With some new Pols poised to take the keys to our collective bus in DC, we’re hearing a lot about he need for federal money to fix our digital infrastructure. We’re also hearing a lot of banter about natural monopolies, and economic stimulus  from self appointed experts who are eager to allocate more dollars to to “create jobs and erase the digital divide”. If you think the new team driving the bus will fix anything, I have news for you. We’ve repeatedly tried to fund and regulate better communications networks  from Washington, and failed every time.  The time has come to quit feeding the porkers at the federal trough and take charge of our own infrastructure.

Technologist Brough Turner eloquently makes the case that we should own our dark fiber and be free to chose who lights it. With double strand fiber prices now in the 30 cents / foot range,  a fiber pipe is less costly than the water, sewer, or electric that we routinely pay for. Instead of forking over billions for make work programs run by Luddites in Washington, why not do it closer to home? Opening the market for who lights the fiber will create more jobs that will continue long after the initial construction, and competition will provide better price and service with more options.

Brough Turner says, “Don’t fight for anything above dark fiber.” Changes in telecom tend to happen on a decade’s time scale so be careful what you ask for - it will be with you for a long time. His proposal for improving internet communications in the United States is based on the paradigm of owning the dark fiber ourselves or controlling who lights the dark fiber that comes into our homes.  (IT Conversations)

 

 Brough Turner from IT Conversations [17:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Stan Beer, Microsoft fan boy extraordinarie takes another shot with Why the IBM Linux desktop will fail. The reason he is in error should be obvious. He is actually believing the IBM press on the offering and not looking at what is being offered specifically. Stan is just doing a MS Office shoot out comparison and not looking at the market this offering is targeted for. —

In fact, the only practical way for IBM to accomplish their goal of wooing enterprise users over to the virtual Linux desktop is to embrace Microsoft. Instead of trying to convince users to be Microsoft-free, IBM should be encouraging them to run their “legacy” Microsoft applications on a virtual Windows desktop side by side with their new Linux desktop applications, including Lotus.

Unfortunately for IBM and other Linux advocates, after nearly a decade and a half of trying, they still don’t seem to have got the message that in most cases trying to get enterprise Microsoft users to go cold turkey simply doesn’t work.

Last things first. Sorry Stan but the Linux crowd has only been after the desktop since about 2003. That’s 5 years not 15. The first 5 years was spent getting the Linux kernel to near parity with Unix class product. The next 5 were spent loading up server suite (eg LAMP) to head to head with Microsoft. Which by the way, they seem to be doing a fair job at. So you are comparing 5 years of effort by the Linux crowd to the nearly 30 years of hegemony of the Windows crowd. That Linux is at about 80% of what a std Windows load can do in 5 years is a damn good track record.

On to the first. Stan ole boy, quit reading the pink sheets dude. As much as this is touted as a ‘MS desktop killer’ it is not. That spin was put on to salve the two other partners — Canonical and Virtual Bridge. It is the only way IBM would have been able to get them on-board.

So what is IBM really doing here? Well look at the application suite — Symphony, Lotus Notes, and Domino R5/R6. Who is that? Why large IBM embedded multinationals — Verizon, AT&T, GM, etc. So why would such companies be interested in this? Risk mitigation. For the same reason that Stan offers that MS products are deeply embedded, so are products like Lotus Notes and Domino. Deeply so. Now look at the marketplace. Microsoft stumbled on Vista. Corporate adoption has been abysmal. The Corps are holding off till they see what is in W7. If MS stumbles again then what is in the mind of the CIO’s? But some companies feel they can’t wait. These Corps are bringing in new hardware but the port costs of moving all the IBM legacy apps is killing them.

So you look at that landscape and this ends up being IBM’s sandbox edgeline –

Well to make it portable it makes sense to consider a virtual desktop. Doing so also eliminates the porting costs. Adding the existing application base targets IBM current customers, not new ones. Being virtual, there is a level of decoupling on the base OS decision. The CIO/CFO can safely recommend the solution letting the MS-Linux war continue unabated. It makes old look new again in a gilded virtual cage. The fact that the partners were the ones doing most of the effort afforded IBM the chance to offer its existing product suite cheaply. Under $300 for the entire suite is cheap compared to their have-to-install counterparts.

