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July 3, 2002
Eric Norlin writes:
I guess at my core i’m a die-hard capitalist — I have an insanely optimistic faith in the ability of the marketplace to sort itself out (please don’t send emails about MSFT monopolistic practices)…
Hmm, isn’t that like saying that you believe you can fly and please don’t send emails about gravity?
I pulled up all the grass in our front yard this spring. That’s a small task since the yard is about large enough to bury two people comfortably (or, as my mother used to describe the capacity of a friend’s cabin cruiser: sleeps 4, fucks 8). I then sprinkled “meadow mix” and waited for my garden to bloom. But, the only plant I recognize is crab grass, which I have been dutifully pullling. Otherwise, I can’t tell a weed from a flower, so it’s all a-growing.
In 50 words or less, please apply this to:
a) The Web
b) Being a parent
c) The endocrine system
d) Something of your own choosing
For extra credit: Must any metaphor be capable of describing disparate phenomena? In general? In this case?
July 2, 2002
I’m currently blogging from a course: “Creative New Media and the Web”. More to follow.
Ok, I was a guest speaker at a course this morning. That first paragraph was a sample blog I did from the class to illustrate a point. The question had to do with the future of linear, sequential thinking which I inadvertently provoked (the question, not the thinking) by saying that my book developed some ideas over the course of its 200 pages. Isn’t linear thinking so ’50s? Well, yes and no. I don’t think it’s dead in our digital future, but I do think that the non-linear, web-like, hyperlinked mare’s nests of blogthreads can often be a better way to get a view of a topic. I’m just not an Either/Or type of guy, I guess. Color me wishwashy.
Dan Gillmor is attending a seminar at Harvard on Internet law and is blogging his notes. But Dan’s notes are better written than the final drafts of the rest of us. And his notes on Lawrence Lessig‘s session on exactly how we can – and will, according to Lessig – lose what’s most important about the Internet are a superb critical summary of Lessig’s position. Read it and weep. Or, better, read it and fight.
Hylton Jolliffe writes: “I wanted to point you to another real-time blog on ILAW that you might find interesting and worth pointing to. It’s edited by the Berkman’s Donna Wentworth: www.corante.com/copyfight/.” Well worth visiting. (Dan G points to this site also in his bloggage from the seminar.)
And Eric Norlin is POed that we’re not paying enough attention to digital ID since that’s a linchpin of the entire scheme. He highly recommends what looks like an excellent conference. Why, I’d be tempted to go if someone were to pony up the travel expenses. (That’s the problem with being self-employed: you have to engage in some serious self-delusion to enjoy the perqs fully.)
Jon Schull is visualizing blogthreads. To him they might look something like this:
BTW, don’t forget the discussion of Shelley’s ThreadNeedle project at QuickTopic. It’s how we’re going to get honest-to-object blogthreads.
Bob Frankston adds a critique of Bluetooth to the blogthread that began with my blogportage of a contretemps between the estimable Landry and the venerable Bricklin (or was it the venerable Landry and the estimable Bricklin?) and continued here (Bricklin) and here (Fleishman, Peterson, Marks).
I’ve written a lot about Bluetooth and don’t want to revisit it again but will risk some short and brief comments. Bluetooth reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant – each feels a part and presumes that it represents the elephant. People find some claim about Bluetooth they like and assume that it is the best way to get that particular aspect. But Bluetooth is like the days of dedicated word processors – they couldn’t compete with the ability to quickly evolve products on generic PCs.
Bluetooth would simply be a curiosity as the triumph of marketing over reality were it not for the damage of sucking the energy out of the wireless marketplace. Just a few quick bullets before I run down to the dinner waiting for me:
- Replacing a cable. This is a lie. If that were the goal, then I’d be able to get a generic cable replacement rather than a better way to get to my cell phones.
- Replacing a cable. It doesn’t just replace a cable, it requires I not use a cable since Bluetooth insists that the protocols work only over their transport and no other. I can’t even use a wire as way to go faster or use less power.
- Lower power. I don’t see any reason why the cost per bit for IP is any lower. The low power is an artifact of the higher level protocols which are designed to reduce traffic for trivial apps. If you use it like 802.11 you blow the design point.
- Low power? If it’s so important use IP over HomeRF.
- Low power? It is it so important then provide power management for 802.11
- Cheap. Cheap is 100% about volume. Color movies are now cheaper than black and white. I can make anything cheap by assuming a volume of a billion units per year. 802.11 is shipping and thus has the advantage.
- Bluetooth requires I use 802.11 Bluetooth’s design point is so limited it can’t be the only protocol so why bother? In order to do all the things a normal user wants, even if you have Bluetooth you will still need 802.11. [Later addition: Bluetooth’s profiles and applications and radios are all tied together and tethered by their accidental properties. Bluetooth’s competition is not 802.11, it is the concept of IP and the separation of transport from applications. If you like the Bluetooth profiles you can use them atop IP but, as you may notice, they don’t seem to have enough value for that to be considered worth doing.]
