antipaucity

I’ve taken an interest in LightSquared recently.

Today InfoWorld reports that the FCC “won’t allow LightSquared’s proposed mobile broadband service to interfere with GPS signals, even though the potential interference would be caused by GPS receivers picking up signals outside of their designated spectrum”.

So, the devices are in error, but the FCC is going to prevent LightSquared from interfering?

Sounds like the FCC should be going after the receiver manufacturers to ensure their systems don’t bleed over, rather than after a company not operating on GPS spectrum.

Wait, I forgot: that’d be too logical for a government agency

I’ve been hearing about a new company called LightSquared a lot recently. Both arstechnica and alarm:clock have both had interesting articles on the company in the last week.

The goal of LS is to create from scratch a nationwide 4G wireless network – and funder Philip Falcone thinks they can do it for about $15B. That’s a pretty impressive number, in my book, especially when compared to how much AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have spent over the last decades building-out their networks.

The ars article points-out that the GPS industry is upset that LS is using a similar spectrum to the one used by the global position satellite system, and are worried it will make GPS receivers act poorly by overpowering the satellite signal.

Personally, I think that if your devices are built so poorly that a non-identical signal can interfere with their functionality, you have an issue on your hands – not on the hands of the folks with the similar signal. Also, LightSquared could take it upon themselves to be a private, terrestrial location service – either by repeating signals from the GPS constellation, or by adding location data to the signal they are broadcasting (40 000 towers with multiple antennae per tower ought to be able to send some useful data over the air along with everything else being carried).

Moving back to the future of the business, it looks like a very exciting time in the telecom industry in the US – like we may finally get some “real” competition to the Big Three already operating. If AT&T’s T-Mobile acquisition goes through, cell phone and wireless broadband competition would be hurt – so I’m thrilled that groups like LightSquared are coming out to play, too.

As a sidebar: Tarus, you should get in front of Philip – they’re going to need some serious monitoring

Thanks to the myriad WordPress developers and contributors, themes are widely available. I just switched to “Dragonskin 1.5 by Angelo Bertolli” from “veryplaintext”.

Go go gadget community!

Saw in a tweet from David Pogue that someone has finally implemented a DVR-for-radio. Only took three years for someone to build

I haven’t started playing with DAR.fm yet, but it looks pretty cool!

I was in Provo UT this week for Moab Con 2011.

It was a great week – got to meet lots of interesting people, learn how different companies and institutions are using Adaptive’s Moab product, and see where the roadmap for the product should bring it over the next 1-2 years.

On 21 May
I am presenting at the
BGLUG meeting.

The topic will be Haiku.

I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to really run with the platform.

I’ll post the slides I use after the meeting.

^{*_{wrote that about 8 years ago}}

Microsoft is trying to buy ~650k IPv4 addresses from in-bankruptcy-proceedings Nortel (for $7.5m).

What gets me is that IPv6 has been a standard for over a decade, and yet so few have moved to it. Way back when I was in college the first time – in 2000 – our networking professor told us we should move to IPv6 as soon as feasible. Somehow I don’t think 11 years meets that urging.

This morning I saw the headline on InfoWorld: “Oracle stopping development on Itanium — slap at HP or obvious decision?”

At my previous employer, we were entertained by a couple visits from both HP and Intel folks ballyhooing the Itanium, HP-UX, and the future of the platform – especially in the database arena.

I thought those visits were pretty funny because every company I have seen with any HP-UX installed base has been migrating off to either AIX or Linux for some time, leading me to conclude that HP-UX is a dead platform. The fact that Microsoft and Red Hat both dropped support for Itanium processors with there last OS releases also tells me that Itanium is not here for the long haul – at least not in anything other than specialized platforms (such as some of the Top 500 entrants).

Yes, in Japan Fujitsu and others are shipping Itanium-based products, but they’re not running anywhere outside of Asia.

Intel had the chance 15 years ago to produce the game-changer for the server and home markets. If they had properly implemented an x86 emulation module (or, shoot, put an x86 processor on the die and switched via microcode), AMD’s x64 extensions would never have taken off the way they did, and we wouldn’t be stuck with bizarre functionality that only made sense in a 16bit world – but not anymore.

But between HP and Intel, they horched the platform, delaying it by months then years. In the process, the venerable DEC Alpha was killed-off by HP, as was HP’s own PA-RISC line.

In my opinion, Oracle’s move is brilliant for a couple reasons:

• HP-UX is dead
• Itanium has no future with any other OS vendor
• Larry Ellison wants to push OEL and some form of Solaris (though I’m convinced Solaris is not long for this world either)
• Larry Ellison doesn’t care what other people think of him
• Oracle is making more money than they know what to do with – so why support something you don’t want to?

What think ye?

Today I started a new job, which will hopefully involve a bit less travel than my last one did. I enjoyed working with my team at my last employer, and wish them the best in their future ventures.

Now off to find out where my first customer will be

Though it’s not the ideal we have of owning our own home, my wife and I will be one step closer in a few days as we will be signing a lease on a rental home here in Lexington and moving out of the apartment complex we’ve been in since we got married.

I think she’s pretty excited