Posted by bordalix
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:39:00 GMT
Tuesday, I read on
ArsTechnica about SBC's CEO Edward Withacre interview on BusinessWeek, where he declares, and I quote:
How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
This is happening because ISP made huge investments in developing broadband networks, betting in the access business, and now are realizing that the real money is some layers above: companies like
Google and
Yahoo, are making huge profits, in advertising;
Skype has a huge hype value, 'selling' free voice instant messaging, disguissed; and
World of Warcraft(
?), with millions of players, each paying an average of 10 euros a month, must be a case study. So, ISPs want a piece of the cake.
And the thing is, in some places, ISPs have monopolies, so they can, for instance, block all your VoIP traffic, and make you use their own product. You, as a customer, having no other broadband operator in your area, have no choice. And companies like
Narus, are already making money with this: Narus product, not only allows ISPs to block almost any kind of traffic, as ISPs can decide to jitter the traffic, in order to avoid any legal constraints. From
another article from ArsTechnica, the words of Jay Thomas, Nerus marketing president:
"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."
Can ISPs do this? Or should they be network neutral? This issue is being debated in several places, like
ArsTechnica and
LessigBlog, and there is a very interesting
paper by Barbara van Schewick, which gives us an excellent economic framework for discussing the need for regulation on this matter.
It is an important matter for managers, regulators, and people concerned with the right to free information. In my humble opinion, this issue must be regulated: the temptation to do this kind of blocking and filtering, either in a monopoly, either in a cartel, is too strong. And with no regulation, we can be going to an ISP dictatorship.
Tags neutrality | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:37:00 GMT
In 10 years, you will be able to be understood by anyone in the world. Talk to anyone in your preferred language (say English), they will listen to you in whatever language they want to (Spanish? Portuguese?), all this in real time, thanks to this
translation goggles. A step back for the
Esperanto community, a huge step forward for
globalization.
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Posted by bordalix
Fri, 28 Oct 2005 14:36:00 GMT
My iMac is having video problems: my screen is scrambled. After some goggling, I found out that my iMac serial number is in the range for the
Apple repair extension program, so it has to be repaired. Meanwhile, back to Windows. But I surelly lack Exposé, and meanwhile, I found
Deskloops, and my first impression is that, maybe, there are some ideas that can be taken to the next Exposé version. Apple dudes should take a look at this.
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Posted by bordalix
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:34:00 GMT
The world is evolving, and so are human relations. Media formats will be purely digital, and distribution will be in a peer-to-peer model. Search engines will understand what I want, in plain english. But should I say 'will' or 'are'? Is the future nearer then we think?
- NTT is experimenting with human remote controlling. The idea is "to perhaps make video games more realistic", which can be very exciting, but having low voltage currents through my brain isn't my preferred definition of fun.
- Videoegg claim is "internet video publishing as simple as it ought to be like posting a photo or frying an egg". Well, I don't know, don't have the time to try it, but it seems people from Six Apart really like this service: the partner each other, and now you can now post video in your typepad blog, as simple as frying an egg.
- How will be TV in 10 years? Well, I don't know, but BrightCove as a really strong idea, and it makes sense. Just add mass adoption of broadband, dropping costs in video production, new reach media formats and home networks, and you have a all new economy model.
- From the web2explorer blog, I found this "more-than-a-search-engine" technology, ePrecis. Read the post, and then try and throw some sentences to the text box
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Posted by bordalix
Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:33:00 GMT
Back in the late 90's, I had this really crazy ideia of having data stored in the browsers of our web site viewers. We run against a lot of technical problems, so we had to cancel the whole deal. But today I found someone with the same levels of insanity (thank god i'm not alone) and definitely, a best programmer: combining
AMASS with the
TrimQuery SQL engine, he is able to
store full SQL tables in your browser cache. Could this be the driver for new AJAX applications?
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Posted by bordalix
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 14:32:00 GMT
Here some quickies from today:
- flock as landed. first experience shows me it's really beta: the del.icio.us integration works pretty well, but when i setuped my blogger account, the cpu just sky rocket (top even showed 103% usage!) and i had to kill it by hand. history search is a major add-on, but it's not working properly: i visited some sites, and try to search from some words that i seen in them, but the search results are not showing some specific pages. feed caching is another major break through, but why do i need to setup my del.icio.us account every time i restart flock? and i'm posting this using flock, and that seems to be working properly. i hope to post more on flock in the next few days.
- OpenOffice 2.0 is out, with full support to the Oasis standard OpenDocument format. there is already a comparison with MS Office Spare some bandwidth, and download it via p2p
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Posted by bordalix
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:30:00 GMT
From
Melo, an amazing parody on a new Microsoft program aimed to lower the number of bugs in their applications. Watch the
video, served from Akamai.
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Posted by bordalix
Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:29:00 GMT
In an amazing audio copy & paste exercise, rx creates new versions of well known musics, all "singed" by George W. Bush. His website is
here and my favorite music is "
Sunday Bloody Sunday" from U2. What's yours?
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Posted by bordalix
Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:28:00 GMT
I was exploring this
post from
lifehacker titled "Subscribe to free, del.icio.us videos in iTunes", and, while on that, decided to go to the podcast directory from iTunes. For my surprise (and pride), "Ha vida em Markl" was in the top of the list, which is amazing for a portuguese podcast, even if it is from
Nuno Markl. Thumbs up Nuno.
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Posted by bordalix
Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:26:00 GMT
Some of my friends had forked some months ago, and their descendants seems to really like DVDs. The problems is, besides loving to watch them, the kids really love to bite the discs, so, all the Noody and Nemo DVDs are getting quite disgusting. To fight this, my friends decided to think on a how to rip DVDs and store it in H.264 format.
Simple? Well, it looks like, the thing is, in total, we are talking of more than 1.000 DVDs, which can take a loooong time. So, they started to think on a distributed system that could offload the work to a network of computers attached to the Internet, each one contributing with spare cpu cycles, to do the job, which is pretty cool.
Meanwhile, I've found this application (Mac OS X and Be OS only) that can rip a DVD (even if encrypted) and store it in mp4 or h.264. It's called
HandBrake, and his telling me that "Bowling for Columbine" will take 6h30m (!) to be completed. Come on boys, we definitly need that distributed network!
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