Comcast CEO Brian Roberts opens his mouth and inserts his foot -- who will invest in Internet infrastructure?

If ISPs have insufficient incentive to invest in infrastructure, who will? Google? Telcos? Government (at all levels)? Premises owners?

At a recent conference, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts rationalized charging Netflix to deliver content by comparing Comcast to the Post Office, saying that Netflix pays to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the internet for free. He forgot to mention that the Post Office does not charge recipients for those DVDs.

The issue is infrastructure investment and it is in our collective interest for that investment to be made. Comcast could invest in the infrastructure needed to insure rapid delivery of Netflix and other's traffic and pass that cost on to the paying customers at a fair rate of return on the investment. But, they make more money by refusing to upgrade their infrastructure, thereby slowing delivery of content and making their customers dissatisfied with content providers like Netflix. If there were competition in the ISP market, customers would switch to the ISP that provided the best price/performance, but since there is not competition, Comcast is able to reap monopoly profits. If they happen to have a competitor in a given location, perhaps AT&T, they together reap oligopoly profits.

What is the solution? One hope is for Google Fiber to provide meaningful investment and competition, which might work in the short run, but one has to wonder about the long run -- cities with Google Fiber would still be oligopolies.

Another hope is Verizon and other phone companies competing agressively, but it seems the cable and phone companies have reached a gentleman's non-competition agreement with phone companies focusing on mobile connectivity and cable companies on fixed connectivity.

If the ISPs will not make the necessary investments, government (at all levels) must make wholesale infrastructure investments and apply regulation as we do with roads and utilities. There is also a role for home and building owners investing in the last "100 meter" infrastructure as we do with water, gas and sewers.

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Update 6/2/2014

Data on Comcast performance before and after their agreement with Netflix

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Update 6/5/2014

Americans consumers are less satisfied with the ISP industry than any other industry, yet are satisfied with the package delivery industry. Both deliver things, but the package delivery industry has private and public competition.

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Update 6/7/2014

There is a long of discussion (250 comments) of this post on Slashdot.

Apple, Microsoft, Google -- how about a Kindle Killer?

I have a Kindle and I like it, but I don't love it. I like the form factor and the e-paper display and the touch interface is OK, but I really wish it used voice input in the user interface and was well integrated with my laptop.

Reading is an active process -- kind of a dialog with the author -- and I create a lot of associations and marginal notes. I want an e-reader that lets me record those in a database while reading. Database entries would include a note, timestamp, tags (global to me, local to the document -- perhaps even global to the world), the document it was associated with, the selected passage or figure it was associated with, etc. The links would be hot.

I'd like to be able to search this database in a variety of ways, for example, finding entries with a given tag or combination of tags, free-text search or those associated with a given document and display the results in a variety of ways, for example in a table showing only the first N characters of a marginal note and the passage it was associated with.

Voice recognition -- for commands and text entry -- should be a first-class input modality. If I have selected a passage for annotation, a single voice command should initiate speech-to-text mode so I could dictate my note and tags.

The e-reader and my laptop should be integrated. I should be able to copy the annotation database to my laptop with a single command and search and display reports in the same way as on the e-reader. I should also have the option of updating the e-reader database from my laptop, uploading it to the Internet or exporting it in various formats, for example, docx or xlsx.

I've outlined a few features I'd like in an e-reader -- what would you like to see?

The business case -- low-hanging fruit

When the Kindle came out, Steve Jobs dismissed it saying “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore -- forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Amazon does not release official sales figures, but Forbes estimated that between 2007, when the Kindle was released, and the end of 2013, roughly 43.7 million Kindles were sold. Assuming a 3-year replacement cycle, about 30 million Kindle e-readers are currently in use -- for reading and purchasing content from Amazon. Regardless of Jobs' opinion, there is a sizeable market.

Apple is a device manufacturer par excellence, Microsoft has elevated "devices" to its tag line and Google sells some devices, so they all have varying degrees of manufacturing experience.

Speech recognition is the key technology that I want added to an e-reader and Apple, Microsoft and Google have world-class speech recognition products and research projects.

Amazon may be taking a loss on each Kindle and making it up on content sales, but Apple, Microsoft and Google have online stores too and could be selling the same content as Amazon.

The Kindle reminds me of the Apple Newton -- a very early "personal digital assistant" with a stylus and handwritting recognition as its primary input modality. The Newton failed because the handwriting recognition was slow and inaccurate -- like typing on a Kindle's virtual keyboard -- and it was a stand-alone device, barely integrated with Apple or Windows computers. (I've still got a Newton -- in mint condition because I only used it to look cool). Apple learned from the failure of the Newton -- the iPod was one component in a system along with the iTunes store and software.

It seems to me that a Kindle-killing e-reader would be low-hanging fruit for Apple, Google or Microsoft. If any one of them builds it, I'll buy it. (Think of the competition if they each built one)!

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Update 6/5/2014

There is a long (320 comments) discussion of this post on Slashdot.

