HACT

Comcast, one of the US’s largest broadband providers, issued a press release today in which it said it would “undertake a collaborative effort” with BitTorrent  ”to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management”. This is in response to their recently being caught with their ”hand in the cookie jar” of bandwidth management with the BitTorrent and eDonkey file sharing protocols. They have said that they will work to find new ways of managing bandwidth (while still creating an obviously tiered network).

Comcast has done a clever thing with this press release that I have yet to see anyone chime in on. The company has effectively shifted the focus of the debate on bandwidth management away from the core issue of network investment and on to the overlayed problem of file sharing as the source of their woes.  The real issue is that they won’t upgrade the network, not that people are sharing files.

Comcast refuses to upgrade its network to meet the needs of its customers. This is the ultimate in turning “no press is bad press” into reality for Comcast. They have effectively said “we’re not the bad guys here, those file sharers are making you all pay” and put the onus on their own customers to change their behaviors. The customer is never right in this day and age with broadband service. The customer pays Comcast, but Comcast is apparently ceding it’s responsibility to give good service. In lieu of that they punish their customers for using what they pay for.

Where are the customer advocates? Who is yelling about this instead of regurgitating the press release and saying what good boys and girls these people are?

Start a company that buys electrical generating equipment, installs it on or near customers and then sells them the energy that you produce. SunEdison has done this. Great idea. There should be hundreds of these companies.

I just received this lovely email from Clearwire, my current main broadband provider:

Dear Mr. Huslage,
 
While monitoring our network, we noticed that an excessive amount of internet traffic from your Clearwire connection is negatively impacting other Clearwire customers in your area.  These issues can be caused by a virus or spyware on your computer, by having a wireless router with no password set or by using peer to peer/file-sharing and FTP programs.
To prevent further strain on Clearwire’s network resources we are actively managing your connection per our terms of service.  Please contact us as soon as possible at 888-253-2794 so we can help resolve the problem.
 
For more information on Clearwire’s Acceptable Use Policy, please follow this link:
https://www.clearwire.com/company/legal/aup.htm
 
Thank you for your prompt attention.

This is enough to chill my bones and make me think about going back to dialup. I called the number, gave my account info and the tier 1 person sent me on to the 2nd line person to be dealt with. The 2nd line person said that my bandwidth had been degraded to aid other users in my area and I was emailed to see what I might be doing on my link. He said that engineering had been looking at my neighborhood and noticed a “large continuous upload use over the past 5 days.” I haven’t been running Bittorrent, a big server or any large file transfers over the past 5 days. I have Macs at home, not prone to the usual virii or trojan horses that might occur on an open link.  My wife plays World of Warcraft, but that’s hardly a big bandwidth hog. I informed the gentleman of these things and he promptly “fixed my modem to the Clear Premium bandwidth level” from what he called dial-up speeds. On top of this, he said that per the Acceptible Use Policy I could “do this” 3 times, but that I was okay because this was the first time.

I pay Clearwire $50 a month for the privilege of getting a 2Mbps wireless link, but I can reasonably expect to see the same modem speeds that I got in 1993 on average. Clearwire turns around and tells me that I use the thing too much and they are really turning the screws to make me feel the burn and stop using what I pay for. They try to appeal to the needs of my “neighbors” on the network. Then they have the hubris to threaten me. Forget you. I pay for service at a certain level which you never actually deliver on a consistent basis.

This sort of behavior has become commonplace in the ISP world and is very disconcerting. Back in 1993 when I helped found a large-ish ISP in North Carolina, we always strived to have the customary 20% overhead in Internet network bandwidth while maintaining at least a 30% oversubscription rate. Today’s ISPs seem to be running at somewhere greater than 100% oversubscription with no overhead in Internet network bandwidth (this is anecdotal, I have no clue what the real numbers are).

What has changed to make this happen? Bandwidth is cheaper than in 1993. Infrastructure is cheaper than in 1993. The wireless access points that Clearwire uses are even cheaper than when they started 3 years ago. The consumer has to pay the price for poor node distribution, low Internet network bandwidth and lack of infrastructure in general. The customer’s needs require them to utilize their connections fully, often through much of the day yet ISPs continue to fight to not do the investments necessary to insure customer service levels.

I sure am happy that I ordered the ADSL2 line from my friends at ISOMEDIA today. I hope they have more sense than Clearwire, who is clearly treating the customer as a liability.

I live in one of the most well connected communities in the United States. Redmond, WA is home to my employer Microsoft and countless other large bandwidth-hogging companies. One would think that with all of these high-tech workers in the city of 51,000 it would be pretty easy to get good, reliable broadband at my house. It isn’t.

