Ramble

Obama Wins!

Stephen Tolton — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:04:12 +0000

According to CNN, Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. My faith in the American people to do the right thing is partially restored. We still have a lot to do over these next four to eight years, from dealing with the financial mess, to the energy crunch, to global climate change. But, at least now, we’ll have a competent, intelligent leader in office to guide the way.

More tomorrow. Time for bed.

The End of the Internet is Here

Stephen Tolton — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:58:46 +0000

The end of the Internet as we know it has arrived. Comcast has confirmed the long-standing rumor that they would implement a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap.

This may be a “generous” cap, depending on how you look at it, but if duplicated by the other broadband ISPs, it spells the end of high bandwidth video sites, backup services, teleconferencing, and anything else that uses significant bandwidth, which is everything nowadays.

As we move toward HD video online, that 250GB will seem very skimpy. If you share your Net connection with other people in your household, 250GB suddenly seems really inadequate. But, the problem is deeper than just the technical limitations imposed, this move may have a chilling effect on innovation.

I work on a video podcasting service geared towards University needs and this kind of cap could severely limit its utility to heavy users and especially to the many off-campus students who increasingly demand high quality, high bandwidth multimedia as a standard part of their online educational experience.

This move is soley about forcing people to use Comcast’s video and VOIP services over competetors that depend on a fast general pipe to the Internet. As Om Malik mentions in his post today, their technical arguments defending this move ring hollow when they are proclaiming that average bandwidth usage is only 2GB/month. Why bother capping, if that is true and the vast majority of their users will not ever get near it? I don’t think it is true, at least not completely.

Comcast executives are not stupid, they can see the trends just as well as I. The future online is HD video, mobile computing, cloud computing, and attaching everything possible to the Internet (assuming we don’t run out of address space, first). The common thread amongst these disparate trends is the ever increasing demand for bandwidth they imply. But, Comcast doesn’t make the big bucks selling a simple utility, a pipe to the cloud of end-point services. No, they make money with the “value add” services, like video, and voice, that directly compete with services like Hulu and Skype. If they can disable competetors by making them more expensive (through potential overage fees) or simply less useful (because you might hit a cap using them), they create a nice incentive for people to use Comcast services instead. This doesn’t even take into account the possibility of charging for a “higher tier” service that is just the same crappy Comcast service with a larger cap.

The tiered Internet has arrived. If you are a Comcast subscriber (like I am), it is time to protest in the only way that seems to get a mega-company’s attention and cancel your service. Make sure that whoever you switch to knows that the reason for this change is Comcast’s bandwidth cap policy and maybe we can prevent this from becoming a trend.

I’m pessimistic. I think we are entering a new era online, and it is not good.

Silverlight > Cable

Stephen Tolton — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:59:10 +0000

I was watching the Democractic National Convention speeches on their website and I realized that the quality of the Silverlight video was much better than the blurry, low resolution, basic cable signal I get on my TV. I’ve thought in the past that a time would come where I could simply get rid of cable service all together and rely on my broadband Internet connection for all my video needs. It seems like that time may be now. The quality of online video has come a long, long way since I encountered my first Real video broadcasts in high school.

Unfortunately, if the big ISPs have their way and succeed in implementing bandwidth caps, they will kill online video. But, that’s the point.

I’ve witnessed the evolution of the ISP market since the late 90s. Back then, there were many dial-up ISPs all competing with each other. It got so bad that we even had at least one free service. But, as broadband penetration increased, the dial-up ISPs were crowded out.

Now, we have an effective duopoly in most markets, with one cable and one phone company. They both now offer video and VOIP service in addition to broadband Internet access. So, they have every incentive to do whatever they can to avoid letting their Internet division canabalize their TV and phone divisions. One way to do that is to limit bandwidth to the point where their separate TV and VOIP services seem like a deal compared to the overage charges incurred in going beyond the meager proposed caps.

The upshot of this change is that broadband in the U.S. is slow and expensive compared to other OECD countries. Capitalism at work.

