infrastructure
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Some thoughts on App Based Car Services (ABCS)
I started using Uber in April. According to my Uber page on the Web, I’ve had fifteen rides so far. But, given all the bad news that’s going down, my patronage of the company is at least suspended. As an overdue hedge, I just signed up with Lyft. I’m also looking at BlaBlaCar here in the U.K. (where I… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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How Radio Can Defend the Dashboard
Dash — “the connected car audiotainment™ conference” — is happening next week in Detroit. It’s a big deal, because cars are morphing into digital things as well as automotive ones. This means lots of new stuff is crowding onto dashboard spaces where radios alone used to live. This is a big deal for radio, since most listening… Continue reading
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A visit to the old ‘hood
A couple weeks ago I took a walk around the historic neighborhood in Fort Lee where my extended family had a home — 2063 Hoyt Avenue — from the turn of the last century into the 1950s. It’s where my parents lived when I was born, and where my aunt and grandmother sat for my sister and… Continue reading
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What’s Neutral about the Net
I posted this to a list I’m on, where a long thread on Net Neutrality was running out of steam: Since we seem to have reached a pause in this discussion, I would like to suggest that there are emergent properties of the Internet that are not reducible to its mechanisms, and it is respect for… Continue reading
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Fun with distance
I’m listening to WGBH on 93.7 from Boston on my kitchen radio, on the low floor of an apartment building in Manhattan, thanks to an atmospheric condition called tropospheric bending, or “tropo” for short. Here’s my section of the current map of tropo at work right now: The same map shows bigger “ducts” running… Continue reading
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Radio and the Web, 2001
Since my old blog (still running, amazingly, on an old server somewhere within Verisign) will some day be Snow on the Water, and conversation about radio has commenced below that post, I decided to re-post March 21, 2001. Here goes… Blast from the past Tune in here right now to catch Larry Lujack on KNEW,… Continue reading
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The cliff personal clouds need to climb
This speed test was done in London, but it’s typical of everywhere: It shows a Net biased for downstream, and minimized for upstream. If we’re going to do any serious personal work in clouds, we need better upstream than this. I wrote about the problem, and the reason for it, in France, four years ago.… Continue reading
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Urban originals
It would have been great to visit the Egyptian Spice Market in Istanbul with my old friend Stephen Lewis, whose knowledge that city runs deep and long. But I was just passing through the Old City by chance, waylaid en route from Sydney to Tel Aviv, and Stephen was still in Sofia, which he also… Continue reading
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Thinking outside the pipes
For several years now I’ve been participating with Pew Internet in research on the Internet and its future — mostly by providing my thinking on various matters. The latest round is the Future of the Internet Survey VI, for which I answered many questions. The latest of those to make print is in The Gurus… Continue reading
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Aereo made the wrong case
Aereo‘s main appeal in the first place was helping viewers get over-the-air TV. If they had restricted their business and legal cases to that, instead of this… Record & Stream Live TV Online with Aereo Cloud DVR Coming soon to 19 more cities! … they might still be in business. But nothing in that pitch —… Continue reading
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A New Data Deal, starting today
There was a time when personal computer was an oxymoron: a contradiction in terms. That ended when personal computing got real in the ’80s. There was a time when personal networking, where every person has status, reach and power equal to that of corporations and governments, was unthinkable. That ended when the Internet got real… Continue reading
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Why to avoid advertising as a business model
I just ran across this item below, which ran almost fourteen years ago in my original blog, and think it’s worth re-running today. The characters have all changed, but the issues have not. In fact they are more present and worth debating than ever. — Doc An Open Letter to Meg Whitman Meg Whitman President… Continue reading
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Weather vs. Flying
Here in the temperate zones, summer is beaches and picnics and biking and dinner on the deck outside. It is also thunderstorms and airport delays. Right now a line of thunderheads is sliding northeastward across New Jersey. Here is how it looks to FlightAware‘s map of aviation and weather activity for Newark Liberty Airport: Notice… Continue reading
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Why EULAs suck for the Internet of Things
I’ve been asked how EULAs — End User License Agreements — might affect the Internet of Things, now becoming better known as the IoT. Good question. The topic is hot: Development, however, is another story. There we are headed straight into a log-jam that Phil Windley calls the Compuserve of Things. In the 80’s and early ’90s, Compuserve was… Continue reading
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Let’s pull news out of its hole
Most of what we call news is filler. The practice of filling space and time — stuffing “content” into a “news hole” — is a relic of an era when printing and broadcast space and time were limited, privately held, and paid for mostly by advertising, which requires ears and eyeballs showing up predictably and… Continue reading
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The long run
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And… Continue reading