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Freshjerky.com. jerky Headed this week to the Grand Canyon in our old Winnebago RV (now minus mice, we think) Mary Alyce, the boys and I stopped outside Kingman, Arizona at this place, freshjerky.com, managed by Gus, whom you'll find …


I, Cringely - http://www.cringely.com/

Headed this week to the Grand Canyon in our old Winnebago RV (now minus mice, we think) Mary Alyce, the boys and I stopped outside Kingman, Arizona at this place, freshjerky.com, managed by Gus, whom you’ll find pictured below, handsome devil that he is.  And that’s Mary Alyce taking pictures of the boys in the Freshjerky parking lot at left.

Just as the sign says, Freshjerky has a limited product selection — various kinds of meat jerky including buffalo; honey (minus “expanders,” whatever those are); olives; nuts, and cold drinks.  Everything is very good for what it is and nothing is particularly cheap.  Nobody goes to Freshjerky, for example, to buy cheap jerky.  That’s why God invented truck stops.

But Freshjerky is a terrific example of American enterprise and how easy it can be to find a niche in our enormous and varied consumer economy.  I found it hard to believe at first that people would really be drawn to such a place (Mary Alyce is the jerky fan in our family). And from one look at Gus, handing out tiny bites of cowboy jerky to lure customers, they aren’t drawn by his innate sex appeal.

So how is the company doing?  Just fine, thanks, though most of the sales are online — about $2 million per year.  The recession has had no significant impact yet on Freshjerky sales, according to Gus.

This is, in a way, a story similar to Parrot Secrets, which caused such a furor in this space a few months ago.  Freshjerky is perfectly mundane. There is nothing Gus does that any of us couldn’t do as well — nothing.  But he’s the guy selling $2 million per year online from a quarter acre beside the highway outside Kingman, Arizona, and we aren’t.

Heck, if Gus can do it why can’t we all?

Well we can.  And in the current recession, as more jobs are lost and people become desperate for work, more of us should try channeling our internal Gus.  We could make our own declarations of indendence by coming up with our own something good to sell.

I have a mouse in my RV.  Or as many correspondents have told me I have MICE in my RV, because the concept of a solitary mouse is beyond their considerable experience.  This month my wife, three young sons and I (and of course the mice) are in California, mainly touring in our 1996 Winnebago.  We tour, we fix, then tour some more. The old Winnie was never built for 107-degree desert temperatures and neither was I.  So since we’re broken-down waiting (again) for the fixit man to come, I think this might be a good time to update my readers on a few old projects.

But first let me say that in an RV that has both Verizon and AT&T wireless data service, in California at least, Verizon is better — substantially better.  More bars in more places, indeed!

1) Whatever happened to NerdTV?  We made a season for PBS back in 2005-2006 then shot a second season in 2007 that was never aired because of pesky ownership issues and people still wanting to be paid.  The show itself has morphed a bit and will reappear with a new name and an exciting new weekly format this fall as a co-production with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  It will be available for streaming online and may appear in some form on television, too, possibly even with PBS.  Look for an announcement on this soon.  And if your big-to-bigger company wants to sponsor the first season (36 shows!) let’s talk. But I’ll warn you this is a professional production that isn’t cheap to make and we’d prefer a single sponsor.  Still, as the old shows continue to show, the content ought to be timeless.

2) And what happened to Bob’s disk drive project with its stainless steel foil platters?  The idea, remember, was to dramatically reduce the rotating mass with several attendant advantages: 1) lower cost; 2) dramatically lower power; 3) higher performance, and; 4) greater shock resistance.  An iPod with this new type of drive ought to easily run 3-4 times longer on the same battery.  A data center could see storage-related power consumption decrease by up to 85 percent.

Yeah, but what happened?

It took time to develop the stainless steel foil, itself.  Most of the other parts come straight from any disk drive maker’s parts bin but the foil required lots and lots of R&D which was done primarily for nothing — no money — which means it took longer than we would have liked.  But that work is now pretty much complete, the foil is indeed smoother-than-smooth, and a pilot production plant is being built in Japan thanks to the recent entry of a Silicon Valley investor whose name you would recognize.  Look for licensed products to appear starting in 2010.  Interestingly improvements in flash drive technology haven’t particularly hurt the market opportunity, either, since the foil is WAY cheaper and video applications are driving mobile storage requirements up faster than flash prices are coming down.

3) Finally, whatever happened to my plan to land rovers on the Moon?  Am I ambitious or what?

