Monthly Archives: February 2003

The future of broadband is…copper POTS?

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POTS is industry jargon for Plain Ol’ Telephone Service — the kind that comes to your home via copper wire that may be older than you are.

Fiber to the home was supposed to be the path to digital media nirvana. But that was a meme borne during the dot-com bubble, and it turns out that replacing the U.S.’s 1.5 billion miles of existing copper lines might be not only fiscally irresponsible, but also not necessary.

Tests in engineering labs and in a handful of areas around the country are yielding Internet connection speeds five to 50 times as fast as what is now considered “broadband” digital-subscriber-line service offered over phone lines.

Which is good, since John John M. Cioffi, a professor of engineering at Stanford University and one of the country’s foremost experts on DSL technology, notes:

Even if [the phone companies] had the money, the labor is exhaustive. Realistically, fiber could be a century away.

Wow. “Not in your lifetime” estimates are kind of depressing, aren’t they?

The article also notes that, in the U.S., 9.4 million subscribers get broadband over cable, and 5.4 million over DSL.

John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident

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John Perry Barlow is the co-founder of the EFF, a one-time cattle rancher, and a songwriter who has several Grateful Dead classics to his credit. I had the pleasure of having the best and most improbable lunch of my life with him and Douglas Adams when I presented QuickTime at a Milia show in Nice, France.

Mother Jones is running a great interview with Mr. Barlow, in which he uses his experiences with the Dead to debunk the “fact” that music sharing is bad for the recording industry.

You’d be hard pressed to find somebody who is more passionate about the belief that sharing music is good for you as a songwriter and good for humanity as a whole. The best thing that ever happened to the Grateful Dead, from an economic standpoint, was giving away our music.

Mother Jones: In terms of bootlegging?

It wasn’t bootlegging. We let people tape our concerts and distribute the tapes. And that became the first example I can think of viral marketing. The record companies certainly didn’t know how to market us. So we became self-marketing through our tapes.

Mother Jones: And that helped you economically?

No question.

And this is just one of the many interesting topics up for discussion. [via Daily Relay]

First Animatrix episode available for download

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The marketeers behind The Matrix have always made effective use of digital media (the web, great QuickTime trailers) in their Matrix-related marketing efforts.

The machine is now gearing up for the on-two punch of The Matix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. As the second major marketing effort of the launch campaign (the first was the trailer shown during the Superbowl), they’ve released the first episode of the anime-style companion to The Matrix, The Animatrix, on the web. The first four hits are free, sometime after which the entire nine episodes series (season?) will be available on DVD.

The largest (640×272) version weighs in at a hefty 140+ MB, so start those downloads now…

MPEG-4 Systems license released

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MPEG LA — one or two “one-stop shops” for MPEG-4 patent licensing (erm, isn’t that a “two-stop shop”, then?) — has released the MPEG-4 Systems license.

The Systems license the last piece of the long-in-coming patent portfolio puzzle. The Systems license covers the MPEG-4 file format, MPEG-4′s interactive features, the MPEG-4 scene description language (BIFS), and the MPEG-4 object descriptor framework.

The object descriptor framework is an extensible model for describing objects and inter-object synchronization. For example, a news broadcast stream may include a “virtual set” object, an “on-air personality” object and a “stock ticker” object.

BIFS (BInary Format for Scene) lets you specify the spatial and temporal composition of objects. It’s a binary standard based on VRML, which nobody wanted the first time around. SMIL enables the same thing, but it works with much more than just MPEG-4, and for this and other reasons I think that BIFS is doomed in the long run.

The file format is obviously the most important part of the Systems license in the short term. I think it was a mistake to group the file format in with a lot of cruft (some of which, granted, is nifty) that the majority of implementations aren’t going to implement within the next few years. My understanding is that MPEG is in the process of reorganizing the Systems specification into several parts, and hopefully this will allow super-inexpensive (free, ideally) licensing of the file format.

Finally, we don’t know what the terms of the System license are yet. Rob Koenen, President of the M4IF (MPEG-4 Industry Forum), had not seen the license as of MPEG LA’s announcement, but said that he expected it to be less controversial than the Visual license given the draft terms that were released last year.

