Monthly Archives: March 2006

New York Times discovers the Slingbox

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Yep — there’s a piece by David Pogue.

IN the olden days, Americans gathered in front of the television sets in their living rooms to watch designated shows at designated times. You had a choice of three channels, and if you missed the broadcast, you’d feel like an idiot at the water cooler the next day. Quaint, huh?

Then came the VCR, which spared you the requirement of being there on time. Then cable TV, which blew open your channel choices. Then TiVo, which eliminated the necessity of even knowing when or where a show was to be broadcast. What’s next — eliminating the TV altogether?

Well, sure. Last year, a strange-looking gadget called the Slingbox ($250) began offering that possibility. It’s designed to let you, a traveler on the road, watch what’s on TV back at your house, or what’s been recorded by a video recorder like a TiVo.

The requirements are high-speed Internet connections at both ends, a home network and a Windows computer — usually a laptop — to watch on. (A Mac version is due by midyear.)

Today is another milestone in society’s great march toward anytime, anywhere TV. Starting today, Slingbox owners can install new player software on Windows Mobile palmtops and cellphones, thereby eliminating even the laptop requirement.

On cellphones with high-speed Internet connections, the requirement of a wireless Internet hot spot goes away, too. Now you can watch your home TV anywhere you can make phone calls — a statement that’s never appeared in print before today (at least not accurately).

New Internet backbone map for North America

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From BoingBoing. CIO.com just published a new detailed map of the North American Internet backbone. 134,855 routers are mapped, each colour-coded to indicate which provider owns it. The colour coding is interesting.

Red is Verizon, blue AT&T, yellow Qwest, green is other backbone players like Level 3 & Sprint Nextel, black is the entire cable industry put together, & gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.

The CIO journalist who produced the map with Bill Cheswick of Lumeta suggests that what it tells us is that the debate on net neutrality needs to be understood not only in terms of the last mile, but also in terms of the backbone. The players are increasingly the same.

Large version of the map (pdf) available here.

Here’s a close-up of one region.

Feds back Apple against France

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Surprise, surprise! Macworld UK report…

The US government has taken Apple’s side, condemning France’s move to legislate for interoperable copy protection technologies.

Speaking on CNBC, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said he needed to take a close look at France’s proposals, but warned: “Any time that something like this happens, any time that we believe intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiaitive.”

French lawmakers this week passed a bill which would force Apple, Microsoft and others to ensure that files purchased with one form of digital rights management (DRM) would work on computers and portable devices that employ another of the standards.

The move seems set to open up the industry, allowing songs purchased from Napster to play on an iPod, or tracks acquired from iTunes to play on a Windows Media-backed player.

Apple has condemned the move as “state-sponsored piracy”.

Ho, ho! See what Cory Doctorow has to say about that.

That Microsoft delay

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Lots of commentary on the anouncement by Microsoft that Vista will be delayed again. Here, for example, is Good Morning Silicon Valley‘s take on it…

Microsoft is portraying Thursday’s shake-up of its Platforms & Services Division as a restructuring, months in the works, aimed at achieving “greater growth and agility” and unrelated to the repeated slippage in the release of Windows Vista, the latest announced this week (see “Don’t you know Lunar New Year is the new Christmas?”). And that may be true as far as it goes. But the problems with the OS may be much uglier than some tweaks needed here and there. Smarthouse News in Australia is citing “a Microsoft insider” saying Vista at this moment is a dog’s breakfast, with more than half its code needing to be rewritten. Smarthouse’s source says programmers and engineers are being pulled off the Xbox and Viiv teams to resolve problems with the entertainment and media center functions in Vista, and that both Vista and an updated Viiv would be targeted for release at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January….

Hmmm… That means that Vista will miss the 2006 Christmas market. It’s also been announced that the next release of Microsoft Office has been put back. But that’s probably because the folks at Redmond don’t want to steal Vista’s thunder by releasing Office 2007 before the new version of Windows. Clearly, running a bloatware-creating monopoly is not all fun and games…

Britannica retaliates

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Remember the study in Nature that concluded Wikipedia is about as authoritative a resource as Encyclopedia Britannica (see “Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown ends in carrel throwing brawl”)? Turns out it wasn’t the rigorous piece of erudition you’d expect from the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal. In fact, it was anything but that. According to Britannica, everything about the study — from its methodology to the misleading way Nature spun the story in the media — was ill-conceived. “Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” Britannica’s editors wrote in an annihilative bit of deconstruction entitled “Fatally Flawed”. “Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

Bush makes an elementary mistake

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I saw a clip of the Bush press conference the other day, in which he indicated that he would take a question from Helen Thomas, a veteran White House reporter he’s been studiously ignoring for most of his term in office. She warned him that he’d be sorry, and he was. But the TV clip only skimmed the surface. Here’s the transcript.

Thanks to James Miller for finding it.

Saddam’s delusions

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The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened a secretive and brutal regime to outside scrutiny for the first time. The U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a secret comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein’s regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources.

In the words of the journal Foreign Affairs,

Two years in the making, the report of the “Iraqi Perspectives Project” draws on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents from all levels of the regime, and is destined to rewrite the history of the war from the ground up. Excerpts from the report itself are presented exclusively in a special double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.