The Moon project, which was originally intended to vie for the $20 million Google Lunar X-Prize, has been moving forward slowly but quietly.  It’s a little harder to do, you see, when there isn’t a $20 million payday at the end, but it became quickly clear to us that there is unlikely to be any winner of that Google prize in the five years ending in 2012 as the contest is currently structured.

Team Cringely, on the other hand, still expects to reach the Moon by 2011 and will by fall have a number of announcements on that front including major technical alliances, major corporate sponsorships, and a global TV deal.  And this is no stunt: we’re working with NASA’s Goddard Space Center to answer a long list of important scientific questions until we use-up our 24th and last rover.

So it’s a busy summer, but mainly we’re wondering now if the 107-degree heat will drive out those mice?

There was a minor flap in tech news last week when the CEO of Activision, a huge video game company, called on Sony to drop the price of its PlayStation 3 game console, suggesting that if Sony didn’t follow this advice Activision would consider withdrawing support for the game platform altogether.  I hardly expect Activision to withdraw its PS3 support, nor do I expect Sony to dramatically reduce the price of systems that have already effectively dropped 20 percent or more in Sony’s top market, the U.S., because of the weak dollar. To the astonishment of hard-core gamers, in fact, I’d suggest that this little drama has nothing to do with game sales or games at all, but is instead directed at the Blu-Ray optical disk drive inside every PS3.  The dude from Activision, sensing blood in the water, is trying to look like a shark, for there is growing sentiment in the industry that Blu-Ray, as it was originally intended, is a failure.

How can that be?  Wasn’t it just a year ago that Blu-Ray, with its greater data capacity, triumphed over the opposing HD-DVD standard?  Well promises were made to achieve that victory and now it appears promises may have been broken.

Understand that the success or failure of Blu-Ray has little to do with games and everything to do with movies.  Two historical events informed the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.  First was the epic and costly 1980‘s competition between the BetaMax and VHS tape cassette standards.  Second was the triumphant succession of DVD over VHS, when we all replaced our tape libraries with disks, gladly paying anew for what we already owned, buying every Hollywood exec a new Mercedes in the process.

Re-fighting the battle between BetaMax and VHS was something the industry wanted to avoid when it came to an emerging HD video standard,  There had been for a moment such a potential conflict for DVD but the opposing forces were brought to a compromise by the movie studios, themselves, and a single technical standard emerged, pumping billions into the movie business as a result.  That’s the same goal that all sides had in the HD video fight — to get it over with quickly and get us all replacing our video libraries with HD.

According to Hollywood insiders who speak with me, the HD video battle was again decided by the studios when Disney and 20th Century Fox went with Blu-Ray in 2008.  The leader in that decision was reportedly Disney, which had 35 animated classic films it envisioned bringing to market in a data rich format with lots of extra material — so much material and games that HD-DVD, with its lower capacity, couldn’t hold it all on a single disk.  So it was Blu-Ray’s greater capacity that swayed Disney, along with Sony’s promise that the rampant success of PS3 game machines would quickly put Blu-Ray drives in most American living rooms.

The Disney fantasy was that Blu-Ray would triumph, PS3s would be everywhere, and American families would, all over again, buy enhanced copies of the 35 animated classics, sending up to $7 billion to Disney.

Well so far it hasn’t happened.

Yes, there are millions of PS3s in use, but millions more xBox360s and Nintendo Wii’s.  PlayStation 3 is the third-best-selling next-gen game console — third out of three, which is the wrong place to be for any competing tech standard that hopes to dominate.  Game consoles that have already been on the market for a year or more don’t suddenly win from behind like Seabiscuit.  Sony sells more PS2s still than PS3s.  PS3 was a year late to market, had supply problems, fewer game titles, and those titles usually cost a bit more than on other platforms.  But what really killed it for the movie studios was something completely different and unanticipated — the need for an HDTV to go with each PS3 Blu-Ray player.

Both the VCR and DVD revolutions required that just a single revolutionary (in the case of DVD, evolutionary) product be successful.  Your TV remained the same.  You can play a DVD on a DuMont black & white TV set from 1956, but Blu-Ray — unless you are not taking advantage of any of its, well, advantages — requires a whole new TV.  The chances of people buying simultaneously an HDTV AND a PS3 were lower and so was the dual penetration with the result that Blu-Ray disk sales, while not terrible, are also not material, yet, to the movie industry.  And the question now is whether they ever will be material?

