Entries from March 2008 ↓

The big tech policy news yesterday was Comcast’s announcement that it will stop impeding BitTorrent traffic, but instead will respond to network congestion by slowing traffic from the highest-volume users, regardless of what those users are doing. C…

Akamai claims it has seen a tenfold increase in software-as-a-service transactions over the past two years

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven’t yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many [...]

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a secret that he thinks is at the core of much of his success.

Links mentioned in todays 120.

Kathy Sierra on Wikipedia
horse.pig.cow

I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey.
Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened. Here’s the relevant part:

During a primary election, …

Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the…

A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to have read it already, I might as well publish it here. Yes, it is…

For a long time, our team (not to mention a bunch of other folks at university research groups, legal academics, network technology researchers, etc.) have urged the media industry and communications companies to stop fighting technologies such as P2P or BitTorrent and look at them as potentially useful tools in the evolution of digital media distribution. It would appear (the link will take you to a Verizon press release that includes a link to a video, among other things) that Verizon went out and did what few other ISPs would do: worked with a vendor (in this case, Pando Networks) that developed a system based on P2P technologies that would actually improve the performance of moving large video or audio files across its networks. (We should note that NBC is using Pando’s technology for its NBC Direct content download service.)

The result of the test? Verizon’s engineers noted that the field test found that Verizon broadband consumers were seeing a 40% improvement (over traditional client/server content delivery models) in the downloading of rich-media files and that the network operator was seeing a 50% reduction in network operations cost. In fact, an engineer featured in the Verizon PR video noted that P2P solutions, such as Pando’s, were approaching “carrier grade.” I don’t think carrier engineers throw around that term lightly.

Then again, apparently some ISPs are still conflicted about P2P and BitTorrent technologies. I think it would be mean-spirited to laugh out loud when reading this story detailing the “dysfunctional” relationship between BitTorrent Inc. and Comcast, after reading the Verizon press release.

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”

Now that HD DVD is dead and Sony’s Blu-ray has apparently won the HD media war, why aren’t we seeing Blu-ray drives available as a factory option, at least, for Macintosh computers? I think Steve Jobs is deliberately holding back in a high-stakes gamble for control of HD video distribution.

Apple has been a member of [...]