It appears that in this place, with these consumers and this large number of smart and affluent people that I live in a broadband wasteland. I have had Comcast cable modem since moving here in the middle of last year, and it has been sub-par at best. The quality of the link is good (as measured by upstream signal-to-noise ratio of 34db) and the bandwidth averages about 3mbits down and 256k up at non-peak times, but during peak times it slows to a crawl of less than 1mbit down and 56k up. This sort of service level is intolerable for someone who uses their connection as heavily as I do. I have asked Comcast for different service tiers, had their service tech come out and replace my cable line and even said a prayer over the cable modem. Nothing I have done has had any measurable effect and short of contacting the local authoroties I don’t see what else there is.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try using our local wireless provider Clearwire, which has been getting good press in the area. I went to Best Buy, bought a modem and hooked it up straight to my laptop. After opening my browser, filling out the signup form and giving away the keys to my bank account I was allowed to use my precious Internet. The link has been solid, if a little pokey for my tastes, at about 2mbits down and 256k up. The fact that the service is wireless means that latency can spike from 50ms to 200ms on a simple ping test over a period of 5 minutes. This spikey behavior can cause havoc on streaming video and large file transfers. I’ve had a few problems, but it’s overall just OK in my opinion.

I’m off to try other options. Over the next few months I hope to try out ADSL2 service from both Verizon and Covad. This should give me the full gamut of what’s available in the area without moving house. I’m not sure what else to check out, considering my upcoming optional accessory and his financial responsibilities. I’m happy to listen to ideas, and stay tuned for your man-on-the-street opinion.

I’m looking to get hold of some OLPC XO laptops for prototyping ideas. If anyone knows of a person who could facilitate this within their organization it would be much appreciated.

Tune in to CNN on Saturday or Sunday or almost any other afternoon for that matter and you’ll see Ballot Bowl, which CNN describes thusly:

CNN Ballot Bowl: CNN brings viewers rare, in-depth access to the people, places and events impacting our world and our lives.

To the naked eye this sounds pretty cool. You get to hear the candidates “Live and unfiltered” and commentary from “The Best Political Team on TV” to boot. Wow. Nice, huh? CNN has taken time out of its busy schedule to show you all the candidates’ stump speeches and press conferences without bothering to edit them. CNN is also letting you hear the latest polls and what “Ordinary Americans” think from their Election Express bus. They must be giving you more information, right? Wrong.

Stump speeches aren’t supposed to give their viewers information. They are designed to excite the audience into action. They are speeches that have been honed and sculpted to get the audience to go out and canvass or give money or evangelize the candidate. They are the ultimate in preaching to the choir. There is no new information given in the typical speech given by any candidate.

The simple act of CNN giving the candidates access to the national TV audience has changed what the stump speech used to be. They still don’t usually convey anything new, but they do speak to a larger audience than those gathered in the room to hear it. Candidates have recently come to “respond” to what the issues of the day are, because they have a national audience in what is essentially an intimate and local affair. This is the case of the Uncertainty Principle in action every day.

I don’t really think this is bad per se, but I do think that it further dilutes the messages of the candidates and contributes to fatigue in the electorate. The US voter is already tired of the elections, and now CNN is helping to make it worse. They aren’t helping people make a better decision for their favorite candidate. They aren’t letting the viewer know any more about what the candidate stands for. They are misrepresenting what they are doing as journalism and informative. The typical US voter doesn’t care about the election until they walk in to the voting booth. They don’t even really make up their mind until their finger is on the button. So piping rhetoric into these addled brains is not really helping much.

This idea about how Obama has no platform to run on and is just spouting hope for hope’s sake is a perfect example of what happens when people hear the same stuff over and over. Obama has all of his position papers and white papers posted handily at his website, the same as all the other candidates. The reason this incorrect rumor persists, I think, is because people hear McCain and Clinton talking about it all day every day on shows like Ballot Bowl.

This just proves to me that TV won’t really set you free. If you’re a voter in the US you have an obligation to vote not only with your heart, but with your mind. You should know who you are voting for and educate yourself independently of any media sources. In the hour you sit down to watch Ballot Bowl, you could read papers on all 3 of the big player’s web sites about an issue that you care about. You could actually know more about these people and what they say. You would be less ignorant and susceptible to rumors like the Obama one and make up your own mind. Go read and understand. Here are the links:

• Barack Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• John McCain

Enjoy yourself!

I am continually amazed at the inability to add basic things to the UIs of media players. I’ll confess to being a mac head and as such iTunes is my preferred program for listening, but I like to play the field once in a while to help remind me why it is so good.

My employer’s operating system comes with what is billed as their best media player ever, and indeed it does work well for playing media, but it should also do a few other things. A good media player organizes your songs intuitively and also allows you to save off frequently listened to tracks and streams. Windows Media Player seems to fall down in the library arena. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to save the stream for KEXP Radio as a favorite. Here’s the UI as it’s playing:

There are no options evident. Even right-clicking shows me a little menu with nothing obvious to add this stream to my library or save it as a favorite.