Comcast expects to have data caps, but not competition

Last week, a Comcast executive VP, David Cohen, predicted that within five years all their customers would have data caps.

It turns out they have been experimenting with 300 GByte monthly caps in some markets and Cohen mentioned both 300 and 500 GByte cap possibilities.

Since Comcast is trying to acquire my friendly monopoly ISP, Time Warner Cable (TWC), I may very well end up being one of those capped customers, and that got me and my colleagues on the YATS podcast, wondering how much data we were up and downloading today.

I visited my TWC account and saw my usage for the last few months:

I have no idea what caused the variation, but even the heaviest month was comfortably under 300 GBytes. But, how typical is my usage? I am a cord cutter, which doubtless leads to atypically high usage, but there are only two users in our home, and we do not watch a lot of video or stream a lot of music.

I can easily imagine our two-person household going over the 3 or even 500 GBytes as video quality improves and more content is available.

But, our usage is a mere anecdote. Sandvine monitors global Internet traffic patterns, so I checked their Global Internet Phenomena Report for the first quarter of 2104 to get a more representative picture. This is what they observed in North America:

Folks were well under 300 GBytes.

But, they drilled down, estimating which users were cordcutters and typical subscribers and non-streamers:

Obviously there are relatively few cord cutters today, but aren't we in a transition to IP TV? The distinction between "TV" and "the Internet" is broken -- it's all bits.

By Sandvine's estimates, cord cutters are averaging over 200 GByte today. Where will they be in five years, when there is a lot more video material on the Net and average video resolution is a lot higher?

Comcast will adjust their pricing to maintain or increase revenue during this transition period.

They will be able to do that because they are a content provider as well as an ISP so they will be able to discriminate in favor of their content. Furthermore, they are big and getting bigger, so they will be able to extract increasing delivery fees from their content-provision competitors.

Don't get me wrong -- I do not oppose the idea of usage-based billing per se. (It would provide the answer to the ISP's claim that network neutrality is bad because it rewards bandwidth hogs). I would be happy to be billed by the GByte or whatever if there were ISP competition. If I could easily switch between several fast, reliable ISPs (as my son who lives in Korea can), they would not be able to set prices at will. But, sadly, that is not the case in the US.

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Update 5/20/2014

On a related note, Comcast and their merger target Time Warner Cable, were the lowest ranked companies on the latest American Consumer Satisfaction Index for the first quarter of 2014.

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Update 5/29/2014

The New York Times has published an editorial favoring rejection of the merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Tourtracker -- a better way to stream the Tour of California

In a recent post, I criticized NBC's streaming coverage of the Tour of Califronia for having way too many ads and reflecting conflicts of interest and requiring bundling with TV service. That was bad news.

The good news is that Tourtracker does a way better job of streaming the race.

For a start, there are fewer ads on Tourtracker. I don't know if that is by design, but, at least for now, their coverage is much less annoying than that of NBC.

NBC is owned by Comcast, and they require streaming viewers to have an authorized television subscription, but Tourtracker does not. It is freely available on the US Web -- I did not check to see if can be reached from other countries.

It is also apparent that the Tourtracker site was designed with cycling in mind. As shown below, there are a number of cycling related statistics, commentary and status displays:

Note that the video is surrounded by race information, not ads as in the case of NBC.

The user can toggle the race information on and off, as shown below, and, in-full screen mode, there is only a thin row of display ads (as is the case with NBC).

Off the top of my head, the only thing I liked better on the NBC site was their 15-second "rewind" button -- let's hope Tourtacker adds one of their own.

Why is the Tourtracker stream better than NBC's? It was designed for cycling, not sporting events in general, and Tourtracker does not have a conflicting TV or ISP businesses to protect. I was pleasantly surprised when commenter Matthew Ferdinand1 told me about Tourtracker, but wonder about rights to the broadcast -- are they licensed from NBC/Comcast?

You could have made a lot of money in one second yesterday if ...

Michael Lewis has written a book entitled the eFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt in which he describes the efforts of high speed traders to gain an advantage by saving a few milliseconds in making a trade. Terry Gross also interviewed Lewis on Fresh Air, and you can listen to the interview (37m 25s) here or read the transcript here.

In addition to talking about the advantage that super fast access and trading algorithms confers, Lewis talks of the complexity of computer trading and the possibility of instability.

We saw a small example yesterday, when, as Bloomberg columist Matt Levine put it, the stock market went WOOSH for a second.

As you see here, you could have made a lot of money in one second if you had a super fast computer with a super fast connection to a stock exchange:

Does this sort of thing undermine our belief in the impartiality of capital markets?

NBC's (Comcast's) sad live stream of the Tour of California bike race

I've taken an in-depth look at the live streaming coverage of the Olympic Games and the Tour de France in past posts so was curious to see what NBC's coverage of the Tour of California was like.

I liked NBC's coverage of the Tour de France last year, but it seems there is more advertising in this year's Tour of California.

