Intel takes Ultra Wideband to 220Mbps

Ultra Wideband radio has looked for a while like a really interesting technology. Now comes a report of what Intel have been doing with it. According to reporter Martyn Williams, “The prototype was demonstrated by Kevin Kahn, head of Intel’s communications and interconnect technology laboratory, as part of his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) Japan event, which ended Friday at Maihama just outside Tokyo”. The transmitter and receiver pair, which Kahn said were just out of the laboratory, achieved a sustained data rate of around 220M bps over a distance of about one meter for approximately 2 hours while on display on the IDF Japan stage. The data rate is more than double that of a system Intel showed in Japan a year ago: That system was working at 100M bps.”

So this is the next Bluetooth then?

More on Concorde

Lance Knobel: “The most loyal Concorde passengers are the Duchess of York, Joan Collins, Sir David Frost and Sir Elton John. Shudder.”

Harvard and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Dean of Harvard has written to students informing them that the University will “terminate the network access of any student who is a repeat offender, that is, a student who has been warned about a first incident of copyright infringement and who is again found to have been downloading, reproducing, or distributing copyrighted material in violation of the copyright laws. The length of termination will be one year. Termination of network access includes all devices owned or registered by the student. We call this severe consequence to your attention because the educational consequences of such a deprivation of access would be so very serious, given the way students typically use the Harvard network on a daily basis for educational purposes.”

John Palfrey, Head of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has posted a thoughtful comment on the issue. “While the university wants to endorse academic freedom and doesn’t want to have to patrol the network”, he writes, “the university can’t very well endorse stealing and can’t open itself to huge liability.  While the university wants to stand up for its students, it probably isn’t likely to want to investigate and litigate every one of the notices it receives of copyright violation (from a proof perspective, one can imagine all sorts of problems of authentication, who’s doing what exactly, whether usage constitutes “fair use”, particularly in the peer-to-peer context, etc.).  While the law just requires a copyright holder to make an accusation in a letter, the law requires much more on the part of the University.  Given that the law — particularly when it comes to fair use of copyrighted material in an academic setting — is quite unclear and one often has to be willing to go to court to achieve clarity in a given instance, how can the University make decisions about the legality of use on the network?  Given the reliance of students and teachers on the network for learning at this point, is the one-year network prohibition the right penalty for repeat violation?  What does it mean to be off the network for a year?  Are you then off-campus?  I do not envy those with the job of answering these questions.”

Nor me.

Is Syria next?
From John Robb:

“Big question; One thing most people don’t understand, is that given our focus on the Loose Nuke Problem Syria rises to the top target.  Why?  It is the prime sponsor of the delivery system for loose nukes (terrorists).  More than any other country in the world.  While it may not have programs to produce WMD, it can deliver them (remember, N. Korea is about to engage the capacity to produce 60 nukes a year, likely to be sold to the highest bidder).  Given this logic, Syria is on thin ice as it attempts to reinforce Iraqi resistance.  It is providing ammo to its critics.  

Here is my question:  Do you think we will go to war with Syria in the next year?”

The NYT has second thought about keeping its archive links active

Dave Winer writes: “The NY Times reversed their archive policy again after my last DaveNet on the subject. As noted here on Tuesday, I am working with the Times people on this issue. I agreed not to write publicly about it until we’re finished talking. I’ve talked with a few people who I trust, on the same terms, to try to make this come out right for the Times and for the Web.”

BBC Photo

Adieu Concorde!

So Concorde is finally to be grounded. She was an impossibly beautiful piece of engineering. I flew the Atlantic in her once — and wrote about it. It was an unforgettable experience.

VisiCalc memories
Lovely report from Scott Rosenberg.

“As the father of twin three-year-old boys, I don’t get out much, I’m sorry to say. But I did head down to Silicon Valley last night for a special event hosted by the Computer History Museum. Titled “ The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc,” the panel discussion featured Dan Bricklin, who dreamed up VisiCalc; Bob Frankston, responsible for coding it; and Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, which succeeded VisiCalc in the spreadsheet marketplace. Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi moderated.

The story of VisiCalc is the stuff of software-industry legend: It is widely viewed as the original “killer app” for personal computing (though Simonyi said that that term was actually first applied to Lotus 1-2-3 and only later retroactively extended to VisiCalc itself). People would see a demo of the spreadsheet, or see a friend using it, and decide to go out and buy a computer so they could use it.

VisiCalc first achieved its popularity on the Apple II, but it ceded its market to Lotus when the IBM PC arrived: 1-2-3, which was coded to take advantage of the PC’s 16-bit processing (the Apple II and CP/M computers popular before the PC were 8-bit) seized the moment of this “platform transition” to take the lead. (The panel, which was being hosted at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, did not touch on the process by which Lotus, in turn, lost out to Microsoft’s Excel, as part of Microsoft’s cementing of its “Office suite” dominance in the ’90s.)

Though this is an oft-told story in the annals of computing, I learned a number of new things from listening to Bricklin and Frankston.

