Electric Currents

Internet Neutrality - Tough Issue0
JR posted in Web news on June 16th, 2006

Ran across an excellent article about the need for neutral flow of packets on the Internet.  But this article isn’t just the latest in the normal doom and gloom of how bad things will be.  Rather Richard Bennet finds the balance to recognize that regulating the Internet at all carries its own peril as well.

What is his conclusion?  Oppose monopolies (and duopolies) at every turn, but in those instances in which you can’t prevent them, regulate them so they can’t abuse that monopoly.

The Return of Turkey Guts0
JR posted in Web news on June 19th, 2006

We haven’t heard much from the world of turkey guts in recent months.  Late in 2003, a company called Changing World Technologies received a lot of science press coverage for their pilot plant in Philadelphia that was converting organic waste from a turkey processing plant into a high quality oil.  The oil was so good that it could be produced for an estimated $40 per barrel and was easily refined for anything that conventional oil could be used for.  They were in the midst of building a demonstrator plant in Missouri.

Like many readers pained by the rising price of gasoline, I wondered what had happened to the project.  After all, $40 per barrel sounds pretty good considering that crude is presently at just under $70 per barrel today.  Discover magazine’s April 2006 edition has answered the questions.

First, it turns out that scaling up the plant wasn’t as easy as the developers originally thought.  Building took more than a year longer than originally planned.  Then there was the tweaking which is still going on.

One of the problems was that the process was sensitive to differences in what was being fed to the plant.  Too much fluid in one batch required different tweaks than when they received truckloads of feathers.  Eventually they settled that by simply blending a number of loads into a more consistent gruel.

Second, their estimated price of product was well short of the $40 they were expecting.  One of these was understandable; they had originally thought that they were going to be paid to dispose of the turkey waste.  After a ruling from the FDA that allowed turkey producers to use their waste as part of the feedstock for turkey feed (something that is suspected to have lead to mad cow disease when done with beef), they actually have to pay the turkey producers for their waste.

Third, they were competing with products like biodiesel which has a $1 per gallon subsidy from the US federal government. Just recently they started receiving the same subsidy and started managing a profit of about $4 per barrel of oil produced.  Not a huge profit, but if the rules on waste change, a tremendous profit again.

Good news for the company is that there are several European countries that already have very restrictive waste rules and higher fuel costs.  There, the company would already be very profitable and doing the good work of getting rid of the waste.

XP Non-destructive Rebuild0
JR posted in Windows on June 19th, 2006

I had to place the link for this on the blog because I’ve had too much trouble where this would have been a nice option.

This article has instructions for doing a non-destructive re-install of Windows XP.  While it won’t fix a badly corrupted registry, it will correct a problem where the key Windows files are broken.

Compromise on Net Neutrality0
JR posted in Web news on June 19th, 2006

CNet has an updated report on the Senate consideration of the communications bill.  A key point of debate in the Senate (and the US House of Representatives before it) was on the matter of net neutrality.

A recent amendment to the Senate bill would mandate a consumer “bill of rights” that would have the FCC police 9 principles (allowing consumers to access and post any lawful content they please;
to access and run any Web page, search engine or application that they
choose (including voice and video programs); and to connect any legal
devices they please to the network).

As the article notes, what these principles specifically don’t cover is the issue of charging for priority of traffic.  Many fear that with key deals to prioritize traffic for some favored sites, the remainder will immediately become less desireable.  Essentially the US broadband providers would be able to “pick winners” in any given market.  It is argued that this would stifle new, upcoming challengers when confronting well-funded established companies.

A simple example would be in VoIP.  Vonage wants to provide phone service, but your provider has their own service or a contract with a competitor and so gives network priority to packets from that provider leaving Vonage with poorer performance.

One solution would be to regulate broadband providers so they offer such services at the same price to all competitors of that particular service.  I have some doubts on this.  Given the phone companies behavior regarding behind the scenes subsidies of other divisions, I could see them charging unmanagable fees for service knowing that their own division could be subsidized by their other profits (or even the fees charged to other providers).  It is a start, but not an ideal.

Others point to the fact that the Internet has succeeded directly because there was no priority of packets, i.e., that it is a “dumb network” that treats all packets equally.  They believe that this practice should be promoted to law and thus the campaign in the US Congress.

I have to agree more with the latter opinion.  The desire by the broadband providers to make additional money by prioritizing packets seems on its face to be sensible; after all they need to pay for infrastructure upgrades to handle additional traffic.  What it doesn’t note is that other countries are doing infrastructure improvements without this prioritization and are even more successful in distributing high bandwidth content while simultaneously delivering better speeds than any US provider at lower prices than a standard US plan.

We should do better.

Microsoft: Price Predator0
JR posted in Windows, Operating Systems on June 30th, 2006

Excellent article by Alex Eckelberry at the SunbeltBLOG regarding Microsoft’s entry into the security software marketplace.  He doesn’t mince words and accuses them of predatory pricing.  With some quick quotes and a plain analysis of the financial terms they are offering, he makes it plain that this may be what is going on.

Now, offering your product at a discount sounds like it would normally be a good thing for consumers.  In this case, because of the power of Microsoft, it may kill the competing products entirely.  In a diverse world, this wouldn’t be a good thing.

I’ve always had misgivings about Microsoft selling products to secure Windows and Outlook/Exchange.  It seems too likely that they are double dipping in profiting from the flaws that should be patched in their original product.

HD-DVD Conspiracy Theories0
JR posted in Devices on June 30th, 2006

One of the tech columnists for the NY Times, David Pogue, puts forth and interesting conspiracy theory with a familiar target regarding the pricing of the first HD-DVD players from Toshiba.  Per the article, he and others don’t believe that Toshiba would be willing to lose about $200 per player to create a market or HD-DVD disks.  They point to Microsoft as the most influencial backer of HD-DVDs with the resources to do this.

This strikes me as a bit too much for an actual conspiracy.  I think that, given the very small volume of shipping players, Toshiba would be perfectly willing to take that small loss to build the format and brand.