The streaming site opens with the race video in a window surrounded by ads -- the ads cover 2/3 of the screen area:

If you switch to full screen viewing, most of the ads disappear, leaving only a think group of display ads across the top of the screen and an occasional pop-up ad or spoken plug by the announcer. But, just as you begin to relax, there is a commercial break. I timed the commercials for an hour and they are on about 30 percent of the time -- enough to wreck the experience for me.

I did not keep track of the number of commercials during last year's Tour de France, but I enjoyed it -- so either there were more commercials for this event or my tolerance for commercials has gone down since I have been a cord cutter for a couple of years.

Last year, NBC charged a fee to watch the Tour de France, but the Tour of California is free ... as long as you have an approved Cable TV subscription:

Note that Comcast Xfinity heads the list of those approved providers. But, wait, doesn't Comcast own NBC? Aren't they trying to acquire Time Warner Cable (home of the LA Dodgers)? Doesn't NBC have the rights to the Olympic Games through 2020 and the Tour de France through 2023?

If this is a glimpse of the future of live coverage of events on the Internet -- gratuitous bundling and conflicts of interest -- it is sad, but familiar.

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Update 5/15/2014

The viewer has a couple of neat features (one of which is broken, but its a good idea regardless).

The first is an instant replay button -- click it and the video rewinds about 15 seconds. Click it twice and it rewinds about 30 seconds, etc. Very handy.

The second is a good idea, but buggy (for now). You can elect to Share a Play, as shown here:

The problem is that the feature is broken -- I tried to share a play and it took me to the Golf channel instead, which was not even streaming at the time.

Note also that they carelessly lifted this from another sport -- we do not have "plays" in bike racing :-).

Recommended podcast: Charles Robinson, Africa's next boom

Emerging markets economist Charles Robinson predicts an African boom, contending that Africa is where India, China and prosperous Asian nations were 25 years ago. He presents demographic, educational and other data and predicts African GDP will increase from $2 trillion today to $29 trillion in 2050. Africa also has the advantage of having learned from the experience of Asian nations and better domestic and global technology than those nations had at a similar stage in their development.

You can read a transcript of the talk here and here are a couple of his slides -- on the availablity of young workers and the relationship between poverty and corruption:

ISPs have the lowest American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The ISP industry ranks 48th out of 48 industries on the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Subscription TV is 47th.

Individual companies are also rated. Large companies are rated separately and smaller ISPs are lumped into "all other." Here are the ISP customer satisfaction indices:

Verizon Communications (FiOS)	71
Cox Communications	71
AT&T (U-verse)	68
Charter Communications	65
CenturyLink	65
Time Warner Cable	63
Comcast	62
All others	71

I am happy to see that my ISP, Time Warner Cable, which I have commented upon in previous posts, is not the lowest rated company in this dismal industry -- that honor belongs to their hopeful merger buddy, Comcast.

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Update 5/19/2014

The latest quarterly survey results are out and Internet service providers are now the lowest ranked industry and merger buddies Time Warner Cable and Comcast are now the two lowest ranked companies of all industries. The inverse correlation between size and customer satisfaction still holds for the ISP industry, so I am confident that if Comcast acquires TWC, they will continue to set dissatisfaction records for years to come.

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Update 6/11/2014

I just got a copy of the latest ACSI company ratings from the University of Michigan. Comcast is no longer the second lowest rated company in the survey -- that honor now belongs to Time Warner Cable (TV). My ISP, Time Warner Cable (ISP), retained its position as the lowest ranked company -- 230th out of 230 companies.

The ISP industry remains at the bottom of the list, with subscription television services next to last

The American public is fed up with the cable TV and Internet service companies (and we are ridiculing them) -- let's hope that translates into political pressure.

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Update 6/23/2016

Time Warner Cable and Charter Communication recently merged. Now a US Senate report concludes that they routinely overcharged customers and failed to issue refunds.

ISPs are aggressively pursuing their goal of remaining the industry with the lowest customer satisfaction index and worst customer service in the US.

The Senate subcommittee’s report also said that consumers are frustrated by the ongoing rise of the cost for cable and satellite TV, with some packages increasing up to 33% since 2011 A copy of the report is available here.

Don't you love monopolies?

Outline of a system for asking, answering and discussing student and teacher questions

I give my students weekly quizzes to focus their studying on key skills and concepts and to encourage them to keep up with the class. The quizzes typically have 7-9 questions and a typical answer is a couple of words or sentences.

After they take a quiz, I post it online so, by the end of the term, they have all the questions. I refuse to give the students answers (that drives some of them nuts), but am willing to discuss the questions and encourage them to discuss them among themselves. (I curve grades relative to the top person in the class, so helping another student does not hurt one's grade).

Each semester, an enterprising student sets up a forum for collectively answering the questions -- perhaps on a blog with a post and comments for each question or, more likely, as a shared Google doc.

I like that because it provides an example of a student assuming leadership and illustrates the use of the Internet to facilitate collaboration, but I very much dislike the focus it puts on memorizing the "right" answer rather than discussion and explanation and, more important, raising new questions.

