Apple WWDC: Yay iPhone, Boo Snow Leopard

Quick WWDC comments ...

• The iPhone 3GS is as expected, only surprise is accessibility and voice commands. That's a win over all. I'll buy the 32 GB version around August. I like what I hear about light sensitivity improving even as pixel count rises -- the current device is light sensitive. The macro feature is great and, of course, the video is excellent.
  
• There's nothing in Snow Leopard I'm interested in. The meager improvements, like an iChat that sucks less, could be implemented in Leopard. Only the $30 price is right. Definitely a 2012 acquisition. I want the Exchange client capabilities in 10.5, not 10.6.
  
• The MacBook Air is still too expensive. The new MacBook is superb; tough to choose between it and an iMac now.
  
• I don't remember Apple ever resurrecting something they killed. They made a mistake pulling Firewire from the MacBook. Now it's back everywhere. Don't wait for the apology.
  
• It's striking that there was no discussion of productivity apps on the iPhone -- nothing about calendaring, tasks, contacts, etc. The Palm Pre and the iPhone are staking different areas. I'm torn. Good news for the Pre!
  
• Given Snow Leopard's Exchange Server client features I expect MobileMe will move to provide Exchange Server-like services (as Google has). I'm neutral on whether MM will use Google's version of Exchange server or if Apple will do there own. They won't use Microsoft's implementation.
• I don't rule out a 10.5 add-on update to iCal and Address Book for MobileMe users after MM goes to Exchange Server.
  

Update: Oh, and whatever happened to the resolution independent user interfaces? It's not in Leopard, and I'm not sure it's in Windows 7 either. I didn't see mention of a keyboard interface for the 3GS, last I heard the dev version didn't have API support. Also, Apple really does hate AT&T these days. Looks like a divorce might be coming. I wonder if Apple will then sign with Verizon or ... acquire Sprint ... Now wouldn't that be interesting ...

Peak hydrocarbon output in 2020?

I'm comfortable with my Peak Oil call of Aug 2008. Of course I didn't mean peak production, but rather that going forward the demand/supply curve would force light "sweet" crude oil prices to rise inexorably until demand was reduced by either conservation or alternative power sources (more coal).

So no more big price drops over time, just occasional dips against a regular rise.

Then the price of oil collapsed.

Was I humbled? Of course not! The collapse of the world economy and a certain amount of speculation played themselves out, but the price is rising nicely now. We should be back up to $120 a barrel by the summer of 2010 -- unless the oil price rises send us down into recession.

What happens then? I assumed we'd just switch to coal and melt Greenland, but maybe I was too optimistic. It happens, even to me.

The problem, as outlined in an article that predicts Peak Hydrocarbon Production by 2020, is EROEI ....

Walrus Magazine Energy Crisis 2009: An Inconvenient Talk

... Energy return on energy invested, which geologists refer to interchangeably as EROEI or EROI. Canada’s exploration treadmill. Reserves-to-production ratios.

You pick one at random, fixate on it. The historical EROEI for conventional oil is 100:1... Invest a barrel’s worth of energy drilling and refining in a spot like Ghawar, then and forever the largest single crude oil deposit on the planet, and you used to get 100 barrels of energy-dense, easily transported fuel in return. These days, conventional EROEI for such places is closer to 25:1.

The EROEI on more recent “new conventional” deposits, which Dave cites mostly by their discovery and extraction methods (“deepwater oil, horizontal wells, 3-D seismic”) is also around 25:1. In Alberta’s tar sands, the surface-mined bitumen comes to market at an EROEI of 6:1. “In situ” bitumen — sludge buried too far under the boreal forest floor to excavate, which comprises the lion’s share of the most breathless estimates of Canada’s energy superpower–scale oil production — rings in at 3:1. Corn ethanol, that darling of America’s farm states, is somewhere between 1.3:1 and 0.75:1. Shale oil, another unconventional source held by its boosters to be capable of indefinitely extending the age of oil, has never been converted into fuel at a net energy profit, at least as far as Dave has been able to ascertain....

Presumably new technologies will improve EROEIs enough to truly bake the earth, but the article is worth a read. If peak hydrocarbon output is really only 11 years away then it's within the planning horizon of energy investors and national militaries.

So we should start hearing more about it pretty soon.

Personally, I've no predictions on PHP (peak hydrocarbon production) -- just "peak light sweet".

Foreign Policy review on child soldiers

FP takes us to the ugliness behind the hype (via Freakonomics) ...

Foreign Policy: Think Again: Child Soldiers

... Asymmetrical conflicts, however, are another story. Take suicide bombing, which child soldiers have carried out in the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. There is little that trained soldiers can do other than guess that a nearby child is in fact a suicide bomber. In Afghanistan, a 14-year-old was responsible for the first killing of a NATO soldier -- likely just one of the estimated 8,000 child soldiers who do or have worked as part of the Taliban's forces.