Highlights include:

  • Did Iraq have WMD? No — but Saddam wanted others, particular in the region, to think he did, so he maintained a calculated ambiguity on the question. In the last months before the war he realized that it was too dangerous to continue playing this double game and finally decided to cooperate fully with international inspectors. But at that point his track record of repeatedly lying meant that no one believed him.
  • What made Saddam so complacent? His belief that the United States did not have the will to take casualties in a serious war and that if necessary France and Russia would keep him safe.
  • What did Saddam care about? First and foremost, preventing a coup. His entire regime was set up to prevent the emergence of any alternate centers of power that could threaten his position. He created an astonishing array of different military and paramilitary forces to maintain domestic control, but made sure to stock them with lackeys and cronies, have them check and balance each other, and have everybody watched carefully at all times. This allowed him to stay in power, but it meant that his armed forces were almost completely ineffective at dealing with actual military operations against a competent foreign enemy.
  • Did Saddam plan the current insurgency? No. He thought the United States would never attack, and was confident that even if it did, the resulting war would follow essentially the same script as the first Gulf War in 1991, without a full-scale invasion all the way to Baghdad. He did preposition a lot of military materiel around the country before the war started, but only to disperse it and keep it safe, so that it would be available either in the later stages of a long and drawn-out campaign against the coalition, or to reestablish control at home afterwards (as he did in 1991, when the Kurds and Shia revolted).
  • How did Saddam think the war was going? Swimmingly. Because everyone knew that Saddam severely punished anybody who told him unpleasant truths, the entire regime was built on lies. During wartime, this meant that junior officers told senior officers that everything was going well, they reported it up the chain of command, and Saddam himself remained a prisoner of his delusions.

    • Full, fascinating, text here.

    A couple of striking passages:

    A 1982 incident vividly illustrated the danger of telling Saddam what he did not want to hear. At one low point during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. With some temerity, the minister of health, Riyadh Ibrahim, suggested that Saddam temporarily step down and resume the presidency after peace was established. Saddam had him carted away immediately. The next day, pieces of the minister’s chopped-up body were delivered to his wife. According to Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the head of the Military Industrial Commission and a relative of the murdered minister, “This powerfully concentrated the attention of the other ministers, who were unanimous in their insistence that Saddam remain in power.”

    And this…

    Fear of Saddam’s reaction to bad news was not limited to his ministers and soldiers. Its pernicious effects reached even into Saddam’s immediate family. One former high-level official related the following story about Qusay:

    At the end of 2000, it came to Saddam’s attention that approximately seventy military vehicles were immobile. Saddam told Qusay to resolve the problem. Republican Guard mechanics claimed they could repair the vehicles if the funds were made available. Qusay agreed to the work, and funds were provided for the task. Once the work was completed, Qusay sent a representative to inspect the vehicles and he found them lined up on a vehicle park, thirty-five vehicles on each side. The vehicles looked like new, having been freshly painted and cleaned.

    After Qusay’s representative inspected them, a second inspection was conducted to verify that they were now operational. The staff was told to supply drivers to move all [the] vehicles to the opposite side of the vehicle park to ensure they were in working order. None of the seventy vehicles would start. When this was reported to Qusay, he instructed that Saddam not be informed, as Qusay had already told Saddam that the vehicles were operational.

    In the end, Qusay did not order mechanics to fix the vehicles — it appears that he was eager only to hide this failure from his father.

    Ndiyo systems in South Africa

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    Quentin’s installed the first Ndiyo networks in South Africa, using 3G mobile phones to provide internet connectivity. As ever, the biggest problem is sorting out the power cables. The Nivo thin clients are fixed to the wall under the desk. Nice to think that each of them replaces an ugly, power-hungry, resource-consuming PC!

    Blair’s credibility deficit

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    “Funny paper, the Guardian“, remarks Simon Jenkins at the end of his (Guardian) column arguing that Blair is the best bet Labour has. What’s really funny is that the paper pays Jenkins something like £200k a year for his increasingly-jaded rants. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the paper argued, in an editorial, that Blair’s time was up. And, today, Jonathan Freedland argued that the Prime Minister’s credibility is shot. He’s right.

    The crude, harsh truth is that no one can take what Blair says on foreign policy seriously, because he is responsible for the greatest foreign-policy disaster in half a century of British history. No matter that he emerged as a major world leader during the Kosovo war, or that he won international admiration after the Good Friday agreement. Now, because of that one fateful decision, his credibility is shot.

    And it is not just in international affairs that Blair is overwhelmed by Iraq. Take the current sleaze affair. A useful law of scandal is that charges only bite when they confirm a pre-existing suspicion. In the 1990s Britons believed the Major government was decayed; the Hamilton and Aitken revelations duly validated that belief. When the Bernie Ecclestone affair broke in 1997, voters didn’t see Blair or New Labour as financially corrupt (even though the charge then, of cash-for-policy, was much graver than anything revealed now). Today’s scandal bites because it plays into something Britons do now believe about their government: that it is not honest and cannot be trusted.

    And the explanation for that, once again, is Iraq. Polls show that Blair was broadly trusted before the invasion. But he told the nation that Saddam had weapons of destruction when he didn’t, and Blair has never been trusted since. In this sense, removing Blair over a few undisclosed loans would be like jailing Al Capone for tax evasion: he will be punished for a small offence because the system couldn’t get him for the much larger one.