In a May 2014 posting we reported that the Chairman of the FCC, former Comcast lobbyist Tom Wheeler, was going to end net neutrality, and allow ISPs to treat different net content providers differently  and to charge them different rates—-essentially allowing providers to buy their way into premium “fast lanes  of service.  This would have a chilling, if not deadly, impact on the diversity of content and innovation of new content.

Today, President Obama urged the FCC to implement the “strongest  possible rules” to protect a free and open Internet.”   Perhaps his work this week with China on their closed Internet problem  inspired him to make sure that our freedom to produce and distribute content on the Web is maintained and protected.

Hopefully, this important part of our Freedom of Information will not become a partisan political football

Bill Patch 12/1/2014

Business Insider posted an article on May 19th, reporting that Cisco CEO and Chairman, John Chambers, had written a letter to President Obama, asking him to stop the NSA from inserting  monitoring devices into Cisco equipment.  :

The article included a copy of the letter, which is dated May 15th.   The timing of the letter is curious.  It says it is in response to photos which went viral last month after being published in Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place to Hide”.  The photos show NSA operatives in 2010  opening packages of Cisco equipment and inserting devices into the equipment.

Last week Cisco also released  a quarterly earnings report, which showed orders were down in their developing nations region—Down 7% in the BRIC  Region  (Brazil, Russia,  India, China) , and down 13% in Mexico.  While  the publication of the photos certainly can’t be helping Cisco’ sales in the developing nations, Chambers’ letter stops short of making any specific link between the photos and the quarterly results. Chambers does point out the negative impact of the agency’s actions:

“We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security.”

He’s right—customers trust Cisco to produce and deliver products that are safe to use; but that’s Cisco’s job, not the government’s. By now it’s clear that the pursuit of national security has led the NSA to engage in practices that  most people deem to be excessive and intrusive.  The leaders of most of the largest technology companies have written similar letters  on the subject. (  See:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-executives-to-obama-nsa-spying-revelations-are-threatening-business/2013/12/17/6569b226-6734-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html).   And as computer technology becomes even more ubiquitous with the coming IoT  (Internet of Things), security of the equipment is becoming increasingly important.

Also this week, five Chinese military officials were charged with hacking into the computer systems in U. S. firms, to give competing Chinese companies an advantage. Catching the five people involved was a great example of how the government can help secure our information technology resources, but equipment manufacturers such as Cisco need to design and deliver stronger, safer, more secure products.  Cisco needs to design routers that are smart enough to detect when an unauthorized part has been installed . All products need to have extensive self-monitoring capabilities, to detect intrusions or tampering, and to alert when the   unit is being used outside of expected ranges of processing ( for example, PCs that have been taken over by viruses and are being used for spam campaigns. or Denial-of-Service attacks.

*     *     *

We don’t have to accept a technology infrastructure that includes pervasive hacking as a given.  We need to expect–and demand –that hardware and software  providers make products that protect themselves—and us.   It should have been impossible for anyone—even the NSA– to open  and tamper with a product without being detected by the product itself.

Bill Patch    05/20/14     

    On Thursday this week the FCC, led by former Comcast lobbyist, Chairman Tom Wheeler, proposed new rules that permit ISPs to charge content providers a fee  to get faster and more dependable service  than the other content that is being processed.    Netfix has already paid fees to both Comcast and Verizon.  This subject  gets complicated quickly, but what it comes down to is that content providers who have lots of money and lawyers will be able to get preferred service from the ISPs,   who  have a monopoly on the “last mile” connection to our homes and offices .    Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner, which includes the old ISP AoL, will concentrate even more power in Comcast’s hands to leverage payments out of content providers.  Verizon, which was formerly Bell Atlantic, which was from your friendly old Ma Bell monopoly, is filled with managers and executives who know how to use monopoly power to manipulate markets.    At its simplest level:  If one party–or group of parties –can buy  preferred service from the ISPs, then other parties, who cannot pay the fees, will get degraded service.  On any given evening, your Netflix movie may be streaming quickly and clearly, but your Massively  Multiple Player world game may be stuttering, crashing and buffering.With this kind of power and control, the ISPs will be able to dictate  who can start up a content-proving service.  Facebook and You Tube are just a couple content providers that probably would not have made it if their service from the ISPs was slower and less dependable than the other content providers.    The days of a “free ”  Internet are over, if this FCC ruling stands.

Bill Patch

 May 15, 2014

In September 2013, when Samsung and others had  first announced their wearable smartphone products (see our posting dated 09/12/13), the price was $300 per unit.      Business Insider Intelligence at that time was predicting the market for smartwatches would be $9 Billion by 2018.  We postulated that $300 per unit was a prohibitively high price, and doubted the unit volume in the BI forecast.   BI has now released a new market forecast, and it is based on an average per-unit price of $100.Nevertheless, the total market forecast remains constant at $9 Billion.    And now they’re beginning to talk about the importance of “attach rates,”  which refers to how many smartwatches can be sold as an extension of  its smartphone. ( Hardware manufacturers used to focus on he attach rates for maintenance agreements, especially on PC products, which had thin margins.)    People seem to dislike the bulky  size of the smartphones, so newer products will have smaller screens.  This puts  pressure on the development of apps that fit the smaller screen, so we may see a trade-off ratio of size and price versus functionality, and  the new cheaper models may not have enough value to justify even the  $100  price.  We’re still skeptical.

