Dana Blankenhorn

The Cloud Starts Now

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One thing tech reporters often ignore, or forget, is that most companies don't live on the bleeding edge.

It's easier to ignore now, with the consumer market dominated by gadgets that anyone can afford, but which can go from latest-and-greatest to obsolete within a year.

The business computing market isn't like that. It's much bigger, and what works tends to keep working until it becomes obsolete.

So I make it a practice to connect, once in a while, with the realities of the business computing market. And I was fortunate that Red Hat invited me to witness their annual Summit in Boston, so I could listen to their customers.

Last Roadblock to A New World is Removed

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In writing about Ipv6 Day, which was Wednesday, reporters struggled to offer a sense of what it means.

We're about to run out of Internet addresses, they said. (Well, there's a workaround, but...) Remaining Ipv4 addresses are rising in price, and we're going to run out of new ones in 2014. (True, but...) Ipv6 is better – more efficient, more secure, inevitable. (As to the last, well, sorta...)

The fact, we've been kicking the can on this for a decade. Ipv6 was actually proposed in 1996, the idea being to expand the address space from four sets of three hexadecimal numbers each – xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx – to eight sets of four – xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx. Instead of having 32 bits – 4.3 billion addresses – you have 128 bits – 3.4 x 10 to the 38^th power addresses. You convert from one to the other by putting zeroes in front of the Ipv4 number.

Balance in Internet Law and Enforcement

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For digital activists, the Obama Administration has proven a bitter disappointment.

Rather than seeing the growth possibilities in unfettered access to the Web, the Administration has focused instead on the national security threat, and has been captured in turn by copyright extremists.

It's a slippery slope, but it's one liberty must navigate. It's one America itself has been navigating, sometimes with mixed results, since its founding. With the rise of the Internet, and its global impact on growth in every country, it's one we all must navigate.

Let's be clear here, because I'm hearing a lot of whinging from my side of the aisle. Activists for an open Internet are not powerless in this fight. Far from it. Because in our hands is growth – economic growth, human growth, intellectual growth. When people are forced offline, when they merely feel less than free, that has a profound, negative impact on growth.

It doesn't take a formal boycott. The action against SOPA/PIPA was merely an overt example of what happens every day, in billions of places around the world. By simply refusing to submit, by withholding the weapon of growth from governments, people demonstrate real power.

On the other hand, government must play a role as both guarantor of liberty and maintainer of order. We can't let the Internet be so open that a foreign government can hack it down. We can't let people steal from our own people and hide from justice. That's anarchy, not liberty. It may seem like a Randian paradise, but it will quickly end as all such paradises end, either in the dictatorship of the Moneytariat or a Somali wasteland.

Both sides must admit that there is a balance to be struck, but right now no one is standing in the middle and saying so. Thus we blunder on.

So let me stand in the middle and say so.

Taking the Internet Off The Grid

Energy pessimists and fossil fuel optimists love to talk about how much juice our grid needs to run, the point being that solar and other renewable sources could never meet such demand, and that the demand is only going to grow.

But how valid is that assumption? We know we can reduce the amount of electricity used for lights. We know appliances are becoming more efficient, and we have simple solutions to cutting the electricity off from unused sockets – all you have to do is buy them.

Ah, say the pessimists, but what about your computers? Even when you get a laptop, as I have, it's still usually plugged into a wall, or has to be recharged from the wall every few hours. And then there are all those huge enterprise server farms to contend with.

Well, the two biggest trends in computing are tablets and clouds, and they are all about reducing that load.

The Education Revolution

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since before my own kids entered school people have been trying to use technology to revolutionize education. (To the right, a hallway where one of my kids went to school.)

They have failed, for two reasons:

1. Desktop FAIL. Before teachers could learn the tool the tool was obsolete.

2. Politics

The Year the Telephone Died

Everyone's talking about the PC dying, and HP's decision to get out of the business seems to confirm it. But the PC's not dying.

The telephone is dying.

A smartphone is not a phone. A smartphone is a mobile Internet client. On a smartphone telephony is a low-bandwidth service, just as it is on a PC. And with the wealth of the Internet in your hand, synchronous services like voice lose their place.

This is having many profound impacts on our lives and world that we don't yet credit. As a reporter my first resort was once to call someone to learn something. Now I go online first, and even when I call I am very unlikely to get any service. PR stands in the way of almost any real newsmaker. The way to flush them out is to Tweet them or just write with what's available. There is usually a lot.

Google is All-In

 

A year ago, at ZDNet, I was railing against Google crapware.

The Samsung “Android” phone I'd gotten from my AT&T store was filled with crapware – programs placed there by AT&T and Samsung. Some seemed to want me to pay for things I knew the phone could do for free. And I couldn't get rid of them. Still can't.

