Software Physics

Man it’s good to be an operator in North America these days. I have no love for the cable boys but I’d be PO’d if I were them. New legislation is likely to be passed that will help telco compete in video. The big deal is that where cable essentially had to go door-to-door requesting franchise permissions in each and every municipality the new law will create a “National Franchise”. One-stop shopping and palm-greasing in Washington means new entrants (read: Verizon and AT&T) will have a lot easier and cheaper time than their cable counterparts.

Light Reading - Video - Barton Bill to Boost Telco Video - Telecom News Analysis

There’s nothing and everything revolutionary about Amazon’s new S3 service. In case you’re unaware of the offering, Amazon has made a storage service available. The big news: pricing and accessibility. The service is priced at $0.15/gig per month for storing data and $0.20/gig per month for data transfer. Compare this to something like XDrive, at $5.00/gig per month ($10/5gig/mo), and you get an idea as to how much this changes the current game. Read more »

What kind of lobbying virus did major telecommunication service providers release on the machinery of the FCC? Seems like whatever they want these days they’re getting (most recently - FCC Helps Verizon’s Enterprise Game ). Starting with the revocation of the unbundling rules two years ago (and effective as of 3/11/06) to allowing the unimpeded reanimation of ma bell, the FCC seems to be under the complete control of the major telecom companies. It’s hard to believe claims that regulatory relief is necessary for Verizon or AT&T to compete with smaller service providers in any market or segment. Aside from anti-competitive issues, an overarching concern is the future of the end-to-end Internet. Think about something as ridiculously improbable as mashups of AIN services and then think whether we should be concerned about having big telco as the stewards of our networked future.

As promised, more stuff on flock: I still like Flock. I like the built-in blogging tools (online and offline) and the social bookmarking integration (del.icio.us and shadows). I had some buggy interactions but for the most part it’s pretty stable. I’m a bit disappointed that the feed aggregation is not more powerful. The capability is burried, unlike the well thought out access to the blogging and favorites; I’m guessing the feature is down on the feature list and will receive more attention in future releases.

Wow. The Chinese are moving fast on their domestic CPU capabilities. Last I looked (about 2yrs ago) their first generation product (code-named Godson) was unimpressive. Today, I came across an article claiming that a Chinese company (Menglan Group, a Chinese company that invests in textiles) plans to launch a $125 PC within the year. Reports are that the laptop computer, based on the second generation Godson II CPU, will have the equivalent performance of a 1Ghz PIII and will play DVDs, video games and comes in a small form factor (around 1.1 lbs). Given that I am writing this on a 900mhz PIII I know that they’ve reached the “good enough point” with the technology. I can’t find any info on disk or memory but even 10G and 128meg would be enough for the bread and butter stuff (web, email, editing, simple games) to run respectably.

I love my Shure E3 in-ear headphones. Here’s why they’re great (in order):

1) Complete isolation from your surroundings

2) Normal sound pressure level listening in loud environments

3) No batteries

4) Superb sound quality

5) Compact

All this and they’re a real high-quality product.

With these I can sit in the middle of bedlam, blissfully deaf to all of it. I’m compelled to mention this now because on Friday I flew cross-country across the aisle from a screaming infant reenacting scenes from the Exorcist. Aside from the occasional disturbing visual, I was completely unaffected. If you travel or work in a not-so-quiet home office, get thee a pair of these.

Downsides: I should mention these as the noise cancellation style headphones provide excellent isolation as well.

1) Comfort - some people have trouble getting used to the in-ear fit

2) Fit - these work great when the ear piece seals well. Moving around a lot breaks the seal and the sound goes to crap. Don’t plan on using these on the treadmill.

3) Compete isolation from your surroundings - With music playing you will not hear anything. That goes for smoke detectors, screaming children and fire department axes at the front door…

Versioning is one of those potential potholes for SOA that no one really wants to think too hard about (it hurts). The problem isn’t new, it’s not even limited to technology — you publish rules that people follow; stuff gets built assuming your rules; you create a new version of the rules; stuff breaks. It doesn’t matter whether it’s software or the license renewal line at the DMV, changing the rules is tricky and can be costly. Read more »

Just starting to evaluate Flock. Seems like a Rather nifty browser with a blog editor built right in (posting from Flock right now or, as Madge used to say, “your soaking in it”). Not sure we need another browser, but I’m guessing this will go along like linux distros (Flock is built on the mozilla core).

I’ll add more as I go along.

Ever find your self trying to optimize away loop overhead or cringing at the thought of one more string comparison? Chances are, if you’re a server-side developer you’ve had to worry about this type of minutia at one point in your life. The solution: get the bits off the server, CodeBoy. Fat client applications can frequently provide this help but browser clients almost never help servers shoulder application load. As we become more sophisticated about client-side browser processing, maybe AJAX techniques can be used for more than just snappy UIs and applied to help scale the server side of “Web 2.0″ applications. Read more »