As an MS Office killer? Never. Or almost so. But twist the crystal ball around. IBM is hedging against the MS - Linux OS battle not the MS Office - OpenOffice battle. IBM’s MF Office Suite has not been pitted against PC products in years. Nor is it likely to now. Its a defensive play pure and simple. The OS war is a battle that is far from certain as nobody has beaten free in the marketplace.

Linky.
Cross Post, Tightwad Technica

Hey, want to buy a paper? No, not the fish wrapper at the corner store. I mean THE PAPER, the business that the fish wrappers comes from. Well according to this article there are some 30 publishing properties on the market — and no takers.

Across the United States, more than 30 daily newspapers are for sale, and buyers are scarce.

From Los Angeles to New York, leading newspapers have slashed newsrooms with buyout offers, and when those failed to reach budget-cutting goals, with layoffs.

The newspaper industry has been caught in a tailspin for three years, a trend variously blamed on plummeting ad revenues, declining readership, growing competition from the Internet and a deepening national recession.

On Thursday, Colorado’s oldest newspaper joined the growing list of dailies on the market. E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, offered to sell it after reporting an $11 million loss through the first nine months of this year.

No end in sight either.

Linky.

The headline was picked from a political blog but it reflects what I am about to tell you. In the world of news, one of the pillars of a news organizations ‘raison de vivre’ is the influence via its editorial pages to reflect and shape public opinion both politically and otherwise. But when even that is under challenge is it time to fold up shop? –

In McCain’s Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently took the right’s campaign against the MSM to a new level by running an anti-media television ad. In the ad, which touts his record as Sheriff, Arpaio instructs voters to throw the local newspapers away. “You can never believe everything you read,” Arpaio says, holding up copies of the Arizona Republic and the East Valley Tribune. “So when these are delivered to your house, they belong in the trash.” He then throws the papers into a garbage bin. This year, knowing full well in advance the Arizona Republic was not going to endorse either of them for reelection given the paper’s constant negative coverage of them, Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas told the paper “no thank you” to an interview. In a joint press release, the two said in part, “the Arizona Republic board has been one of the biggest voices against steps we have successfully taken to reduce Valley crime. Even the paper’s own lawyer has been opposing us outside of its own pages…They will talk about our opponents in glowing terms while ignoring their own research which would alert the public to embarrassing, disgusting or way too soft on crime information about our opponents.”

But if that were the Arizona papers only problem, circulation, but alas it is not –

The most popular political blog in the state, the conservative sonoranalliance.com, gets around 1,000 unique visitors each day. Considering only 4% of newspaper subscribers read editorial pages, and the Republic is down to only 361,333 subscribers, that means only 14,453 of subscribers are likely reading its editorial pages. Depending on how many of sonoranalliance.com’s readers are repeat visitors each day, there may now be more people reading that blog than are reading the Republic’s editorial pages. It is time to start giving reputable blogs the status historically given newspapers, because they are gradually becoming the newspapers of the future. Just like Fox News and talk radio destroyed the hegemony of the major TV news networks, blogs are now taking down the left’s last media bastion, print media.

Ad revenues have been stripped away by forces like eBay and CraigsList. National news is being usurped by blogs from both the left and the right. Reportage is being downgraded to an event that anybody can do, even video with a $600 camera. And now we have reached the point that their influence is so low that politicians not only ignore them but challenge them publicly.

Sounds to me like the barrel of ink has run dry. Blogs have won.

Linky

That’s right US News is going online only here shortly. Its a cost cutting move and looks like it paves the way for them to transition. –

US News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, has become the latest US media outlet to abandon print for the Web.

The move to become an Internet-focused publication was announced to US News employees in a memorandum on Tuesday from management of the magazine.

“We’re accelerating this transformation in response to our rapid growth online where our audience is now about 7 million uniques a month and growing,” US News president Bill Holiber and editor Brian Kelly said in the memo.

“For all of you who have worked so hard to make this transition possible, say good-bye to Web 2.0 and welcome to Journalism 5.0,” they added.

Like other US magazines and newspapers, US News has been losing readership and advertising revenue to online media for years.

