Brett Glass (on the left) runs Lariat, a small wired and wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the prairie in Laramie, Wyoming. Bob Frankston (right) programmed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet and for several years worked on home networking issues for Microsoft, somehow without having to move from his beloved Newton, Massachusetts. Two nerds, a decade apart in age yet both vastly experienced, they have completely different views on Net Neutrality. Bob loves it. Brett hates it. Yet coming to understand each man’s position helps us better understand the whole Net Neutrality issue and what really matters.
Net Neutrality discussions usually come […]
Bill Joy used to say, “not all smart people work at Sun” (he was right). Max Levchin is making a killing in Web 2.0 by resuscitating Web 1.0 projects that were too ambitious for 1999 but — thanks primarily to Moore’s Law — are just right for 2009. Sometimes all it takes is a change of scene or season for something that was a failure the last time to be a big success today. And that’s why I’m predicting the eventual return of Teledesic or something just like it — some new form of Internet in the sky.
I’ve had a couple days now with Windows 7 and it is certainly an improvement over both Vista and XP, requiring slightly less resources than either (significantly less than Vista), booting faster, and offering superior usability. Yeah, but why does it cost so much? I know why.
It’s not that hard to predict what will happen in the future (I will die; Fifi, my son Fallon’s stuffed orca, will eventually need restuffing, etc.) but it is very hard to predict with any accuracy when things will happen. For technologies, I tend to see events happening long before they actually do, which makes me something of a prophet, though a pretty useless one. This may be proved yet again in the coming months as Apple and other companies attempt to take most of the paper out of publishing, something I thought we were about to do 15 years ago, but didn’t.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission this week 