Month: January 2003

the good thing about standards

is that there are so many to choose from.

I just found out that 802.11a — what was the weaker precursor of 802.11b, the WiFi standard — is now bigger and stronger at 56 Mbits/second just like 802.11g.

What does this mean? All I’ve been able to determine is that 802.11a is better in a lot of ways, most notably that it operates in the 5 GHz spectrum rather than the increasingly crowded 2.4 GHz 802.11b, BlueTooth, and wireless phones operate.

And to add to my confusion, mixed-mode a/b equipment has been out for a year, well ahead of 802.11g. So why has Apple embraced the g standard? I can only assume that it’s interoperability with the 802.11b hardware they already support was a strong selling point.

For the life of me, I can’t see a whole lot of use for 56 Mbit anyway. It’s not 100 MBit so it’s not the next logical step up from 10. I’d like to dig up the article with Bill Joy talking abou the wireless stuff they (Sun) setup in Aspen and his determination that 1 MBit was about all anyone used: more than that made no difference. That may not be true in the these rich media days, but is 10 Mbits/second enough?

Review: Rains All the Time: A Connoisseur’s History of Weather in the Pacific Northwest


Rains All the Time: A Connoisseur’s…

A slim but enjoyable book. It details the impressions and facts of the weather in Oregon and Washington, from the days of Captains Drake, Cook, and Vancouver to the modern day. There is a lot of good information about weather forecasting and why it never seems to tell us what we want to know. In all fairness, we do get warnings of big storms — the likes of the Columbus Day storm of 1962 will likely not surprise anyone again — but the day in/day-out questions about whether it will rain and how much are still beyond the grasp of the weathermen.

No, it’s not Hawaii, nor is it the humid sweltering east coast, either. Been there, done that.

insights and impressions

My first full day of work in almost 2 years and my first in a university.

It’s more different from the grubby commercial world than I imagined. In a morning orientation with my boss, she recalled her initial impressions of her first days. In relating it to a friend, her wise friend replied that she had now entered a medieval world. As I went through the day, I realized how true that was.

The central concepts of the medieval, or more correctly, the feudal period was the fiefdom, the rigorous caste system and its resulting lack of mobility. You were what you were.

That may take some getting used to, but after all this time out of the workplace, what wouldn’t?

someone owes Ted some money

[Ted] Turner, as well, refashioned himself as a global newsman as CNN expanded into new markets (by 1995, it reached 156 million subscribers in 140 countries around the world), banning the word “foreign” from CNN newscasts in favor of “international.”

Someone used the F word (“foreign students”) in a CNN.com quickpoll this weekend. There was a monetary fine associated with it back in the day: I wonder if he’s exacted the punishment yet?

count me in that number

“Given that some shareholders continue to focus their disappointment with the company’s post-merger performance on me personally, I have concluded that we should take steps now to avoid the possibility of that effort hindering our ability to pull together as a team and focus fully on our businesses.”

Yes, we do blame you and your old pal, Mr Levin. Now you’re both gone: perhaps we’ll see some improvement.

Oh, and thanks for doing this on Sunday: the market opening on Monday should be a good one.

So much for GPL’ed code being the “death of innovation”

We’ve been hearing for ages now how GPL’ed code was going to kill innovation and destroy the computing industry. Here’s some stuff about it, straight from Redmond, but funny how the video uses a format that is, um, less than universal. If they really want to get their message out beyond their own community, you’d think someone would realize a more platform-neutral format would be a good choice, even as an alternate. Nope, it’s our way or the highway.

So Apple decides not to wait around for MSIE to get any better on its platform. Now, in many cases, when you might lose a customer’s business — after all, the five year deal to make IE the preferred browser has been over for awhile — you redouble your efforts in hopes of retaining that business. Not so at Microsoft. Evidently, you assume you’re still the only game in town and there’s no need to do a better job. I have often used the phrase “institutional arrogance” to describe their behavior: this seems to be a good example.

With IE languishing and upstarts like Chimera and stalwarts like Mozilla/Netscape making gains, Apple takes a look at the state of the field and chooses the KHTML rendering engine from the KDE project’s Konqueror browser (ironically, in KDE, it functions much like IE with file and LAN browsing built-in) as the basis for its free browser.

Not only that, they make a lot of improvements to the code base, give those away, as the GPL requires, and release a detailed changelog.

This makes for very interesting reading: there is already a bit of KDE code in Sherlock, apparently, and it’s instructive to see the Apple guys talking to the KDE developers as peers.

So where is the huge danger if other companies do this? How is Apple harmed by taking a freely available good — the KHTML and KJS code — making it better, and then giving away what they add? They save time, gain credibility, make friends, and lose . . . . what, exactly?

Obviously, it all comes down to your business model. Apple’s is to sell computers and the way to do that is to make them more valuable to people than any other on the market. Microsoft’s model is to sell licenses to use their software, ostensibly by making it best of breed, but more often by locking customers in. Where Apple will let you run anyone’s apps on their hardware, even as they make free and competitive offerings, Microsoft can’t and won’t let that happen.

How long will it be before some IT decisionmaker loses his job for buying into the hype, only to find he’s locked his company into a situation it can’t get out of?
Continue reading “So much for GPL’ed code being the “death of innovation””