A blog or shared document with comments or a vanilla threaded discussion, allows for questions and discussion, but the students take the easy way out and pretty much focus on a single answer, period. (I find that the first answer someone posts is usually accepted without question or discussion, even if it is incorrect).

So, I would like a collaborative system that encouraged discussion and questioning. What might that look like?

I would seed the discussions with the sorts of weekly quiz questions I currently give and students could respond by suggesting an answer or asking a related question. A simple answer would not suffice -- it would have to be supported by a brief explanation and/or a link to its source. The system would present the student with a simple answer submission form (with all fields required):

There would also be a mechanism for the other students to evaluate the answer and its explanation. A simple mechanism like a "Thumbs Up" button would encourage voting, but is somewhat superficial and easily gamed (though one might detect that through statistical analysis -- or at least tell the students you could :-). More elaborate systems in which students have to fill out a simple form in order to vote for an answer would also be possible. That would discourage thoughtless voting and also provide more fine-grained data for determining the value of an answer, but would discourage voting.

The system should allow the teacher to customize the answer-evaluation mechanism and to allow or disallow anonymous contributions.

More important than answering questions, students should have a mechanism for posing questions. (Our education system focuses on getting correct answers to questions, but raising questions and seeking satisfactory answers is a more valuable skill -- life is not a series of multiple choice exams).

The same answer-submission form would be used for a question asked by a student as one asked by the teacher.

In addition, there should be a means of evaluating a question -- again, ranging from a simple "Thumbs Up" to a short form.

In addition to student evaluation of answers and questions, the system should be instrumented to give the teacher feedback on what is working and what is not and for (optional) use in grading. (Like it or not, grades are the primary motivation for most students). The teacher should also have the option of sharing those statistics with the students or keeping them hidden.

Well, that is a rough sketch of the question discussion and answering system I would like to have. The closest thing I have seen is Stack Overflow, where users post technical programming questions, answers are voted up or down and a contributor's reputation is a function of the ratings of his or her answers over time -- perhaps that could be a starting point for implementing what I've outlined here. In the meantime, I plan to take a look at QSQA, an open source question answering system that I may be able to use for my class. Has anyone reading this post used it?

The wrath -- and the protection -- of the crowd

Last week, we saw how quickly a viral post on the Internet can damage a person when a recording of Donald Sterling's conversation with his young girlfriend was posted. He was quickly outed as a racist and a bully who used his power to get his way and buy affection. He also seemed quite illogical -- perhaps suffering from dementia.

Today, Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez posted a vivid description of a caudillo watching a coerced crowd cheering him at a large May Day rally on her blog. The Internet has provided visibility for Sánchez -- her blog has won international awards and her posts are re-posted on the Huffington Post and other sites. Would she have dared to speak this way without the cover of her Internet-based fame?

Would she have dared entitle her post "Raúl Castro: Man alone in the crowd" or included this unflattering photo of him?

50th anniversary of BASIC and, more important, computer literacy courses

On May 1 1964 two simple BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programs ran simultaneously on the Dartmouth time-sharing system (DTSS) -- marking the birth of the BASIC language, created by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.



That is an important milestone, but the BASIC language was only a part of the invention of the notion of computer literacy and of computer literacy courses.

To put this in the context of the time, only professional programmers and operators used computers in 1964. Nearly all programming and computing was done using batch processing -- you typed a program into punch cards, added some control cards and data, and fed the card deck into a computer card reader or transferred it to magnetic tape to be fed into a large computer. You typically dropped your job off to be run by an operator and picked up the results -- printed, punched in cards or written on tape -- some time later.

Card deck ready to submit for compiling and execution

A steady stream of jobs insured that the computer was kept busy, but programmers wasted hours waiting to get their output.

But, by 1964 there were several experimental time-sharing systems where users sat at terminals and typed in programs and data and got answers immediately. The computer allocated a small slice of time to a terminal, then went to the next, and so forth.

While switching rapidly between users meant some wasted computer time, it meant programmers could get immediate results and they could write interactive programs.

Kemeny and Kurtz realized that this meant non-specialists would be able to program and use computers in the future and they decided to create a computer literacy course that would be taken by all students at Dartmouth, not just the engineers and scientists.

For that to happen, they needed a time-sharing system of their own and a simple, teaching-oriented language, so they built the DTSS and invented BASIC with funding from the National Science Foundation.

BASIC was not intended to be used in production -- it initially had only 15 statement types -- it was intended solely to teach algorithmic thinking and introduce the notion of a stored program.

Once DTSS and BASIC were running, they were able to offer the first computer literacy course with the goal of teaching the skills and concepts needed for success as a student and after graduation as a professional and citizen.

I teach a digital literacy course today -- the skills are different than they were in 1964 and many (though not all) of the concepts are new, but the goal remains unchanged.

