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A Rotten Idea - GPS Auto Tracking

by Andrew McCaskey
GPS Tracking for Gasoline Tax

The Kansas City Star reports that there are trials underway at the University of Iowa involving GPS tracking for tax enforcement. With a target date of 2020, they will need those 11 years of lead time to handle the first round of lawsuits.

The notion is that as fuel efficiency increases, revenues from the gasoline tax go down. The tech solution is to place GPS trackers on every vehicle and then read them remotely and send a bill each month based on the exact miles driven. This would, supposedly replace the 18 cents per gallon gas tax with a mileage tax of 1 or 2 cents per mile driven.

There seem to be an increasing number of things that get investigated without thinking - and this is a prime candidate. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

Or maybe you’d be willing to sell your right to privacy of movement for half a penny a mile ? If your auto gets a bit better than 20 mpg and the gas tax is roughly 18 cents, you’d “save” 16 cents and be able to drive around 32 miles on the difference.

This sounds like a non-starter. And the EFF and ACLU have not even begun to sharpen up their knives. As well they should.{sharethis}

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iPhone Translator App

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Energizer Bunny OS

by Andrew McCaskey

The Energizer Bunny OS

“Just because you can is no particular reason to do so. “That’s a pretty good rule of life in general and even more so in the decisions that are facing business IT managers and users. It has been a year since the official end of XP but most users are content to stretch the life of old systems and want nothing so much as to be left alone.

Microsoft has not quite sunken to the Madison Avenue level of “lemon scented” features, but it’s on that track. More that half of all business PC’s have been sold with Vista and then subsequently downgraded to XP. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP, but user reaction was strongly negative, and they have ended up extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011.

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Drupalcamp Entreprenurial Session

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Short Weeks

by Andrew McCaskey

Two Short Weeks

This week, I am on a nominal vacation in Washington DC - but it’s turning out to be busy time indeed processing the videos from Drupalcamp in Denver, as well as the HP Tech Forum product videos and backchannel videos.

For the next few weeks, we will be mobile as well - so afer a while the mobile rig and mic will start to sound normal. It’s a hectic summertime schedule.

Speaking of Schedule - SDRNews and CMS Weekly will be taking two days off for 4th of July - Friday the 4th and Monday the 6th - As much fun as it has been, the double duty on Drupalcamp coverage, HP Tech Forum and some major extended family responsibilities have all triple converged . SDRNews team not unlimited supply of energy - get ready to enjoy a long holiday weekend. Hope you are able to do the same.

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HP Performance Optimized DataCenter

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Realities of the Reality Layer

by Andrew McCaskey
The Mobile Killer App: Only As Good As..

It’s been billed as the final integration of all of the great gadgets that have been crammed into the mobile phone. Companies in Austria and the Netherlands have launched, with heavy weight support from the likes of Nokia and IBM to supply an additional data driven visual layer to cellphone video and camera.

This so-called ‘Reality Layer’ would project information onto the camera view - but since it is mounted within the mobile phone and has location knowledge from GPS and orientation information from accelerometers. The only problem that I see is ‘who’s reality’ ? While the technology is converging nicely, the data that could be applied to a given situation or view is subject to a LOT of selective editing.

For example, consider the real estate application - look at a house that is for sale through your mobile phone viewfinder, and if you have the “real estate reality plug in”, you’d see the home’s listed price, taxes, particulars on schools, distance and direction to shopping. You would however, see a selective slice of reality. It probably would not give you information on drug busts, breakins, local crimes, transient tenents or other information that might be highly useful in the housing decision.

The Killer App is going to be truly killer only if the “reality layer” isn’t the Disney version of the data that needs to be seen. Even if reality is not a pretty as you would like.

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Killer App for Mobile Phones- The Reality Layer

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Wimax in Atlanta

by Andrew McCaskey
Do or Die for Clearwire

The rollout in Atlanta for Wimax adds 3 million potential users to the service. Today’s rollout means WiMAX is now available in Baltimore, Portland and Atlanta. Clearwire has a more or less “open secret” soft launch in Las Vegas, and later this year…Chicago, Charlotte, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Honolulu, Philadelphia and Seattle should come online.

At CES 2009, we had a chance to look at the ecosystem that was coming on line: Netbook, Cradlepoint adapters, and support for Intel for chipsets. The question is: Will they come online quickly enough to make a difference ? Supporters point out that there are exactly zero LTE deployments to date, and by year end there may be as many as one.