This is hurting Google's brand, I wrote. When people get an Android phone they expect that Google is standing somewhere behind it. Even if they got it from a carrier, no matter whose brand name is on it, there are brand expectations here the phone's not meeting. What I found on reading other blogs and investigating things further was that, not only was this the case, but there seemed to be little the company could do about it.

Turned out there was.

Over the last year Google has steadily taken more-and-more control over Android. They updated my software, in the background, and it's better. They imposed new conditions on OEMs and stopped talking so much about the Open Handset Alliance in favor of the Android brand. Now the main differences I note between my phone and my daughter's iPhone are that my GPS is an energy hog, and her music integrates well with her phone.

The news peg here is Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, the shank half of the Motorola ham, for $10.5 billion, which includes a $2.5 billion “breakup fee,” money that will go to Motorola if for any reason the deal isn't consummated. 

Much of the early talk about the deal was it was about patents. Motorola has thousands of patents. But as Florian Mueller notes at his excellent blog FossPatents, Motorola is in court against Microsoft, Apple and many trolls over other patents, and Motorola's court cases are not going well.

No, this is about control. By having a real Google phone, designed by Motorola and produced under Google's direction, in the marketplace, Google sets a bar for every other Android phone maker (think Samsung and HTC). By having its own name and design out in the market, and its own name on Motorola's lawsuits, Google can also face the legal difficulties of its OEMs squarely, like the sibling whose kid brother is getting beat up and finally comes outside.

“You want a piece of me? You want a piece of The Goog? Well here I am, come and get me.”

Which they will.

Who Will Make the Mozilla Phone?

That's the key question here  and the answer is, probably no one.

Android was a Linux, backed by Google. Their problems weren't with the operating system. In theory a mobile Internet client should be no different than a desktop Linux. But every aspect of the design for any “smart phone” – from how it takes calls, to the user interface, to the way apps interact – is covered by literally hundreds of patents.

• Some are held by giant companies which use them to pry open markets.

• Some are held by “development companies” like Interdigital, who research, invent and patent things for a living. (Interdigital invented one of the first digital encoding schemes, TDMA, back in the day.)

• Others are held by trolls like Lodsys, law firms that pick up minor claims at the patent office, expand them into grand conspiracies, then hold up every company in the mobile ecosystem for big gobs of cash.

You can't invent a way around these patents. If the present patent-and-copyright regime were in place at the dawn of the PC age, I'm sure we'd all still be driving IBMs with twin floppies.

Software patents are bad law for two main reasons.

1. They give lawyers an excuse to file their own private taxes on any innovator, slowing innovation, eventually slowing it to a crawl. Meanwhile nations without such court-created regimes, like China, are free to innovate all they want and run rings around us.

2. You can't invent your way around these patents, unlike drug patents, which specify compounds, or device patents, which are published so rivals can improve them. Patents granted on concepts don't have to show an actual invention. They don't have to publish the code. Which means you can't do the same thing, or something similar, in some other way. You can't patent a new mousetrap if someone has already patented the trapping of mice. You have an absolute monopoly on an entire industry that last for 20 years or more.

When Everyone is in the Pool, Online and On the Grid

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The big difference between the developed world and the developing one has always been infrastructure. We have it. They don't.

Now they do. Or they will. Thanks to satellite, Internet, and solar technology, remote villages that previously had no access to electricity or the Internet can now get it.

For electricity this comes in the form of a mini-grid, a local 11 KV village electrical network that may be powered by solar, wind or biomass.

Sophisticated sensing, control and communication is required to make such a grid possible, but that's just chips and software. As one Indian customer told the AP, “Now we have light. We can move on, maybe expand with another solar panel and get a TV."

You can't imagine what it means to have electric light or a TV unless you have never had it. It brings light to the night, allowing people to read and learn after a long day's work. This can transform the lives of children, connecting them to the outside world for the first time.

But it's not as good as an Internet connection.

Google is Not at War

I have always been annoyed by the lazy "great game" tech analysis of reporters who would rather be covering politics than business.

An example is found in a recent TechCrunch piece on Google. Headlined "Google's Six-Front War," it focuses on the areas of business where Google is now concentrating its energy under co-founder (and now CEO) Larry Page.

VC Ben Horowitz started this nonsensical meme, calling Page a "war time CEO" in contrast to the "peace time" leadership of predecessor Eric Schmidt.

There are two things that are true here. First, Page is paring down the company's development focus. Second, he's focusing the company's energy on areas where it is in direct competition with other big companies. Microsoft in browsers, Apple in mobile, Facebook in social networking, etc.

This is natural. This is good. Page is wasting fewer development hours, he's aiming to monetize his infrastructure advantages in various ways, he's working to compete.