For more on computer literacy, BASIC and DTSS, see:

• John G. kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, “The Dartmouth Time-Sharing Computing System,” Final Report to the NSF), June 1967.
• Kemeny, John G., and Kurtz, T. E., "Dartmouth Time Sharing, “Science, Vol 162, No 3850, October 11, 1968, pp 223-228.
• Historical site on the DTSS project

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Update 5/6/2014

There is an "Easter egg" at 2m 18s of the above video -- a picture of Bill Gates and Paul Allen at a Teletype at Lakeside School. No doubt they were writing BASIC programs, although they would not have been running on DTSS.

The Dartmouth public computer room -- probably the first campus student lab:

John Kemeny worked on the Manhattan Project, was Einstein’s mathematics assistant as a student, and was Professor of mathematics and President of Dartmouth College.

Thomas Kurtz studied under John Tukey at Princeton, has been professor of math, computer science and Computer Information Systems and computer center director at Dartmouth.

Recommended podcast: Interview of Bill and Melinda Gates

Chris Anderson's TED interview of Bill and Melinda Gates. The interview covers the work of the Gates Foundation and the Gates' philanthropic goals, strategy and philosophy. They also talk about their family, relationship and child raising.

Edited transcript of the talk

From punch cards to CLUI to GUI to EEUI (Easter-egg user interface)

In the batch processing days, we punched operating system commands into IBM cards. When we moved on to time-sharing, we began typing commands on terminals and later on PCs -- the command-line user interface (CLUI).

While we were memorizing and typing commands, researchers at Xerox PARC were refining the work of people like Ivan Sutherland and Doug Engelbart and developing the modern graphical user interface (GUI).

We could not write GUI scripts, but we flocked to them because they did not tax our memory -- you no longer had to remember a list of commands or type help or man for a reference sheet, you just clicked on a pull-down menu or right-clicked your mouse and saw your choices. Icons like trash cans also helped us see and remember our options and we could also click on clearly-labeled tabs and buttons.

Being lazy and impatient, I liked GUIs.

When touch screen phones and tablets came along with relatively small screens, the space used for menus, icons and buttons was limited so we added a new twist to the GUI -- we hid most of the icons, buttons and menus. The good news is that the screen is uncluttered, but the bad news is that we are back to memorizing commands. We either study tutorial material or we fool around to stumble upon then memorize commands -- the Easter-egg user interface (EEUI).

I understand the motivation for the EEUI, but it is more difficult to learn than a GUI and is not needed on a laptop or desktop with a relatively large display. (Jakob Nielsen describes this usability tradeoff in this post on GUI "chrome").

This was driven home to me the other day, when I went to create an application using Zoho's database service, Creator. I had not created an application for some time, and the user interface had been changed, providing an example of an EEUI.

This is a screen shot of the program's uncluttered dashboard:

When you roll the cursor over a region on the screen, a menu appears giving three choices -- view, edit or delete the current form.

If you move the cursor to the left, the menu choices remain on the screen, but the cursor icon turns to a small hand, indicating that clicking will execute a command. (It activates the form design menu).

Finally, we see a horizontal-line icon, which indicates another hidden menu. This one is hard to see, but perhaps three horizontal lines is becoming known as an icon signifying a drop down menu.

To end on a positive note, I will offer a UI solution for the easter-egg problem: provide a simple, consistent way -- a voice command or gesture on a system with no keyboard -- to toggle between a chrome-free display and one that reveals all easter-egg commands, mode changes and cursor hot zones, as shown below. (This is analogous to a global right-click in a GUI).

Toggle: Easter-egg display off

Toggle: Easter-egg display on

Udacity drops free certificates in their shift toward lifelong vocational education -- universities should pay attention

Udacity has continued with its shift of focus toward lifelong vocational education by phasing out certificates of free courseware completion. The courseware will still be available free, but a certificate will require interaction with "coaches," projects and testing.

The certified course model is explained here and they are offering courses in three certified tracks for now: Data Science, Web Development the Georgia Tech Masters in CS.

Udacity is not trying to compete with universities by offering the equivalent of a college education at a lower price -- they are doing something more subversive -- trying to alter the vocational certification process.

The reason most students go to college is to get a job or get a better job -- what do employers look for in making hiring decisions and will that change in the future?

Consider Google -- here is an excerpt from an interview of Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Maybe Udacity is on to something universities should pay attention to. If Udacity is right, what does that imply for undergraduate education? For research universities?
_____
Update
4/23/2014

Sal Khan published a book, The One World Schoolhouse on his educational philosophy and strategy. Here is an interview on the book and the future of the Khan Academy. His view of certification -- of signaling competence -- is not unlike that of Udacity.

Verizon deception in order to avoid fulfilling broadband committments

In 2006, Bruce Kushnick published a book documenting $200 billion in subsidies given to Verizon on the condition that they make infrastructure investments. They did not make those investments. In 2009, Kushnick published a second edition in which, he increased the amount to $300 billion.

