multicast

As mentioned in my previous post “My Game System is My New Cable Box,” the newest system update for the XBox 360 now includes a number of social networking and Internet applications, including Facebook, twitter, last.fm, and Zune (Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the iTunes store).  For me, the integration of these services feels like a kind of weird collision of different neighborhoods and cultures.

The neighborhoods metaphor is apt, in part because of the debate earlier this year about the socioeconomic and race connotations of different social networking sites.  Danah Boyd notably described a “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook (here’s a nice overview article of her point).  Facebook, she argues, has been portrayed as a higher-class, safer place by media coverage.

Eszter Hargittai also published a revealing demographic analysis comparing SNSs two years ago in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, titled ”Whose Space?“.  She found a number of interesting differentiations among these sites: “different populations select into the use of different services.”  For instance, Asian-Americans are less likely to use MySpace.

So our Internet applications are like demographically distinct neighborhoods of a city.  Of course we know that all kinds of things are differentiated demographically (see: Stuff White People Like).  But the XBox360 merge combines the XBox’s own social networking system (based on Gamertags) with others systems like Twitter and Facebook and this is a different kind of mixing.  Yes these sites can reach different audiences but that they are used by the same audiences for different purposes in different contexts with different interfaces.  It’s not just that different people live in different neighborhoods (MySpace vs. Facebook demographics), but that when I personally visit different neighborhoods I expect them to look different (many people use multiple SNSs).

Everything is suddenly all mixed into the XBox interface. Having some of this stuff on my TV is actually pretty weird.  Adding Zune to the XBox makes a lot of sense — that’s a store to sell a/v products and I want to buy TV shows to watch on my TV.  But the other services are jarring — they echo Don Norman’s point from ten years ago in The Invisible Computer that single-purpose devices are often preferable to multi-purpose ones (here’s an old interview when he makes this point).

No one seems to be listening to him.  The interface is so much more difficult to get right on a multipurpose device.  Rather than a generic menu system that must fit everything, with a specialized device you can have a streamlined interface that helps you do what you are trying to do.  It makes so much sense to just keep each single-purpose device in the place where you want to do that task.

For instance instead of a smartphone to do everything, you might want a dedicated e-mail device like the Peek (pictured above).  A friend of mine keeps both a Palm TX for the calendaring and an iPhone for mobile web surfing (and occastionally, telephoning).  I think this kind of thing is actually quite widespread.  The specialized devices are often so much better at a particular thing while a generalized device is bad at everything (or mediocre at everything).

So now the XBox is kind of a mishmash of Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, gamertags, etc.  Maybe it will grow on me but I doubt it.  For instance, Zune and Netflix now have to share the awkward XBox menuing system and are only differentiated by the fact that their backgrounds are different colors (Netflix is red, Zune is black).  To continue the neighborhoods metaphor, in their wisdom the XBox Live designers have taken all of the neighborhoods you like to visit in Manhattan and relocated their shops to a bland suburban street grid that stretches to infinity in every direction.

In my earlier post I praised the idea of the game console as the new basic entertainment computer in the living room that could handle a variety of video and gaming functions.  Let’s me temper my enthusiasm.  A game console is a good idea for things a gaming console connected to a TV can be good at!  If we try to cram everything else in there too I don’t think the results will be pretty.

The IFT/AFT Local 6300 AFL-CIO is on strike as of 8:00 a.m.  Picket lines run 8-5 today.  The union voted 92% yes for a strike.  Visit a strike coordinator in the University YMCA to find out where to go.

The Campus Faculty Association stands in support of the GEO.  The CFA has asked faculty to cancel classes and not to cross picket lines.  Faculty “We Support the GEO” picket signs are available at the picket lines.

Catherine Predergast (Professor of English) has this to say about the situation:

As it stands, TAs in many departments here are already drastically underpaid compared with what other schools in the CIC offer.  For example, one course in freshman composition is calculated to consume 17 hours of a TAs time per week at the University of Wisconsin. At the University of Illinois, that same course, which I direct, is only calculated to consume 13 hours. The real losers here are our undergraduate students. Why should they accept four hours less per week of instructional time than they would get at Wisconsin? If the University were to tinker with tuition waivers, whether in-state, or out-of-state, thus even further down-grading its support to graduate students, you might as well rename this  East Central University of Illinois, so shattering would be the consequence to the UofI’s R1 status. I think the GEO’s version of the language on tuition waivers is by far clearer than what the university has proposed, and should be accepted.   Please invest in this university:  Approve the GEO contract.