 With iTunes, however, things are quite different. Here’s the UI:

Here we see a convenient listing of radio stations and all I need to do to allow iTunes to remember it is drag the track to the Music tab on the left. It’s now saved forever. Anything that is playing can be done this way. Dragging the stream to “Library” on Windows Media Player doesn’t do anything obvious for me.

I could go on and on about the hideous UI tragedy that is Windows Media Player. Microsoft keeps wondering why it’s not “winning” at stuff and often overlooks what’s right under its nose. Users hate interfaces that make no sense and don’t do what they want out of the box. You can study this stuff in a vacuum all you want, but the real test is comparative/competitive testing with real-world scenarios. Fear not your competition, but learn from them and make something even better.

I didn’t want to put the info about our coming baby here, but if you are interested please check out baby.hact.net for pictures and talk from Chrissey and I.

Basically. the reason we are driving ourselves to death is because there aren’t any incentives not to. So we remove barriers to ownership of cars, while charging based on usage. People would drive less, the roads would be paid for by the users of them and cars would naturally become more efficient.

What if the road and the car were intimately linked? What if the car negotiated with the road to determine how much your trip was going to cost based on carbon usage? What if, given this new economic model, the car cost was amortized based on how much you drove (the road pays the car manufacturer too)?

Firstly, Microsoft is not evil. Microsoft is not organized enough to be evil, in and of themselves. They don’t really have the capability of being evil at this point even if they wanted to be what with the constant audits by legal entities and governments. This company has a monopoly on desktop operating systems and office suites, but that monopoly does not extend any further. There is no hegemony in servers or enterprise systems. There is certainly no monopoly in Internet properties. Microsoft might have had some evil tendencies in the past, but that was then and this is now.

Secondly, Microsoft has proven that outside of the areas within which it dominates they cannot execute at all. Even leaving the humble Internet offerings aside, there is not one single shining star where Microsoft has competed in an overwhelming fashion. Windows Mobile is a modest success, built on the back of other modest successes in the server business. Exchange server might be the de-facto corporate email standard, but it doesn’t hold a candle to other high-volume email servers out there that service consumers’ billions of email accounts. Office Communications Server is a failure in the VOIP arena even with the new version’s great improvements. I could go on, but you get the point. Microsoft follows the market in every instance.

Thirdly, Microsoft is consumed by process. There are myriad processes for doing anything at Microsoft. Some days I’m surprised I don’t need a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Certainly any company that has 80,000+ employees needs processes to survive, but this level of process fetishism is absurd by any measure. Everything has checks and re-checks, code gets reviewed sometimes 4 or 5 times before it can be checked in to main branches. Network changes require two or three triage processes to get done. There are these daily scrum meetings all over the company to triage bugs and tickets and assign the work. There are meetings about meetings. There are documents and forms to be filled. I want someone to come ask me where my TPS report is, or if my 27B/6 in triplicate has been submitted. I understand that taken singularly, any of these processes can be justified by many people and I’m not suggesting that everything go away, but process in this respect kills creativity and stifles the work that people are here to do.

Finally, Microsoft is risk averse. All of the previous points culminate in this one statement. When a company becomes afraid of change, it dies. When Microsoft decided that it would follow the market instead of create the market, it started to die. Some would say that started with Windows, but I disagree. Windows was not a “me-too” product, like so many of the company’s current lineup today – it was the natural evolution of computer interface and as such was bound to happen. I think the company tipped over after it acquired its monopoly in the desktop space. As soon as that happened, the world became much smaller for Microsoft as it attempted to duplicate enterprise applications and become dominant there. Microsoft decided that it would survey the market and make “me-too” platforms upon which it could expand in the future. The problem with this approach is that they are just modifying existing markets and no longer working on innovation. Microsoft became insular and not forward thinking. Sure there were parts of the company that continued to expand on these bases, but true innovation was left to ISVs and startup companies which were then purchased by Microsoft in order to fuel its expansion. Leave the risk outside of the company and you assume little of it yourself. If you have no risk to take, the employees become cogs in the wheel, ready to do service but not listened to when their ideas might help.

Microsoft will continue to fail in the markets that it competes in. It will struggle to regain relevance in the technology world as long as it continues to make the decisions it makes. I have no answers for these problems only suggestions, and those often fall on deaf ears. The Powers That Be say I couldn’t possibly understand what goes on here, since I’ve only spent 6 months looking at the problem. They become defensive when I suggest that we have these problems, and even more reticent to talk when I try to suggest solutions. Microsoft is dying a slow, painful death. In 20 years, this company will cease to be and one of its competitor will rule the roost. To make the same mistakes again.