Tom Moon:
If you think American rock bands face long odds chasing success, consider the improbable tale of Sigur Ros. The five-piece band from Iceland makes spacey progressive music, with often-indecipherable lyrics. Despite those apparent handicaps, the band has gone from playing small clubs to headlining large international rock festivals. The band’s fourth studio CD is called Takk…, which means “Thanks.”
We won’t stop until every San Franciscan has broadband access,” says Chris Vein, the senior technology advisor to San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom. It’s not only rhetoric. His boss is one of the nation’s most visible proponents of so-called muni Wi-Fi. Because he runs San Francisco, Newsom probably gets more than his fair share of ink. Some think that he also harbors ambitions to one day run for U.S. president–and nothing would look better on his resume than a line about how the city extended affordable broadband access to all its residents.
But Newsom is only picking up on a theme increasingly sounded by politicians elsewhere. The city of Philadelphia has also announced a high-profile plan to provide Internet access to its citizens. From its point of view, broadband is a necessity, not a luxury. With the United States’ ranking for broadband penetration plummeting from third place to 16th in just four years, this is more than an academic concern. The fear is this will translate into massive job losses to other nations.
From Chris Edwards’ new book, Downsizing the Federal Government (which cited CAGW):
2005 – 13,997
2004 – 10,656
2003 – 9,362
2002 – 8,341
2001 – 6,333
2000 – 4,326
1999 – 2,838
1998 – 2100
1997 – 1,596
1996 – 958
1995 – 1439Using 2005 numbers, by voting down the “Bridges” amendment, the Senate let the country know that it was unwilling to defund 2 out of 13,997 pork projects today. That’s 0.0142887762 percent.
A recent visit and discussions with a mentor friend of mine reinforce Alan T. Saracevic’s article: Silicon Valley, Where Brains Meet Bucks. My friend mentioned two ventures where he stuck with ideas through two bankruptcies until they were successful. That type of risk taking and stick to it attitude is generally not seen (there are exceptions) here.
What do you get when you mix two parts money, a healthy dose of brains and another three parts money? Why, Silicon Valley, of course. The most opportunistic place in the world.
The Madison area has plenty of cash. We simply must be willing to use it. Judy Newman notes that Wisconsin lags in high-tech jobs.
Lawmakers want to spend $3 billion to make sure millions of Americans won’t wake up to blank TV screens when the country makes the switch to all-digital broadcasts.
The subsidy was approved Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee as part of legislation that would set April 7, 2009, as the firm date for television broadcasters to end their traditional analog transmissions and send their broadcasts via digital signals.
Meanwhile, we lag behind the world in deploying the future, broadband internet.
DeLaval Voluntary Milking System:
The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.
DeLaval was started in 1883 by Swedish inventor Gustaf de Laval. It sells a variety of dairy supply and “cow comfort” products aimed at increasing dairy yields. It claims to lead the automatic milking machine market, with a 53 percent share, and says it has sold more than 1,000 VMSs, in all European countries, Canada, Japan, and Mexico.
Slashdot has more.
Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton:
The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.
The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.
Toshio Fuji published a gorgeous VR journey: The way to Mt. Fuji. Quicktime VR
All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen’s core mantra of “Do it, delegate it, defer it”. If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into “In”. Never.
On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen’s core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called “life hacks”. Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com – all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
In his latest informal white paper, Belk takes aim at mobile WiMax, a not-yet-finished standard that’s not expected to appear in base stations for deployment until 2007, although all tea leaves I read look like 2008 for any carrier deployment. (My only quibbles have to do with how he compares Wi-Fi usage to cell data usage, and how he boosts ubiquity over speed—but they’re not worth going into in length as the quibbles are small compared to agreement.)
WiMax “could” radically change wireless internet services. On the other hand, it’s been just around the corner for awhile….