It will be interesting to read their write down numbers once they close the pulp side down. Those numbers will be indicative of whether other firms make the same moves or fold shop permanently.

Linky.

Foul!!! We predicted it was coming, and I am sorry to be proven correct. AT&T will impose download limits on users in Reno. I’m pretty sure that AT&T’s capacity is under no threat of overload. More likely is that business in flat, and this is a way to extract a few more dollars from the existing customer base. I don’t think that by the bit billing has to be a bad thing, but if that’s how it will be done, the bill should begin at zero. Unfortunately, if you believe AT&T’s “average users downloads” statistics, then by the bit billing would probably reduce revenue for the Death Star. Without competition, we get this instead of a bigger more open pipe.

AT&T will initially apply the limits in Reno, Nev., and see about extending the practice elsewhere.

Increasingly, Internet providers across the country are placing such limits on the amount of data users can upload and download each month, as a way to curb a small number of “bandwidth hogs” who use a lot of the network capacity. For instance, 5 percent of AT&T’s subscribers take up 50 percent of the capacity, spokesman Michael Coe said Tuesday.

But the restrictions that Internet providers are setting are tentative. And the companies differ on what limits to set and whether to charge users for going beyond the caps.

Starting in November, AT&T will limit downloads to 20 gigabytes per month for users of their slowest DSL service, at 768 kilobits per second. The limit increases with the speed of the plan, up to 150 gigabytes per month at the 10 megabits-per-second level.

To exceed the limits, subscribers would need to download constantly at maximum speeds for more than 42 hours, depending on the tier. In practice, use of e-mail and the Web wouldn’t take a subscriber anywhere near the limit, but streaming video services like the one Netflix Inc. offers could. For example, subscribers who get downloads of 3 megabits per second have a monthly cap of 60 gigabytes, which allows for the download of about 30 DVD-quality movies. (Yahoo)

It’s not much of a secret that Microsoft intends to announce cloud computing services at next week’s developer’s conference. Amazon, the most aggressive player in the arena seems to be determined not to give Winzilla any quarter in the battle for the cloud.

Here’s what’s happening today:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

Let’s take a look at each of these items in turn.

Production - After a two year beta period, Amazon EC2 is now ready for production. During the beta we heard and responded to an incredible amount of customer feedback, adding support for powerful features such as Availability Zones, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic IP Addresses, multiple instance types, support for the OpenSolaris and Windows operating systems, and (as of today) a Service Level Agreement. Regular EC2 accounts are allowed to run up to 20 simultaneous instances. Requests for hundreds and even thousands of additional instances are granted all the time and can be made here. (Amazon Web Services Blog)

The death star’s management could be facing an angry mob of shareholders very soon if they can’t adjust quickly. Simple Third Pipe wisdom would recommend a big investment in a dumb pipe, with a reward in steady incremental income, and declining costs in service delivery as it takes fewer people to operate while technology constantly delivers more for less to grow profits. Unfortunately, AT&T’s management has been focused on pay TV, iPhone and acquisitions in an effort to make a killing. In the short term, at least iPhone has delivered terrific profits, while the impact of the other two have been less than stellar.

The iPhone will have lots of competition in the next year, both in terms of device cost and service offerings. While Apple’s take is set in stone by contract, new customer sign ups are likely to become fewer and less profitable for AT&T. Then there is the inevitable churn as all wireless carriers will be pushing 3G on smart phones to grow profits in a market that has peaked. Pay TV will be under pressure from TVoIP and increasingly desperate satellite operators. The only potential domestic takeover target is Qwest, and it’s network is out of date, making it a potential money pit when upgrades are combined with acquisition costs. That leaves broadband which has been the all but forgotten stepchild in the AT&T family. Recent data indicates that AT&T is losing ground to cable. Why? It’s all about speed. AT&T’s top tier DSL service offers a paltry 6MBPS download speed (the same top tier they have had for 4 years), while the cable guy has actually started to boost speeds. AT&T’s chairman has routinely stated that bandwidth was not important to consumers. Guess he may be wrong about that. I won’t say I told you so, Mr Stephenson, but I did. If you smell tar at the next shareholder meeting don’t bother looking for feathers before you flee.

More on the end of the iPhone miracle.