More realistic souls note that it’s rare for the combination of financial mass and momentum to fail. You can be assured that Verizon and other wireless carriers will swing into action slowly, but with great power. I’d like to be more upbeat, but I think it’s going to be a long battle and unless the Wimax forces are more nimble in some as yet undisclosed way, that power and mass with LTE are going to eventually win. And the biggest opportunity for the “third pipe” besides the duopoly DSL/cable into the home would have a viable challenger.

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Google Voice

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In Defense of Panasonic

by Andrew McCaskey
Hardware DRM

Panasonic is going to get all sorts of grief from the consumer side, with their new camera firmware upgrade. It’s sole purpose: to verify the presence of a genuine Panasonic brand battery, and if it finds none, to shut down the system.

As much as I dislike proprietary systems and restraints of what amounts to ‘ hardware DRM ‘ , I think I have to side with Panasonic on this one. The problem is reportedly overheating and malfunction when some third party batteries are used in the camera. If this is consistently true - or even if it is possible with a few bad actors in the third party battery business and there is only a chance of the malfunction, it’s Panasonic that will have to bear the warranty cost.

Apparently someone within the company made a calculated decision: Take the PR hit now, one time and suffer some minor brand damage, or wait until later when potentially serious liabilities (think Sony Laptop Fire) or recalls lurk. I think they made the right business decision, long term - protecting their brand and minimizing impact. And that’s one reason that doing the unpopular thing might be right in the long term. {sharethis}

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Legacy System Productivity e-Cubed Systems

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iPhone 3.0 Software on Original Hardware

by Andrew McCaskey

First Gen Hardware ? Beware !

 Gearlog.com warns that “iPhone 3.0 software works well when pre-installed on the new 3G S. When users download and install it themselves on older versions of the handset, however, things are apparently taking a decidedly different turn.”

I have to admit that I’m seeing the same symptoms cited in the article on my original iPhone hardware. I did the 3.0 upgrade Monday, saw that most of my Apps had disappeared but was able to at least call them through  the new Spotlight screen. I thought it was just my lack of understanding and wanted to take time later in the week to go back and grab some of the web tutorials I have bookmarked, learn how to cut and paste, and run the new system. 

Along the way, I noticed that around the house and around town the battery did seem to be losing a charge.Not traveling, so no problem to put on the charger. And it looks like a rollback to 2.2 might be in order - or keeping the charger handy.
Gearlog.com suggests that hopefully we’ll be seeing a 3.1 version of the software soon that addresses most or all of these problems.

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Keynote Production Tour

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Blu-ray on Track but Stalled

by Andrew McCaskey

No Surprise: Still more HD-DVD players

A few months ago, we reported the words of a senior Samsung executive that “Blu-ray will be gone in five years”. There are more HD-DVD players than Blu-ray players in American homes (thanks in no small measure to Walmart’s blowout of Toshiba boxes at prices less than $200 during the final days of the epic battle, now 18 months settled.

The real story is that neither the Blu-Ray camp or Toshiba will turn out to be the winners. Anemic sales of Blu-ray disks are as much due to the pricing policies and the recession as to the rapid growth of downloadable content and streamed content, about to sweep away any form of physical distribution. It may be that Toshiba will have the last laugh - licking their wounds but moving on to more profitable ventures, as Sony and the rest try to move premium priced content wrappers of atoms, when bits are so much lighter. And, with the right licensing model, ever so more profitable.

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Fusion IO at HP Tech Forum

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Getting Back on Track

by Andrew McCaskey
Back this Week

One of the hard choices that I had to make last week with the entire SDRNews operation deployed in Las Vegas for the HP Technology Forum, was to drop the episode of CMS Weekly from the production schedule. Purely due to limitations such as 24 hours/day

It’s a rare week indeed that we miss production on a daily episode of SDRNews. My goal, as always, is to provide listeners with a service that is noted ( if not for flash for production value) , at least for consistency and dependability. I had hoped to keep that record intact in the CMSWeekly production, but it was not to be. Long term listeners know that I will be pushing the envelope from time to time and have lived through a number of “seemed like a good idea at the time” ventures to ‘improve’ - but that things level out over the long haul.

CMSWeekly will resume this week, probably for air date on Tuesday. And we should shortly get back on track with show notes for SDRNews as well. Meantime ,enjoy the videos from HPTF !

Thanks for your patience.

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Opera Browser UNITE Web Server

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