; the actual case to decide that and settle on the amount of damages will most likely not get scheduled before 2005, but even now it is of mostly academic interest except for the $1 billion Sun is asking for. One analyst notes that "history and market forces have largely passed this case by", since MS has already stopped including either kind of Java with Windows and PC makers like Dell and H-P load Sun's version on machines they ship. I suppose it depends on the dog? Anyway I checked the story and lunch is what the man said; maybe he had a different excuse in mind. In Microsoft We Trust An article today discusses the "Trusted Computing Group" backed by monopo- er, industry leaders such as Microsoft and Intel, with support from wannabes like AMD, IBM and H-P, to create a special chip on motherboards with secret identifying keys. Never mind that Intel tried something like this in 1999 that led to the phrase "Big Brother Inside" and was a PR flop on the level of their floating-point processor who-needs-accuracy gaffe, they're at it again. Intel says the activation of hardware features will be "voluntary" on the users' part, though it may be an offer they can't refuse if they want various features. Coupled with the proposed Windows Palladium initiative, now known as the "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" to be included in the Longhorn release, it involves two operating system partitions, one of which is like today's and the other locked down with security features to protect the record industry I mean the user. Though MS denies it, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor opines they may some day offer Office software and other applications only on the locked half. Other criticisms are that the initiative focuses on turning the PC into a media conduit for commercial entertainment despite the inappropriate nature of such uses for corporate and most SOHO users, though it would provide companies more tools to control employees' use of desktop systems. Another is that it facilitates creation of a secure illegal "Darknet" for file swapping and other nefarious activities among trusted conspirators. Apple meanwhile relies on software for music-file protection with its iTunes function, but the Wintel companies appear to take no lesson from its success. DHS.com Shopping is fun when you can print money; the Department of Homeland Security has a big budget and means to use it on buying tech toys to spy on us. (The name DHS.com was coined by the department's Assistant Secretary Robert Liscouski.) Unlike the DOD who designs say a bomber and puts out bids for it, the DHS is going out to procure stuff already available; partly out of the current administration's belief in Private Enterprise and partly because a government-designed router would probably bring the net to a dead stop if they turned it on. Speakers at the "Information Technology Leadership In A Security-Focused World" painted a picture that "involves collecting vast sets of personal information in computer databases, then sorting and analyzing the data to look for suspicious activities". Whether that collection of users' data would be hindered or helped by the secret features of the Trusted Computing Group was not mentioned in the story. SAP To Oracle: Hold Your Coat? The battle for control of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards leaves SAP smiling, the way a bruising primary battle among Democrats is a welcome sight to Republicans. With current and prospective customers wondering if Oracle will drop PeopleSoft's products, and whether PeopleSoft will do the same to JDE's, and if the whole set of deals will be snarled in legal challenges for years (the DOJ just said it is extending its query), SAP is taking out ads asking "Will your needs continue to be addressed? Or will you find your business playing second fiddle to the turmoil of mergers and acquisitions?" SAP, which stands for Systems, Applications, Products for Data-Processing (no wonder they abbreviate it) was founded in 1972 by four ex-IBM engineers and is now "Europe's largest software developer and the world's leading supplier of business software". Per the following figures from the paper: $Bil 2002 Market Revenue Share SAP 7.8 35% Oracle 2.5 13% PSoft 1.9 10% JDEdw 0.9 5% Oracle Bid Delayed Some more on the DOJ's statement that it will "extend its review" of Oracle's $6.3 billion hostile takeover proposal to PeopleSoft shareholders. The review is expected to take several months to run its course; that goes past the present July 7 expiration of the tender offer, though Oracle can and probably will push the deadline rather than give up its effort. More serious for them, it gives PS time to complete its $1.75 B buyout of J D Edwards, which poses three problems for Oracle. First, it makes PS bigger and would likely require raising the offer price for it; second, it means merging three companies instead of just two; and finally it increases antitrust scrutiny by reducing further the already small number of vendors offering enterprise software. Of course, it means more and longer uncertainty for current and potential customers of PS and JDE as well. The 40-Hour Laptop NEC says it has developed a laptop power source based on a fuel cell that provides about ten times the useful life of today's lithium-ion battery. It hopes to market the system by 2005, though if it uses a hydrogen tank for a power source it's unclear how many airlines will allow it on board. Chances are NEC will not use images of the Hindenburg or the Challenger in its ads. Quote Of The Day US District Court Judge Milton Pollack, dismissing class-action suits against Merrill Lynch by investors (not ML clients) who claimed their stock market losses were due to overly optimistic company evaluations: "plaintiffs would have this court conclude that the federal securities laws were meant to underwrite, subsidize, and encourage their rash speculation in joining a free-wheeling casino that lured thousands obsessed with the fantasy of Olympian riches." Why The Bubble Burst An article by two NYU B-school professors in the latest Journal Of Finance looks at causes behind the spectacular rise and fall of tech stocks and finds two main explanations. One was public faith in their value, which far exceeded the belief of insiders and institutional buyers. The other was a sort of structural limit on short selling, which kept pessimists from having the market effect they might exert in more widely traded companies. The latter arose from the fact that most tech stocks were recent IPOs, prevented by underwriters from offering for sale more than 15-20% of authorized shares until after a "lock-up" period; with so few shares publicly available, the cost of selling them short was raised by brokerage rules. At the end of the lock-up term, tech stocks dropped in value about twice as much as other types and they continued to drift downward. Move now to the spring of 2000: an unusually large number of tech stocks came out of the lock-up period at about the same time, releasing $300 billion of essentially new shares at a time when the level of public optimism was insufficient to absorb them all at existing prices. So prices fell, further disillusioning the potential buyers, leading to more declines, and the rest as they say is history. Reviewer Hal Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley, notes that already in the latest market rise it is speculative issues like biotech, Chinese Internet companies, and penny stocks that are leading the advance with individual buyers while institutions lag behind them; or in other words "Here we go again". Laptops On Top Per the NPD market research firm, retail store sales of laptops accounted for 54% of the total, exceeding desktop systems for the first time ever and more than double their 25% share in January 2000. Pneumatic Hose Makes News From the BBC at comes the story of aerosol stockings, evidently a craze in Japan. They don't snag, they're more comfortable than the woven kind in hot weather, and even in monsoon season they don't run (as in dissolve). Available for $12 a can of about 20 pairs worth, they come in terracotta, bronze and "natural"; fishnet seems to be beyond the technology, though with a screen who knows. They can be washed off with "a bit of scrubbing".

More Wireless Burger Joints McDonald's is super-sizing its network menu. It's beefing up its NYC outlets so equipped from 60 to 75 (access is free through the end of next month, then goes to $3 a day) and plans to install the facility in up to 20,000 locations. Already 75 restaurants in SF have it and Chicago is next. Thanks Ron.

My old uni town, Brighton, has just wirelessed the beach up. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3068915.stm

Do you have a wireless rig of some sort, Mike?

no...don't even have a network at home at the moment. Will have by the end of the week...building myself a second machine as part of the very early phase of starting a company.

Cool Mike, what's the company going to be doing?

if it happens we're going to be providing tech support/installation/config services to small/medium companies who don't have the need/money for a full time IT person.

Good business to be in! What's your company called?

no name as yet...still in the planning stages...but we might be associating ourselves with my friend's girlfriend's PR company, "Bamboo PR". So it could be "Bamboo Technology" or something along those lines.

That's a great name and suggests all kinds of possibilities for logos.

Check out www.bamboopr.co.uk. I particularly like their "panda feet" logo.

