Thursday, May 10, 2007

Nice

Strategic Optional Framework Position

I love it when folks find BuzzPhraser, now many years after it went up. Hell, TechnoLatin too.

Anybody heard HD radio yet?

Just read this about HD radio, which points to this. Meanwhile I had a conversation with the chief engineer for a pile of radio stations in the vicinity here, in which he told me basically that HD radio sucks because it modulates on the upper and lower edges of the analog signal, causing interference to adjacent channels. Actually, I've been noticing that as well, and wondering what the hell it was. Suddenly my highly selective radios seem to be getting more adjacent channel interference. Turns out it's HD, screwing up Old Radio while underserving the New.

So I'm wondering... do you or anybody you know have an HD receiver? Have you noticed a difference? Do you care? Just wondering.

Perhaps a good sign

Comcast is allowing more upstream speeds, apparently.

Help Sun shine in your pocket

Dana Blankenhorn says Sun needs political help after saying this and this and doing this. Specifically —

Support open spectrum. Demand real competition. Ask for investigations of past spectrum auctions, and the return of frequencies obtained through fraud. Demand that systems be built-out.

It will take political pressure to create the kind of competitive wireless market in which something like a $30 Internet phone can be made available. Time to bring it.

Agreed.

More background from Jim Thompson, remarking on a Steve Jobs' insult of Java:

You have to know how much this pissed-off McNealy, Zander and Schmidt, all at once. Schmidt was key in Java's rising, and he probably still loves his baby. Zander is getting forced into a corner, and must be looking for an effective strategy to re-take MOT's once-dominant position in the cellphone handset space, and is likely to trust his golf buddies.

After 25 years at Sun, including 22 years as Sun's CEO, McNealy has to be looking for his swan song. Absolute dominance of the software used on cellphones would do it. If he can manage to corrall MOT and Nokia, he'll have done it.

I'd say Jonathan is looking for a score here too. I'd add one more bonus: the opportunity for customers to use mobile phones as VRM devices.

Knowing more than you can blog

Nice review by JP Rangaswami of David Weinberger's new book Everything is Miscellaneous. The line that stands out most is this one: I think it was economist Mihaly Polanyi who talked about things that we know we know, things that we know we don’t know and things that we don’t know we don’t know.

What JP's talking about here are tacit and explicit knowledge, about how the former far exceeds the latter and how, as Polanyi once said, in perhaps his only quotable line, "We know more than we can tell". I can go on about Polanyi to boring lengths because, back at Guilford College, where Steve Lewis and I were among the small handful philosophy majors in the Class of '69, we actually majored in Polanyi, thanks to professor Donald Millholland, who was obsessed about the dude. To Don, Polanyi was It. And in those days there weren't many other philosphy teachers operating at Guilford. (One of the best, Carroll S. Feagins, had fallen sick, and the others took up far less intellectual space than Don Millholland.)

Yet, to put it generously, Polanyi was a minor philosopher. I'm not knocking Polanyi's thinking, which continues to influence mine (and, I suppose, Steve's, and Tom Brown's — Tom was the philosophy major in the Class of '68, I believe). But hey: the dude was, and still is, obscure. Not to mention obtuse. Freeman Dyson once told me that Arthur Koestler once said, at an event honoring his friend Polanyi, that the latter had written a book that was too important to ignore yet too dense to read. Or something like that. My conversation with Freeman took place at one of the much-missed PC Fora his daughter Esther put on. I had first heard Freeman at a lecture he gave the late Polanyi's honor at the University of North Carolina, back in the early 80s.

Anyway, reading JP dropping Polanyi's name (and with the Hugarian Mihaly, no less) seems more than coincidental. Like, maybe The Matrix is working.

Anyway, Dr. Weinberger actually taught philosophy for awhile back in the past someplace. Coincidence?

Everything is Miscellaneous is a terrific book. I'm reading it right now in parallel with John Clippinger's A Crowd of One, which is terrific as well. Expect warm reviews for both as soon as I'm done with them. Meanwhile, read David on John. And, speaking of loosely joined miscellany, Steve on the phone business.