Bricklin explained that his father was a printer and that’s how he learned the importance of prototyping, doing quick mockups for customers first before you committed to stuff that was hard to change. He showed a manual page from a typesetting terminal, the Harris 2200, that also served as one inspiration for the spreadsheet, with its separate layers of data, calculations and formatting. He also mentioned that it was his backhround in computerized typesetting that inculcated in him the principle of “keystroke minimization” — because in that field, people were actually paid by the keystroke.

Bricklin and the other panelists agreed that VisiCalc succeeded because it was different from the kind of financial forecasting software that already existed — it was a free-form, general purpose tool, an electronic “back of the envelope.” It allowed non-programmers to do things at a level of complexity that, previously, you had to learn programming to accomplish.

Bricklin and Frankston recalled that their initial efforts to promote VisiCalc did not meet universal enthusiasm. Experienced computer people weren’t bowled over, Bricklin said; they would dismiss the spreadsheet with, “Hey, I can already do most of this in BASIC.” People who had no experience with computers tended to think that computers could do anything under the sun, and so VisiCalc didn’t wow them. “But when the accountants saw it — there was an accountant [at a particular computer store], he started shaking — he said, ‘This is what I do all day!'”

Kapor closed out the discussion with a tribute to this pioneering piece of software: “VisiCalc literally changed my life. It was a complete inspiration. I don’t think people remember what impact it had. It had an elegant minimalism — it got out of your way… My goal in life was to design something that could stand next to VisiCalc without embarrassment.”

As someone who was an undergraduate in Cambridge at the same time in the late ’70s that Bricklin was dreaming of a “magic typable blackboard” at the Harvard Business School, I found Bricklin’s photos from that era (posted on his own Web site here) evocative. Since I spent a lot of time in that era working on Compugraphic typesetting machines, I was amused and intrigued to hear him acknowledge his debt to the world of that technology.

Bricklin also displayed a copy of Inc. magazine from Jan. 1982, with a cover story on “The Birth of a New Industry” and a cover shot of Bricklin and Frankston. (You can see it on Bricklin’s site here.) As the photo appeared on the screen at the front of the lecture hall, someone in the crowd shouted, “Same shirt!” Then and now, Bricklin favored the plaid flannel look.”

Gimme a W! Gimme an M! Gimme a D! What’s that spell?
From Scott Rosenberg…

“As the statues of Saddam fall and waves of euphoria swell through Fox-News-land, unchecked by cautions from Bush and Rumsfeld, one little issue haunts the war effort: The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive.

The imminence of the Iraqi threat that the Bush administration identified as its reason for invading Iraq now, rather than wait for further U.N. inspections to do their work, was a matter of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq, we were led to believe, was a teeming arsenal of chemical poisons and biological weapons, and was on the verge of developing nuclear capabilities. At any moment Saddam might hand over such weapons to terrorists so they could wreak havoc on the homeland. There was no time to waste.

So far, however, the war in Iraq has been remarkably free of usage, or even sightings, of “WMD.”

There are many possible explanations: Maybe Saddam hid everything really well. Maybe he didn’t want to use these weapons because he knew that would convict him in the court of world opinion. Maybe he simply didn’t have such weapons on nearly the scale the U.S. charged.

We may never know the full story, but we will learn a lot more as the U.S. tightens its grip on Baghdad and the countryside and begins a more systematic search. Sooner or later, we will have a pretty clear idea whether Iraq was or was not teeming with WMD. A lot hangs on this. And if it turns out that the Bush administration’s claims in this area were inflated or wrong, it will be very interesting to see how the issue gets spun.”

Calendar ambushes

Two years ago today, my life fell apart. Sue and I had taken the children to Disneyland Paris for the weekend. We both loathed the place, but it was impossible not to revel in the pleasure the kids took in the park, the hotel (where we had a suite), the exotic experience of being abroad in a non-English environment. And then when we were dressing for breakfast, she came out of the shower, deathly pale, and said she had found a large lump in her breast. We knew it was serious from the word go. The drive back to the UK, during which we had to maintain an outwardly calm appearance for the sake of the children and the friends with whom we had embarked on what had seemed such a frivolous adventure, was the longest and most traumatic journey I’ve ever undertaken, but it was as nothing compared to what lay ahead. Eighteen months later, the love of my life was dead.

Steven Johnson brooding on DisneyWorld

Steven Johnson has been to a conference in Paris, but played truant for a while.

” The afternoon that I arrived I made a quick excursion to the Magic Kingdom solely to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (In my experience, the EuroDisney version of Pirates is the best.) I’ve probably gone on that ride 25 times in my life, but this time, an entirely new thought occurred to me. Forgive the flair for the obvious here, but those pirates are terrorizing that town: they’re firing on it with huge cannons; they’re setting fire to houses; they’re drunkenly chasing after local women, presumably to rape them; they’re shooting off weapons indiscriminately into open windows. If you think about people in the actual Caribbean towns hundreds of years ago, being attacked by pirates must have been just about one of the most terrifying things you could imagine. Pirates were the Al Qaeda of the 18th century. But on the ride, they’re not even supposed to be scary; it’s all played for comic relief. All of which made me wonder: in two hundred years, when we’ve all moved on to new fears (gray goo and sentient machines, no doubt) will Disney roll out a new set of rides? Suicide Bombers of the Middle East? Terrorists of New York? ”