Yay Mike! Way to insert yourself into a niche market! Good luck!

fingers crossed...have some potential clients, too. This thing could actually work...

ronks rides again: Who Is Mr. Big? While the author of the Sobig worm is still unknown, a few clues to his identity are emerging. Over the last eight months six variants of the program have been issued as he refines it to evade countermeasures. The main functions of the worm appear to be obtaining information about the victim's e-mail lists and mailing the worm to those on it. Just like spam with a toxic twist. Speculation centers on the likelihood that the author is building a tool to flood the Internet with e-mail from either the primary victims or a secondary set (like the 20 IP addresses the victims were to be told to contact on a given day); doing so from these machines would bypass blacklists of known spam sources. It's unclear if the author has commercial or simply disruptive intent; the latter would include a sort of distributed denial of service attack on the entire Internet. The current version, Sobig.F, expires on September 10 with self-inactivating code; some time after that a new release is likely to appear with possibly more clues for the white hats to unravel. Shareholder Web Site Proposed For Worldcom As the scandal-ridden telecomm company (now renamed MCI) tries to emerge from bankruptcy as less of a poster boy for corporate fraud, one innovation is a Web site for owners of stock. That is probably not a new idea per se, but this one has some novel features. According to the report, "investors can bring concerns to the attention of the board - and other shareholders. The site will allow them to have resolutions voted on without having to win approval to do so at the annual meeting." It's not clear from the story if the votes would be binding, or how shareholders without Internet access would vote. Phone Games Bored SUV drivers with no one to talk to on their cell phone who might be tempted to waste their attention on driving don't have to worry now. Nokia is coming out with the N-Gage handheld phone, radio, Web browser and music player, and if that isn't enough it will include games from Electronic Arts. Silicon Shrinks Silicon Graphics will reduce its staff by a sixth (600 jobs) in its quest to cut expenses and "return to profitability". Its high-end systems, largely targeted to Hollywood and the military, have not sold well lately. Earthlink Sues 100 defendants were listed in the ISP's complaint against spammers in Alabama and Canada, said to have created "an elaborate chain of fake names and nonexistent companies" to shield their issuance of over 250 million unsolicited commercial e-mails. Bank fraud, identity theft, and stolen credit cards are also alleged in the complaint.

Float Like A Penguin, Sting Like A Big Blue Bee IBM is rolling out a new suite of curious ads identifying itself with Linux. In them, the operating system (which is about ten years old) is played by a 10-year-old boy like a young Luke Skywalker receiving "words of wisdom" from Muhammad Ali, professor Henry Louis Gates, and coach John Wooden; also a movie director, an astronomer, and a plumber. Some of them (the ads that is, not the Jedis) are said to be interactive at www.ibm.com/open and some will run during the US Open tennis tournament if it ever stops raining there. Use the Force, Linus. Ronks - ron sipherd is the source!

Busy Techie (ronks) Security Patches Breed Viruses An interesting article today suggests that Microsoft's publication of a fix actually provides fodder for exploitation of the weakness it corrects. Writers of worms and viruses are said to dissect the patch to analyze the flaw it addresses and take advantage of it on machines whose owners are slow to (or simply fail to) apply the patch. The infamous Blaster worm for example appeared 25 days after the issuance of a fix for it; as it happens, a similar patch to another area of MS code came out 19 days ago so look out. The story also includes the: Understatement Of The Week "The PC business model has not placed much value on building secure, well- engineered software." RF Tags In The News The conference has a more in-depth topic on radio-frequency tags, but there was an overview of the business in a recent news story. While they a still a ways from replacing those bar-code tags you see on items in the store, they're gaining. The Defense Department and Wal-Mart are expected to require some or all of their suppliers to attach the tags by 2005 at least to cartons and pallets of materiel delivered for inventory control, using a newer version that can "be read by scanners anywhere in the world". The present cost of each tag at about 25-30 cents makes them impractical for cheap mass-market items today, but they are still so ubiquitous that a group originally formed to protest data mining of credit and grocery-store cards is raising the alarm over RFID's privacy issues. They paint a 1984+ picture of "companies and government agencies ... able to monitor what people read or where they assemble, from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing". The industry is expected to have revenue (for the tags, the readers, and associated software to pursue novels and trousers) of about $1.13 billion this year, with projected annual growth rates in subareas like: Security & access control: 9.5% Automobile immobilization: 6.4 Transportation: 18.9 (when not immobilized) Supply chain management: 38.3 Toll collection: 9.8 (like CalTrans' Fastrak) Asset management: 21.5 ("tracking people, equipment, or documents") European Ruling A Threat To Microsoft A squabble in Brussels between two American health services could cast a shadow on Microsoft's licensing policies. Atlanta's NDC Health sued IMS Health in the EU Court Of Justice over an obscure issue: the Connecticut defendant's refusal to let NDC license its drug-sales database structure. The preliminary finding by the European Advocate General, likely to be adopted by the court, is that "a company should have access to a [dominant] rival's intellectual property if it planned to offer a different product, or if the sharing was necessary to create competition". The decision could serve as precedent in a European case involving Microsoft's refusal to license its software code to rivals like Sun and IBM who want to use it to create server operating systems that interface with Windows, the dominant desktop OS. An analyst observes the court could hold that "a refusal by Microsoft to license the necessary parts of Windows could be an abuse of its dominant position". The EU court has no jurisdiction in this country, but once the code is out of the bag... "Dominant" is borrowed from another sentence by the Advocate General: if the court finds that NDC intended to offer a better or different product, "that would render a refusal to grant a license an abuse of IMS's dominant position". Basically as I understand it the EU law somewhat tracks US law in holding that a monopolist is subject to more scrutiny and limits than a player in an atomized market (many competitors, none dominant) or one with a small market share. Icann Do It; VeriSign Caves A couple days after domain-name registrar VeriSign announced its strategy on September 15 to hijack misspelled .com and .net URLs to its own advertising- supported site with the hope of reaping millions, the Internet oversight group Icann asked them to stop, since the unannounced change wrought havoc with some spam blockers and caused other problems. VeriSign refused. Yesterday, Icann decided to stop being Mr. Nice Corporation; it told VeriSign if it did not terminate the "service" by 6 PM today, Icann would "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations" such as being a neutral registry administrator and not a rival to other search sites, resulting in a possible $100,000 fine and the termination of VeriSign's registration rights. Mighty VeriSign responded with a request "for a few days' reprieve". Icann refused. VeriSign then agreed to stop. Perhaps the good guys don't always finish last after all.

Caller ID For E-Mail? A sort of Internet-wide whitelist feature is being proposed as a solution to spam. "Whitelisting" is used by the Well and many ISPs to allow users to define senders of mail who should be let through spam filters, but many fail to list say Land's End before placing their first online order, so the confirmation and subsequent mailings are treated as spam. The original trusting nature of the Internet, from back when users were PhD's swapping theses and obscure jokes about John Von Neumann, has left a legacy structure that may have to be completely revamped to be more secure from unwanted Viagra vendors, but the big legitimate online merchants are pressing for a solution. Outside of the technical challenges, which are not trivial, is the problem of widely divergent goals among the players. Merchants want a sort of seal of approval that gets them a blanket pass unless the user specifically blocks them; ISPs worry about their customers and disfavor the free-pass idea out of concern over complaints from users who don't want any more @#$% Land's End turtleneck ads; and some of the bigfeet ISPs already have proprietary spam filters they see as selling points to their customers; and there is also a smaller group that presently sells e-mail filters and doesn't relish the idea of being superseded by a free global solution. A major issue is how to keep Mr. CheapViagra.com from passing himself off as Land's End. Kevin Doerr of Microsoft waves away the issue with "IP spoofing is hard to do and easy to detect", but others are not so breezy about it. There seem to be two major solution candidates, akin to the pea-shooter and the howitzer. A simple registry of good-guy e-mail servers could be set up quickly and used as a kind of good-faith badge; if it is not spoofed. To guarantee against that, the heavy-duty solution is digital certificates based on long binary keys like those used for encrypting online orders. Whether either solution could avoid the necessity for all recipients of e- mail to install new software is unclear. MS Sued Over Bugs LA film editor Marcy Hamilton says she suffered a case of identity theft because the Windows software on her PC where her Social Security number and other ID codes were stored is defective. So defective as to violate California consumer-protection laws and be an unfair business practice. Her lawyer is seeking class-action status for the case on behalf of all Windows users. It could serve as a major precedent and a test of MS and other vendors' software licensing terms. Unlike other products which are sold and are subject to product-liability statutes, software is licensed; the user gets a right to use the code, but not much by way of a "product" other than a shiny CD. So far the article declares "Microsoft ... has suffered no reverses in court that would establish any liability for flawed software." The plaintiffs may claim that Microsoft's disclaimer of responsibility in the license agreement is void because nobody reads that stuff before clicking "Yes"; this has been tried before, but with limited success, mostly against vendors who stupidly don't show you the agreement before telling you to consent. More broadly, they may try to override the license provision on consumer-protection grounds like the implicit guarantee a product is "fit for its intended purpose", which in some cases cannot be negated by agreement of the parties. from Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com

