My dad died less than a month ago (here is our tribute site to dad) and my sisters and I have been going through the house and his belongings. Besides removing anything of value and cleaning the place out, we have a relative staying there who also has uncovered some cool stuff like this old newspaper in a crawl space which I saw and went through yesterday. Dated Friday, April 2, 1982, it was the last of the Minneapolis Star evening editions which was then merged in to the morning paper to make today’s Minneapolis StarTribune.

Paging through this yellowed rag brought back a lot of memories of the role this newspaper played in our lives and yet it was another reminder of how the old makes way for the new. People, and information delivery methods, all outlive our usefulness as direct economic contributors. The history of mass media shows how the first “high circulation” newspaper was the London Times in the early 1800s, so the major daily newspaper is but a blip in the timeline of humanity. 

Bill Borsch

Thankfully, as evidenced by how wonderful it was for my dad to be around for twenty five years after he retired at 62 years of age, dad’s influence and ‘usefulness’ to everyone around him continued on.

But back to newspapers. A lot has been written about the demise of ‘traditional’ media like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. Most of us are aware that things are downtrending, some magazines have gone to digital only, and clearly newspapers are struggling. 

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For nearly a decade I’ve been using Skype and it’s now the ‘hub’ of my voice communications, especially since (in 2005) Skype enabled “SkypeIn” which allowed a user to select a phone number, pay a one-time $60 fee, and have that number “point” to Skype. This is especially useful when a landline or mobile phone user calls — or when I forward my direct landline or Google Voice number to Skype — but it misses one huge benefit achieved with Skype-to-Skype calling: high fidelity audio.

The sampling rate of the plain old telephone system (POTS) is 8kHz and Skype is usually sampling at 16kHz (depending on ones bandwidth at the time). But that tells only a small part of the story since Skype’s SILK codec — which can actually sample at 8, 12, 16 or 24 kHz and at a bitrate from 6 to 40 kbits/second — can scale up or down on the fly and give one the best possible call quality with available resources.

So imagine my delight to see this post at Skype today talking about an even newer codec called “Opus“, a “...totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.“

Why should you care?  [Read more...]

When major global companies like Sony decide that Comcast’s 250GB ‘cap‘ on data downloading makes entering a streaming video business not worthwhile, then you know things are coming to a head. From Ars Technica, “Sony: Internet video service on hold due to Comcast data cap“:

An executive from Sony said Monday that concerns about Comcast’s discriminatory data cap are giving the firm second thoughts about launching an Internet video service that would compete with cable and satellite TV services. In March, Comcast announced that video streamed to the Xbox from Comcast’s own video service would be exempted from the cable giant’s 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap.

Oops...we've gone over the 250GB 'cap' for the last 3 months! (Click for larger view)

I am growing SO weary of the obvious control Comcast is leveraging in order to protect their own cable TV franchise. Here are posts I’ve written about this in the past, pointing out how Comcast is a monopoly and how the 250GB ‘cap’ is there to ensure Comcast can deliver their video services and keep out competition. Any other explanation I’ve heard from Comcast or others to the contrary is a load of crap.  

As you can see from the Comcast Customer Central image to your right, my household has exceeded the Comcast 250GB cap three months in a row. Are we going to get shut down like this guy? Maybe (especially after this post). The kicker is that Comcast has always classified households like ours as “excessive use“.

I do spend a lot of money with Comcast every month: home TV; home internet; the quite fast business class 50/10 DOCSIS 3 service in my own firm. I also evangelize Comcast’s business class service to others and also run a Minnesota tech site called Minnov8 that would certainly serve as one helluva bully pulpit should I get cut off.

Fortunately I’m certain we’re atypical in our data use in our area. Comcast states on that excessive use page that, “We contact customers who have repeatedly exceeded the threshold in geographic areas where those excessive users are, or could, negatively impact the experience of other customers in their area.” It’s unlikely we’re causing issues for anyone within our network subnet so hopefully we’re safe.

How can we possibly consume so much data? We’ve got a lot of tech that consumes data with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and devices (e.g., AppleTVs, a TiVo box and a Sony Playstation) which stream Netflix. Since we’re avid users of on-demand streaming — and have always found Comcast’s on-demand streaming and access to it a joke — we use what our family considers best-of-breed services. 

With Sony, Netflix and possibly Apple (rumors about them shipping a TV) lining up to battle with Comcast over equal access to the network, I’m really hoping Comcast gets forced to be network neutral. Otherwise we’ll all be relegated to their less-than-good services. Or, as the old joke from the 1990s went about the former monopoly Microsoft vs. Apple, “If it hadn’t been for the Macintosh user interface being invented, we’d all still be using a command line MS-DOS.“