infrastructure

The Belkin Conserve Valet: Dishonorably Discharged?

valet-charge-smartIn recent years the number of devices that we need to charge daily has constantly grown. Initially it was just our two cell phones. Since they each had unique power connectors each had its own AC adapter that lived near the appropriate night stand. Simple enough. Tidy even.

My Blackberry Bold 9700 was the first cell phone I used the featured the newly common micro-USB power connector. Shortly thereafter we added a Barnes & Noble Color Nook. Both of those devices require high-current chargers, where “high-current” means more than the 500 mA that is actually part of the USB standard.

That’s when things started getting more complicated. We may have achieved standardization of connectors, but still required dedicated chargers for some devices.

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Here’s Proof That SOPA Is Simply Idiocy

Earlier today Dan York posted a lovely and very simple explanation of how to completely circumvent the DNS based filtering scheme that’s been put forward in the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill, known generically as SOPA, has been the focus of the senate judiciary committee for the past while.

The bill is being promoted by Big Media in all it’s facets. I would have thought that a decade’s worth of debacles with digital rights management (DRM) would have taught the industry something. There is no technological solution that cannot be overcome. This I understand to be a universal truth.

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Recommended Reading: The Master Switch By Tim Wu

the master switch-200A few weeks ago I finished reading “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by MIT Professor and outspoken network neutrality advocate Tim Wu. Professor Wu starts with a historical examination of various industries that he considers to be “information industries.” This starts with the telegraph, telephone, movies, radio and television before moving onward to consider the internet.

In each case he traces the evolution of the business, key innovations, notable rivalries, competitive pressures, corporate alliances and government involvement. Each little tale is entertaining and informative on its own, revealing something of the great men and companies of an earlier era.

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Streaming vs Screaming Media: USB 3.0 Tries My Patience

Clarity Monitor-220 Preface: This is a wee bit off topic, but I haven’t ranted in a while, and you may find it worthwhile in the end.

For many months I’ve been toying with the idea of using streaming video as an alternative to some of the training and demonstration activities that haunt me in my working life. Historically, sending staff and gear to some distant location was the primary means of selling the gear, or post-sale, conducting end-user training.

In the past year one of our more experienced sales staff has found that demonstration given by remote means can be very effective. Initially this was merely his response to having limited access to my time, but it’s also become a way for him to get ad hoc demo’s accomplished on very short notice.

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Revisiting Steve Song & The Village Telco

Village-Telco-Logo-200You may recall that some time ago we had Steve Song appear as a guest on a VUC call. At that time he was working for the Shuttleworth Foundation coordinating the Village Telco project.

The Village Telco project developed a low-cost hardware device intended to help deploy telephony to underserved parts of Africa. This device, called a Mesh Potato, is essentially a wifi access point with a built-in analog terminal adapter. Groups of Mesh Potatoes form a wifi mesh network. This supports the sharing of voice & internet resources at extremely low-cost compared to commercial solutions.

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Wrestling With a Definition Of “The Cloud”

For much of the past year I find that I’ve been struggling with putting some definition on “The Cloud.” This thought process began way back on November 5, 2010 when I hosted a VUC call that was a panel discussion intended to consider “The Cloud” in its many facets. That call featured a number of guests, each of whom had specific experience with cloud infrastructure, applications and services. Since that time I’ve been pondering what was said, and further, the evolving public perception of “The Cloud.”

cloud-comm-summit-4-logoSo it was that while attending ITExpo earlier in the month I found myself spending much of my time there in the sessions that comprised the CloudComm Summit 4. During those sessions I had the opportunity to pose some of my questions to the assembled experts. In some cases their answers were enlightening, in other cases they seemed to be puzzled about the very nature of the questions. Even so, all of this has helped to crystallize my own personal definition of The Cloud.

One of Microsoft’s more recent marketing programs made considerable mention of “reaching for the cloud,” presumably with respect to some common end-user applications. I can’t help but feel that such public representations are less than helpful, perhaps even a little misleading.

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