Ron Sipherd (ronks@well.com) has more great stuff: Borland Slumps The company that imagined itself a contender for the office-software market, ran afoul of the Microsoft juggernaut years before Netscape and was turned into a corporate grease spot on Highway 17, is still alive but struggling. Its shares fell 17 percent on announced plans to let go 125 staff, declining sales, and barely break-even profits for the last quarter. Execs Out At CA Computer Associates is shedding people too, but closer to the top of the pyramid. It fired its CFO and the SVP and VP of finance following an investigation of how sales were booked. The company has been sued over charges it manipulated its accounting to show a pretend profit and give the CEO $1.1 billion in unearned bonuses. No State Regulation Of Internet Phone Calls, Says Judge A federal trial court in Minnesota has declared the state may not treat a company offering VoIP (Voice over IP) services as a local phone company. Vonage offers unlimited calling in the US and Canada for $35 a month over the Internet. Reasons for the decision are to be announced Friday, but it may be on interstate-commerce grounds. Speculating on the growth of the industry, a UBS analyst made the Quote Of The Day "VoIP technology has the potential to do to [phone companies] what file sharing is doing to the recording industry." Hot Products Nokia cell phones have lately developed the unfortunate habit of spontaneous combustion. The company blamed earlier instances of blazing communications on third-party replacement batteries, but two recent cases in Holland, most recently of a teenager whose Model 7210 burned a hole in his pants, involved all Nokia components (other than the trousers). Even Hotter Products Rod Sprules, a Canadian engineer, has received a patent on fireplace logs made from coffee grounds. Called the Java Log, it all started when he found in a reference book that burning coffee grounds produce more heat than burning wood. Several years later, he began to capitalize on the idea by scrounging used grounds from the dumpster of Ottawa's Planet Coffee. This entrepreneurial approach to obtaining raw material was not without its drawbacks, he says: "Have you ever seen a wet bagel? It swells to the size of an inner tube." He now hopes to strike deals with Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and the like which will obviate the need to rummage in wet trash. And he says his company Robustion is working on a log that doesn't smell like coffee for those who prefer a non-aromatic variety. Et Tu, SCO? SCO, who is suing IBM over the latter's claimed incorporation of its code into Linux, is controlled and mostly owned by an investment firm called Canopy, who until recently also owned a software developer named Lineo. Lineo has just settled a claim that it incorporated the proprietary code of another company into GNU and stripped off the copyright notice of the developer, Monte Vista. Lineo required that the terms of the settlement be sealed, and neither party will discuss it on the record, but it is speculated that Lineo claimed the infringement was an innocent mistake deserving of only token damages, a defense that IBM could as easily raise to the embarrassment of SCO. Overseas Profit Up At Two Companies Philips Electronics reports quarterly net profit of $145 million, compared to a loss over twice that size a year earlier, largely based on sales of its LCD monitors and despite sluggish sales of consumer products in the US. Similarly Intel doubled its quarterly profit from last year, mostly on strength from Asia, Europe, and high-end notebooks while US and flash-memory volume lagged. Transmeta's Got A Secret Another one, from the company who kept their low-power CPU under wraps till rollout. They are said to have lost ground to Intel for general mobile- computer use and to be making a stand with specialized applications. However, Intel made no presentation to this year's Microprocessor Forum and is reported to be dealing with problems as they reduce circuits to etched lines of 90 nanometers. Tiny circuits and fast-switching ones leak current; and tinier and the faster they get, the more they lose. Enter Transmeta. They say they have a software solution to the hardware dilemma, though they declined to provide details. E-Mathoms Katie Hafner reports that many computer users accumulate useless gadgets that look good in the catalog but end up gathering dust on the shelf or being sold off on EBay to the next gullible fool, to the point where NIB or "new in box" has become a standard abbreviation on auction offers. No one here would do this of course, but she says there are people with webcams, a "universal remote that came with a manual as thick as a Russian novel", massive CD duplicators to share music with friends whose tastes differ, GPS locators that give the exact latitude and longitude of your backyard (in case you need to call in an airstrike on the gophers), belt-clip monitors that tell how many dozen miles you ran that day for uploading onto your database (with optional heart monitor and perhaps a navel thermometer), flatbed scanners, cordless everything, probably even cordless cords, PDAs for storing all your committee meetings, and oh so much more. She observes "all too often the buyers find they cannot really change their lives just by acquiring something new and different." If this fact gets out the economic recovery is done for. From One Ster To Another Wayne Rosso, described as "a colorful music business veteran", has left his post as president of the Grokster file-sharing company to become CEO of Blubster. Owned by Madrid-based Optisoft which he will also head, the Blub is said to offer secure and anonymous file-sharing for music lovers that dare not speak their name. Especially to the RIAA. Data Mining For The Rest Of Us A recent news story discusses the expansion of data mining to something called "text mining" that doesn't require as much structure to the information it sifts through, and is adaptable to a wide variety of uses outside the business world. Phone call transcripts, articles, e-mail and other sources feed into products from ClearForest and SPSS at up to 250,000 pages per hour to look for correlations among terms, for medical research and spotting of behavior patterns. One of the most dramatic uses of the technique however occurred long before the current generation of tools: in the mid-1980's a researched at the University of Chicago observed an unexpected linkage in articles on Medline between the terms "migraine" and "spreading depression", and another with the use of magnesium to forestall occurrences of the latter, suggesting that "magnesium deficiency might be a causal factor in migraine", which had not been thought of before. Sun Down Yet Again With the regularity of the fall of dusk if not the frequency, Sun Microsystems announced another quarter of declining sales (the tenth in a row) and a widening net loss. The loss amounted to $286 million compared with $111 M a year ago, and revenue was off 8 percent. Cash flow was a negative $49 million and margins are off 1.1%. Last year Sun let go 11 percent of its staff, and last month it said it would boot another 3%; no plans were announced in the latest gloomy report to lay off any more of the company's employees. Either of them, ha ha. A Merrill Lynch analyst says it may soon become "acquisition bait". The Fish Is Back Red Herring magazine is described as "an early messenger of the new economy"; it is of course dead, along with many other once-shining stars of those heady days back in the previous millennium. However, it may make a comeback; Frenchman Alex Vieux, impresario of fancy confabs like the European Technology Roundtable, has bought the brand name and hopes to re- start it up. He can't send it to the magazine's subscriber list, or even print it till next fall - Time Warner bought the list with an 18-month no- compete clause last April - but he says he is hiring writers and other staff, perhaps for an earlier Web edition. Emphasizing a global perspective from his present offices in Mountain View, he made the Quote Of The Day (Utterly Obvious Division) "Silicon Valley is not America. It is not a mirror of the country." XP x 5 = 2003 Microsoft's new Office 2003 product which officially went on sale this week is not getting a lot of good press: PC Magazine's summation is "end users will probably not find Office 2003 a compelling upgrade". The main features seem to be in Outlook (a program for the transmission of viruses and e-mail) and workgroup authorship-sharing tools. And XML, for those who write letters in Extended Markup Language. In fact, MS Office appears to be in trouble: of the company's major product lines, it has the slowest sales growth rate over the last three years now that every man, woman, child and vertebrate life form has a copy, and there is actually a hint of competition from Sun's StarOffice and Linux-based products. So, what to do? Build on your strength, which in Microsoft's case is a cash hoard the size of Neptune, and quintuple your advertising budget over the rollout of the previous (XP) release. They plan to shovel $150 million to persuade users to upgrade and not to defect to rivals, with ads on "The West Wing", "CSI", and the Travel Channel. The first to appear in the newspapers give a hint of the new "tongue in cheek" tone, as well as the lavish budget: in yesterday's NY Times they took out four full-color full-page ads featuring: a baseball diamond, empty except for a guy on a tractor raking the infield and desks on the mound, in the outfield, and so forth (title: "Swing for the cubicle wall"); a basketball court, again empty except for a conference table at center court ("Light up the scoreboard from a swivel chair"); a football stadium filled with cubicles ("Split the uprights with a keystroke") and finally a bunch of wage slaves in a huddle ("Great moments don't just happen on a playing field"). Gee, I think I'll buy two... The Ultimate Apple Virginia Polytechnic Institute has just built the world's fourth fastest supercomputer in one month out of 1100 Macintoshes for about $5 million (plus an unstated amount of free pizzas and football tickets given to the assemblers), rivaling units that cost around $100-250 million and take years to construct. Its speed was ranked by testers at 7.41 trillion operations a second. National ID Card Proposed The interesting thing is that it's proposed as a private business venture by Steven Brill, creator of CourtTV and the American Lawyer and Brill's Content magazines. His Verified Identity Card Inc. startup wants people to pay about $50 up front and "a few dollars each month" for cards that vouch the possessors "are not on terrorism watch lists and do not have certain felony convictions on their records". He says data about the customers' misdeeds or lack thereof will be stored on a central database, which others have criticized as "an attractive target for subversion" and a "single point of failure for multiple security systems" that rely on it, but he is unfazed by these issues. He also says that while the system will be developed "in close cooperation with the government", customer data will not be sold or shared (except with anyone who hacks into the system), and the card will never be used to track a customer's movements from place to place. What, never? No, never. What, never? Well, hardly ever. The idea is to speed impatient air travelers through lines and skip searches, though not envious looks from the other passengers; but that requires airports and agencies to agree to accept his word the client is a loyal citizen. The Future(s) Of Computing A story in today's paper examines the diverging visions of IBM ("on-demand computing") and Microsoft ("seamless computing") for the direction of PC and Web technology. Both are not above lobbing the dreaded mainframe analogy at one another, with an IBM VP calling Windows "a superb legacy business" and MS execs likening IBM's plan to dumb 3270-like browser terminals driven from a central server. While they cooperate on developing standards for Web services like XML and SOAP, the article suggests they agree on little else. (For example, IBM is a big Linux champion; MS wishes it would just go away.) They agree that the future involves more than downloading stuff; for example they both see business computers automatically conducting transactions such as parts purchases, and consumers' PCs scheduling dentist appointments for their unhappy owners. But how they do it is where they part company. MS is said to focus on "technology tools" such as the upcoming Indigo project that lets programmers write code to run on PCs, cell phones, hand-helds, and perhaps even mainframes without modification. IBM by contrast wants to "free companies from the previous constraints of technology" and let them focus instead on their business requirements by shedding their server farms and buying technology services from suppliers - like IBM. The article doesn't mention it, but it may be that people don't actually *want* their computers to buy parts or trundle them off to the dentist without their knowledge. Both of these future have a whiff of "Modern Times" about them. Microsoft Deals - And Finds An Unlikely Ally Five states (the Dakotas, North Carolina, Tennessee) and DC agreed yesterday to resolve their consumer class action suits against Microsoft for about $200 million total. Earlier this year it reached a deal with Florida, Montana, West Virginia, and California to compensate buyers for claims they were overcharged. The California arrangement in brief provides buyers of MS products in (roughly) 1995 through 2001 with vouchers: $16 for Windows or DOS, $29 for Office, $26 for Excel, and $5 for Word or Works; multiple purchases (e.g., Windows 95 and 98) get multiple vouchers. Details and claim forms at . The company still faces suits by Massachusetts, Sun, and the European Union over its practices. It is also being sued for patent infringement by Michael Doyle and his Eolas Technologies over its browser technology to execute programs from another site, and two months ago a jury awarded the plaintiffs $521 million. Comes now the World Wide Consortium into the battle; in a letter to the director of the US patent Office, director Tim Berners-Lee asks him to re-examine and invalidate Eolas' patent on the grounds that it is not a new idea, having been preceded by (for example) the Write program in Windows 3.1 which summoned other programs. The letter from a group not normally though of as a friend of MS also cites the "substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web" if the patent is upheld, with potentially mortal threats to Java, RealPlayer, Flash plugins, Adobe Acrobat, and Apple Quicktime.

