The illusion of spectrum scarcity

In March last year, David Weinberger wrote a memorable article in Salon highlighting David Reed’s seminal insight that the ‘spectrum scarcity’ which has led to so much government regulation of communications is actually an illusion. Or, more precisely, it is an artefact of the limitations of old analog comms technologies. Analog signals did interfere with one another, and so had to be spread out over the spectrum — which was therefore finite, given the transmission and reception technologies of the day.

But that was then and this is now (to coin a phrase). With smart digital technologies we can now fit a virtually infinite amount of stuff into the electromagnetic spectrum. But we’re still stuck with the mindset which says spectrum is finite. The truth is that we’re no longer running out of spectrum, any more than we are running out of the colour blue. Here’s a lovely exposition of this idea by Gregory Staple & Kevin Werbach.

What this means is that an entire regulatory infrastructure — the FCC in the US, the DTI in the UK, etc. — is actually obsolete because the assumptions on which it is based are becoming obsolescent. Will things change? Hmmm… we’ll see.

Reality dawns at last: UK eUniversity to be, er, restructured

It’s been an open secret in the UK academic world for quite a while that Tony Blair’s ‘eUniversity’ project was a disaster. The only question was how long it would take officialdom to concede this. Now, it seems, the penny has dropped. Or, rather, the £62 million has dropped (that was the sum set aside by the government for this fatuous enterprise.) HEFCE (the body that funds UK universities) has just announced a ‘review’ of the eU. A tersely-worded statement (a classic example of the British mandarin’s mastery of euphemism, by the way) intimates that the plug has finally been pulled.

In the course of its miserable existence, the eU attracted a total of 900 paying customers. That works out at about £69,000 per student. It would have been cheaper to have given these folks £60k each and sent them to Harvard. And just in case you think I am being wise after the event, I gave a Keynote Address to a networking conference in Cambridge in the Spring of 2001 explaining why this venture was doomed. Heads should roll for this debacle, but somehow I doubt that they will for that is not the British Way. Instead, some cove who might otherwise have expected a knighthood will now be denied one.

Colm Toibin on Lady Gregory

Someone once asked a famous writer why he had written such a long book. “Because”, he replied, “I was not clever enough to write a short one”. This is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but I’m not sure about its provenence.*

It came to mind a lot this weekend, though, because I’ve read Colm Toibin’s Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, a gem of a biographical essay on WB Yeats’s friend and collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory.

It’s a beautiful little (125-page) book, packed full of effortless insight, and fascinating for anyone who (like me) is interested in Yeats. I particularly liked this quote from Yeats about a dispute between English colonial censors and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (which he and Gregory founded):

“The root of the whole difference between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are certainly always true to ourselves. In England, they have learned from commerce to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone”.

Also lots of hilarious quotes from Lady Gregory’s correspondence. On a visit to Washington, for example, she met President Taft. “When I was standing near him talking”, she reported to Yeats, “something soft and pillowy touched me, it was his tummy, which is the size of Sancho Panza’s”.

Speaking of which, I am reminded of a story about Lord Castlerosse, an Irish earl who was a famously indolent gossip correspondent and voluptuary in the 1930s, and who was likewise endowed with a magnificent paunch.

One day he ran into Nancy Cunard in the street and she remonstrated with him about the size of his tummy. “Really, Valentine”, she said, “can you imagine something like that (pointing to his paunch) on a woman”. “My dear”, he responded calmly, “half an hour ago it was”.

*Thanks to Veronica Yuill, who emailed to say that the real source is probably a line in a letter of Blaise Pascal’s: “Je n’ai fait cette lettre-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” : (roughly) “I’m sorry this letter is so long — I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” What a wonderful thing it is to have erudite readers.

Clay Shirky on VoIP

Clay Shirky has a new essay out, this time on the subject of internet telephony. As usual, he’s perceptive and on target. And here is Kevin Werbach’s admirably lucid testimony on VoIP to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

More on BitTorrent

I wrote about BitTorrent a few weeks ago. Now there’s a good piece in Slate about it. It’s the next rachet up in the file-sharing arms race.

Some days…

… end beautifully. This was the view from my front door at the end of the afternoon

.

[(Large) PhotoShopped version here.]

Look — no wheels

Observed in a Cambridge street the other day. The building in the background is the original Microsoft Lab.

The price of computing comfort?

About $300 for one of these contraptions:

Looks awful, I know, but David Pogue of the NYT swears by it, and he’s got good judgement, generally. Details from here. No distributors outside of US and Canada, as far as I can see.

Do-Not-Try-This-At-Home Department: How to disassemble your mini iPod

(Note: this section is only suitable for millionaires with a technical bent.) Are you sitting down? Right, we’ll begin:

“The plastic top and bottom plates are glued into place with a tacky adhesive that will soften considerably when heated so use the hair dryer on a low setting to heat up the top plate. Work the area until it’s very warm to the touch. Now turn the mini around so you’re looking at the Apple logo and squeeze the two rounded edges together at the top, causing the enclosure to bow a little bit in the middle. Insert the flat bladed screwdriver between the plastic and the metal (in line directly above the Apple logo) and gently pry the plate straight up. Work around the edges, leaving the area around the ‘Hold’ button till last. When you finally do get to the ‘Hold’ button area, pry carefully and pull the plate STRAIGHT up. Behind the ‘Hold’ button are two plastic standoffs (sort of like tabs) that extend down into the case and push the real switch on and off. If you pry the thing out at an angle, you will break one of these standoffs. That was mistake #1 for me. The actual ‘Hold’ switch soldiered onto the main board broke, so the ‘Hold’ switch no longer works….”

It gets worse. Read on…

“Turn the mini over, looking back into the top, you will see two tiny philips head screws on either side of another metal plate. Remove these with the #000 screwdriver carefully and put them in a safe place (don’t drop these on the floor, you will never see them again).

Now comes the fun part – gently push on the 30 pin connector at the bottom of the mini and all of the main components (on an assembly I call the component sled) will slide right out the top. It is a bit tight, but if you meet major resistance, back off and INSURE you have the ribbon cable disconnected. This is where I messed up and killed my iPod mini, I forgot to check and I pushed with all my might, ripping the ribbon cable off of the male connector. Oops.”

Oops indeed. And the cost of one of these little beauties? Why a mere $249.

Alternatively… you could just stand under a hair-dryer tearing up 20-dollar bills.

Terminus blues

On my way to a meeting in London I passed through King’s Cross station (which is where one of the Cambridge lines terminates). KX was always the poor relation of its grand baroque next-door neighbour — St Pancras station. And — as the picture illustrates — it’s become very tatty. Now, to make matters worse, its relative impoverishment is set to increase. As the Guardian reports: “From 2007, St Pancras station, expanded from eight to 13 platforms, will be the principal London terminus for Eurostar trains scything through the North Downs, under the Thames and by means of viaducts and tunnels to North Pole Junction, the Regent’s Canal and Barlow’s train shed. The platforms at St Pancras will be extended under what Lansley describes as a “lightweight and diaphanous” steel and glass roof. Eurostar trains will take centre stage, with Midland main line and suburban trains on either side. Barlow’s roof will be restored to its original condition, its great iron trusses painted sky blue as they would have been in the 1860s.”

And what is to happen to poor old King’s Cross? Why, it is to be ‘regenerated’.