Blu-Ray will survive, but will it be just for cinephiles?  That depends on how the 1080p download market evolves (which is why Apple has yet to sell a computer with a Blu-Ray disk installed, seeing it as eventual channel conflict with iTunes) or whether a new HD-DVD standard will emerge to compete again with Blu-Ray.

And don’t forget the impact of up-converting progressive-scan DVD players, which even Sony sells: I just bought one for $44.77 at Wal-Mart and driving the 720p display in my RV makes a standard-definition DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory look amazingly good.  Not good enough for a cinephile, but that’s five percent of the video market, tops.

Yes, Blu-Ray is better, but for many people the incentives aren’t there, which leaves us still looking for a higher-density data standard that ideally costs less than Blu-Ray. That particular need, especially in the PC industry, never went away.

This alternate standard is coming, I’m sure, and don’t be surprised if it turns out to be pretty much the same HD-DVD that lost-out a year ago, though this time probably not under the Toshiba brand.  It would make a superior archival platform and might even be used for HD video, too.  Retooling a factory to stamp HD-DVDs costs millions less than upgrading to Blu-Ray and the eventual disks are significantly cheaper.

But that The Making of Bambi featurette may have to go.

Rodney, an artist/poet/landscaper who also happens to be my wife’s old boyfriend, got his mobile phone bill the other day and was shocked to see that Echo, his 16 year-old daughter, had the month before sent or received more than 14,000 SMS text messages from her mobile phone.  Yes, Echo has unlimited texting, but among her friends this behavior isn’t unusual and it says a lot about how media habits — good and bad — are changing in our culture.

If a typical month has 30 days that’s 720 hours, a third of which we’ll guess Echo spends asleep, giving her 480 hours of texting time per month.  Fourteen thousand texts (the number was actually higher, but we’ll round it down for simplicity) divided into 480 hours is about 29 texts per hour or about one every two minutes.  Since texting is usually a binary activity (the texter sends a text for every text they receive) we can guess that Echo writes about 7,000 text messages per month, with writing probably taking twice as much time as reading.  Half an hour at the mall with a stopwatch told me the average teenage SMS message takes about 20 seconds to type (if you can call it typing) suggesting that Echo is spending about a quarter of her waking time on texting.

According to both Neilsen and the Pew Internet Life Project, Echo is an outlier, a user of texting at prodigious levels beyond her peers.  A Neilsen study from the second quarter of 2008, for example, says that mobile phone users age 13-17 send or receive an average of 1742 texts per month, which would only require 7.25 hours by my reckoning.  So Echo is an outlier, but on the other hand her data is fresher and texting IS rising at a rapid pace.

So who cares?  Advertisers care.  Kids who are texting aren’t attending to TV ads while they are doing it, nor are they reading magazines or newspapers (what are those?). So advertising is coming quickly to SMS.

TV executives care.  Remember those words “standard text messaging rates apply” at the end of every American Idol episode?  Well for reality television, texting means revenue.  Idol averages 30 million voters per week of which a quarter are using SMS that reportedly yields a nickel per vote to the TV producers.  Seven and a half million messages per week and 12 weeks of voting yields another $4.5 million per season for Simon and the gang.

Educators care because texting competes with other activities like paying attention at school and doing homework.  Keeping kids from texting in school is almost impossible.

To really understand the Echo phenomenon, though, you have to appreciate that she’s a very pretty girl living in a semi-rural area where kids like to complain that there isn’t anything to do.  So they gossip. If teens twittered, which studies show they don’t, Echo would be a twitterer because her peers are interested in her life.  And THAT’s what really makes her an outlier, because Echo is an opinion leader and a trend-setter and SMS — generally a one-to-one technology — isn’t well-suited for that.  So the poor girl has to work really hard to keep all her friends informed, using an antiquated interpersonal communication technology as an ad hoc social network.

What’s most interesting to me about this phenomenon is the part about teens not twittering.  All the studies show that’s true but don’t seem to look for causality.  They miss the simple point that twittering is public behavior (one-way at that!) and texting is private and bi-directional.  An adult or a teen celebrity might twitter but most regular kids see what they are communicating as too private to share with anyone other than the person for whom it is intended, much less any old creep who chooses to subscribe.  And divas like Echo, who might happily embrace a more public channel, are trapped by the tools of their audience.

Girls age 13-17 are interested in relationships (who likes who) and boys age 13-17, who would normally be interested more in things, also happen to be generally obsessed with girls age 13-17, effectively dragging boys into the sway of SMS, too, sustaining an industry.