ronks brings us more great stuff. Awesome, Ron! The End Of Silicon? Just in time with Saudi Arabia saying it's nearly out of sand (see : Saudis 'fear sand shortage'), Intel says it has a new material to replace silicon dioxide as an insulator in semiconductor chips. They haven't yet said what it is, though they may have more details today when they discuss it at a tech confab in Japan, but it addresses the problems of separating circuits that are growing (so to speak) ever smaller, from 130 nanometers now to 90, then to 65, and later to 45 nm around 2007 when the new stuff would become necessary. It's been reported that Intel's next-generation Prescott CPU is being held up on account of current leakage across insulation. The human hair has long since disappeared as an analogy: the story today says transistor gates are "approaching thickness of just five atomic layers". The End Of SuSE? Not so, says Novell, who just bought the German Linux company for $210 million with $50 M help from IBM (who got 2% of Novell in return). Novell says SuSE and its staff of 400 will remain largely independent and the product separately branded from Netware for "the foreseeable future". With the Netware network OS battered by Microsoft and other rivals, Novell has moved to shore up its line by emphasizing Linux; it bought developer Ximian three months ago. SuSE is Europe's largest Linux vendor, though it trails Red Hat in the US; I almost installed it myself until I read the company "goes through CEOs faster than drummers with Spinal Tap". Maybe it will find the groove now. The Bounty Hunters Of Redmond Microsoft is offering rewards for catching virus writers. Bringing the head in to their corporate offices is not required, or even encouraged, and in fact the reward is not that easy to achieve by its terms: up to $250,000 for evidence leading to the *capture and conviction* of the *original authors* of MSBlast and SoBig, with a total pot of five million in the program. Some cynics suggest MS might better spend the money to make its code secure; but the company calls that criticism "unfair", saying it already spends on that and a variety of approaches is useful. One analyst thinks "It will probably be easier to get a $250,000 reward than to break into some company's network." I wonder.

