Monthly Archives: November 2002

"Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm"

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Kevin Werbach is a respected independent technology analyst and consultant. He was most recently the editor-in-chief of Release 1.0, and before that led internet policy for the FCC. And, as he puts it, “Almost everything you think you know about spectrum is wrong.”

The assumptions underlying the dominant paradigm for spectrum management no longer hold. Today’s digital technologies are smart enough to distinguish between signals, allowing users to share the airwaves without exclusive licensing. Instead of treating spectrum as a scarce physical resource, we could make it available to all as a commons, an approach known as “open spectrum.” Open spectrum would allow for more efficient and creative use of the precious resource of the airwaves. It could enable innovative services, reduce prices, foster competition, create new business opportunities and bring our communications policies in line with our democratic ideals.

A short while back I posted a piece on cognitive radio and open spectrum. Kevin’s paper is a must-read for folks whose interest was piqued by that piece, and who want to better understand the technology and politics of open spectrum. | “Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm” (PDF) | Interview with Kevin Werbach

P2P webcasting software goes open-source

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PeerCast is a peer-to-peer (audio-only, for now) streaming system that allow webcasters to stream without a central server and the pile o’ bandwidth they’d normally need to support a large number of streams. How does it work? As PeerCast listeners receive a stream, they’re also relaying it to a small number of other users.

Recently, the PeerCast folks announced that their software is available as open-source (GPL). This technique is clearly how live webcasts of all sorts will be done in the future, at least until multicast is an option over the public internet. | About | FAQ

Dolby makes MIT an offer they can't refuse

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Dolby may have fine technologies, but that’s not why they dominate. They dominate because they know how to grease the wheels of weak institutions.

MIT’s campus newspaper reports that Dolby paid one such institution — MIT — $30 million in return for a professor’s 1993 vote in favor of Dolby for DTV audio technologies. The professor, Jae S. Lim, will personally receive more than $8 million.

Jack Turner, the associate director of the Technology Licensing Office, claims, “There’s clearly a conflict of interest,” Turner said, but “it can’t be avoided. MIT’s reputation as being pure … in its academic evaluation of things is very important.” In his head adding, “unless money’s involved”.

In a court filing, professor Lim admits “I did not believe that the Dolby system was technically superior to the MIT system”. If not for love, then for money — he voted for Dolby so that MIT would bring home $30 million worth of bacon, since if the Philips solution won MIT wouldn’t see a dime.

This is an important story. I hope the $30 million was worth MIT’s complete loss of integrity. Link

Can they make the CD go away?

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Two new audio formats are vying to be “the next CD”. However, in a questionable move for formats trying to replace a ubiquitous and already-pretty-great format, neither offer any benefits for average consumers.

Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio are, in theory, a nice improvement over CDs. Both support 5.1 channel surround as well as 2 channel stereo, and offer a much higher dynamic range and significantly more accurate sound than CDs.

However, any potentially-noticable quality benefits are offset by the lack of digital outputs on players. Because of this, early adopters — audiophiles — aren’t buying. High-end audio dealers aren’t selling, either, until the industry delivers players that can play both formats as well as “legacy” CDs at the highest quality. Both formats are copy-protected, but (ironically) it’s trivial to record via the players’ analog outs, if a little more inconvenient.

Will average consumers ever actively want SACD and DVD-Audio? I don’t think so — CDs are good enough, and people really the ability to make their own compilations, etc. Can the industry force these new formats on us? Long term, probably. But expect the transition from CD to take 10 years. Link

Movielink's inauspicious opening

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Movielink, the studio-backed online movie rental service, is now open for business.

If you have a Mac, don’t bother — your computer doesn’t meet the “minimum system requirements”. If you live outside the U.S., don’t bother — you don’t meet the minimum system requirements. Whether you should bother if you have a Windows box is an interesting question.

Rentals cost (for good movies) $5 — more than it would cost me in time and money to drive 5 minutes to my local Blockbuster and rent a movie for 2 days (new releases) or a week (not new releases). Plus, movie previews (for the movies that had them) didn’t work on my Windows XP machine with the latest everything. The site looks nice. Shame it doesn’t work.

How copy-resistant "Not-CDs" work

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The methods used to make “Not-CDs” (which purposefully violate the Red Book audio CD standard in an effort to prevent copying) are incredibly trivial and easily defeated, according to an article in New Scientist. So trival and easily defeated, in fact, that it almost makes you feel sorry for the record labels that are paying to license the “technologies” (if you can call data corruption a technology).

A CD containing a copy-prevention system indexes the music correctly in the first table but then adds dummy tables containing deliberate errors. So CD players that read only the first table will play the music normally. But PC CD drives – which people use for copying – look at the last table, see garbage, get confused and play or record nothing.
But all these measures can be sidestepped… [...] Makers of CD players and CD-ROM drives only need to make “relatively simple modifications” to their software and supposedly protected CDs can be played with ease. So playback and recording equipment is becoming resistant to copy-prevention techniques.

Wow. The record labels sure are suckers, aren’t they? It’s amazing, the desperation we’re seeing as they try to protect prices that are way out of line compared to, say, DVDs.

As an example, for twice the price of a very plain CD you can get a four-DVD version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, with 208 minutes of movie and hours upon hours of commentaries and extras in positively luxurious packaging. And the record industry wonders what the problem is? If CDs cost what they should cost — $7.99 is a good place to start — there wouldn’t be a problem.

ASCII art @ 30fps

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If you have Mac OS X, you have the option of watching QuickTime Movies in glorious ASCII-mation — from a command line. Intended or not, this is a nice old-school homage to the QuickTime team of the early 90s (which had an ASCII codec for QuickTime). Hrmmm…maybe we can retrofit old phones for video… Link

Cable (kinda) a la carte: Who knew?

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In Oct 2002, a federal rule of the United States’ 1992 Cable Act kicked in. The rule says that cable operators can no longer require you to buy multi-tier packages of programming to get pay-per-view programming or premium channels.

The FCC can’t require cable operators to tell their customers about this, and they’re not likely to tell you about it, so tell your friends that they no longer need “Expanded Service” packages to watch the Sopranos.

Sendo kills Z100, drops Microsoft for Nokia in future handsets

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Sendo was one of the earliest supporters of Microsoft’s “Windows Powered Smartphone Software” OS. (Microsoft marketing: You may want to work on that name thing.) However, today they announced that they’re dropping WPSS in favor of Nokia’s Symbian OS and killing the Z100 handset, which they announced just days ago. From Sendo’s UK home page:

It has been a very difficult decision for Sendo given its leadership position in the development of smart devices. We are disappointed that we will not be able to ship the Z100 given the high level of interest shown in the device.

Reuters quotes Symbian CEO Hugh Brogan as saying that one reason for the switch was that they couldn’t get access to source code for WPSS, but could for Symbian. There must be other reasons, since Sendo had planned on selling millions of Z100s, and won’t be able to introduce a Symbian-based phone for at least nine months.

Nokia and Microsoft are the two players to watch in the smartphone OS market, with Palm in a very-distant third place. The early leader here will have a strong influence on which digital media technologies become the lingua franca of Little Internet. Nokia appears to have the early lead, which means MMS (a limited profile of SMIL 2.0), MPEG-4 and J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition).

Handset manufacturers are terrified of both Nokia (which competes with them directly) and Microsoft, but appear to be more terrified of Microsoft. The Symbian vs. WPSS fight will be very interesting to watch. Link