Now ARS Technica has shed some light on tactics Verizon uses to avoid fulfilling committments:

To make sure it doesn't have to complete the buildout to all of New Jersey's 8.9 million residents, Verizon led an astroturf campaign that flooded the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) with hundreds of identical e-mails purporting to support Verizon's case. One person who is listed as having written one of these e-mails told Ars that he didn't submit anything, and if he did, "I would've slammed them." A report in Stop the Cap this month found several other Verizon "supporters" who had no idea e-mails were submitted under their names.

Kushnick has been researching and writing about this sort of thing for years and Verizon has agreed/decided to invest in mobile infrastructure and marketing, not home connectivity. It is good to see it finally getting wider coverage -- if the general public begins to wake up to the self-serving, anti-competitive behavior of the telephone and cable companies, we may see some real change.

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Update 11/30/2014

A common pattern -- an ISP promises to make capital investments in infrastructure in return for a rate hike or permission to merge -- then they break the promise. Bruce Kushnick has been writing about this pattern for years. His latest example concerns AT&T's promise to roll out fiber in return for a merger with Direct TV. The FCC asked to see AT&T's plans and they received fully redacted documents. For the full story of this and many other broken promises, see Kushnicks book The Book of Broken Promises.

My son pays $30/month for symmetric, 100 Mbps Internet service ... in South Korea

My son lives in a relatively small city about 50 miles from Seoul.

He has a choice of three major Internet providers -- their monthly list prices for symmetric 100 Mbps Internet connectivity are as follows:

KT Corp: 31,680 ₩
SK Broadband: 33,000 ₩
LG Corp: 31,350 ₩

1,000 won is just under one dollar – about 96 cents, so, they are all around $30 per month.

Here is a copy of his latest bill from SK Broadband:

The top line is his charge for the month. (The second line shows the balance due from the previous month).

The charge is 35,000 ₩ (I guess there are some taxes), but he has a 13,000 ₩ discount because he signed a two year contract. With that contract he is paying about $22 per month for 100 Mbps connectivity.

How does that compare to your Internet service bill and speed?

How about customer service? Here is a quote from a comparative review of South Korean ISPs:

As mentioned earlier of fierce competition between a much-similar service providers, they will dispatch a repairman within a few hours of your call, even on WeekEnd!

How is it that Korea has achieved intense ISP competition? There is no simple answer, but the government has pursued a multifaceted policy encouraging investment and demand creation and providing common infrastructure, which is used by compteting ISPs (as in Singapore, Sweden or Latvia)

By contrast, we have little ISP competition in the U. S., leaving customers in a weak position -- dealing with non-competitve providers of a necessary service.

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Update 4/11/2014

My son saw this post and offered a couple of corrections. He sent me prices for the three major ISPs he can choose from, but says there are a number of smaller ones -- he said I understated the level of competition. He also said that the difference between his bill and the list price I quoted was not due to taxes, but the fact that the list price comparison he sent me was from a blog post and may not have been current. His list price is 35,000 ₩, not 33,000 ₩, but the general point remains true.

Laptop vs Chromebook vs Tablet

I have played around with an Acer C720 Chromebook on and off for the last two weeks -- trying to see where, if anywhere, it might fit into my digital life.

My primary computer is a laptop, but I use a tablet from time to time, and, the bottom line is that the Chromebook is not ready to replace my laptop, but, it trumps the tablet.

I came to this conclusion by considering my digital applications and the hardware. Let's begin with a look at my applications

Applications

Consuming Web content: I often have fifteen or twenty browser tabs open That is no problem for my laptop, which has 8 GBytes of memory, but, I worried that the C720, with only 4 GBytes of memory might not be up to the task. I did not have to worry -- the C720 surfs as well as my laptop.

Casting tabs: The C720 easily outperformed my laptop in smoothly, quietly (no fan noise) casting video streams to the Chromecast device on my TV set. The Chromebook wins this application hands down since my laptop is unusable for video tab casting. In testing tab casting, I also noticed that its display colors are cooler than the TV set or laptop.

Email: I use the Thunderbird email client for most of my email and my primary account is on my university's Exchange server. I prefer Thunderbird because I am used to it, but Outlook Web App (OWA) runs in a browser and is an excellent client. I could easily give up Thunderbird and use OWA on the Chromebook. I could also access it on the tablet, but want a real keyboard for writing email.

Drafting documents and HTML pages: On my laptop, I usually draft documents (like this post) and edit HTML pages with a text editor and paste them into an application like Blogger or Word. Google Docs or Word Online could replace my text editor. The Chromebook and laptop are about even on this score, with the tablet a distant third, for lack or a keyboard or precision pointing device.

File transfer: Edited HTML pages must be transferred to my server and I have not found a browser-based FTP client with the features I take for granted when using FileZilla on my laptop. If anyone knows of a good one, let me know.

Microsoft Office apps: As a teacher, I create a lot of Powerpoint presentations and frequently need to write a formatted document. Neither Google Docs nor Office Online can match Office. I expect the next big clash between Google and Microsoft to be in the browser, and, if I were in charge at either company, I would put a lot of resources into these applications, but, for now, I'm sticking with my laptop.