There’s clearly a new product opportunity in here, somewhere.

Andy Hertzfeld tells how Steve Jobs used to argue for a faster-booting Macintosh citing the man-years and lives it would save.  But that’s nothing compared to the impact some twitter-like hybrid SMS product would have for a girl like Echo.  It could change her life.  Maybe even free up enough time for her to get into Duke.

And as the central node in an Idol-like SMS network, her popularity might even cover some of that Duke tuition, too.

Intel last week bought for $884 million Wind River Systems, a venerable embedded operating system company — yet another of the chip giant’s recent forays into software. The reason for this purchase is both simple and grand — to help Intel vertically integrate and to further its Linux ambitions.  Intel’s ultimate target with this purchase is Microsoft.  It’s all about kicking Redmond out of the netbook business.

Netbooks are the big hardware success of 2009 and most are powered by Intel Atom processors.  The problem with PC’s in general and netbooks in particular is that they aren’t very profitable for Intel campared to the good old days.  Microsoft makes more profit from every Windows PC sold than does the PC manufacturer and LOTS more profit than Intel makes despite its massively dominant market share in microprocessors.  And with Netbooks retailing under $400, compared to Microsoft Intel makes hardly any profit at all.  So Microsoft has to die.

This is a huge change for Intel, which has for decades acted as Microsoft’s bitch, doing pretty much whatever Redmond demanded for fear of being written-out of the next Windows PC hardware spec in favor of AMD or even IBM.  But that was the old Microsoft.  The Microsoft of today isn’t nearly as powerful, whether they yet know it or not.

Netbooks and mobile handsets are the first products from Intel’s Linux strategy.  But Intel’s Linux platform — called Moblin — can be extended to the desktop as a direct competitor to Windows 7 if the company finds success in the netbook space.  Microsoft isn’t stupid, so of course there is a huge battle brewing.

Here’s the problem for Intel: the company lacks key software capabilities despite having more than 5000 software engineers on staff. This is true especially for system software.

Intel’s new strategy (now 3-4 years old) is to be a platform company rather than a processor company. To become a platform company, Intel needs both silicon and low level software to tie all those pieces together.

Think about Intel’s Centrino as a platform. Centrino has: 1) a low-power processor; 2) a wireless chip, and; 3) software to manage wifi/wireline connections. Intel makes more money selling these three parts together as the Centrino brand and less when they sell the individual pieces. So software to Intel is glue to connect chips together and maximize revenue.

New chips at Intel require more system software (firmware) than Intel ever anticipated. For example: Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) requires firmware to wake up chips and apply patches when the computer is sleeping. This is true for both virtualization and security. In recent months Intel has stumbled delivering some key platform technologies simply because the firmware wasn’t ready.

Now Intel is searching for the next wave of applications for non-PC (typically embedded) computing devices — autos, healthcare, gaming to name a few. All these non-PC based applications will require even more system software capabilities.

Intel’s efforts with the Atom processor are beginning to pay off. They have the right process technology to produce Atoms at a low price. But the market is not paying much for Atom and Intel is at risk of cannibalizing its traditional markets with OEMs designing Atom-based netbooks that consumers buy instead of more profitable notebooks. In this environment Microsoft is not helping, since Windows makes netbooks more expensive and limits the profitability of both the PC maker and Intel, which is essentially making a netbook-on-chip.

Moblin is Intel’s answer to Windows – an Open Source Linux entirely funded by Intel.

Moblin is also Intel’s answer to Google’s Android operating system.  Since Android is also Open Source and free, Intel might have relied solely on Google to take on Microsoft.  But Intel as a platform company is too strategic to rely on any third party, even Google — hence Moblin.

The Wind River acquisition is Intel’s $884 million acknowledgement both that Moblin is strategic for the company AND that the Linux campaign isn’t going as well as Intel would like.  Wind River, as a major force in embedded software, will quickly move Moblin into a variety of non-PC devices while also giving Intel more of the low-level software expertise that it has so sorely needed.  If it works, we’ll see Moblin everywhere in 18-24 months.  If it works really well, we’ll see Intel challenging Microsoft on servers and desktops, too.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini is determined not to be anybody’s bitch.

