Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Exciteable dudes

Brian Linse reminds us that his pal Warren Zevon will be on Letterman tonight. As you may know, Warren has inoperable lung cancer. The whole show is dedicated to him.

Kinda gives you the warm cruddies

Says here that the conversion of the ordinary AM and FM dials from analog to digital will be accomplished using a proprietary transmission method licensed exclusively by iBiquity. Here's who's behind it:

The board of directors includes prominent radio broadcasters, government regulatory and emerging technology experts, such as Mel Karmazin of Viacom, Gregory Simon of Simon Strategies, Fred Wilson of Flatiron Partners, and Thomas Uhlman of Lucent Technologies. iBiquity Digital's radio broadcast ownership group has coverage in over 220 of the 276 Arbitron-rated markets, access to over 200 million listeners, and account for nearly half of the broadcast industry’s total revenues.

iBiquity Digital is building on this ownership base and assembling the broad business coalition necessary to ensure radio's rapid transition to a digital future. It has entered into strategic alliances with radio broadcast transmission equipment manufacturers: Andrew, Armstrong, Broadcast Electronics, Continental Electronics, Dielectric, Energy-Onix, Harris, Jampro RF Systems, Lowpass Prototype, Moseley Associates, Nautel, Orban,QEI, Shively Labs, and Telos/Cutting Edge: semiconductor manufacturers; Philips Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments: receiver manufacturers Alpine, Fujitsu Ten, Harmon Kardon, Kenwood, Mitsubishi, Recoton, Sanyo and Visteon: and wireless data content providers Accuweather, The Associated Press, and Smartroute Systems. Each member of this growing coalition has agreed to develop coordinated strategies for the market launch of iBiquity Digital’s IBOC technology and its associated products.

I'm all for inventors getting the credit, the patents, and whatever else they deserve for their good work. Major Edwin Howard Armstrong, inventor of FM radio, should have benefitted from his good work, but ended up a suicide after getting steamrolled by RCA and other industrial giants.

But this is a yet another top-down industrial move. Is there DRM in this system? Consider the sources. Will you be able to build a receiver that lets you do whatever you want with the digital signal? Yeah, right.

These guys talk about a "digital future" that never would have happened if it hadn't been for the Armstrongs of the Internet.

Thanks to Dean for the pointers.

Gullets gag on Net goods

Says here online sales are down. Come to think of it, I did forget to buy shit online during the last quarter. I'll try to make it up and see what happens.

Which makes him youger than 3 of our 4 kids

Pud, founder and proprietor of FuckedCompany and other fine sites, is 27 today.

Clean

Nice to read Dave's definition of SOAP:

It's a simple way to call procedures running on other machines, on other OSes, written in other languages, using different economic systems, without being forced to pay a tax to Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Sun or the W3C.

That should go intact in the Jargon File, no?

Fresh Agenda

Nice to discover this morning that Yoz Grahame not only has a blog, but that he's digging into Mitch Kapor's OSAF and Chandler, which Yoz sees as the second coming of Agenda, Mitch's much-loved Lotus product.

By the way, Yoz reminds us of how good radio can be.