Many graduate students receive free tuition (called a tuition waiver) as part of their compensation.  This strike comes about after the administration failed to guarantee the security of these waivers in the future.  TAs rightfully have the jitters on that topic: rumors have been circulating about an impending overhaul in the tuition waiver system.  Undergraduate TAs in Chemistry recently had their teaching waivers revoked as a cost saving measure.  (One of them is our babysitter.)

EO facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/GEO/171984109397

You can help!  Phone numbers and script for calls for support:
http://funferal.org/blog/2009/11/15/geo-strikes-and-seeks-help-from-you/

Longer blog post summarizing the situation and the strike:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/strike_at_illinois (This post also points out that the last time Grad Students were on strike the results were disastrous for adjunct faculty on our campus.)

I really appreciated Nicholas Carr’s article “The Price of Free” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, mostly because it makes many of the same points as my last blog post.  I see from Web searching that the original title was possibly “The Price of Free (Television).”  As Carr and I both wrote, the Comcast merger is about the threatening decline of the cable TV business.  It is Comcast’s attempt to get into the content business and the Internet business before they are left out of business.  Luckily the conference paper that my post was based on was first published in 2000 so we can win any disputes about priority… because Carr is a much better writer than I am.

He makes a nice comparison to the failed AOL/TimeWarner merger’s attempt to join Internet pipes and content producers, and he describes some of the antitrust problems with a Comcast/NBC-Uni deal in more detail.  He even includes a primer on network neutrality.  Excellent.

However, I don’t understand two of the turns he takes in the article.  FIRST: He comments on the fact that “the smartest, most creative TV shows” are also the most expensive to produce, and he suggests that an Internet video platform will fail to fund these shows because they will “stanch the flow of money back to studios” so that “producing those kinds of programs may no longer be possible.”   But there’s nothing in the current moment to suggest that people don’t like watching television (or at least, video) or that they aren’t willing to pay for it with their attention or their cash.  What’s on the table is how much we should pay Comcast to get to NBC, not that we aren’t interested in NBC, or aren’t interested in paying.  An advertisement-based Internet television would simply be a return to the funding model for over-the-air television. I’m not a big fan of the advertising-only funding model for a number of reasons that will be saved for another post, but for now suffice to say that it doesn’t sound like the end of quality television if we don’t pay comcast and instead we watch ads on Hulu.

(I’m also not sure that the best shows are the most expensive, but let’s just cede the point that people do like expensive shows.)*

So I’m not sure why the “free” parts are in there, or why “free” is in the title.  I blame Chris Anderson.

SECOND: I also really liked his brief discussion of TV as a communal activity (see the nifty graphic, right, from the article).  But… oops: I’m not sure I see how using the Internet as the transport for my TV shows changes their communal nature in any way, especially if I use an Internet-enabled device in my living room to watch TV via the Internet (Carr uses his Blu-Ray player).  And sharing a televised experience while alone has defined the form since the cultural critics started writing about it.  So it’s a nifty graphic but both frames of it should look like the bottom one.

It is an empirical question as to whether new Internet video distribution is driving a new trend of watching television alone.  I’d bet against it probably because I think we’re already watching television alone.

Unlike the graphic, the difference between the coming Internet TV platform and current TV will be largely invisible.  People soon can easily switch conduits to their existing sets, while TV and computer interfaces increasingly resemble each other.  My last post was subtitled “My Game System is My New Cable Box” but another point to remember is that my television is a computer.

–

* …because the big studios use high production values to train us to differentiate their work from that of other, smaller producers.

