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| Thursday, July 11, 2002 |
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The opacity problem 
| | Big surprise: there's not much demand for the Segway. You can blame the price, or anything else you want, but the big problem from the beginning was Dean Kamen & friends' insistence on secrecy when they were developing the thing. |
| | I believe that Dean Kamen's creation is so original, and his vision so personal, that there is no way anybody else could have cloned it or stolen its thunder before it came out. So it annoys me that he and his crew were so deeply secretive about the thing, even though I know secrecy is pro forma in the invention business. |
| | Yes, there was some nice buzz about "Ginger" (aka "IT") when it was in development, there wasn't much to talk about. And now that it's out, there still isn't. We don't know enough. We haven't been talking about it. |
| | If Kamen and crew kept no secrets about Ginger when she was in development, I'd betcha there would now be far more demand, and far more creative thinking about what could be done with it. |
| | And I'll guarantee you this: the most original uses for this original machine will be ones Kamen didn't imagine when he created it. |
| | Again, the issue is transparency. If you want the market to ignore you, just keep'em clueless about your really cool ideas. |
Metaphorical clarifications
| | My latest SuitWatch is out. It's about infrastructure and transparency. At the end I point to an online forum at Linux Journal, where an anonymous contributor just offered this explanation of Micrsoft's approach to the infrastructure business: |
| | The electric company comissions a new hydro dam. Dams-R-us wins the bid to provide the dam. When it is completed, Dams-R-us points to where the electric company will attach to the HV transformers. The electric compay doesn't receive keys to the dam and Dams-R-us give them an 800 number to call if the dam ever stop generating power or collapses. |
| | Hits the nail right through the board. |
| | What I'm trying to do here is change the open source conversation a bit by giving credit where due (it's great for infrastructural uses where the product you're selling is something that depends on the infrastructure, rather than deep infrastructure itself — which is exactly what companies like UserLand have been doing with their own infrastructural work on XML-RPC, SOAP and related efforts), and moving on to other topics, such as the connection between infrastructure and transparency. |
Making the point
Hi-Fli
| | ...operating devices that emit RF on a commercial flight is typically forbidden. The more likely outcome of embedding Wi Fi in every notebook computer is a ban on computer use while in flight. We can't expect flight attendents to be up on which notebook has Wi Fi and which doesn't. The typical big biz response would be to simplify the matter and ban them all. |
| | Someone out there that knows aviation electronics care to comment? |
| | I know a little about RF, and about the kind of RF used by airplanes for navigation and for communication between planes and control towers. And while I think the situation is complicated, I don't think it's hopeless either for Internet service on planes, or for wi-fi (which is already there, frankly — more about that later). |
| | First let's talk about interference. |
| | Ever try to listen to a radio next to your computer? AM radio is nearly trashed. FM is in much better shape, but some radios are more immune to noise than others. Tune your Walkman to a weak signal, set it by your laptop and see what happens. |
| | What's interesting here is that your laptop is putting out plenty of noise, even without a wi-fi signal. |
| | Now try this one: tune a radio to an empty channel at the upper end of the FM band. Take 107.1, for example. Now take another radio, such as a walkman, and tune it back and forth between 96 and 97 on the dial. Around 96.4 or 96.6 you'll hear a blank signal on 107.1. That's because most radios are busy transmitting while they're also receiving. And they're doing it at frequencies about 10.7 or 10.5 MHz away from the channel to which they are tuned. Don't ask why; it's just the way most FM radios have been built for the duration. It's why you'll sometimes notice that SCAN on your car radio will stop at a station that has exactly nothing on it. That's because a car nearby is tuned to a station 10.x MHz up or down the dial. (Using a similar technique you can actually do non-invasive research into TV viewing and radio listening.) |
| | Now look at the FAA's list of aviation frequency bands. Note all the radionavigation stuff between 108 and 118. Air/Ground communications (what United Airlines often shares on Channel 9 of the armrest audio system) starts at 118. These are all frequencies that your walkman can conceivably interfere with if you listen to FM on the plane (which is very easy to do, especially if you're sitting by a window). In fact, a few years ago PC Computing magazine did a test on a variety of devices, including laptops, portable radios and game players, and found that only walkman-type radios were a conceivable threat. But that was long before wi-fi was huge. Or even digital cellular telephony. |