There was lots of good discussion last time about cyber warfare, cyber security, and U.S. policy, but what most respondents seemed to miss was the international nature of the IT business — all the outsourcing and offshoring that we were told was so great — and its implications for U.S. security.  The upshot is that any U.S. cyber warfare czar will have to effectively function as a WORLD cyber warfare czar, a fact that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations have yet been willing to embrace, at least in public.

Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when  Pakistan takes down the Internet in India?  Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades.  There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive.  The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

And with what effect on the U.S.?  It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen.  A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories.  And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents.

You can have 1000 safe deposit boxes with only three holding anything of real value, but that obfuscation is meaningless if the target is ALL safety deposit boxes.

To this point cyber security conferences tend to concentrate on intelligence (probing attacks to learn about a potential enemy, gather information and map defenses) and tactical deployment (using that intelligence information to blind, disable, or defend some network resources in what’s usually perceived as an encounter lasting hours).  There is little to no regard for strategic use of cyber warfare as in the India-Pakistan example or the nuking of source code libraries.  We don’t talk about it because it is too horrific, not because it can’t happen.

The result, of course, is that any major power has to be concerned about the cyber security of all its technology partners, which over the last decade has come to include a lot of Third World nations.  Try to do a security audit of Argentina or Bangladesh and see what nightmare is unveiled.  Yet this is exactly where major international companies are deploying more and more technical resources.

The military answer of course is to isolate network traffic, as many readers have suggested.  But how do you enforce that in other countries?  And how effective is it at all against a strategic attack on essentially commercial resources?  Not very.

This is not a battle but a war and wars take a long time to prepare for and wage.  As readers have pointed out we’re not just concerned with malware and viruses but even hardware-based attacks. Who knows if that flash memory from Malaysia or that router card from Taiwan is compromised?  Who CAN know?  And if you’ve found one hardware exploit in a product does that mean you’ve found all that are there?  Hardly.

One point of view is that this makes both old tech and traditional firepower more valuable.  Analog systems, for example, are unlikely to be compromised by digital exploits. And 2000-pound bombs are a pretty darned effective response to a cyber attack IF you can clearly identify the attacker and figure out where to drop the bombs.  Both effects tend to neutralize the effect of advanced systems, making Syria a more effective opponent against Israel, AND push superpowers toward brandishing their biggest guns — nuclear weapons.

So cyber warfare is internationally destabilizing in whole new ways with the world being dramatically less safe as a result.  This works mainly to the advantage of the bad guys.

Then there’s the Code God Effect — the potential strategic impact of a single programmer with commanding skills.  That very guy or gal who typically is the creative heart of an entire company (but they never admit it) because he is the equivalent of 100 average coders can be the secret weapon in a cyber war, too.  And the distribution of such megabrains is random enough that to say one or more aren’t working right now in North Korea would be a bad bet — one that a nation like the United States would be unwise to make.

We see the Code God Effect happening right now with publicized Chinese Internet incursions and those are just amateurs: the real damage is being done by much more skillful players we have yet to even detect.

What this means for any major power is that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are and that power is even less across borders.  There isn’t a U.S. agency I know of — ANY agency — that is prepared to win such a war against a clever and determined opponent of almost any size.

If the game is U.S. versus Albania, who wins?  I don’t know.

We need new tools and new weapons.  We need to find ways of changing the battlefield to negate opponents (this is HUGE), not just shooting back.  We need leadership that understands this.  Maybe President Obama understands it, maybe not.  He hasn’t demonstrated yet that he does, at least not to me.

Let’s hope that’s just part of an incredibly clever master plan.

Yeah, right.

Billy Mitchell was an iconoclastic American military airman from the early 20th century.  He was a firm believer in military air power and was ordered court-martialed in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge for criticizing his military superiors over the issue.  My kind of guy. Gary Cooper played Mitchell in a 1955 movie, by which time everyone knew he had been right all along.  My fear is that when it comes to cyber warfare there is no Billy Mitchell today in Washington.

Cyber warfare was big news last week.  President Obama said he would name a cyber warfare czar to be a single point of contact on the issue for his Administration and that person would have direct access to the President.

If only that were true, but it isn’t, and the U.S. will be endangered as a result.

Billy Mitchell’s argument was that aircraft would come to play a huge role in modern warfare, supplanting battleships at sea and artillery on the ground. Air power was so important, Mitchell argued, that there should be a single air service to develop and deploy aircraft as needed in any war.  This still hasn’t fully happened, of course, though Mitchell’s work did directly lead to the creation of the U.S. Air Force in 1947 — 22 years and one world war after his court-martial for suggesting it in the first place.

