Charlie Ergen's War

A third of the readers of this column are not in the USA and I can’t claim anymore that America is on the cutting-edge of all things Internet so I’ll just fall back on the argument that this is happening here and could just as easily be happening in your country, too. Which brings us to today’s story of Charlie Ergen’s plan to dominate the distribution of TV content to America in an all-IP, post-broadcast, post-satellite future. John Malone and Reed Hastings beware!

Echostar owns Dish Network, America’s second-largest satellite TV provider. Charlie Ergen is Echostar’s iconoclastic founder, CEO, and largest shareholder. Just as John Malone does with DirecTV, Charlie runs Dish any old way he […]

By |May 23rd, 2011|2011|58 Comments
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Netflix too big to fail?

The Intertubes are alight this week with old news — that Netflix is the largest user of U.S. Internet bandwidth. Most stories cite a Sandvine report I won’t link to because you’d have to subscribe and I like you too much for that. Better still, look at the very interesting graphic above, courtesy of Arbor Networks. This chart has been floating around the net for a couple of months and shows the result of an Arbor study of several U.S. ISPs illustrating how we Americans spend our Internet bandwidth. There are three lessons I think we can learn from this chart: 1) that BitTorrent is no longer (or perhaps never was) the threat were were […]

By |May 19th, 2011|2011|53 Comments
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Google at Carson's Speed

Search is a fundamental component of intelligence or even thought.  Maybe that’s why Google is now calling it knowledge. Our brains are already good at search. Look around a room and every object your eye passes is identified in your brain. Something out of place? It catches your eye.  That is where we are headed with Internet search, though not exactly the way one might expect.

This is where every new generation of computer scientists brings-up the idea of artificial intelligence. If only we made the network smart enough to know not only what we really mean but what we really need. Maybe someday, but for now don’t hold your breath waiting for that one.  Starting […]

By |May 19th, 2011|2011|56 Comments
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Google decides knowledge is power

Back in 2008 I declared that the information economy was giving way to what I called the search economy. The Internet was making it more important to know how to find information than to actually possess that information, because data — and therefore the fully-explored truth of any matter — might be constantly in flux. Even more to the point today, we need the same knowledge on many devices so it is usually better to find the link than to maintain multiple copies of aging data. This might explain in an ass-backwards way why Google just changed the name of its largest tech division from search to knowledge. A more accurate […]

By |May 18th, 2011|2011|38 Comments
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Jann Wenner is my hero

This is one of those columns that will piss-off some of my geekier readers. They’ll complain that I am covering this subject at all, they will declare me dead or at least too stupid to be worth reading, and they will claim to be departing Cringelyville never to return. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. And it is important that I not give a damn, because that’s what freedom of the press is all about. This column concerns a particularly damning story about Goldman Sachs, the big Wall Street bank, that is available online now from the Rolling Stone. But I’m not so interested here in Goldman, or even in our ongoing global […]

By |May 13th, 2011|2011|99 Comments
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