SMART Letter #79
Dregs and Grabs
November 13, 2002
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()
------------------------------------------------------------
SMART Letter #79 -- November 13, 2002
Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg
isen.com - "the Hubbert's Peak of telephony"
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
------------------------------------------------------------
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()
CONTENTS
> Fail-Fast Op-Ed in Today's USA Today
> Quote of Note: Victor Zue
> SMS with Voice Input
> Smart Remarks from SMART People:
+ Howard Morgan on VOIP
+ Anonymous at AT&T on more painful business troubles
+ Gary Hughes-Fenchel, ex-Lucent, on underemployed friends
> + Christian Huitema on the real history of pirates
> More on Pirates, with quotes from Bucky Fuller
> Quote of Note: Walter Cronkite
> If it's Funny it Must be True, by Scatt Oddams
> The isen.com Trans-Pacific Tour
> Conferences on my Calendar
> Copyright Notice, Administrivia
-------
FAIL-FAST OP-ED IN TODAY'S USA TODAY
David Weinberger [self@evident.com] and I penned (pecked,
actually) an op-ed piece for today's USA Today
[http://tinyurl.com/2o15]. Weinberger concocted the brilliant
ending: "When Elvis died, one pundit cracked, 'Good career
move.' That's the advice we would give to the obsolete
telecoms: Fail - fast."
SMART People have seen the rest of the argument already.
-------
QUOTE OF NOTE: Victor Zue
"We've been the slaves of our machines, interacting with
them on their terms. We want to make machines more
intelligent, rather than making humans more obedient."
MIT Professor Victor Zue, quoted in "Talk to the Machine" by
Jean Kumagai, September 2002, http://tinyurl.com/2ihl
-------
SMS WITH VOICE INPUT by David S. Isenberg
I smell a winner app. Voice recognition -- the ability to
render tens of thousands of spoken words into text -- is
coming to a pocket-sized device near you. Instead of thumbing
444-7777-33-66-000-444-7777-33-66-11111-222-666-6, you'll just
say, "isen@isen.com". Instead of scratching graffiti, you'll
say, "Meet me for lunch." Then you'll say, "Send."
For more info see the Kumagai article cited above;
http://tinyurl.com/2ihl.
If you try to read all the text messages you'll get while you
are driving, you'll crash your car -- unless you have a text-
to-speech voice message reader. Such readers have been
available with voice mail systems for at least fifteen years.
However, for some reason they've been consistent marketplace
non-starters. So along with more short text messages I'm
expecting more car crashes. Message retrieval; a REAL killer
app.
-------
SMART REMARKS FROM SMART PEOPLE: Howard Morgan
[howard@idealab.com] writes:
"I have been using vonage.com's IP phone via my cable modem
for the past three months. It is my only long distance
carrier in our NY apartment (2nd home), and no one I speak
with has any idea that I'm not on a POTS line. And the
$40/mo unlimited LD is reasonable. I have not business or
investment connection with the company.
"The other nice feature is that I can take my Cisco ATA box
with me to CA, plug it in, and still receive calls on my
212 number. As you point out, adding 802.11 would be the
final icing on this cake."
[I wish I could report similar success, but recently somebody
called me using the Vonage service and it sounded downright
crummy. Admittedly I was talking on a cell phone in an area
with marginal reception, but he called me back on his
conventional telephone and it sounded much better. We still
have a ways to go with VOIP. For example, maybe Vonage
quality would improve if it used Global IP Sound's technology.
Not that Global IP Sound has any monopoly -- it is just the
best VOIP codec I've heard to date. I have second-hand
information that open source, patent-free technology by Speex
http://speex.org sounds pretty good too, but I have yet to
experience it with my own ears. -- David I]
-------
SMART REMARKS FROM SMART PEOPLE: Anonymous at AT&T writes:
"I am sorry about your friends [who have been laid off from
AT&T]. However, staying behind has been worse.
"[Here at AT&T,] data is not doing as well as it
could/should be because we cannot get it installed.
Amazing, but we have huge backlogs for T3's and OC3's
because of lack of in house knowledge and manpower. The
demand for higher broadband is huge but we can't deliver
it. It almost seems intentional. This is what really
killed Concert Frame Relay. . . . Everything they do still
interfaces with some aspect of AT&T's legacy network,
which, of course, is the source of all the problems to
begin with."
[Concert was AT&T's failed joint venture with BT. -- David I].