The problem with Obama’s cyber czar is that the Administration is CALLING the position a priority but not MAKING it one.  The position has in some accounts been called a “member” of the National Security Council, but the czar is also said to “report” to both the Director of National Intelligence and to the President’s Senior Economic Adviser.  Well you can’t be ON the council and also REPORT to those guys — one of whom is on the council and the other is allowed to drop in if he feels like it.

In short, this is an NSC staff job.

Obama said the czar would have “direct access” to him, but didn’t say how.  At best I think they’ll pass in the corridor.

This is no czar.  That’s literally the case, of course, because nobody has yet been hired for the job.  But it is also the case that the job will — as the NSC is organized — not have the power needed to do what must be done.  Czars are dictators; this guy can only recommend and even then he’ll be recommending to people who may not then bother to inform the President.

If the cyber warfare czar is, in fact, a czar, the first thing he or she should do is give himself a promotion, which won’t happen.

In the meantime there are competing interests at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and possibly elsewhere.  Each of these agencies is building its own cyber warfare capability, each with a different agenda both stated and real.  The stated agendas are to play either cyber defense or offense.  The actual agendas are to protect departmental turf from the new cyber warfare czar, to undermine him or her.

Let’s go back to Billy Mitchell for a moment and think about how the technology of aerial warfare came to be in his era.  Most of the military services developed their own air capability as lip service to the idea while actually protecting major — and antiquated — weapon systems.  The U.S. Navy bought some planes and built some aircraft carriers, but not at the expense of battleships.  Even when naval air power came to the fore during World War II it was almost an accident, since the only surviving capital ships in the Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor were aircraft carriers, the battleships having for the most part been destroyed.  So the Navy had to rely on air power since that’s the only power it still had.

They weren’t smart at all, just lucky.

It is rare in U.S. military history for a technological innovation to come down on our side.  That’s because as self-designated good guys we are generally playing defense and defense doesn’t usually get the cool new toys.  It’s only in the U.S. development of nuclear weapons that we got a jump on the rest of the world — a jump that put us firmly in control for half a century (now past).

We are woefully unprepared for cyber warfare mainly because the military doesn’t want to lose funding for its other weapons — weapons that are likely to be rendered unusable or, worse still, actually used against us in a cyber attack.

Yes, it is that bad.

The best position here is to make cyber warfare a real priority, give the cyber czar some actual authority, and have him or her report to the President.  Otherwise the lessons of Billy Mitchell will have been forgotten and our first cyber war could be our last.

The Government Accountability Office, a Federal watchdog agency, reported on May 7th that the Global Positioning System of satellites used for navigation and many other business and scientific purposes as well as for proving that your teenage son was actually driving down the Interstate at 100 miles-per-hour last Thursday night when he claimed to be bowling, well that satellite system is in danger of becoming unusable because satellites are not being replaced quickly enough by the U.S. Air Force.

Only it isn’t true.

Right now on Google News you can find more than 400 stories all saying the same thing with varying degrees of alarm.  The Air Force is three years late in launching a new generation of GPS satellites.  The replacement program is over-budget by more than $700 million.  The whole mess has been incompetently run and ought to be fixed.  All this is true.  What isn’t true is that it matters very much to the real world operation of the GPS system or its users.

The GPS system has 31 satellites in orbit right now, the oldest of which has been operating since 1990.  For the system to work perfectly it must have 24 or more satellites functioning.  The GAO says it is only 80 percent certain that the Air Force can maintain full coverage before replacement satellites can be launched.  This lack of confidence is not based strictly on the idea that eight or more satellites will go dark over the next couple years, but that some undetermined number of satellites will go dark, the Air Force will make no progress in replacing them, and that the remaining satellites will be unable, for some reason, to be moved into new positions, filling gaps in coverage.  That’s quite a combination of improbable events and makes me very suspicious of the 80 percent number.

For the GPS system to work requires that the receiver in your car, airplane or iPhone  be able to simultaneously track at least three satellites (four if you require altitude information).  If your receiver can show the satellites it is tracking (many can) you’ll see the number in sight is usually five to seven satellites with the rest being over the horizon and out of view.

If your GPS equipment was purchased in the last couple years it probably makes use of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), which is a system of ground stations and two geosynchronous satellites that help your receiver correct for ionospheric variations that can slightly degrade GPS performance. Without WAAS your GPS is only accurate to 7.6 meters.  With WAAS accuracy is about one meter.  The reason we care about this is because GPS is used now to land airplanes and the difference between 3.8 meters above the runway and 3.8 meters below the runway could ruin your whole day.