Links for 2008-08-11 [del.icio.us]

Stephen Tolton — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:48:03 +0000

Internet Memes

(tags: web2.0 visualization humor weblog )

Links for 2008-07-31 through 2008-08-01 [del.icio.us]

Stephen Tolton — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:28:41 +0000

Last Guy
A japanese game that turns any website into a battlefield.
(tags: games flash web2.0 weblog )
An anthropological introduction to YouTube
Presented at the Library of Congress.
(tags: video sociology anthropology culture youtube weblog )

Opinions

Stephen Tolton — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:47:05 +0000

Everyone has opinions, but not everyone thinks very deeply about what kinds of opinions they hold. I strive to uphold the principle of strong opinions, weakly held while it sometimes seems that most of the rest of the population believes in strong opinions, strongly held or conversely, weak opinions, weakly held.

Weak opinions lead nowhere. The holder is unmotivated to develop strong supporting arguments and therefore the soundness of such opinions are suspect. You can’t learn much from someone with such opinions. I find people who hold very many weak opinions to be rather apathetic and irritating. I actually don’t encounter too many of these types of people. Maybe I am just lucky?

However, strong opinions that are held dogmatically are just about as useless as weak opinions. Such opinions have ossified and are immune to reason or counter-evidence. People holding very many such opinions can be merely annoying or occasionally very destructive if they have power to implement their views and their views turn out to be wrong. I regularly encounter people holding such opinions. These types of people are epitomized by the guests and hosts of the Sunday morning talk shows.

Strong opinions that are weakly held are what should be sought. They inspire one to develop strong arguments that are open to modification or even falsification as new evidence dictates. In order to develop and continusouly test such opinions, one needs to be well informed about the subject matter, as well as know how to properly interpret and reason about relevant data.

Continuously testing your opinions is hard work and it must be done with discipline, everyday, if one is to avoid slipping into dogmatism. Unfortunately, I don’t think our educational system does a good job of teaching people how to do this or how to even recognize the difference between a well supported opinion and a superficial one. That’s why, to this day, I consider Pete Amato’s Critical Reasoning course to be the most important course of my undergraduate college career and one that I always implore new students to take seriously.

Striving for strong opinions, weakly held will make you a better thinker. Question everything, seek empirical evidence to resolve disputes, and be your own harshest critic. Once the principle is internalized, you begin to see the world differently and it can be a revelatory experience. Of course, that’s just my opinion.

Links for 2008-06-20 [del.icio.us]

Stephen Tolton — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:07:49 +0000

All About Interop - WCF
A collection of WCF blog entries from the Microsoft Interop group.
(tags: .net blogs programming wcf weblog )

Links for 2008-06-19 [del.icio.us]

Stephen Tolton — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:04:07 +0000

Demystifying The Code : REST in WCF - Part I (REST Overview)
Part 1 of an N-part series in building RESTful WCF services.
(tags: .net codecenter programming tutorial weblog )

Links for 2008-04-10 [del.icio.us]

Stephen Tolton — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:35:35 +0000

New Thinking on the Climate Crisis
Al Gore gives an inspiring talk at the TED conference on being optimistic about solving the climate crisis.
(tags: weblog gore climate )
How to Setup Git on OS X
For my colleague who was wondering how.
(tags: OSX git mac opensource howto weblog )

Dreaming in Code Paperback Released

Stephen Tolton — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:53:43 +0000

Yesterday, I received my paperback copy of Dreaming in Code from Scott Rosenberg as part of a free paperbacks for bloggers promotion. I read the hard-cover edition when it was first released, but it has been a while and my original copy is now in the hands of a colleague. So, I will be re-reading this fantastic book this week and writing a more formal review as soon as I am done.

If you haven’t read it yet, you really should. The digressions into software engineering history alone are reason enough to read the book. The Chandler part of the story may strike some as a cautionary tale of what not to do when developing new software, but I found it an accurate description of the kinds of unexpected issues and challenges that crop up in any large software project.

Go out and get a copy from your local library or buy the new paperback today. It is a great read.