-------
SMART REMARKS FROM SMART PEOPLE: Former Lucent employee Gary
Hughes-Fenchel writes:
"I find the situation quite upsetting. I know a lot of very
good engineers who are now very unemployed. At age 48 I'm
definitely older than most of my co-workers, but I am one
of the lucky ones because I have a job. Roger, my MSEE
friend, is selling bolts at the local hardware store.
Kent, my PhD CS friend, is now teaching with two part time
jobs at about one quarter of his old pay. My pal Bill who
cannot use GUIs (he's blind, but has written some damn good
code) is still completely out of work after 1 1/2 years.
Willard, who was arguably the world's leading expert on
several aspects of the 3B20, found work after a year but
has to commute [home from another state] on the weekend so
he can see his family."
[The two letters above show the pain of under-employment
whether or not a person still has a full time job. Imagine
the unleashed progress if the existing telecom workforce were
working up to its potential, without being (a) laid off or
(b) impeded by organizations that are desperately trying to
defend their obsolete businesses! -- David I]
-------
SMART REMARKS FROM SMART PEOPLE: Christian Huitema
[huitema@windows.microsoft.com], responding to my recounting
of Buckminster Fuller's theory that pirates cause progress [in
SMART Letter #76, see http://isen.com/archives/021005.html]
writes:
"Laurence Brothers [laurence.brothers@verizon.com, in SMART
Letter #77, http://isen.com/archives/021014.html] writes:
> to flee when they saw a warship's masts on the
> horizon.I wonder if there are any historical
> examples of pirate attacks on warships (not just
> on boats). I suppose there must have been some,
> but few and far between.
"Laurence is correct. Many pirate ships were captured
merchant vessels, refurbished for speed and gun power.
There also were fast vessels, but these vessels were rather
small, typically corvettes.
"The faster and better vessels were mostly found among
privateers, which were not quite the same as pirates.
Privateers were private operations, financed by
capitalistic investors, but they were endorsed by the state
to operate guerilla warfare against enemy commerce; their
methods were in many ways similar to those of WW1 and WW2
submarines, with the twist that cargo and profits were
split between crews and investors. They tended to have fast
ships. There is at least one documented event of a
privateer attacking a warship: the capture of the English
frigate "Kent" by the French privateer Surcouf, on August
31, 1800. Surcouf was not considered a criminal, at least
not in France; today, the French frigate FNS Surcouf is
patrolling the Indian Ocean.
"It is also true that privateers, or pirates, would
certainly not try to attack a warship by close reaching
upwind. Even with a fast boat, this would be a very slow
and dangerous approach. The problem is to avoid the larger
ships guns, and you really don't want to be downwind. The
song that records the August 31 event mentions that the
privateers "vire lof pour lof, en arrivant", i.e. jibes by
steering downwind, and then boards the frigate "par son
avant", i.e. by its undefended front. The superior upwind
speed is not a tactical advantage for attacking; it is
indeed mostly an advantage for escaping.
"There are many other reasons why pirates would not attack a
regular vessel of the line. As speed is a function of the
length of the waterline, larger vessels tend to actually be
faster; lighter vessels may be faster in small airs, but
then you see them coming. Larger vessels were also much
higher, with three decks, which mean that the attackers
have to climb a wall. Large war vessels also had a much
larger crew, which guaranteed a very bloody battle. All in
all, pirates certainly preferred to attack smaller merchant
ships, just like muggers would rather prey on old ladies
than on the football team."
-------
MORE ON PIRATES by David S. Isenberg
I can't argue with Christian Huitema's naval history -- he's
clearly an expert and I'm a mere dabbler. But I did take
Christian's letter above as a spur to go back to Buckminster
Fuller's writings to see what he did say about pirates, and it
appears that when I said that Fuller said that "pirates cause
progress" I was guilty of oversimplifying to the point that I
got it wrong. Here's some of what Bucky actually said
about pirates:
"I call these sea mastering people the great outlaws or
Great Pirates simply because the arbitrary laws enacted or
edicted by men on the land could not be extended
effectively to control humans beyond their shores and out
upon the seas. So the world men who lived on the seas were
inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did
rule them were the natural laws-the physical laws of
universe which when tempestuous were often cruelly
devastating."