In addition to improving GPS accuracy over North America (and just North America — there are different systems for Europe and Japan), WAAS also effectively adds two virtual satellites to the GPS constellation.  These are the two geosynchronous reporting satellites, which for ease of use in the system are treated by receivers like regular GPS satellites except they for some reason don’t seem to move in the sky.  For WAAS-enabled GPS receivers, then, it is possible to maintain acceptable accuracy with only ONE (not three) of the regular GPS satellites in view.

The chances of the GPS system going down are very remote — FAR lower than the 20 percent suggested by the GAO.  That’s because the GAO ignored completely in its analysis the implications of WAAS.

So what’s going on here?  Why is this even a story?

The Air Force is late and over budget and the GAO wants to make a point of that.  The best way to make that point is by putting the technical story in the worst possible light, which the GAO has done to an extreme that I think is excessive.  This is just political infighting.

What’s worse, though, are those 400+ news stories that miss the point entirely.  Where is a professional and questioning press?  It looks to me like 400+ media outlets rewrote the GAO press release and left it at that, giving-in to the fear-mongering that has become the way government policy is promoted these days.

Some stories quoted experts saying a failure isn’t likely.  Some stories said the GAO likely has a non-technical agenda.  But I couldn’t find any stories that put the whole thing together and questioned whether there was any news value at all.

We need smarter, better-informed, and less gullible reporters.  THAT’s the story.

My last column generated a lively debate on the prospects for various business and technical options for the delivery of Internet TV so it makes sense to continue this topic and build it into a more full-featured model.  I used to write quite a bit about this back when I was trying to get NerdTV going.  The core of what I’ll write here can be found in a couple dozen columns from back then — columns that would seem to have been for the most part forgotten given the direction last week’s discussion took.  You see the future of television IS Internet television.  There is no other in sight.

No business or technology exists in a vacuum.  They all have customers, users, competitors, and make use of resources in an environment that is not one of total abundance.  This means that if there is going to be something like television in the future it is going to adapt to the distribution model that offers the highest price/performance, which is to say the highest performance for the lowest cost.  That is not how one would traditionally describe the Internet, but then times are changing.

Whatever country you live in there are generally four models for live entertainment video distribution — broadcast, cable, satellite, and Internet.

Broadcast is a limited local resource and therefore more highly regulated than the others but it has traditionally featured the lowest cost per marginal user.  That means it costs a lot to build and maintain a TV station but additional viewers within the service area can be added pretty much for free.

Cable offers more channel capacity than does broadcast but requires building a distribution network that’s fairly expensive.  While one could imagine a cable TV “station,” the way the industry has grown is through cable operators becoming content aggregators offering many services over their expensive networks.  That’s the most efficient way for cable companies to serve the broadest audience and the only way that enables them to sell extra-cost services like pay-per-view, premium movie channels or, indeed, Internet service.  Remember, though, that cable operators pay for nearly all of the content they carry, which is different from broadcast, where a lot of content is free to the broadcaster and some content even comes with money attached.

Satellite operators pay for their content, too.  Satellite initially used wireless technology to offer cable content in rural areas where it was too expensive to build a wired network.  Having gained economies of scale in the rural markets cable couldn’t compete for, satellite has come to town competing generally on price.  But satellite offers no practical Internet service.  I know there are some and I tried one years ago (Starband) but they don’t work well.

Internet TV is different from all these others.  It began as a parasite on telephone and cable networks so the cost of building the network generally wasn’t there, having already been covered for the most part by those earlier services.  Internet TV is less of a network than a conduit; at present the Internet Service Providers don’t pay for video content but then neither do they get paid for it.  Yet this common carrier attribute also makes Internet service often more profitable for telcos and cable companies than the core services those companies were established to provide.  Whatever you pay for Internet service, it is mainly profit for your ISP.

The important lesson to learn when it comes to these competitive services is that the first three — broadcast, cable, and satellite — are all going up in cost to their providers while the cost of providing Internet service is going down.  In the USA, broadcast viewership is dropping, which means the cost per viewer is rising.  Same for cable where viewers are stagnant, viewership is declining (number of hours of viewing) and the cost of content is rising.  Satellite has been growing marginally but that could end at any moment and it shares the same content cost increases as cable.  Meanwhile Internet service just gets faster and cheaper thanks to a Moore’s Law double whammy.