UPDATE (5:20 p.m.):

The watching alone/together thing in the article irritated me enough that I looked it up.  My hunch was right.  The Internet can’t be making us solitary television watchers because we are already solitary television watchers. The most recent study I can find says that TV is most likely to be watched alone.  While we do tend to watch television together in larger households with families and at certain times of day (prime time), this is dwarfed by the overall amount of time we watch television, an activity we mostly do alone.  (This is from the Ball State / CRE Video Consumer Mapping Study [funded by Neilsen], July 7, 2009.  See esp. Section 6 from the Technical Appendix ["Solitary vs. Social TV Viewing"].)

(or: “My Game System is My New Cable Box“)

Comcast is the largest cable operator in the US and it was my cable service in Illinois until I cancelled cable earlier this year.  Here’s when I snapped:  Our cable bill was up to $123.80 per month (internet + digital cable) and we were not getting premium channels or using pay-per-view.  Cable operators are notorious for leveraging their legal monopoly — they like to charge high prices for terrible service.  My Comcast cable regularly had service problems even though I live in the center of town.

In one of my memorable service calls a technician somehow smashed one of the windows of my house.  I know it was an accident (and they paid to replace it) but I think that this poignantly symbolizes Comcast’s attitude toward their customers.

As another example, they sent me a gift certificate for a free pay-per-view movie as an apology for one of several recent outages, but to redeem it I had to call them on the phone.  Since calls to Comcast customer service are actually more unpleasant than some kinds of dental work, that wasn’t much of a reward.  They have allegedly-voice-recognizing computers that do not understand my voice and customer support people who can never help me with whatever I called about… no thanks.

I’m not alone with my rising cable rates.  According to the FCC’s most recent cable report, cable rates have increased about 122% since 1995 — that’s about 3 x as much as the consumer price index rose over that period.  While cable likes to boast that they’ve added many more channels in that time, subscribers don’t appear to watch many more channels — they divide a relatively constant amount of video viewing time (an average of about five hours per day in the US) over a small number of channels chosen from whatever they are offered.  So we are paying a lot more but not watching a lot more.  And how are they delivering more extra channels?  I turned on my cable TV before I cancelled and saw something like this:

Click to zoom in and look around the buildings.  The dots in the sky aren’t supposed to be there: that’s MPEG noise… quality loss induced by using too much compression.  Sometimes this is called “Mosquito Noise.” (Compression artifact example from topaz.com.)  My Comcast digital cable movies were suddenly filled with these dots.

Just in time to match everyone’s purchase of high-resolution televisions, Comcast decided in 2008 to compress their already compressed MPEG streams so that it could add more channels without adding more capacity on some systems (see this thread on the AV science forum for some nice comparison shots).  So to recap, my digital cable images look like they’ve been growing mold when they work at all and they cost more every year.  Comcast’s customer service strategy is to violently attack my house.  Time to switch!

US consumers are often stuck with cable service they hate because the FCC’s focus on platform (or “inter-modal”) competition. Instead of multiple competing cable or landline phone services we have to switch modes and buy a new box (cable modem, DSL modem, satellite TV receiver, etc.).  Search for the word “inter-modal” in Yochai Benkler’s summary for more explanation of that.  So the customer usually has to be really pissed off before we bother with it, but I reached that point when I figured out that I could buy this package and convert my XBox into a kind of cable box:

XBox Live Gold: $6.46/mo.
Netflix (1 DVD + unlimited streaming): $8.99/mo.
AT&T Elite DSL: $35.99/mo.
Hulu.com watched on TV: free

…and get substantially the same thing that I was getting with Comcast at less than 50% of the price.  If you want you can add in free over-the-air digital TV (we don’t).  Note: this partly works well as a substitute because we watch a lot of movies and few shows.  Your mileage may vary.

Now that the upcoming XBox Live update adds Zune pay-per-view video, last.fm, and other goodies (like Facebook), my strategy looks even better.  Since the PlayStation network recently added Netflix streaming that would work as well.  My game system is my new cable box.  I described this kind of move in 2008 with a paper co-authored with François Bar titled “US Communication Policy After Convergence” in Media, Culture, and Society.  This article was actually written in 2000 so it’s nice to see that François’s nine years of foresight worked out.

