Cisco’s New Videoconferencing System

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Sarah Jane Tribble:

One industry analyst described Cisco’s system — which the company calls “telepresence” — as far superior to other video conferencing products, typically accessed or run over the Internet.


Chambers has touted the new technology as so lifelike that it could replace corporate travel, saying that Cisco will cut $100 million in expenses by reducing travel 20 percent in the next 12 months.

The system uses software the company created and runs on a network powered by the company’s own routers and switches. The pictures are displayed on a 60-inch plasma screen with 1,080-pixel screen resolution, which is four times better than the standard television and two times better than a high-definition television.

The increaasing unpleasantness associated with air travel makes these products compelling – along with software only tools like Skype with video.

Find Out of Congress is a Family Business

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The ever useful Sunlight Foundation:

Rep. Richard Pombo ☼ did it with his wife and his brother. In his 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. Joseph Lieberman ☼ did it with his children. Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay did it with his wife and daughter. All have hired relatives to work on their campaigns, paying them salaries out of special interest contributions. Our system of campaign finance is often called “legalized bribery,” in which special interests donate tens of thousands of dollars to a member’s campaign committee in the hopes of advancing their own issues. Some members of Congress, by hiring their spouses, in effect use their campaign treasury to supplement their own bank accounts. The practice is legal, disclosed in obscure corners of campaign finance reports, and rarely mentioned by those who cover campaigns. And now citizen journalists can investigate it!

I’m proud to announce that the Sunlight Foundation is launching a new distributed research and reporting project that will enable citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll. Our simple, user-friendly six step tool (developed by our ultra-cool Sunlight Labs division) lets users investigate and record their results in just three minutes.

Unlocking the iPod – Great Fair Use Article

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Robert Levine:

Sometimes, however, the things Johansen tries to improve were made a certain way for a reason. When he was 15, Johansen got frustrated when his DVDs didn’t work the way he wanted them to. “I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it,” that is, on a PC that ran Linux.

To fix the problem, he and two hackers he met online wrote a program called DeCSS, which removed the encryption that limits what devices can play the discs. That meant the movies could be played on any machine, but also that they could be copied. After the program was posted online, Johansen received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation – and a visit from Norwegian police.

Johansen, now 22 and widely known as “DVD Jon” for his exploits, has also figured out how Apple’s iPod-iTunes system works. And he’s using that knowledge to start a business that is going to drive Steve Jobs crazy.

A disruptor
If you want to be specific – and for legal reasons, he does – Johansen has reverse-engineered FairPlay, the encryption technology Apple (Charts) uses to make the iPod a closed system. Right now, thanks to FairPlay, the songs Apple sells at its iTunes store cannot easily be played on other devices, and copy-protected songs purchased from other sites will not play on the iPod. (The iPod will play MP3 files, which do not have any copy protection, but major labels don’t sell music in that format.)

Doonesbury’s War

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Gene Weingarten:

It’s hard to know what to say to a grievously injured person, and it’s easy to be wrong . You could do what I did, for example. Scrounging for the positive, I cheerfully informed a young man who had lost both legs and his left forearm that at least he’s lucky he’s a righty. Then he wordlessly showed me his right hand, which is missing fingertips and has limited motion — an articulated claw. That shut things right up, for both of us, and it would have stayed that way, except the cartoonist showed up.


Garry Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” hunkered right down in front of the soldier, eye to eye, introduced himself and proceeded to ignore every single diplomatic nicety.



“So, when were you hit?” he asked.


“October 23.”


Trudeau pivoted his body. “So you took the blast on, what . . . this side?”

Steadman’s “The Joke’s Over”

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Christopher Hitchens:

Perhaps you can picture the work of Roald Dahl without the illustrations of Quentin Blake, or of Charles Dickens without the cartoons of Phiz. In a part of my mind, when reading Anthony Powell, I retain the images of the characters furnished by the imperishable Mark Boxer. Would we really have appreciated Alice in Wonderland without the drawings of Tenniel? However these questions may be decided, it is a certainty that the noir contribution of Ralph Steadman (who also produced a brilliantly illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass) is as inseparable from the output of Hunter S Thompson as Marks from Spencer, or Engels from Marx.

