It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

We're counting down the final days to the June 12 transition to digital broadcast television. There has been added urgency to the effort because Nielsen reports that Austin is one of the worst prepared cities in the nation.

The May 24 DTV report reports that 4.81% of Austin-area households are unprepared, as compared to 2.66% nationwide. That means approximately 30,000 central Texas households could lose television reception when the transition occurs.

This isn't just about watching American Idol and Conan O'Brien. It's a serious public safety matter. Television remains the most widely used resource for important news and information, such as current weather conditions. In the event of emergency, necessary information may not reach households cut off in the transition.

Six months ago the media was full of stories about DTV. Now, not so much. I talked to a major media reporter yesterday, and he told me his readers are pretty sick of hearing about it.

Time-Warner Austin has announced that later this year, it will implement a tiered set of bandwidth caps for its broadband customers. That's been a controversial and hotly debated proposal. I see some things frequently mentioned in the debate that I think are distracting, not helpful.

First, I see people frequently trying to draw a parallel between broadband tiers and cell phone usage plans. This makes sense only on a superficial level. Yes, in both cases you buy a certain amount and pay extra when you go over.

This analog does not hold up under scrutiny. The usage patterns of cell phones are pretty stable. There continues to be some migration away from landline service and towards online (VOIP) services, but for most of us our cell phone usage a year from now won't be that much different from what we do today.

This is completely untrue for broadband usage. New, innovative services are being created as we speak. Our broadband usage patterns may be radically different a year from now than they are today. Broadband caps lock in current usage patterns, which is detrimental to innovation.

One of the biggest problems with Twitter is that a single blathering user can monopolize the discussion. This week, Facebook rolled out a new home page design. In this change, they introduced this Twitter misfeature to Facebook.

Conventional Twitter presentation (such as your personal landing page) is a zero-sum game. (That's a mathematical term that says for every winner there is a loser.) Each "tweet" update you post on Twitter pushes somebody else's update off the page. Each time you win a space on the page, somebody else loses theirs. This means that a single blathering user can displace numerous other people.

The problem is compounded by the realization that the value of a person's updates often are inversely proportional to the frequency of their updates. Now I'm in the hall; Now I'm in the room; Speaker A said, 'this'; Speaker B said, 'that'. Thus not only do blatherers displace a proportionate number of other people's messages, they often do so with low value messages.

When I heard that Apple announced it was dropping DRM from music in the iTunes store, my first response was to say, "Yay!" My second was to pat myself on the back.

That's because the Apple announcement may end up revolutionizing the music format of choice. Right now, it's MP3. Thanks to Apple's decision to make their music portable and copyable, it may change to AAC, the format used by the iTunes store.

Several years ago, I ripped all my music CDs, about 450 of them. It was a laborious and tedious task. It was complicated by my decision to first rip to a lossless FLAC format and then transcode to MP3. The transcoding part was automatic, but took a very long time; it's a computationally intensive process. It would have been a lot easier to just rip to MP3.