But Comcast, my old window-smashing nemesis, hasn’t been sitting still.  It’s announced plans to acquire a majority share of NBC Universal — a video content production powerhouse (The Office, Law & Order, Saturday Night Live, the Olympic Games, Inglorious Basterds, Coraline, …).  Bernstein Research (quoted by Post Tech) evocatively noted that if this merger goes through “Comcast would be calling the shots for one out of five viewing hours in the United States.”  I don’t think they planned this merger just to go after me, but I don’t rule it out.

Commentators on media mergers like to say that “big = bad.”  Ben Bagdikian compared media mergers to George Orwell’s 1984 — “Big Brother” was the ultimate media monopolist.  But the most interesting thing about this proposal are the implications for Internet video distribution.  NBC Universal is behind Hulu, sometimes called an Interent-based “television catch-up service,” but as far as I can tell the Hulu viewers like me don’t plan on going back to cable or the public airwaves for their shows.  My students often report that they watch Hulu and YouTube exclusively, not to “catch-up” with anything else.

Comcast has created its own hulu-like Internet service (called fancast) that will be restricted to Comcast subscribers only.  They’ve got to do something, as this nice anonymous analysis on ReadWriteWeb puts it: “cable-based television will not survive the next decade.”  The pressing question for people who like video entertainment (and EVERYONE watches video) is: what will the next video platform look like?  That is the crux of the Comcast/NBC-Uni merger.  Either competing with hulu via fancast or buying into hulu (by buying NBC) is an attempt to be sure that they get to decide.  Even minor differences in the shape of such a system would have major consequences if the platform became dominant.

Aside from the many antitrust issues (the previously-cited Post Tech article summarizes them), the big question I’m asking about the proposal is: What will this do to Internet video? We have a brief opening when some tech-savvy consumers can get away from their cable lock-in via alternative technologies but the carriers are trying to figure out how to close that loophole.  We need to figure out how to keep the future of video as open as possible.  None of the catch-up sites (hulu) or online video services (YouTube) really looks good in that regard but they both look better than Comcast from where I sit.

(Potentially a continuing series…)

1. Clover Food Lab
2. This giant snake (click to enlarge slightly):
   
   
   
   
3. Petsi Pies
4. The MIT Press Bookstore
5. The smell.  (Maybe it’s the sea air?  It smells fresh.)

I’ll post more if I like more things.

Just noticed that google groups historical search doesn’t work anymore.  That means we have no access to most of the history of the Internet.  All of those flamewars…  all those snarky comments…  gone!

This comment complains about the fact that there is only one provider for historical search of usenet newsgroups.  I can’t find any other usenet search engines that keep more than a few hundred days online.  So much for Internet history, or anyway USENET history.  Where will the children of the future learn about legendary trolls?  How will they meet B1FF?

Let’s say you own a Kindle 2 and you want to quickly get a few Berkman Center basic readings on there.  Here’s a quick start:  I’m assuming you want to (1) right click on the files below and (2) save them to your computer, then (3) email them to your kindle account for automatic transfer ( yourname at kindle.com).  This will cost you 15 cents per megabyte but it is by far the easiest way to get these books onto your Kindle 2.  My notes in parens.

1. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler — ZIP (each chapter and section will dump into your kindle as an unhelpfully-named separate file [e.g., "ch-11"] in an apparently random order, but the text in each one is well-formatted and readable).
2. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain — PRC (e-book reader format — table of contents won’t show up but footnote links will work)
3. Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig — HTML (as one large file — TOC appears but links won’t work — they’ll launch the Kindle web browser instead)
4. Remix by Lawrence Lessig — TXT (courtesy Internet Archive — some yukky text formatting characters throughout, but overall not too bad)

Surprises:

• Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig has no easily accessible HTML or plain text file that I can find!  Surprising, as Code 1.0 was available in many formats.

Back story:

• PDF conversion on the Kindle 2 is awful — perhaps you can install Savory but this is a pain.
• These books and more are available as PDFs so you can read them online for free.  But not easily on the Kindle 2.
• The books that aren’t available above are available as kindle e-books (you can buy them).

I did this for myself, but I hope this list helps someone else.  Of course, if you read all four of these books they will convince you that you shouldn’t own a Kindle in the first place.  You have been warned.