Image editing: I have not found a Web-based image editor with the speed and features I need. I do not need a high-end image editor like Photoshop, but do need speed and features like layers, magic wand and other selection modes, effects and adjustments, fat bits, etc. provided by the editor I use, Paint.net. If you know of a tablet or Web-based image editor that can keep up with Paint.net, let me know.

Audio editing: I only work with speech, not music, so don't need a professional editor. I use Audacity to record, capture and edit speech and have not yet found a Web or tablet based equivalent.

Video editing: I use Camtasia Studio for capturing and editing video. It has plenty of features for what I do, but, unlike open source Audacity and Paint.net, it is expensive. I would love to find a "good enough" video editor editor for my laptop or online or on a tablet.

Podcatching I download a lot of podcasts using iTunes and listen to them on a small mp3 player. I've never used a cloud-based podcatcher -- are there some good ones?

Writing programs: I don't do a lot of programming these days, but occasionally fire up Visual Studio for a utility example or in teaching. Microsoft is moving in the direction of a browser-based version of Visual Studio and Google is developing Spark, a browser-based development envirionment, if I were at Microsoft, I'd speed up that effort. For now, I need the laptop for running Visual Studio.

Hardware

As we saw above, the C720 is fast. With 30 browser tabs open, I was able to stream video smoothly and there was no noticeable delay when changing or opening tabs. Checking memory utilization, we see that it nearly all being used:

In spite of that, the Chromebook operating system and swaps between memory and the solid state drive are so fast that I did not notice slowing.

So, the system hardware is fast, but what about the input/output devices?

Screen: The larger, high resolution screen on my laptop allows me to work comfortably with two windows open -- the Chromebook screen is cramped when creating content.

Keyboard: Typing is easier and faster on the laptop, with its larger, deeper keyboard. I don't have a tablet keyboard, but, if I did, I would want one that was full size.

Pointing device: The trackpad on my laptop is smoother and more precise than that of the Chromebook and there is enough physical space for real buttons rather than the virtual buttons on the Chromebook. I like the two and three finger gestures on the Chromebook trackpad, but that is not enough for me to favor it.

Summing it all up

As a content creator, I prefer my laptop because of its input/output devices, but as a content consumer, my laptop cannot compare to the security, simple set-up, battery life, quick charging, instant on/off, size, weight and $250 manufacturer's suggested retail price of the C720. The Chromebook is comparable to a tablet in convenience and simplicity, but is more useful for casual content creation and light editing. If I have one computer, it would be the laptop, but, if I could have two, the second machine would be a Chromebook.

Of course different people have different applications. I let my 11 year old grandson Lucas use the Chromebook for a while then asked him how he liked it and how it compared to his iPad. He said he likes the touch screen of the iPad and missed that on the Chromebook, but he said the Chromebook was better for the "Interweb" and there were more games that he liked. He did not like the feel of the Chromebook touchpad, but liked the keyboard because he could type things like he does with Microsoft Word. The bottom line question -- I asked if he could have only an iPad or the Chromebook, but not both, which would he choose, and he preferred the Chromebook.

My wife reads email, consumes Web content, does Skype calls, takes photos and plays games. She would probably prefer her iPad to the Chromebook. And, geekier folks might get around some of the Chromebook limitations by installing Crouton, which would allow them to run Linux-based applications like Audacity, the audio editor I mentioned above.

How about the future? What about five years from now, when I hopefully have at least 100Mb/s connectivity, a much faster CPU and a Chromebook that runs HTML 6? I suspect that I will be doing more in the browser, and the Chromebook will look better than it does today, but I will still want the form factor and input/output devices of my laptop for content creation. So, I bet I have a laptop and a small Chromebook in five years, but I don't expect to own a tablet. Sorry Apple.

Recommended podcast: Hans Rosling on data visualization (19:50)

In this data visualization classic, Hans Rosling applies his visualization tools to data on life expectancy, fertility rate, GDP, infant mortality, etc. His tools present data dynamically -- we see changes over time -- and he is a dynamic, funny speaker as well.

The talk ends with visualization of some Internet penetration data and a plea for open access to government data.

The talk is immodestly titled "The best stats talk you've ever seen," but it delivers what it promises. If you are hooked, you can interact with his tools and follow him on his Website.

Excellent phishing spam: Rakas sähköpostin käyttäjä

The other day, I got an email with the subject line "Rakas sähköpostin käyttäjä."

I figured it must be an excellent spam specimen, but did not know what it said or which language it was written in, so I popped it into Google Translate:

It turned out to be in Finnish. Next I checked the email source and this is what I found:

I shared this with my class -- it's a funny example that makes the point that you should be careful what you click on.

Recommended podcast: Radioab -- when the moon was close and the days were short (14 minutes)

The title of this podcast, "The Times they are a Changin," does not refer to the Bob Dylan song, but to the fact that, on a cosmic scale, we can't take anything for granted.