Face to face with child soldiers in battle, Western military forces are often befuddled as to what to do. Should they engage, retreat, surrender, or attempt to disarm? The U.S. Army's war manual, for example, offers no guidance on rules of engagement. The British Army only recognized the problem after one of its patrols was captured by child RUF soldiers in Sierra Leone, having been hesitant to attack the under-15-year-olds. Britain later used pyrotechnics and loud explosions in that conflict to induce panic among the ill-trained youngsters, many of whom would simply run away....

Since the US recruits at age 17, we technically employ child soldiers. Most are in Asia and the near East, not in Africa.

Armies use child warriors because they're effective. Much more effective, you may be sure, than I would be.

The conclusion? To end the use of child soldiers, we must first end the most common forms of modern warfare.

Update: Sarah, in comments, points out that technically the US is compliant with current law as long as our child soldiers don't fight (though some have). We violate international law when we prosecute child soldiers as adult war criminals.

Gingrich is a loon

Either Gingrich believes he can con the religious right into thinking he's one of them, or he really believes this ...

Shared sacrifices - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

... "I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Gingrich said. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."...

Either way, he's a loon.

The implications of cyber war in an interconnected world

This is the first cyber war discussion I've read that's had anything interesting to say ...

I, Cringely - Collateral Damage

... Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? ... 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...

Sounds plausible. I'd say we have a problem ...

Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery

So we'll go no more a-hackin
So late into the night
Though the heart be still as geeking,
And the moon be still as bright...

Apologies to Byron

Able I was ere I saw Elba. Anon.

It is hard to remember a time before the Man-machine war. Things were bad in the TSR years, and yet again when QEMM laid waste to the minds of men. Strong warriors weep to remember when Mac OS 7 crumbled before TCP/IP, or the Hell that was Hayes. We hoped for peace with OS/2, but got Me instead.

Yet we won those battles. The machines seemed chastened. Windows 2000 was peaceful. Modems died. OS X 10.3 was good. We thought a world of true productivity lay ahead.

We were wrong. The machines were only playing for time. The synchronization front claimed thousands of mortal minds. OS X turned vicious, and XP maniacally senile. The powers of Google gave us new hope, but was Google truly on the side of flesh?

It's not only that the machines are becoming ever more powerfully complex. We of the first generation are growing weary. Many comrades have retired from the front. We can't weave and dodge as in the days before bifocals. Exercise, sleep, work and ... yes ... family -- they take their toll.

Yet I fought on. I was a Gerserker; I threw myself into battle. When others held back I charged Sharepoint heights and fought Outlook hand to hand. Yes, I synced contacts with the iPhone.

I went too far. In my bones I knew the end was near. OS X Tiger lived up to its man-eating namesake. My ancient XP box was dying slowly of chip rot. Office 2007 bit my ankles.

I was weakened when I met IT. Active Directory is a rabid shark on steroids. We fought for weeks. Some days I was netlocked seven times, but I struggled to my keyboard every time. One day I thought I had it beat, but it raged back when I turned my head. Finally we fought tooth, nail and hackery until I pulled the poisoned dagger from the treacherous heart of Outlook 2007.

The battle was won, but the my war was done. Even replacing my mother's cable modem and upgrading her plain Mini to 10.5 had too many bizarre bugs.

My time as a Gerserker is done. I still contend, but no longer do I leap to the battle.

Just as I have sworn by Gordon's Laws of Acquisition, so I do By Darwin Swear upon Gordon's Laws of Aged Geekery ...

1. Avoid Microsoft. They are one with the Darkseid.
2. Fear authentication, above all fear authentication with synchronized credentials.
3. Fear that which is beyond the hand of the Geek, such as networked data that cannot be copied locally. Above all, fear the services of those foreign domains that lack an effective and responsive Help Desk.
4. Embrace redundancy.
5. Simplify, even at the cost of power.
6. Pace technology. Take on new battles only when the supply lines are strong and the forces are rested.

It's a new world for me. It means I don't want a 10.6 iMac -- instead I'll buy a 10.5 iMac once the 10.6 "up to date" program is announced. I doubt I'll do 10.6 before 2012.

I won't be doing any more Windows installs outside of a VM. I embrace the Virtual Machine and the Sandbox as my allies.

I'm putting off my new SLR purchase, partly because Canon has gone mad, but mostly because those images are too large for old G5. I will need to get a new iMac completely pacified before I take on new camera. The SLR will move into 2010.

I'm going to get the new iPhone -- but not at the same time as the new iMac. They'll have to be spaced.

At work I'll drastically reduce my participation in anything new beyond the absolutely essential.

In the fearsome Cloud I'll be stay closer to Google -- the Demon I ride -- and avoid the complications of distributed authentication and extended identity.

I have returned upon my shield, and the night is now for sleeping ...

