Edifice Complex

Apple bought a huge piece of Bay Area property for a new corporate campus, promising to develop the land into an enormous project that would allow thousands of company employees to live, work, shop and play without ever having to leave company property. It would be the perfect community for staffers who are allowed to work any 80 hours per week they choose. This may sound a lot like Apple’s plan to redevelop the old Hewlett-Packard Cupertino campus about a mile from current Apple headquarters on Infinite Loop, but it isn’t. What I’ve just described was Apple Computer’s plan to develop 640 acres in Coyote Valley south of San Jose, circa 1985.

What goes […]

Verizon LTE iPhone4V

No insider info here, no leaked secrets, just an aging but wily geek putting himself in the place of Verizon Wireless and guessing how that mobile carrier will handle next year’s rumored iPhone introduction on its U. S. network. I’d go for a knockout punch and I think Verizon will, too.

Apple’s iPhone is coming to Verizon sometime early next year as AT&T loses its exclusive deal for the iconic smartphone. It could be as soon as January. Verizon will want to use this opportunity to grab disaffected iPhone users from AT&T because surveys have shown American iPhone users love their handsets, but not their carrier. So Verizon, which already appears to have the better network, […]

Follow the Money

There’s a dispute going on right now between Comcast and Level3 Communications concerning the peering agreement between those two companies. Comcast says the dispute has nothing to do with the fact that Level3 just got the Netflix video streaming contract while most observers think that’s all it has to do with.

I think so, too.

Peering is at heart nothing but restraint of trade. Peering came about when various Internet backbone providers noticed they were all connected to the same big data centers and points of interconnection, normally inside telco central offices. Simply pulling an Ethernet cable from one rack to another could interconnect millions of users from two different backbone providers, saving time, distance, router hops […]

3D and Me

Is watching 3D movies good for your eyes or bad? I think it might be good, at least it seems to be for me.

Last weekend we took the kids to see Megamind 3D, which was great fun except four year-old Fallon and I both sacked-out for about 15 minutes during the second act, completely missing the death of MetroMan. Fallon had been pretty busy playing in Kung Fu Panda World that day so I can understand why he was tired, but I really had no excuse. Still, even though I saw only 80 instead of all 95 minutes of Megamind 3D, it had a profound physiological effect on me. I think watching the […]

Wikileaked

I spent eight years at InfoWorld working as a gossip columnist and know a thing or two about news leaks. So here is the gossip columnist’s view of this week’s huge Wikileaks story about U. S. diplomatic cables. It comes down, frankly, to a squandered opportunity.

Wikileaks is a garbage dump for embarrassing information. When it is about truly bad guys or even just the other guy (not us) most see some value in the site, but those in power really hate it and so do the media, which might surprise you.

Maybe an example will help. Back in the early 1990s I got a call one day from someone at Apple who wanted to […]