A new protocol for web services

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Web services currently work over HTTP — the same protocol used to deliver web pages — because it’s well-understood, there are no firewall issues, and it works. However, HTTP isn’t an optimal protocol for web services, and there are several proposals for efficient alternatives that could eventually replace HTTP as the web services protocol of choice.

One proposal is called “Order-based Deadlock Prevention Protocol with Parallel Requests”, by Jonghun Park. As you may have guessed given its name, Mr. Park is a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s School of Information Sciences and Technology.

Analyst Stephen O’Grady had an interesting comment when he was asked about the protocol:

Web services is currently held up — in my opinion — by things like security and reliability. Once those concerns are addressed, people will turn their attention to something like this protocol, which would offer incremental improvements in performance.

In other words, the lack of optimal protocols for web services isn’t a problem yet, because there are still some basic problems that need to be solved.

JVC to ship first HD DV camcorder in May

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JVC has announced that they will be shipping the first high-definition camcorder for consumers, the GR-HD1. It will be launched in Japan in early March, and is scheduled to ship in May for only 3,500.

The GR-HD1 supports 3 recording modes — HD, SD and DV. HD mode records 750/30p (1280×720/30 progressive fps) video, SD mode records 525p wide (16:9) video, and DV mode records traditional DV. The camera uses MPEG-2 to get traditional recording times for HD content on miniDV tapes.

I don’t know about consumers, but this camera could be huge for independent filmmaking.

Janis Ian: "Don't sever a high-tech lifeline for musicians"

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Recently, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Verizon must give the RIAA the name of a customer suspected — there is no evidence — of downloading “infringing” files. In an L.A. Times editorial, Janis Ian comments on the RIAA’s actions from the point of view of an average, successful recording artist.

The record companies say this decision will mean more money for musicians, but they have it backward. The downloaded music they’re shutting off actually creates sales by exposing artists to new fans. If this ruling stands, many smaller musicians will be hurt financially, and many will be pushed out of the music business altogether.

She also updates us on how downloading has helped her.

Thousands of people have downloaded my music since then — and they’re not trying to steal. They’re just looking for music they can no longer find on the tight playlists of their local radio stations. After I first posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales went up 300%. They’re still double what they were before the MP3s went online.

Not only does the RIAA continue to be more and more of a liability for artists and labels, but it’s also inspired unprecedented hatred in their customers. Can it be fixed before it destroys the industy it’s supposed to represent? Hilary Rosen is scheduled to depart at the end of this year, but there’s a good chance that she may just be parroting attitudes irrevocably ingrained into the organization. At some point, it’s easier just to start again from scratch.

64-bit microprocessor roundup

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I think I’ve already proclaimed 2003 to be the Year of MPEG-4 and the Year of recordable DVD. But did I mention that it’s also the Year of the 64-bit microprocessor? No? Okay, then…

A site called Real World Technologies just published the third in a series of technical roundups on 64-bit processors. If SPECfp_base2000 means something to you, you’ll probably find it an interesting read.

For my money, the most interesting story on the Wintel side of the world is how AMD forced Intel to change their 64-bit strategy. Intel originally tried to escape its x86 instruction set with Itanium (a.k.a. “Titanium”), which was not compatible with today’s 32-bit processors and would require new versions of all of your software (including your operating system). AMD saw Intel apparently giving up on the x86 franchise, and took the logical route of creating 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set (dubbed x86-64) for their 64-bit processor effort. Now, Intel has been forced to eat AMD’s dirty snow with an x86-64 processor of their own, and Itanium will find long-term success only on servers, if anywhere.

On the other side of the world, the great news for Mac users is that IBM’s PowerPC 970 — we’ll just call it the G5 — doesn’t suck. This thing’s going to come just in time:

The G4 and G4+ processors Apple currently uses in its Macintosh line of desktop and laptop computers are hopelessly out-muscled by the latest x86 processors from Intel and AMD. Worst yet, the growing use of [Intel's] SSE [instructions] in multimedia and content creation software has put a slow leak in Apple’s competitive life preserver, the Altivec SIMD PowerPC instruction set extension. By some strange coincidence IBM has announced it was developing the PowerPC 970, a desktop class processor based on the POWER4 microarchitecture and extended with Altivec support.

Unfortunately, even if IBM can produce 2 GHz processors, the G5 will not be able to match the fastest Pentium 4 available right now.