A baby grand piano is an intricate piece of musical technology—more complex than some of the computer systems we repair, manage , and sometimes renovate.  Recently, we needed work to be done on our family piano, an Estey baby grand built in 1929. It is a classic beauty, but it was beginning to show its age, and it needed lots of work. It needed to be tuned, but before it could be tuned it needed to be  restored and renovated.  Elisabeth, who studied piano at the Boston Conservatory, found the website of a company in West Chester that specializes in the repair and restoration of grand pianos.  We  are always anxious to pass on good news and to recommend great service providers as we find them, so in this post we are highlighting Sweeney Piano, a family company that has been specializing in grand pianos for 30 years.  All of our realtor friends and clients should take note, because many times people who are buying a new home may need to move or repair a grand.  We highly recommend the work of Sweeney Piano.

An Informative and Attractive Website

As promised on their website, they exceeded our expectations for quality and service delivery.  The website is attractive and informative.  Michael and Lisa Sweeney have built a great business, and you get a feel for their high quality standards when you visit the site.  Our piano required a mix of technical work and  artistic refinishing of wood and metal.  To these two prime attributes they added effective communication skills, as they kept us posted about progress—right up to the delivery date, which they hit exactly.  Here’s a picture they sent as the work neared completion:

If you value your grand piano, and want it treated with care  for any needed repairs or renovation, contact the hard-working folks at Sweeney Piano for service you can count on—for yourself, your friends, or your clients.

As for us, we now have many hours of enjoying Elisabeth’s playing, and we are always happy to find a service company that shares our values..

Bill Patch

10/01/2013

The level of public discourse—in emails, Tweets, and Facebook posts and message boards–  is discouragingly low.  It is profane, gramatically incorrect, and not courteous.  It is rough and insulting, and oft-times mean-spirited.

Some people blame technology—It is easy to hide behind the computer screen,with a degree of anonymity, and throw prose stones.  While it’s easy to be anonymous doing a crude posting to a message board, the other forms of computerized communication actually expose the writer. In business emails are written by individuals who used to have secretaries to correct their grammar and language. People tend to treat emails informally, like they were talking to someone, not writing to them.  Gmail even calls them “conversations”….  And, folks get informal, and they start using slang, and they sometimes use sarcasm, or they make a snide remark, trying to be funny…But, it’s not  a conversation, and when it shows  up on the recipient’s screen, it’s just text.  There’s no facial expression to let the recipient know you are fooling, or making a joke.  Sarcasm shows up as a literal statement.  Anybody reading the email sees the person’s writing directly–unfiltered and usually without editing. This generates another problem—people don’t seem to be receiving effective grammar and language  instruction in school.  I don’t know whether teachers simply tired of trying to teach what for most is a boring, tedious subject, or whether school districts just removed grammar and parts of speech from curricula, but  many emails and other documents in business are starting to show that the writers did not get a good background in grammar and language, and many are spelling and using words phonetically.  This gets people in trouble with possessive pronouns and contractions of pronouns that sound the same.  Thus, they confuse and misuse:  Its and It’s, There,  Their, and They’re;  and Your and You’re.

So….emails show up on screens and make a bad impression, or sometimes no impression, or sometimes they hurt peoples’ feelings .

Emails are not verbal,they are a document, and they can be more effective if they are well-written. The overall Internet writing problem hit a new low  this past week, as people took to Twitter and message boards to denounce the Miss America winner. Because the young woman was Indian, she was called a terrorist, an Arab, and worse.  The nasty tone  and ignorance of the messages  that appeared were embarrassing.

Once you hit the send button, your words may appear in a virtually infinite number of locations. Internet writing is important.  People need to be more careful , and even more cordial and courteous, in the writing they do in the many  electronic venues now available. Workshops should be held to give folks some skills in writing emails and Facebook and other postings–for business or personal use. Good grammar and language create writing that respects the recipient. Angry, selfish communications degrade both the writer and the reader.

Bill Patch

09/26/2013

Forty-one years ago, when I started in the computer industry, computers were serious machines.  They were big, filling a whole room.  They whirred, blew fuses, spit out long complex reports, sucked up lots of air conditioning, and had nice red and green blinking lights.  The reports they produced were used to run large organizations, including businesses and serious government agencies.  Only highly-qualified people could actually approach the machines and do something with them.  But we’ve evolved now, and computers are everywhere, being used  to play Candy Crush, look at pictures on Facebook, and send 140-characters-or-less messages to the world.    We have devices that we use to get news, play games, and talk to each other.  All these devices use the same basic zeroes- and-ones computing technology that powered the first behemoths.  The Technology  Industry  is now betting that we need our devices with us so much, we’ll actually be willing to wear them .  Last week Samsung   announced its new Smartwatch, The Gear.

Business Insider,  a technology industry information provider, forecasts that worldwide spending on smartwatches will rise steadily to $ 9Billion in sales by 2018.  If I were Samsung, however, I wouldn’t count on those billions just yet.  Even though we have shown a seemingly endless demand for the conspicuous consumption of computerized devices—Have you ever seen two people sitting together in a room, texting, rather than talking?—I think $300 a pop is a bit much in today’s economic environment, and wearing our technology just might be an over-step.

 –Bill Patch 9/12/2013