Stick It In Your Ear From the BBC at comes news of a new Japanese cell phone. A wristband functions as a microphone, and also as a transducer that will "convert the sounds of conversation to vibrations that can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear". The Finger Whisper phone from NTT DoCoMo is dialed by speaking the number into the wristband; you answer incoming calls by placing your forefinger and thumb together and jamming your finger in your ear; you hang up by placing forefinger and thumb together again. No date has been set for commercial availability of the unit, which is probably not for drivers or those who make a lot of hand gestures while they talk.

ronks: Grid Wars According to a story in today's paper, while the US is most often the catalyst and the initial innovator in a new technology, Europe is frequently in a better position to take advantage of it for two reasons, both related to the greater role of government there. Europe is said more likely to have a common mandated computing or communications standard, and the authorities there take a more active part in bringing new ideas to market. Sometimes this can backfire: the article says "Europe's telecom companies have wasted tens of billions of dollars" on third-generation cell phone services that nobody seems to want. In networked supercomputing, which depends less on the fickle public, the Old Country seems to be more successful; businesses like Switzerland's Novartis use their own office PCs (and American software) to sift for promising pharmaceutical compounds, and the EU has initiated two big grid-computing science projects to start next year. The goal of the "Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe" is to link PCs into a 24-hour computing network for universities and research consortia, while France's National Center for Scientific Research is building an optical net to join seven supercomputers into effectively one. American scientists have applied to use the E-Science grid, but Europe in turn says it wants some NSF money if it is to share the benefits with its new-world colleagues.