The Radiolab hosts weave commentary with clips from experts to explain that, about 4.5 billion years ago, when the moon was created, it was about ten times closer to the Earth than it is today and days were around six hours long.

(The podcast has a second part -- a six minute long conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson).

Office for the iPad -- too late? The browser is the next battleground.

Microsoft finally released Office for the iPad, but the iPad is four years old -- this announcement is long overdue. Preliminary reviews say they have done a good job on the touch user interface, but isn't that the last war?

The next war is not over the tablet or phone, but over the browser.

Don't take my word for it. In a 1997 Time interview (by Walter Isaacson) Bill Gates said:

Any operating system without a browser is going to be f****** out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?

In 1998 he sent a memo to Microsoft executives saying:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company...This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I have been using a Chromebook for a week and I use Google Docs quite a bit, and, while I like both, am not ready to give up Windows. But, I bet there are a lot of folks who would abandon Windows if they could run Office in a browser.

What would have happened if Microsoft had released Office for the iPad, say, two years ago? It would have helped iPad sales and hurt Windows tablets for sure, but Windows tablets are not doing well regardless, and Microsoft and Office would have strengthened their dominant position with professional and enterprise users. Maybe they should have rebranded themselves the "software and services company" instead of "devices and services."

Now let's look forward, say, five years. I will have a gigabit Internet connection (well, not if Time Warner has their way) and my Chromebook will be very fast and compatible with HTML6. Will I want to use Office 365 and One Drive or Google Docs 2019 and Google Drive? Which one will my university or an enterprise settle on?

Today, Microsoft has the advantage of having many years of experience with Office and full-featured productivity applications. (Charles Simonyi, who worked on object-oriented programming on computers with bit-mapped displays at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, led the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft). They also have a solid grip on the enterprise.

Microsoft "got" bit mapped displays before Google existed, but Google "got" the Internet before Microsoft did and they have more experience with network infrastructure and applications with their data centers, Google Fiber and Google Docs/Drive. They've also got the chromebook and Chrome. (That being said, both may end up running on Mainframe 2 if that technology prevails).

I don't know which will "win" the browser battle (it may end a tie) and neither do the folks at Google and Microsoft -- and that is good news for us as consumers and citizens.

Internet censorship is a cat and mouse game, and there are many mice

When the Turkish government decided to "obliterate" Twitter, they got a court order allowing them to delete the IP address corresponding to twitter.com from the domain name servers (DNS) used by Turkish ISPs. Twitter.com became an unknown host name.

But the DNS your ISP uses is not the only one on the Internet -- there are many. If you knew the IP address of an alternative DNS, you could continue accessing Twitter.

A few years ago, Google decided to run a DNS as a public service in order to improve Internet security and speed. Word quickly got out that one could change the DNS address supplied by their ISP to Google's: 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4:

The government ploy may have worked a few years ago, but people are now more computer savvy and those who wished to continue using Twitter quickly switched to Google's public DNS.

The government countered by blocking traffic to/from Twitter's IP address, but Turks could circumvent that by using proxy servers, which hide the fact that they are communicating with Twitter.com:

As the government learns the IP addresses of the various proxy servers around the Internet, they can block them, but there are many available and new ones come online when old ones are discovered.

Twitter also posted a tweet showing how to post using SMS rather than the Internet:

This cat and mouse game has been going on since the time of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, when the network operators abandoned their office for the anonymity of their laptops at home:

At that time, there were only a handful of citizen journalists; today there are millions.
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Update 3/24/2014

More on the ability of the Net to route around censorship.
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Update 3/26/2014

Turkey will hold municipal and regional elections on March 30, and Reporters without Borders just published a post on the “Toxic climate for media a week ahead of elections.” The post links to several other posts from this month and last. While focused primarily on television and print, the posts also address electronic media. Check, for example “Blocking of Twitter -- worthy of the most repressive regimes,” which offers a tutorial on four ways to remain in contact with Twitter.
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Update 3/30/2014

Turkey blocked YouTube after a recording of a top-secret military meeting was posted, but the recording has been copied to Dropbox and circulated online -- you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once its out. Their attempt to block Twitter earlier in the week resulted in silencing regime loyalists, but not critics. Twitter now has posts mocking the prime minister’s high voice and the failed attempt to block Twitter.
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Update 3/30/2014

The cat fights back -- the Turkish government has blocked access to Google's public DNS -- Turks using 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 will now be using a fake domain name server.
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Update 4/17/2014

Turkey is now blurring (pixelating) offensive tweets. Is that for real? Do they automate the process? Is Twitter cooperating? Is April Fools Day on the 17th in Turkey?

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Update 10/3/2014

The Turkish Constitutional Court has ruled that Turkey's telecommunication authority does not have the right to close websites on grounds of protecting national security. The court also ruled against their authority to store internet data for up to two years. (They had been granted these powers when parliament passed amendments to the Internet Law on September 10).