I was recently having a conversation about unlicensed wireless devices.  That is:  radio transmitters that don’t require advance permission from the government to operate (a license).  Examples of unlicensed devices are baby monitors and cordless phones.  You can buy them at Best Buy and you don’t need to have your own radio station call letters or pass a test.  One reason that people find unlicensed devices interesting is that they often have a lot of them sitting around their house or office.

Some questions came up in the conversation and they are hard for me to answer.  I’m putting them up here as a way to document my attempts.

Here’s the first one:  What frequency band contains the most unlicensed devices? “Most” in this case meant most diverse.  In other words: Where in the ether would we find the greatest diversity of different kinds of things sharing frequencies with each other?  My guess was the 2.4GHz band, as that is the frequency band that really popularized the idea of mainstream low-powered unlicensed devices for untrained consumers in the 1970s using spread spectrum techniques.  That’s where some of the most common devices today really took off.  Another good bet would be 900MHz, however.  (Amateur radio enthusiasts and engineers used devices without specific frequency licenses much earlier than that.  All of this is chronicled in Kenneth Carter’s Unlicensed to Kill.)

You could pick other bands as historically important but they didn’t really take off in the same way.  (I’m thinking of the U-PCS and U-NII bands.)  There is some more history in Henry Goldberg’s short paper Grazing on the Commons, which also draws attention to of Silicon Valley’s interest in unlicensed wireless operation and includes the delightful quote:

Like sin itself, the deliberate un-licensing of spectrum began with an Apple.

The next question:  Is there a list of all of the different kinds of things that operate in the band?  ”Unlicensed” means the device operator doesn’t need permission but the device still needs to get one of those nifty FCC stickers on it — called certification.  Here’s a retro one.

In some contexts this is called a “declaration of conformity.”  What a nice phrase!  Those administrative law regulators really have a way with words.  I’ll use it as my post title.

So you can search the certifications online.  I searched 2400 – 2483 MHz (not exact match) in the charmingly not-user-friendly EAS database at our own Federal Communications Commission (use “authorization search“).   It turns out there are 3001 different things certified to operate in that band right now.  The database is so hard to use that there is no easy way to see what the devices are without several clicks for each device.  I tried two at random and got (1) an off-brand wireless camera and (2) an old-looking GE cordless phone.

Okay that didn’t really help.  Let me expand the question and just brainstorm instead.  Here’s question number three: Is there a list of all of the different kinds of unlicensed devices? Maybe I can brainstorm one.  I’ll see if I can list all of the examples of unlicensed transmitters that are intentionally transmitting.  My guess is that we can find examples of most of these (except as noted in parentheses) in the 2.4 GHz range.

• wireless microphones
• telemetry (water controllers, industrial controllers, etc.)
• wireless sensors
• anti-pilferage systems (those planks you walk through when entering stores)
• security alarm systems
• auditory assistance devices (help you hear the sermon in church)
• garage door openers
• ground-penetrating radar (below 2GHz)
• through-wall imaging (not sure what this is exactly… sounds awesome! or scary.)
• medical imaging (some)
• keyless entry (wireless car key fob)
• wireless cameras
• remote controls
• wireless video game console controllers
• radars (frequency varies)
• marine radios (some VHF radios don’t require a license)
• toys (”Mr. Microphone” is a famous historical example though it initially operated in AM and then FM radio)

• RC cars
• novelties (??? don’t know what this means exactly but the term shows up in certification records)
• any Bluetooth devices (mobile phone headsets, PDAs, laptops)
• also ZigBee devices
• wireless LANs like Wi-Fi, HiperLAN, HomeRF and any device that uses them (networked picture frames, printers, laptops, computers, phones)
• cordless phones (not cellular)
• low-power transmitters designed to broadcast your iPod or whatever to your car radio (uses FM bands)
• talking houses, talking billboards, or talking roadsigns (temporary advertising or informational messages — only some of these are unlicensed — they must be low power)
• RFID tags (although at lower frequencies than 2.4GHz) can now be found all over the place in anything that someone wants to track.
  • toll road transponders, airline baggage tracking tags, various shipments of valuable or controlled substances where the boxes/containers are tagged (e.g., prescription drugs), fast-pay keyfobs, shipping containers, credit cards (American Express blue card), keyless entry cards in your wallet, passports, expensive car tires…  I read in Wired Magazine a while ago that rare Indian elephants were having chips implanted to reduce trafficking.