Once again, a big thanks is owed to Ron Sipherd (ronks@well.com) for his brilliant and timely observations on the tech business scene. We are privileged that he allows us to republish these comments. Another big thanks, Ron! Just Want Somebody To Sue The SCO Group just gave $1 million cash and 400,000 shares of itself to its law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner; in return, David Boies promised to sue somebody, saying that within the next three months "we will identify a defendant" who uses Linux and hasn't caved in to SCO's license demands. SCO's suit against IBM is set to begin next March in Utah, and the company's CEO Darl McBride "predicted that the current General Public License that accompanies some open source software would not survive". The Itanium Jubilee? Intel's president Paul Otellini says "I'm going to declare this the year of Itanium" in a presidential proclamation honoring his company's two year old 64-bit CPU chip. So far it looks more like the winter of his discontent; while he expects to see 100,000 units shipped this year, analysts think it will take at least till 2006 for the architecture to become popular, since it requires special programming to take advantage of its new features. Intel's rival AMD offers a "more evolutionary" 64-bit chip that is reported to work better on today's 32-bit apps as well as providing an easier migration path for developers. Intel has prototyped such a chip itself according to industry reports; it's called the Yamhill, but the company is vacillating on whether to introduce it. Either they don't want to cannibalize sales of the Itanium, or the challenge of selling a new high- speed processor named after a pile of sweet potatoes is too much for them. YAPS Yet another patent suit: AT&T filed against EBay over claimed ownership rights to the business process of secure Internet payments used by EBay subsidiary PayPal. Today Is T-Day No, not turkey day; that's Thursday. This is "Transfer Your Wireless Service Without Changing Numbers" day, but TYWSWCN sounds like an obscure Welsh village, perhaps near Llareggub. The consequence of the long-delayed event is expected to hasten the shakeout and kill off one or more of the six major wireless providers (Verizon, Cingular, AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, and T- Mobile in decreasing order of size) as the friction of changing is reduced. The article on today's event suggests "tens of millions of consumers are expected to switch companies"; it says Verizon's reputation is for quality, but if that becomes more uniform across carriers, the price advantage of Cingular and T-Mobile may give them an edge if they have the deep pockets to last out the storm. The business is already cutthroat: with 70% of US adults owning a cell phone, there's not much room for growth except by stealing rivals' subscribers. A loss of 25-30% of a company's base in a year is typical and would be fatal did they not do unto their competitors as well. Machine Poems Ray Kurzweil, who created a melody-composing computer program when he was 16 and went on to other more practical ventures like text-to-speech and speech- to-text software (not to be used together, of course), is up to his old ways. An article on his latest venture notes, "Were he not such a successful entrepreneur, Mr. Kurzweil might be considered something of a crackpot". Anyway he has received patent number 6,647,395 for a "cybernetic poet" capable of producing lines like Sashay down the page through the lioness nestled in my soul. Yes; well anyway, perhaps in defense of his creation Mr. K belittles other similar software as the poetic equivalent of Mad-Libs. Poetry thrash! A free version of the software suitable for open-mike nights is available at www.kurzweilcyberart.com; a "deluxe" version, no doubt capable of tossing off dactylic hexameter, anapests, trochees, and casual references to the wine-dark sea, is $29.95. SpamCop - And Robbers IronPort Systems in Silicon Valley makes "a specialized computer with the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages"; they are known as spam cannons according to the ePrivacy Group. But times change and that business, though lucrative, doesn't do much for one's reputation as a good Internet citizen; also, there is probably money to be made on the other side of the street with the white hats. Last July, IronPort bought SpamCop, a service that publishes a list of spam senders; they didn't admit the purchase until this month in response to queries from reporters who found out elsewhere. Of course if they were to cripple SpamCop or retool it to let favored clients have a free pass they could make profits from both sides of the battle, but they say they do "not plan to water down SpamCop's current service". What, never? No, never. What, never? Well, yes a little actually; IronPort has opened a line of business called Bonded Sender for spammers who "promise to send messages only to people who request them". Such customers will go on a SpamCop white list and will not be blocked. Of course none of these customers would ever bury the "agreement" in tiny white letters on a white background. What, never? Etc. This just in, from the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/africa/3241710.stm "Nigeria is to launch an inquiry into internet fraud ... The "419" swindle - named after the penal code that outlaws it - will be targeted in particular. In the scam, people overseas are promised a share of non-existent riches in return for details of their bank account - which is then emptied. ... The 419 scam has been so successful in the past 20 years that experts say it is now the third to fifth largest foreign exchange earner in Nigeria. But ... the government is keen to stamp out the fraud as it is giving Nigeria a bad name." http://www.419eater.com/index.htm they made my day! Something New To Worry About Now that we're done being thankful, let's get back to our normal state of anxiety with a story on cell-phone viruses. This is almost as good as my all-time favorite, deadly invisible odorless radon gas seeping up out of the ground in your basement while you sleep, but we'll take what we can get. Anyway, the Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo reports customers have received messages that caused their phones to freeze up and dial 110, Japan's equivalent to the 911 emergency number. Since the first complaints came in, NTT has installed central office filters that now block 55 percent of incoming text messages, and another 26% are blocked by filters installed in the users' handsets. Chip Sales Up October semiconductor sales rose over 23 percent from the previous year, and 2003 is up 16% from this point in 2002. Primary factors are global PC sales and strong growth in cell phone purchases in China, with about 5 million new subscribers added a month. Longhorn For Sale Although not supposed to be released until 2005 or later, the next release of Windows (code-named Longhorn) can be purchased for 5 ringgit (about a dollar fifty) in Malaysia software souks. Don't count on MS support, however - as if you ever could, eh? Anyway, the CDs are believed to be a beta version distributed to programmers at an LA conference in October. Google As Equalizer A story in today's paper discusses gains that small merchants and even SOHO entrepreneurs are making via use of search engines, auction sites, and Web portals. Unlike earlier Internet commerce efforts that made a big splash when they opened and another when they failed, these guys had "no venture capital to blow through" so they started at a level they could handle - what a concept - with a few EBay offerings, a virtual store on Yahoo, or a sponsored listing on Google. Unlike expensive banner ads and popups, Google and Overture search sites charge per search term, which puts small targeted vendors at an advantage over say Wal-Mart which offers zillions of types of merchandise. It seems to be working: the owner of a family-run New England hardware store chain that bought Google placement for "Christmas light sets" says "Instead of us chasing customers around, on search engines the customers chase us around". Visa reports that for the post-Thanksgiving week just ended, online sales rose 47 percent from last year while in-store sales were up just 9%. HP, As In Hit Parade Hewlett Packard has definitely come out of the garage, unless you count garage bands. Bye-bye oscilloscopes, hello "Hewlett-branded online music store" which the company is expected to open next month along with the announcement of an HP digital music player. Names In The News OK, this is not strictly biztech but I was surprised to see the name of Michael G. Tyson prominently featured on the stock page next to the S&P 500 and NYSE reports. Mr. Tyson, who is or was a pugilist of note, gets nearly a quarter page; unfortunately he heads the bill as "Debtor" in a tombstone ad published by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. I don't think I ever saw his middle initial before. Microsoft Claims To Unclench A Bit Frequently accused in the US and Europe of blocking rivals from accessing its technology and preventing competitors' products from inter-operating with its own, even to the point of violating the weak settlement terms that ended the US antitrust suit, Microsoft announced "a more liberal policy" of licensing patents and copyrights. They say some will be let out free of royalties to industry standards groups in areas like Web services and machine-to-machine communications; others will be made available for a fee. Examples of the latter are ClearType, a technology for displaying text on LCD screens, and the File Allocation Table (FAT) protocol for disk file storage. Actually FAT is so old I suspect the core patents have already expired, but MS hopes to see it used in digital cameras and other hardware where it does not presently dominate. On Hold The FCC has asked AT&T Wireless to explain delays of over a week in some cases handling the transfer of numbers for customers who switch cell-phone service providers. The apparent cause is breakdowns in automation of the turnover: the customer's name, address, Social Security number, and other data must match between the from and to companies for the process to work, and AT&T's end has failed about three out of five times for the hundreds of thousands of transfers. When that happens the two companies must manually walk through the records, which is said to take days. (Though the idea of two phone company reps waiting for hours on hold is kind of delicious.) While AT&T is far from alone in the problem, its handling seems to be the worst of the major carriers, perhaps because it uses a different transfer agent from the others. If it's any comfort, the other companies fail about half the time, and AT&T is as bad at handling incoming customers as outgoing ones, though it's reported they're losing more than the other carriers. Topic 158 [biztech]: In the news for 2003 #755 of 764: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Dec 8 '03 (10:12) 50 lines World vs. USA Yet Again The United Nations has created a working group to study Internet governance, with an eye to putting it more under global management; it is to report its findings in 2005. According to the BBC, "developing nations had been pushing for the UN to have a far greater role in the regulation of the net, while western countries opposed handing over control to an international agency." The NY Times has a similar story, noting that while Web users in China are expected to constitute over half of the world total in four years, the entire country has fewer IP addresses than MIT. Viruses For Fun And Profit "At least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal computers that have been taken over" and used in a Kazaa-like peer network that both expands the originator's capacity and shields his identity, according to an exec at anti-virus firm Sophos. Trojan horse programs like "Sinit" seen in the last three months create rings of zombie PCs to send spam and bogus credit-card number requests. Hacker Web sites like Carder Planet reportedly carry ads for "remote administrators" or "radmins" who offer the services of their controlled systems. After Wi-Fi, What? OK, so Starbucks now has 2600 out of its 4100 outlets equipped with wireless hot spots; but who doesn't anymore? With cities, non-profit groups, and merchants' associations offering free access to draw customers, you need something more, they reason. Besides coffee, that is. So Starbucks, McDonald's, and Schlotsky's Deli (a chain) are starting to offer new bonus items like free streaming blues, holiday stories, an interview with Sheryl Crow, and the like. A Starbucks rep suggests it may keep customers in the store long enough to buy a second cuppa. Web Site Of The Week Mr. Picasso Head may not be ignored. The site www.mrpicassohead.com is the product of Ruder Finn, a Manhattan PR firm; visitors may select facial features from a variety of Cubist and Blue Period works for assembly into a portrait of sorts, or a landscape of noses if you like that sort of thing, and have it displayed in an online gallery; though it will take some effort to stand out from the 40,000 already there. The firm's chief creative officer says he got the idea from his 3-year old son. Inasmuch as this is a Business & Technology topic, it would be remiss of me not to drag in some vague relation to business, however remote; the exec says it demonstrates "the power of viral marketing"; i.e., word-of-mouth, even off to the opposite side from the eyes. Think expressionist Fotolog. VoIP Set To Explode? Telephone call services that use the Internet, called VoIP for "voice over Internet Protocol" and rhymed with er, ah, xoip and qoip are poised for dramatic near-term growth. British Telecom plans to offer it to customers there, Time Warner Cable to its cable TV subscribers, and now AT&T has jumped in with plans for cheap unlimited local and long-distance calling. All of the services require an underlying high speed Internet connection, whether cable or DSL. At stake are "tens of billions of dollars in fees and taxes now paid" to phone companies for the use of their network which at present do not mandate fixed charges for data traffic (which is how VoIP is presently classed) as they do for circuit-switched voice calls. Needless to say, federal and state governments and local phone companies are the losers and may have something to say about that, but for now AT&T sees a savings of $11 billion a year; its CEO calls VoIP "the most significant fundamental new technology shift in telecommunications in decades". Besides the regulatory savings which could be undone, there are said to be genuine economies in treating voice calls as packet-switched data transfers: installation and operation are less costly, and users could employ computers to, say, not allow incoming calls after bedtime (or disable the ringer and route the message to a recorder), to forward calls to a cell phone, and to filter incoming calls like e-mail with whitelists and blacklists. On the other hand, VoIP is more subject to power outages and at present is considered less reliable in real time during periods of Internet congestion (though that can be a problem at present: think of Mother's Day). AT&T estimates that 23 million US households already have cable or DSL and would be eligible for their service, expected to run about $35-40 a month compared with $50-70 for regular unlimited calling plans. Which Paradigm D'Ya Like? The US telephone system is closely regulated, in the past due to AT&T monopoly domination, but today for the purpose of keeping phone service both affordable and accessible to low-income and rural users who are in effect partly subsidized by city and corporate customers. The US Internet structure is "essentially unregulated" out of concerns that the new technology will best develop without government interference. With the recent decision of AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and others to offer voice call service to millions of broadband users, the worlds have collided. Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell and FCC chair, believes "there is no functional or technical difference between an Internet phone call and other data" and therefore Internet voice service (VoIP) should be left alone. Consumers Union and other groups believe there's no functional or technical difference between an Internet phone call and other phone calls: they both involve somebody talking at each end and they are both carried over the same network paths for most of the way. CU and its allies also concerned that free competition could lead to the sort of thing that airline and energy deregulation have produced, in the form of a small number of providers charging as much as they can and ignoring low-margin accounts. A third view is expressed by Cox Communications, who suggests the degree of regulation should vary by market share, with large providers heavily overseen and smaller ones like, er, Cox Communications left alone. Analysts see an element of self-interest there and that plan is unlikely to go far, but battle lines are being drawn between proponents of the other two. UN Voices Ineffectual Support For Poor This is news? Well it's recent anyway: a conference in Geneva on the governance of the Internet fought to a standstill between industrialized nations who "feared that developing nations would vote for the UN to take administrative control of the Internet and call for a new pool of money [to be provided by guess who] to help poorer countries go online", and third world countries who wanted the UN to take administrative etc. The result? Why of course they formed a committee to study the issues, which made the delegates happy and insured they would all be able to get together again in fancy Swiss hotels for many fine lunches and dinners into the indefinite future. Besides the menus, one of the "working groups" will study "whether to introduce more international oversight" of the Internet's administration, and another will "review ways of paying for efforts to connect the world's poor to the Internet". The Geneva group also bravely voted in favor of "intellectual property rights as well as human rights and media freedom". Adding to the farce, Robert Mugabe lectured the delegates on human rights for an afternoon. However, the meeting was not a total loss since it produced the Quote Of The Day "Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no equality." - Shashi Tharoor, UN under-secretary for communications Just Bought A TV? Don't Read Any Further Intel is reported set to announce a new line of "advanced semiconductors that ... will improve the quality of large-screen digital televisions and substantially lower their price". The new products "integrate display, television receiver, and computer electronics on a single piece of silicon" and could "lead to lightweight 50-inch TV screens only 7 inches thick for about $1000." OK, OK, the gnashing of teeth is so loud I'll stop quoting. Anyway, chipmakers are looking into consumer electronics for profits as Moore's Law turns to Moore's Curse with buyers constantly expecting faster cheaper computers, and getting them. Intel's work is similar but not identical to Texas Instruments' development of Digital Light Processing (DLP) screens; while TI has concentrated on microscopic mirrors, Intel is focusing ha ha on tiny shutters in a technology known as Liquid Crystal on Silicon or LCoS. Intel will probably save its official announcement for the Consumer Electronics Show next month, but analysts expect sets using the chips to be available in time for next Christmas. Of course, by then there will probably be some reason to wait for 2005...

