Windmills gone wild!

Ouch! This video of a wind turbine self destructing will be about as explosive as photos of Obama in a turban [no pun intended].

I'm pretty sure they will end up blaming it on a bird strike, or terrorists, or the oil companies.

Just say No to pay TV

I beg to differ with the story in Wired News that says end of analog TV broadcasts in 2009 will cause US households to switch to cable instead of buying a converter box or a new TV. I actually think the net effect will be fewer cable subscribers.

My reasoning is that people still using old analog TVs are looking for cheapest way to receive TV and as such wont want to pay at least $50 a month just to receive the local programming they can get over the air anyway. Plus switching to cable means you'll have to install cable outlets in all rooms that means a lot of expense putting in wires and outlets - and splitting cable is notoriously problematic because cable companies often provide a marginal signal to households that isn't strong enough to split (as any multi-family dwelling cable user can attest).

Also I believe that once people discover that ATSC (digital transmission) provides interference free reception and many more channels than they ever received before they will actually start dropping basic cable packages for the free over the air programming. As low end TVs increase in capabilities the ability to view 720p and 1080i high definition programming (in particular sports) will also be a big draw. In a recession people are always looking to save money and cutting the cable is an easy fix.

Alternative headlines

The headline for Yahoo's latest news reads "Yahoo rejects Microsoft, report says it may buy AOL" but I'm amazed no one is saying "Yahoo looks gift horse in mouth, shoots self in foot".

Seriously, could there be a dumber move? Has AOL done anyone any good in years - indeed during this century? Have they got money to burn buried in the Yahoo basement? Don't have enough of their own employees to fire so go buy someone elses and fire them as well? Or is Yahoo just doing a bit of dirty work for Microsoft for them before the acquisition really happens? Come to think of it why not scoop up Ask while you're at it? Or does someone at Yahoo have friends in AOL they want to make rich first?

Any way you look at it, every day of delay is another day of dimminshing advertising earnings for Yahoo that has little else to count on to justify their value. Hence they should have countered and wrapped it all up in double-quick time.

I'm kind of sad about all this because Yahoo was the first search site I ever used, when it was still just a directory, and the first online email account I ever had - hence I have a five letter @Yahoo.com email with no digits even if I haven't used it in years because of all the spam. I would have hoped Yang and Filo would have been smarter. It is never too late for them to pack it in and move on to something new.

Interesting developments in traffic monitoring

About a couple of years ago I had a conversation with someone who did a bunch of contract work on traffic monitoring systems - he was networking all the traffic cameras and radar together and providing a nice web interface with Traffic 511 like monitoring of congestion data. The added bonus was you could actually get a live feed of traffic on your favorite streets - his system was for Alameda county and hence monitored mostly city streets, not freeways. During the meeting he talked about how much cheaper his implementation was than the tens of millions CalTrans spent on their system which used data read from FasTrak transponders in people's cars. When he mentioned the trip time data that Traffic 511 was providing (and is now shown on electronic signs by the freeway) I asked him if they were doing the dumb thing of quoting actual measured journey times - it turns out that was how they do it.

I say it is dumb because if you are in Oakland (say) and trying to get to San Francisco and there is a wreck then you wont know about it from estimated journey times until someone has completed the entire trip - which could be a long time. And as each person arrives at the destination their data is as old as their complete journey time. Now a way around this is to break journeys into much smaller segments and integrate along the path continuously but apparently they weren't doing that either, except perhaps at very gross city to city levels.

Ideally as soon as there is a change in traffic flow past a point, as measured by velocity and number of cars at that point you should be able to feed that information into a model, combined with everything else you know about traffic on the roads and generate a new estimate very quickly - without waiting for cars to drive an entire segment. As a physicist by training that just seems like basic fluid dynamics to me... And you can feed in other information about known changes to the configuration of "pipes", ie. the roads. So when CHP calls in that they will shut down a freeway for 15 minutes to bring a medivac, or take it down to 2 lanes while they sweep debris, or open up Hwy 580 to trucks for a while then you should be able to feed that data in an make travel time prediction adjustments immediately. Thus the effect of a wreck in Oakland can instantaneously be feed back to someone in Milpitas traveling to Berkeley and allow them to choose an alternate route.

Anyway two years ago most of the clever stuff you could do really depended on having a lot of data about where cars were which either meant outfitting a lot of cars with telemetry systems or getting access to the FasTrak transponder data. Well of course two years on we have an increasing number of gadgets flying up and down freeways that already have GPS and data links built-in - they are called phones. So I kick myself for not thinking about what Nokia is doing in a trial where they are using standard N95 GPS equipped phones to see if they can predict traffic flow information - not just travel times, but predict information like I suggested. Plus the benefit is this system can be extremely cheap to set up since people like participating in such "social" applications (cf. Seti@Home and Folding@Home), even more so if they are actually of benefit to themselves. I think it will only be a matter of months before some open source project, quite likely sponsored by Google (and running on Android) will produce an app and centralized traffic monitoring/prediction services to the masses.

The only issue is that do really great prediction actually requires more than simply measurement - for this reason I think the initial data provided will be just the same level as Traffic 511, just measuring speeds on the freeway. To do really smart stuff requires complicated routing calculations and someone like Google (say) with access to that, and smart people to crunch the numbers and build models will be needed to build the software. All good stuff to build into Google Maps right and make it even more of a killer app - especially when mobile.

Two and a half years on someone finally decides to sue over unwanted text messages

I have to admit I was pleasently surprised (for once) to read about a new class action suit. This one was being filed over T-Mobile's practice of refusing to block text messages and then charging customers for receiving them. This is something that I blogged about two and a half years ago when T-Mobile told my partner (whose bill I pay) that it was impossible to block unwanted text messages from someone she didn't know. These were being sent by some kid who was crank texting her (or just had the wrong number).

I was, how shall I put it, "gobsmacked" that they could claim it was impossible to block those texts and her only recourse was to change her phone number. I mean what kind of P.O.S. network were they running that such a request was not possible. There really was only one answer - it was a deliberate ploy to extract the most text fees from all their customers. As anyone knows texts are expensive and getting more expensive and yet the underlying cost to networks is essentially zero because they are sent on a control channel that is otherwise unused and if there is ever any conflict texts are just not delivered (although I'd happen to guess customers still get billed!).

In general I'm not a particular fan of class action suits - but in this case I see that it was basically the only way to force a corporation to drop a practice it was clearly pursuing to maximize profit. In the USA since the 1919 Supreme Court case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co corporations have been legally obliged to persue profit over customer interests until such time as it is no longer profitable to ignore those interests. And since almost no individual has money to make a case against a carrier stronger than moving their business elsewhere, then a class action suit and associated punitive damages is basically the only effective way for them to get such a result, especially since such behavior seems to be endemic in the cellular industry.

Hence I would actually encourage you to contact the lawyers involved (see the linked article) if you believe you are entitled to join the class. Ironically I actually contacted a legal firm that specializes in class actions back in 2005, but they never bothered to follow through. I bet they are wishing they had now!