This is not to say that the two men were exactly made for each other. Starting with their first joint assignment, which was to lampoon the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine in 1970, Steadman was made to appreciate that he was yoked to a volatile and often dangerous manic-depressive. To describe the subsequent partnership as addictive would be disconcertingly accurate, although “disconcerting” would be the weakest way of expressing Steadman’s alarm at the properties of a small yellow pill that his friend so thoughtfully gave him on a later bad trip — if you will excuse the expression — to the America’s Cup in Rhode Island. The ensuing near-death experience is described without either rancour or self-pity, and, indeed, Steadman cannot claim not to have been warned.

Tattered Cover link.

The Information Factories

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George Gilder:

This change is as momentous as the industrial-age shift from craft production to mass manufacture, from individual workers in separate shops turning out finished products step by step to massive factories that break up production into thousands of parts and perform them simultaneously. No single computer could update millions of auctions in real time, as eBay does, and no one machine could track thousands of stock portfolios made up of offerings on all the world’s exchanges, as Yahoo does. And those are, at most, terascale tasks. Page and Brin understood that with clever software, scores of thousands of cheap computers working in parallel could perform petascale tasks – like searching everything Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, and anyone else could shovel onto the Net. Google appears to have attained one of the holy grails of computer science: a scalable massively parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software.

Google’s core activity remains Web search. Having built a petascale search machine, though, the question naturally arose: What else could it do? Google’s answer: just about anything. Thus the company’s expanding portfolio of Web services: delivering ads (AdSense, AdWords), maps (Google Maps), videos (Google Video), scheduling (Google Calendar), transactions (Google Checkout), email (Gmail), and productivity software (Writely). The other heavyweights have followed suit.

How HP Kept Tabs on a Wall Street Journal Reporter

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Pui-Wing Tam:

Unbeknownst to my family and me, someone was scoping out our trash earlier this year — someone hired by Hewlett-Packard Co.

The trash study was carried out in January by Security Outsourcing Solutions Inc., a Needham, Mass., investigative firm that H-P employed, according to a briefing H-P officials gave me yesterday. Whether the sleuths ever encountered my toddler’s dirty diapers, H-P said it doesn’t know.

I learned this — and more — as I sat in a conference room at H-P’s outside law firm yesterday in San Francisco, where attorney John Schultz ran through a litany of snooping tactics H-P’s agents used against me as part of its effort to identify which of its directors might be leaking news to the press. For around a year, Mr. Schultz told me, H-P collected information about me. H-P’s investigators tried at least five times, he said, to get access to my home-phone, cellphone and office-phone records. In several instances, they succeeded: H-P now has lists of calls I made to people such as my editors, my husband, my insurance company and a reporting source employed by one H-P rival.

H-P’s agents had my photo and reviewed videotaped footage of me, said Mr. Schultz, of the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. They conducted “surveillance” by looking for me at certain events to see if I would show up to meet an H-P director. (I didn’t.) They also carried out “pre-trash inspections” at my suburban home early this year, Mr. Schultz said.

A Lesson from Europe on Healthcare

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David Leonhardt:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that this country’s increased medical spending over the last half-century has, on the whole, been overwhelmingly worth it. Thanks to new treatments for everything from premature births to heart attacks, human life has continued to lengthen — defying expectations — even without major improvements in public health. Yet, strangely, we talk about medical spending as if it were nothing more than a drag on the economy, rather than an investment in the most important thing of all: our well-being.

I received about 500 e-mail responses from readers, and the most common reaction was a version of a simple question. “Why do Americans spend so much more than folks in most other developed countries while getting worse results?” as Sumati Eberstadt of East Greenwich, R.I., wrote.

In Greece, the government and individuals combine to spend about $2,300 per capita on health care each year, and the average life expectancy is 79 years. Canada, where the hospitals are probably cleaner, spends about $3,300, and people live to about 80. Here in the United States, we spend more than $6,000, yet life expectancy is just below 78.

The Politics of Electronic Rights

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Lessig:

echWorld (a UK publication) has an article about a “leaked” letter from the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) (apparently MSFT funded) about, as the article puts it, the “potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development.”

Nothing weird there. What is weird is, first, that such a letter has to be “leaked” (aren’t submissions to the EC a matter of public record?), and, second, the way in which the letter is made available on the TechWorld website. TechWorld gives you a link to the letter. The link states: “You can view the entire letter here.” And indeed, the link means what it says. You can ONLY view the letter. The PDF is locked so that it can’t be printed.