David Boies at SCO gets the $mil and 400k shares of SCO. Wonder if this is the same David Boies who took on Bush and the Supreme Court on behalf of Al Gore? With that Kurzweil poetry maker, I can now make the scene at the open mikes. Harold cohen looks a bit like Allen Ginzberg. He has software to create art as well.

Sashay down the page through the lioness nestled in my soul think i'm gonna have that printed on all my stationary... same david boies (he gets around)...

Is he a candidate for Saddams' defense attorney? I think Johnny Cochran is retired.

Format Wars A new generation of DVD players and disks is on the drawing boards, driven by the data demands of moviemakers and high-definition TV. Sony already has a model for sale in Japan; at about $3500 US for the recorder and $27 a disk it is not surprising they have sold only a few hundred units, even though the media has about five times more capacity than current models. With volume production not expected till 2005, a multiplayer standards battle is underway like the days of Betamax vs. VHS. Several factors seem to be at work here; the anointed winner at the DVD Forum's Technical Coordinating Group will probably be in line to collect major royalties from licensing the technology, and it will also be advantageously placed to thwart competition from its Chinese / Japanese / Silicon Valley rivals. The antagonists have more or less coalesced into two blocs. The NEC-Toshiba side champions the HD DVD, which uses mostly existing manufacturing techniques for their disks. Arrayed against them are Sony and Matsushita (who owns Panasonic and JVC) with their "Blu-Ray Group", whose candidate requires expensive new machinery to create the disks (which are enclosed in a protective jacket like a diskette), and whose players need two lenses if they must also read Ye Olde DVDs of Yore as well as their native kind. The Blu-Ray specs so far do not include read-only disks, only more expensive rewritable ones which Hollywood is not at all happy with; moguls want cheap unmodifiable media and are leaning toward the HD DVD in consequence. Looming over their shoulders however like Time's winged chariot is the growth of broadband, which could end up replacing disks altogether as a means of delivering movies to homes. The Rhodes-Jamison Weight-Loss Program R-J was a large-scale sand and gravel dealer in Berkeley; retail buyers of up to a few tons of stuff drove their truck on the scale when they went in, and again on leaving to determine how much they just loaded. Yefim Kriger of Connecticut received patent 6,649,848 for an intra-vehicle high tech version of the R-J scale designed to "weigh drivers, track pounds lost or gained, ad warn them when they overeat". On first entering your new fatmobile (garaged in the fatcave?) as the driver-on-a-diet, the system weighs you; it is designed not to be fooled by driving over a hill to reduce gravity, and requires the vehicle to be "parked or driving slowly" while the driver enters a profile of age, height, gender, and other data (more on that later). It continues to monitor changes to make the profile more reliable, and after it thinks it knows you well enough it responds to extra weight in the seat by (I am not making this up) "asking for information about shoes and clothes in an effort to account for the weight of the attire." If you don't come up with a credible story about heavy boots or an infant in your lap, the display screen issues a warning and brings up "a list of diet and exercise programs"; it can even - get this - use the car's cell phone to telephone or e-mail your doctor to snitch, if you have been so incautious as to enter the contact info. I suspect this gizmo will not be part of many people's New Year's resolutions. And another thanks goes to Ron Sipherd (mailto://ronks@well.com) for providing us with so much great information.

Ronks the Soothsayer and Future Seer The Year Ahead "For I dipp'd into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be"; - thus Tennyson in 1842. With 2004 upon us, here are some predictions and quotable punditries. PC component makers are rushing into the TV business, now that flat-screen sets are becoming a larger version of the monitor. Big names like Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola, as well as lesser fish like China's Konka, BenQ and Sampo of Taiwan, and South Korea's LG are all expected to offer sets: an analyst at Insight Media opines "you can pretty well expect anyone selling PC's appliances or TVs to have an LCD TV within a year." Cable service providers, long-distance phone companies, and "local" phone companies are all trying to offer it all at each others' expense, as well as Internet access and wireless service. Although bandwidth is usage-neutral and frankly becoming something of a commodity, repeated examples have shown that customer "churn rates" decline with subscribers who use multiple services from one source. From the Yankee Group: "Every company is going to try to provide every service to every customer." Venture capitalists; remember them? They're baaaack, though in a small way; money raised by VC firms in this country in the last three quarters totaled about $6 billion compared to the champion $76 billion raised 3Q1999-1Q2000. Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future observes "the turtle is cautiously poking its head out of its shell, but it's still protecting its vital organs". [Which evidently does not include its brain.] Other stuff to come: this may really be the year that 3G (3rd-generation) cell-phone service takes off, though that's been predicted about as regularly as the Year of ISDN. Software companies will continue to mate and merge whatever becomes of the Oracle-PeopleSoft bid. And for biometric ID, good old fingerprints are expected to gain in the marketplace over newer fads like iris and face scans and silly-walk analysis, er "gait patterns".

Who Owns Ya, Baby? That nervy orphan may have to move over for a new definition of chutzpah. Pentax Camera has taken out multi-page newspaper ads proclaiming itself "The Official Digital Camera Of The Internet" (TM). Canon, Olympus, and Sony are specifically declared ineligible for the title, which is "a trademark of Pentax USA". The copy declares the company's products are "recognized" as the ODCotI on account of their "greatness", but never says by who exactly; presumably the entire world, minus those three losers. This self-declaration could lead to some interesting imitators; imagine the official coffee drink, or lip balm, or paint thinner of the Internet. Or "the title of Official Ocean of the Internet, formerly the Atlantic, has just been outsourced to - of course - the Indian Ocean." Tanks ronks

Ronks Rocks, of course. Thanks again Ron Sipherd, at the WELL Taking The Heat Diamonds' crystal structure resembles silicon's sufficiently that they are candidates for use as semiconductors. Very pretty, expensive semiconductors, but still. They do have some practical advantages such as being able to operate at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 800 degrees above where silicon stops functioning. Recent developments in growing industrial diamond crystals with vapor deposition suggest they may be practical in time. They've been grown from seed crystals in a methane-hydrogen mix in sizes up to 1/5 inch thick by 2/5 inch wide. Their depth? Sorry, the article doesn't say. Anyway, two types are needed as with silicon: positive and negative, to use the shorthand. P-types have been fairly easy to make so far using boron, but n-types have proved much more difficult to fabricate though recent lab tests with phosphorus doping and boron-deuterium show it's possible. CA Bond Rating Lowered Moody's has declared Computer Associates debt to be junk-bond level, in view of questions regarding its accounting practices. Its short-term commercial paper was also lowered to "Not Prime". The Matrix Retreated An article in today's paper by covers the declining fortunes of the Matrix or "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange", a program developed by Florida company Seisint which received $12 million from the US Homeland Security Department to build a mega-database of everybody's personal information for use by law enforcement. All (Federal and participating state) government-held and publicly available data about individuals, drawn from criminal records, vehicle registrations, real estate transaction, drivers' licenses, credit bureaus, and so on is to be fed into the computer for retrieval in the event of suspected anti-social activity. At one time, up to 16 states had joined the jihad er program to monitor everything known about everyone; but after its auspicious rollout, some began to have reservations about the privacy implications of the thing and now all but five states have withdrawn their support and declined to provide information to it. With New York and Wisconsin bailing out last week, that leaves only its home state Florida plus Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Many critics see Matrix as an end run around the killing off of the Bush administration's unpopular Total Information Awareness initiative; as the article colorfully puts it, "opponents of the Pentagon program regarded the development of Matrix as a sign that the bubble was simply moving under the wallpaper". Matrix was perhaps not helped by the discovery that the founder of Seisint, Hank Asher, "was involved in the 1980's with a group of cocaine smugglers". As states drop the project over concerns of misuse, supporters are reduced to arguments like this from Mark Zadra, Florida's Chief of Investigations: "It really comes down to trust. Do you trust law enforcement to do what is right?" Oh hahahahahaha.

