tingilinde

flavors of voip

Clay Shirky has a nice essay on the two main flavors of VoIP and what they mean to consumers, telecoms and new providers.

For some time I've been arguing that VoIP in the Vonage sense won't have a huge impact anytime soon. Some geeks will buy it, but it is too close to conventional telephony to add value and any costs savings are highly dependant on FCC rulings which are coupled with a rather greedy taxation system.

What will dust the wireline telecoms is the other form of service -AOL IM with voice, iiChat AV/Yahoo IM with voice, Skype, Microsoft Messenger with voice ... These aren't conventional telephony, but allow users to do much more without complications introduced by touching the PSTN or the mentality of the PSTN.

The curves on these are difficult to pin down, but I'm going to be really surprised if Vonage type services have 2 million subs (about 2% of the market) by the end of the year. If you look at the demographics of the market segments that might be attracted to this type of service you find some gapping holes.

The IM-ish VoIP (Clay class it Plan B) will take off subversively -- it has already started its climb. The red herring is universal service/coverage. The folks who are in the Plan A camp have this in their DNA. They had a difficult time understanding that cellphone service might be popular - limited coverage rather than cost was the issue. The fact that you couldn't get a signal from 99.999% of the US 99.999% of the time was their argument.

If you have multiple communication paths using different technologies it is possible to assemble something that is good enough. For many people an IMi-sh VoIP and a cellphone are going to be just dandy. The consumer wire line voice business won't drop to zero, but it could easily be down 30 to 40 percent in 5 years - partly due to cellphone migration and partly due to a combination of Plan B VoIP and cellphone serivce (I doubt that Plan A service will be as important)

It will take longer for Plan B like services to take over wireless due to the much higher costs involved. It will eventually happen, but not in the short term.

So an interesting question is who is going to own something like ENUM and will it be a unique service or not (I don't believe that ENUM as it is cast will fly, but something that is ENUM-like may have value).

homo depactusum

In a conversation with Norm and Jan, Sukie asked some interesting questions ...

• Is the belief in a higher power hard-wired into humans?


• If so, and if one seeks a possible biological cause could it be related to the submission inherent in most trooping animals (as expressed in the concept of the ultimate alpha)?


• If so, then do non-trooping domestic animals such as cats and ferrets view humans more as simply other individuals than dogs? Do dogs lend a deity tint to humans and if so is that because of the mental hard wiring related to trooping?


• Also if so, does this impair our ability to question leaders (politicians, famous sports-figures, major actors, etc.)? Are some people never able to question such individuals due to being extremely hardwired for being submissive to extreme leaders? Are others only able to question once the public viewpoint of extreme leaders has been badly enough tarnished for that reason? Do some of the mental variants which alter social interactions increase questioning of those in authority, and is this subset of the group essential to a population for troop corrections of bad leadership?

comments appreciated - I will pass them on...

cia spy device museum

Apparently the CIA has an employee's only museum and CBS was given the opportunity to have a look (the CIA seems to be on a mission to show that they know what they are doing -- several views into the organization have appeared on NPR and PBS in the past month).

Nothing really astonishing, but interesting nonetheless... (thanks for the link Ben)

sunset on mars

From Spirit ... amazing ... very dusty

A standard physics prelim question is to discuss the color of the atmosphere and sunsets on Mars.

how to bet on a coin toss

Perfect tosses and spins are difficult ... perfect coins don't exist. What you probably expected, but it is surprising that someone didn't do this 100 years ago.

an excerpt:

...

A new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased: A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on.

"I don't care how vigorously you throw it, you can't toss a coin fairly," says Persi Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University who performed the study with Susan Holmes of Stanford and Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 1986, mathematician Joseph Keller, now an emeritus professor at Stanford, proved that one fair way to toss a coin is to throw it so that it spins perfectly around a horizontal axis through the coin's center.

Such a perfect toss would require superhuman precision. Every other possible toss is biased, according to an analysis described on Feb. 14 in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The researchers' logic goes like this. At the opposite extreme from Keller's perfect toss is a completely biased toss, in which the coin stays flat while in the air. Since the coin never actually flips, it is guaranteed to land on the same face that it started out on.