- It’s all about paying for connecting by making the cell phone the center of the universe. Even if you accept that I simply use a second cell phone in a PCMCIA slot in my laptop.
- Cell phones are bad designs anyway and date back to FM modulation tricks in the 1970’s and now are mainly ways to pay for foolish 3G investments.
- Bluetooth is awfully slow.
- Bluetooth is IrDA with the same mistakes of being too clever and treating IP as a third class protocol over a simulated serial path
Enough – I could go much further in dissecting and trashing Bluetooth but this dead horse is already leather.
The real point, however, is that Bluetooth is a bad design that has the advantage of making expansive claims that have no basis in reality. Demos will work very well and that is a bad sign since it means that that which is not the demo is given short shrift.
Bluetooth – why should anyone care except insofar that it is a way to annoy us.
Mary Lu pulls together two threads by noting that Belkin has introduced a Bluetooth USB adapter.
July 1, 2002
For the second time, my Belkin Nostromo 500 Speedpad, an essential add-on if you play computer games, broke. For the second time, a simple email to their support folks resulted in them sending out a new one. These folks are great to do business with.
Glenn Fleishman, journalist to the stars and WiFi enthusiast, takes up the cudgels against the comments from Dan Bricklin I ran about the inadequacies of BlueTooth.
We’re in the early phases of Bluetooth which is now clearly a technology that will be here to stay. I used to be a Bluetooth denigrator, but having seen it survive some early nonsense (overhype by its backers, lack of hardware, lack of standards, a terrible 1.0 stack, etc.), it’s got a lot of advantages.
Advantages over 802.11:
1. No set up “cost”: ad hoc networking is and will continue to be a pain with Wi-Fi which is Ethernet sans fils (I mean without strings, but I might have said without parents). Bluetooth doesn’t have setup and breakdown costs, which reduces power use, network traffic, and user complexity.
2. Bluetooth is low power: it will work in devices in which battery life is at a premium.
3. Bluetooth chip costs are plummeting: yes, of course, it’s ridiculous that you pay $150 for a Bluetooth adapter, but, frankly, those are proofs of concept right now. In less than a year, you’ll buy a Bluetooth-equipped printer that may cost less than $25 more than a similar non-BT model.
4. Another point on ad hoc networking: Wi-Fi *must have* a base station to allow more than two devices to talk to each P2P. This is an inherent limitation of the protocol. If you want to have 3 devices exchange data, you need extra hardware, or one of the devices must turn itself into an infrastructure node which requires special software (available for Mac OS 9, for instance, but not Mac OS X yet or possibly ever).
Some of this will change as discovery technology improves. Apple’s great interest in offering discovery over several media (FireWire, wireless, wired, etc.) means that Bluetooth’s discovery protocol could be less important.
Wi-Fi can “discover” other devices, but it doesn’t know what to do then unless you join a network.
In a follow-up email, Glenn writes:
I thought Bluetooth was a lousy idea. However, they’re going to make the chips so small soon that they’ll be able to do some of the very cheap, very powerful concepts, like embed them in otherwise ridiculous devices (books, flexible drawings, e-paper), and make them super cheap and super low power.
Wi-Fi devices must conform to the certification process (otherwise, they’re just plain 802.11b), so they have to have minimum power and distance compliance.
Jonathan Peterson responds with an email supporting what seems to me to be Bricklin’s main problem with BlueTooth:
The real problem with bluetooth is that it isn’t an open transport standard that anyone can build on. You want to build an atomic clock wristwatch that acts as a timeserver to keep all your devices in sync (a cool idea if I say so myself)? Not only will your users have to dick around with it incessantly to convince everything to take time information from it, but the manufacturer will have to apply for certification to 7 Layers AG, you they won’t be able to sell the product until it has been approved.
How long would current WWW technologies have taken to mature if Tim Bremmers-Lee et al had to submit everything for ISO approval before moving forward with implementation?
Which among other thoughts I blogged of course:
Kevin Marks writes:
I know you have trouble with numbers, so here’s a handy guide to relative speeds in orders of magnitude
BlueTooth is 10 times faster than a 56k modem
USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth
802.11b is as fast as USB
10baseT is as fast as USB
100baseT is 10 times faster than 10baseT
FireWire is 4 times faster than 100baseT and 40 times faster than USB
Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times faster than 100baseTBlueTooth was designed to replace the slow things on USB (mice, keyboards, serial ports – the oens tht run at the slow speed).
It has no chance in hell of competing with 802.11b.
Halley runs Jeneane‘s transcription of RageBoy’s comments on NPR about weblogs. Well put, RB.
Meanwhile, RB blogs some spam promising to enlarge his penis. A quick calculation shows that had I responded to every spam offer to enlarge my penis, my dick would currently be 2.36 miles (3.64 kilometers) long. Ok, ok, like all men, I rounded up my starting length. It’d really only be 2.357 miles long.
(You’ll find a witty metric conversation chart here).
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