Remember Moore’s Law works in two ways.  It makes digital products ever cheaper AND ever more powerful.  This has profound meaning for Internet TV because it continually increases the bandwidth we can get for the same dollar while giving our devices the capability to do even more with the same bandwidth.

Here’s an example.  My primary Internet connection is an 8 megabit-per-second business cable line with a service level agreement and static IP addresses.  I pay more than you do but then I get more, too, though even my service is crap compared to what you can get in Japan, Korea, and much of Europe.  My primary computer WAS a Mac Pro G5/1.6 circa 2004.  I should have replaced the G5 a couple years ago, I know, but my kids are in private schools and I keep buying airplane parts. I finally replaced the G5 last week, though, with a dual-core Mac Mini 2.0.  Both the old and new computers had four gigs of RAM.  Though my Internet connection can easily carry one or more 1080p H.264 video streams, there is no way that old G5 (which cost me $1999 in 2004 dollars) could play it.  It didn’t do much better with 720p for that matter.  But the $750 Mini (small drive but lots of RAM) can easily decode 1080p.

This is the trend, then: our available bandwidth will go up while our devices will become more powerful, making better use of the bandwidth.  The result, as always with Moore’s Law, is either better services or lower total cost or maybe a little of both.

What this means for the future of television is that we’re approaching a point where Internet service will equal and then be lower than the marginal per-viewer cost of the broadcast TV model.  This crossover will inevitably happen with the only question being when. That’s a function of bandwidth costs decreasing at 50 percent per year and processing power increasing at 50 percent per year.  My calculations suggest the crossover will happen around 2015, which used to seem like a long time away but no longer does.

When Internet TV becomes dramatically, unequivocally, and inexorably cheaper than the other three distribution models, those other models will quickly go away.  That’s why I argued in PBS meetings to forget about spending $1.8 billion to upgrade local stations for digital TV and instead sell or lease that spectrum for commercial data use and throw the resulting $3 billion (lease revenue plus the $1.8 billion savings) into rebuilding the network solely as an Internet service.

Nobody listened.

So there is a cliff rapidly approaching for television.  Five years from now local TV stations will have the same complaints that local newspapers have today as many of them go out of business.  Cable TV operators will become ISPs, period.  Phone companies will be ISPs, too, and analog voice service will be gone completely.  The regulatory implications of these changes should be interesting.

Who, then, will be the players in this future TV?  For the most part they will be the content providers, which probably doesn’t mean traditional networks.  And the networks know this, by the way. Hulu.com isn’t called NBCFoxABC.com and TV.com isn’t called cbs.com for a reason. Networks will go away.

But content will endure, bringing new value to I Love Lucy episodes and almost anything else people like to watch.

The TV networks are throwing their lot together.  CBS chairman Sumner Redstone will come to his senses one day and merge tv.com into Hulu, I am sure.  Their big competitors will be Google, Apple, and a player yet to be even founded (definitely NOT Yahoo OR Microsoft).

Google will differentiate itself as always through technology.  Those shipping container data centers I first wrote about in 2005 exist not just because they are easy to stack inside big Google plants.  Why botehr with weatherproof containers if they are to be used exclusive indoors? Because they are even easier to put in the parking lot at the telephone company central office or at the cable company head-end, both of which will by then be strictly ISPs.  Google will proxy content at every major ISP in America.  And they’ll do this because Google has no idea what people want to watch on TV, nor do they particularly care.

Apple, on the other hand, cares.  Following the content development scheme I laid out last time Apple will attempt to become the dominant content provider to the 20 percent of the market that spends 80 percent of the money, with margins high enough to use Google distribution and still come out ahead, leaving to Page and Brin the 80 percent of content that generates 20 percent of revenue.

But wait, isn’t Apple just a maker of hardware?  Don’t they do iTunes just to sell iPods?

No.

Apple is a software company that has traditionally packaged its software in attractive hardware boxes.  The fact that any new Mac is essentially a Windows computer proves that.  But price points have been eroding in every hardware category and will continue to do so.  Microsoft right now makes more profit from every Windows PC than does the maker of that PC.  Apple is not immune to this trend.  So the company needs to find ways to sell more and more software.

Content is software.  TV is software.  And the great thing about entertainment is that it is software we can be induced under some circumstances to buy over and over again like those teenage girls who paid to see Titanic dozens of times.

What does that leave, then, for that player to be named later?  I’ll get to that next time.