Between the perfectly spinning toss and the flat toss lies a continuum of other possibilities, in which the coin spins around a tilted axis, precessing like an old-fashioned children's top. Each of these possibilities is biased, the team found. The bias is most pronounced when the flip is close to being a flat toss. For a wide range of possible spins, the coin never flips at all, the team proved.

In experiments, the researchers were surprised to find that it's difficult to tell from watching a coin whether it has flipped. A coin toss typically takes just half a second, with the circumference of the coin whizzing around at 3 meters per second. What's more, the coin's spin makes it wobble, often creating the illusion that the coin has flipped.

...

a jpl martian playlist

Theme music at JPL for the folks sweating over Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the choices are excellent.

I think this sort of thing may be common. We had theme music in the particle physics experimental trailers at Brookhaven National Lab (ours was generally picked by the grad students and postdocs).

Other strangenesses were logbook entries like:

A zephyr of negative pions continues from the Southeast at 17.1 GeV/c ...

commonplacing

Thanks for the note Hanna ... I'm going to pass this by an anthropologist friend (who has worked on blogs academically) ...

what about the era?

I was chatting with a very bright young friend about the Equal Rights Amendment and it came as a bad surprise to her than she did not have equal rights under the Constitution. She is very sharp and well informed, but this was something she had assumed. She asked her co-workers and they weren't aware either. The right-wing of the Republican party have really managed to bury this one over the past two decades.

I wonder what the Bush position is on the ERA? My guess he doesn't support equal rights for women - perhaps someone should ask him and get it on the record - particularly for younger voters.

Here is is

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article.

Section 3. This Amendment shall take effect two years after thedate of ratification.

A few notes on the subject ... there is an amazing amount of irony and contradtion in the president's position when you view the right wing comments on why the ERA should not become part of the Constitution...

extreme irony warning

from Phyllis Schlafly (the ERA's most visible opponent and something of a right wing heroine):

1. ERA is a fraud; it pretends to benefit women and "put women in the Constitution," but women would receive no benefit from it whatsoever, and the Constitution has been gender-neutral ever since it was written.

2. ERA would require 18-year-old girls to register for the draft and make them subject to conscription and combat duty just like men, and the American people are not going to tolerate this.

3. ERA would transfer large areas of law, now within the domain of the states, to the Federal Government, such as marriage, divorce, family law, child custody, schools, insurance, prisons, etc., and the Federal Government already has grabbed too much power.

You have to love number three ...

microsoft blames marketing

So Microsoft believes customers aren't using some of the features of XP due to marketing failures - the names aren't catchy and the features haven't been properly positioned.

shakes his head

Has anyone tried to user Movie Maker? People I know who have tried suggest that is the best ad ever produced for using iMovie on a Mac.

Microsoft does offer a large number of interesting technologies, but on a platform that the average person can barely keep running. If someone is focued enough to want to use some of these technologies they often go for a better third party product or, in the case of creative tools, OS X and its toolset.

Microsoft has a long way to go to make its technologies (many of which are interesting) accessible to their average user. Apple, in many ways, has it easier as it is cream skimming a more elite crew - the average person probably does more with a Mac because they were attracted to it because they wanted to do more (the same can be said for specific applications).

What is very sad is how opaque Windows and the appliations sets are to the average user - people who can't even keep their machines running reliably. OS X isn't perfect by any streach of the imagination, but it is better and more stable. Its audience seems to get more from their machines. Linux is far too opaque to the average user, but is just fine for its current audience.

In the case of Microsoft it isn't bad marketing, but rather poor design that doesn't couple to the needs of many of their users.

___

One of the delightful things that I've come to expect in the OS X world is the existance of beautiful small programs that work and make my life better ... in no particularly order NetNewsWire, OmniGraffle, OmniWeb, Keynote, iChat AV, SubEthaEdit, NoteBook, Watson and other tools.

more on the administration's favorite cost plus company

An interesting piece on Halliburton and the free ride they are getting from old friends.

One has to wonder about these tell-alls, but they are probably more credible than the corporate PR or the VP's stories...