From _Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth_, Chapter 2,
paragraph 2, by R. Buckminster Fuller, Southern Illinois
Press, 1969, http://bfi.org/operating_manual.htm
". . the people who learned that the water leads between all
the countries, the people who then exploited the remoteness
of humanity . . . I call them the Great Pirates for the
very simple reason that the law of the lands could not be
enforced out on the water any further than human beings
could throw projectiles, and that was such a little bit the
three mile limit and so forth and that was about it. The
laws of the land have never been enforced on the sea, and
therefore the sea, which is three-quarters of the Earth, is
outside the law. And the people who lived on it were the
"outlaws." And the top ones are called sovereigns and the
lesser ones are called the pirates. The 'ins' are the
sovereigns and the 'outs' are the pirates. And it's often
they reverse their positions.
From "Everything I Know," a 12-tape, 42 hour monologue by
Buckminster Fuller, January 1975, transcript available at
http://www.bfi.org/EveryThing/everything_i_know1.htm
-------
QUOTE OF NOTE: Walter Cronkite
"[The German people] applauded as Hitler closed down the
independent newspaper and television stations and only gave
them his propaganda. When they did not rise up and say,
'Give us a free press,' they became just as guilty [as
Hitler himself]"
Walter Cronkite at Texas A&M University, on Sunday 27 Oct
2002, quoted in "Journalist Cronkite Warns of Potential War,"
in The Eagle, Oct. 28, 2002, http://tinyurl.com/2ii4.
-------
IF IT IS FUNNY IT MUST BE TRUE, by Scatt Oddams
Hey David,
Wow, check out the graphic on this U.S. government site about
Homeland Security -- http://tinyurl.com/rrj. It's an animated
red, white and blue eyeball peaking through a keyhole! Do you
think the web designer is warning us about something?
Toon-a-loon!
Scatt
-------
THE ISEN.COM TRANS-PACIFIC TOUR
November 21, 2002, Tokyo, Japan. Socio-Economic Impacts of
Mobile/Wireless Technologies: Strategies and Policies,
sponsored by GLOCOM, the Institute for Global Communications
of the International University of Japan. I will be talking
about the recent Spectrum Policy Task Force report and about
multi-hop (mesh network) radio. For more detail, see
http://www.glocom.org/seminar/indexto.html
November 27, 2002, Melbourne, Australia. I'll be talking
about, "The Stupid Network: Why the Intelligent Network was a
Good Idea Once but isn't Anymore," at 6.30 pm at the State
Library of Victoria Village Roadshow Theatrette, 328 Swanston
Street, Melbourne. This talk is at the invitation of Monash
University and is sponsored by Australian Telecommunications
Co-operative Research Centre, http://www.atcrc.com. Contact
richard.nelson@eng.monash.edu.au or call Sarah Craze 618-9266-
3581 for more information.
November 29, 2002, Wellington NZ. I'll be talking at a
breakfast meeting (7:30 AM) at the e-vision Digital Media
Centre. It is open to the public for NZ$45. See
http://www.evision.org.nz/events/isenberg.shtml to book a seat
or contact Prashanta Mukherjee http://prashanta.com for more
info.
-------
CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
December 9 - 10, 2002 Palo Alto CA. Supernova, a Kevin
Werbach, Jeff Pulver collaboration starring Sergey Brin of
Google, Doc Searls, Clay Shirky, and yours truly.
http://www.pulver.com/supernova or
contact Kevin Werbach, kwerb@werbach.com.
February 4, 2003, Santa Barbara CA. My talk will be one in
the lecture series of the UC Santa Barbara Center for
Entrepreneurship and Engineering Management (CEEM). Nothing
is on the CEEM Web site yet, but keep checking
http://ceem.engr.ucsb.edu and save the date.
-------
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any
part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes,
provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 2002 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
-------
[There are two ways to join the SMART List, which gets you
the SMART Letter by email, weeks before it goes up on the
isen.com web site. The PREFERRED METHOD is to click on
http://isen.com/SMARTreqScript.html and supply the info
as indicated. The alternative method is to send a brief,
PERSONAL statement to isen@isen.com (put "SMART" in the
Subject field) saying who you are, what you do, maybe who
you work for, maybe how you see your work connecting to
mine, and why you are interested in joining
the SMART List.]
[to quit the SMART List, send a brief "unsubscribe"
message to isen@isen.com]
[for past SMART Letters, see
http://www.isen.com/archives/index.html]
[Policy on reader contributions: Write to me. I won't quote
you without your explicitly stated permission. If you're
writing to me for inclusion in the SMART Letter, *please*
say so. I'll probably edit your writing for brevity and
clarity. If you ask for anonymity, you'll get it. ]
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*
David S. Isenberg isen@isen.com
isen.com, inc. 888-isen-com
http://isen.com/ 203-661-4798
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*
-- The brains behind the Stupid Network --
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*