Okay I’m running out of steam.  Anything else?  I seem to remember that J. H. Snider wrote some sort of list like this but I can’t find it.

The University of Illinois [InfoStructure] (left):  Proletarian.  The standard shape — one size fits all.  Midwestern earnestness.  Plain fonts.  ”I (heart) INFO” = funny, but in an over-eager sort of way.  Obvious.  Hardworking.

Oxford Internet Institute (center):  Effete. European. But stylish handle.  ”We are near France but not French.” Our coffee is smaller but stronger.  So what if you have to squint to read the writing — it’s worth it.

Harvard’s Berkman Center (right):  Stylish, rounded, large.  Says: “We in the Ivy League can afford more coffee.”  Real intellectuals wear black.  (But… trying too hard?)

When we bought our 1904 house we inherited a monster of a heating system.  Steam radiators in every room, and when we moved in it didn’t work well — lots of banging, some radiators didn’t heat up at all, and the energy bill was EXPENSIVE.  Worse, the temperature set on the thermostat didn’t seem connected to what happened in the house.  On top of it all, this was some kind of system that none of our contractors were familiar with.  They would arrive and stare at the fittings and you could see a kind of doubting look come into their faces even though they tried to conceal it.  For a while we paid them to adjust things that didn’t need adjusting and add things that didn’t need to be added.  The system didn’t work any better.

Finally I got down to business.  By examining this antique gauge (which appears to measure a vacuum in bars of mercury) I figured out that I had a Kellogg-Mackay-Cameron Co. Vacuum System installed in 1906, based on Morgan’s patent.

(See also the flickr photoset for my heating system.)

I managed to find the original product literature [PDF] on a steam heating enthusiast web site.  I found the original patent on Google Patents. Heady with this success, I thought — why not look for the original repair instructions that would be written for the steamfitters of the day?  I found the book 500 Plain Answers to Direct Questions on Steam, Hot Water, Vapor, and Vacuum Heating (1915) on Google Books.

I don’t know anything about do-it-yourself projects in the home.  I am not good with my hands.  But no one seemed able to solve this one for me, so I dove in.  After a lot of reading I ended up performing three adjustments.  Two involved a screwdriver and one a wrench.  That’s it.  It took me two weeks to understand the system and 15 minutes to fix it.   Just after I finished the last adjustment there was a terrific whooshing noise and the heat started to work — and work beautifully.  It gives me a new perspective on cybernetics.  The solution is never near where you see the problem.  As Dan Holohan, the leading chronicler of steam heating enthusiasm, writes:

A steam system is like a child’s mobile. When you touch one part, everything else starts swaying. If you’re not sure what will happen when you touch something, don’t touch it.

My system now produces a cozy, dry heat that my allergist says is far superior to forced air.  It’s much quieter.  My heating bill dropped substantially (it is lower than an equivalent forced air system would be in my house, but the maintenance cost is higher for the steam system).

Like many others, I ended up with an enduring appreciation for steam.  These systems were so well-made and also so clever and complex.  The thought that went into a normal household heating system in 1906 boggles my mind.  Dan Holohan calls his classes on these systems the Dead Men’s Steam School.  (Everyone who designed these systems is dead.)

While steam radiators have a reputation for being trouble-prone heating systems, in fact the main problem is that nearly everyone that knows how to build, operate, and maintain one is dead.  And what craft! My system is 100 years old and works very well. As I learned from Holohan’s writing, it is quite common to encounter parts of these systems that no one alive understands and (until recently) weren’t documented anywhere.  If that knowledge were more widespread and steamfitters (and spare parts) were as common as they once were I think steam would rule the world.  I guess this is another case study in path-dependence.

Pick up The Lost Art of Steam Heating and you won’t be disappointed.  This book is worth buying for Dan’s chronicles of famous boiler explosions alone.