Microsoft building China beach head June 21 issue - Microsoft's largest beachhead outside the United States is in the state most hostile to it: the People's Republic of China. Since arriving in Beijing in 1990, the Gates empire has assembled a network of business ...

Microsoft plans to clamp down on piracy and promote security by expanding the Windows Genuine Advantage program. This program requires users to verify the authenticity of their copy of Windows before they download patches to the OS. http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/showstory.jsp?storyid=57366&s=ln

This will only serve to drive more folks to the Linux Desktop and the Firefox Browser. I see China moving to Linux in large numbers.

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is going to give the Entertainment PC a makeover. The lukewarm response for the EPC--a living room computer that functions as a DVD player, a digital-video recorder and a media storage vault that sort of looks like a VCR--is prompting the company to rethink the design and function of the devices, said Don MacDonald, general manager of Intel's home product group. "I think there is an in-built inertia against anything called a PC in the living room." --Don MacDonald Intel home product group Future living room units will be smaller, more stylish and likely less costly, he said. They could possibly even be integrated with movie delivery or other content services. Equally important: The fact that the box is a PC will be heavily de-emphasized. "I'm not sure I want to call it an entertainment PC," MacDonald said during an interview at the Intel Developer Forum. "I think there is an in-built inertia against anything called a PC in the living room." An early example of Intel's new direction is a rectangular prototype computer shown off at the conference that resembles Apple Computer's Mac Mini. from http://news.com.com/2100-1042_3-5598948.html

What's the buzz? Teens don't want to hear it New York Times News Service Nov. 28, 2005 07:12 PM BARRY, Wales - Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside. "The noise!" he complained. "What noise?" the grownups asked. advertisement Now 39, Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble. The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away. So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside. "On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers," said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. "On the high end, they'd be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff." Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one. from http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1128teenbuzz-ON.html

India's Outsourcing Boom Runs Into Trouble Shortage of Skilled Workers Could Mean Losing Jobs to the Philippines and China A chronic shortage of skilled workers is threatening India's outsourcing industry. Call centers and outsourcing firms are growing fast, but their human resources employees despair because most of the young Indians they interview are, they say, "unemployable." Some people in the IT industry have said that only one in 10 graduates is worth taking on. "Just look at their English," fumed a frustrated Mumbai-based call center manager as he waved around letters written by employees. One read: "As I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave." Another said: "I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well." India employs about 350,000 people in the outsourcing industry and adds 150,000 new jobs each year. But filling those vacancies is proving to be a nightmare. At this moment, the industry needs to hire around 9,000 people but can't find them. The crisis is set to worsen. The industry faces a shortfall of half a million workers in a few years' time, according to a study this month by McKinsey & Company and the Indian IT body Nasscom. The specter haunting the industry is that it could lose its leading position as the world's "back office." "If the industry has to go on paying higher and higher salaries to retain the staff it has, costs will rise and India will lose its biggest advantage � cheap labor," said Saurabh Wig, a former call center sales manager. If the industry fails to recruit workers at reasonable wages, India will lose orders to countries such as the Philippines and China, according to Nasscom. With half of its 1.2 billion people under age 25, how can India possibly be short of workers? The problem is not quantity but quality. Many of the 3.6 million graduates churned out every year by Indian universities are considered mediocre. The Nasscom-McKinsey report confirmed the experiences of HR executives. It said that only about 10 percent to 15 percent of eligible workers are fit for employment in the offshoring industry. Fluency in English apart, employers complained that graduates lacked computer skills, the ability to reason clearly, solve problems, think critically, analyze, work in teams and think creatively. The Confederation of Indian Industry said that what's taught at universities is not what industry needs. This is why the Indian government has set up a "Knowledge Commission" to improve Indian brainpower. Sam Pitroda, who is based in Chicago but visits India regularly, is the chairman of the commission. One of his tasks is to overhaul higher education from top to bottom. "About 80 percent of what is taught in Indian universities is obsolete. A professor boasted to me about how he'd used the same notes for 20 years. Think how much the world has changed, and he hasn't updated his notes." said Pitroda. Could Foreigners Benefit? The labor shortage, however, is good news for foreigners. Disgruntled British and American workers who have seen their jobs outsourced to India could get them back � with one catch. They need to move to India where their English and their accents will be an asset. "When foreigners take calls from their respective countries, it helps that they know the culture of the person they are speaking to. That can often be the differentiating factor between a successful Indian outsourcing company and a failure," Avaneesh Nirjar, chief operating officer of Hero ITES, an outsourcing firm. Young British graduates just out of college and looking for a year's travel and work experience are already taking jobs in New Delhi, Bangalore and Bombay. So are British call center workers looking for a change? Currently, about 30,000 to 50,000 foreigners work in the outsourcing industry. But a World Bank report says that by 2009, up to 16,000 of those jobs will be filled not by Indians but by Britons. It's estimated that, apart from fluent English speakers, the outsourcing industry will also need 160,000 professionals with European languages by 2010. Only 40,000 Indians are expected to have this specialization. The remaining 120,000 jobs will have to be filled by Europeans or Americans. At the New Delhi offices of Technovate e-Solutions, more than 100 foreigners from nine nationalities work alongside 900 Indians carrying out the sales, telesales and booking work for e-Bookers, a European online travel agency. Tea Westerlund, 35, from Finland, said she came for the challenge and experience of a new culture. "This experience will widen my career opportunities in the future. Most people in Finland tend to stay there, so it will be a big plus for me to have worked here," she said. "In the meantime, I'm being looked after and having a fantastic time." http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1428299

Pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G is manifesting itself on auction site eBay, where eager buyers are bidding in excess of US$1,000 to get what's turning out to be a hot commodity. The demand for the iPhone remains high even off the Internet, with lines forming Monday outside an Apple store in New York to buy the limited stock of the devices. Launched on July 11, the phone sold more than 1 million units worldwide over the first weekend, according to analysts. The demand has continued with carriers, including AT&T in the U.S. and O2 in the U.K., reporting iPhone 3G shortages. The 16G-byte iPhone is priced at $299 in the U.S., with the 8G-byte version priced at $199. In some countries carriers are giving the iPhone for free with contracts. The bidding for a 16G-byte iPhone 3G on eBay is exceeding $1,000, with one bid ending at $2,325. The average 8G-byte iPhone 3G bid is reaching the $800 to $900 range. In one auction a potential bidder asked if the iPhone could be shipped to Indonesia, indicating that bids were coming from countries where the iPhone won't be shipped by the end of this year. The phone is currently sold in 20 countries, but Apple hopes to expand its availability to 70 countries by year-end.