| | European cell phones use bands around 900 and 1800MHz. U.S. bands are around 800 and 1900MHz. Microwave ovens, Bluetooth and wi-fi are all up around 2400-2500MHz. There's aviation stuff near these bands, but not on them. |
| | Now it's looking like the FCC will open up bands upwards of 2400MHz (2.4Ghz) for spread spectrum, frequency hopping and other techniques that will allow broadband communications to your laptops and other devices. |
| | I think that's when the Internet shows up on commercial aircraft. |
| | The dirty not-so-secret (it's actually a Good Thing) is that, as frequencies go up, the waves get stopped or absorbed by smaller and smaller things (though they might still be reflected by bigger ones — it all depends). Think of it in terms of sound. Play music in your living room and go around the corner into another room, then another room again. What you lose first are the highest treble sounds. As you get farther away all you'll hear is the deepest bass. Same goes with lightning and thunder. Lightning causes thunder. If you're nearby, you hear a loud crack, or a tearing sound followed by a boom. (In the latter case you're actually hearing the sound produced along the length of a liightning bolt striking nearby, where the sound produced by the bottom of the bolt arrives first, and the boom produced by the spreading roots of the bolt in the cloud above arrive last, but loudest because they're produced by a part of the bolt that's parallel to the ground.) But if you're far away you only hear a low boom or a deep rumble. Higher frequencies degrade over shorter distances. |
| | The powers used by wi-fi and the new higher-frequency spread spectrum stuff are extremely low, and the frequencies are extremely high. They're also fairly isolated from the frequencies used by planes. The only thing close to the new 5.7 GHz spread spectrum band is TWDR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar), which uses 5.6-5.65GHz. I don't think that's an issue. |
| | So I'm betting that the FAA is quietly monitoring the wi-fi situation. They'd be dumb not to, considering how many laptops come with wi-fi already. |
| | The problem I have with the article is when Lou quotes Gartner wonk Joseph Byrne, "For example, you and I can swap files while sitting next to each other on a plane". |
| | Yeah, right. Right after I get to place a call to my wife on my cell phone. |
| | Well, this is already do-able, among Macintosh laptop users, and probably plenty of Windows and Linux users as well. I can make my laptop into a base station with very a few clicks, and exchange files willy-nilly with any takers. I am sure lots of files have been passed back and forth in planes already, with nobody the wiser. |
The clue train seems to be stopping there.
| | David Reed: "I'm really excited by what may be starting to happen at the FCC." |
A little humility, please
| | Never mind what Google says, N.Z. Bear has me pegged as a lowly insect in the Blogosphere Ecosystem. Not sure what I used to be. Living ooze or something. |
The wandering optimist
| | The American identity can be summarised in a single polling question: we are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed - with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s - that next year will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world, especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power. The essential American credulousness - we believe in our nation, our system, our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God - must seem pretty obnoxious, too. |
PointPower
| | Blogging presentations live is a terrific new sport. I'm not sure if anybody was playing it when I gave this presentation to JabberConf in Munich last month, but bringing it up is an excuse to finally put it up, which I just did a few minutes ago. |
| | And what the heck: here's most of another presentation I gave to a group assembled by Lance Knobel in London a few days later. It opens with my wireless adventures there. Still a fun story. |
Your loss
| | Took my laptop in for an HD and memory upgrade yesterday. The guy behind the counter knew who I was and asked if I'd heard of Blog Wars. (Don't click yet. Keep reading.) "You mean warblogs?" Nope, he said. Blog Wars. "Watch out," he added. "It's really over the top." |
| | More like it's really under the bottom. The site is flat-out pornographic. But not a porn site. I mean, it doesn't open 40 windows you can't close or anything like that. It is kind of a Slashdot for sex and gross-out topics. There are a few nuggets like this link to a bizarre idea for WTC2. But... man, there's some nasty shit on there. |
| | Anyway, click at your own risk. |
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