Update 6/8/09: Added Virtualization tag (label) to my tech blog.

Update 7/13/09: I missed this Gizmodo cry for gadget reliability when it came out in late 2008. Peace brother.

AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s

The demise of AvantGo has not received much attention. I am one of the few who remember the deceased Palm application, so I'll deliver the obituary.

I knew it well. In 1998 I did a little presentation on AvantGo for the primary track of the American Medical Informatics Association (my little JavaScript driven slideshow applet still works btw - 10 years later on Safari 4beta). It got a mention on my 1998 PalmPilot web page and my old AvantGo targeted medical notes page is still around.

In its youth AvantGo was bright, clever and reliable. There were two parts - a server and a client. The net server based web spider processed a URL to specified limits and stored the results in AvantGo format. Then, whenever I serial cable synched my Palm III or Vx the results updated the Palm AvantGo client.

AvantGo was a way for me to carry static snapshots of web pages. Even then my extended memory was moving to the web, but there were no portable browsers, no G3 networks, no wireless to speak of - so a static snapshot of my web memories was pretty handy.

At work we built a handheld prescribing application around AvantGo and a server we controlled locally. In the late 90s AvantGo wanted to become a platform provider to the palmtop. That prescribing app was one of my ideas, for what it was worth (not that much unfortunately!).

Alas, the strategy didn't work for them. Their main business, unfortunately, was streaming newspaper output to the Palm. Yes, like Byline or Google Reader, but before feeds. Newspapers have been looking for electronic delivery options for a long time, AvantGo was just one more failure. You didn't really think anything was new, did you?

It was a nice idea, but there was no money in it. In retrospect AvantGo's failure heralded the death of the traditional newspaper business.

Even before the dotCom crash AvantGo was getting bloated and buggy. They wanted to become a handheld browser, but that was a tough road. We didn't get a decent small scale web browser until the iPhone -- AvantGo never got close. Even as AvantGo struggled the PalmOS platform was slowly dying.

I lost track of AvantGo, though even now I wouldn't mind the ability to offline cache spidered web pages on my iPhone. Heck, I'd even pay for that, though I'm probably the only one who would.

Now the AvantGo I knew is gone. Wikipedia says they the company was founded in 1997 and that it once had a market cap of $1 billion. It was sold to Sybase in 2002 for $38 million.

$1 billion. Back when a billion dollars was real money.

Man, the 90s were good times. 

Who will acquire Palm ... and the Pre?

As a long-suffering and occasionally joyful iPhone user, and as scarred and bloodied Palm-era road-kill, I'm very happy that the Palm Pre is receiving first class review coverage. Yes, Pogue and other reviewers are keen to praise the underdog, but this is a genuine achievement.

It's also a desperate Hail Mary pass -- and the goal is not corporate survival. The iTunes hack (the Pre forges iPod credentials) and the expected severe product shortage are just two early signs of how badly Palm is limping now.

I'm with Blodgett ...

The Palm Pre Will Bomb (PALM, AAPL) - Henry Blodgett

.. The smartphone game has become a waltz of elephants, and Palm is just a Jack Russell terrier.  In the US, the smartphone war is between Apple, RIM, and, to a lesser extent, Google.  Palm can yip a bit and run around nipping at the others' feet, but it's too late to become one of the big dogs.

One thing Pre does do for Palm is turn it into a more attractive acquisition candidate.  We doubt Apple, RIM, or Google would buy it, but there's always Nokia, which is nowhere in the US smartphone market...

Nokia is everyone's number one guess for the soon-to-be home of the Palm Pre. I'd wonder about SONY and Samsung -- neither company can afford to surrender the computer infrastructure of the next 15 years.

I also wouldn't write off RIM. It's difficult to describe how badly the BlackBerry OS sucks. Yes, I know it sells well in the consumer market, but that's because most consumers are clueless. I don't think that's going to continue. If RIM's only strength is Exchange server they're in trouble.

So my choices for the future home of the Pre are Nokia first, RIM second then SONY and lastly Samsung. Dell is a wildcard. Any other lists out there?

The long slow development of human culture - and technology

Modern humans are a new species -- but not born yesterday. Why did it take so very long for humans to develop art and varied technologies? This Economist article doesn't convincingly answer the question, but it presents the current consensus on the problem...

Warfare, culture and human evolution: Blood and treasure | The Economist:

... The species is now believed to have emerged 150,000-200,000 years ago in Africa and to have begun spreading to the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago. But signs of modern culture, such as shell beads for necklaces, the use of pigments and delicate, sophisticated tools like bone harpoons, do not appear until 90,000 years ago. They then disappear, before popping up again (and also sometimes disappearing), until they really get going around 35,000 years ago in Europe...

The astounding part is that we got going about 90,000 years ago, but then didn't really reboot until 35,000 years ago. We get writing about 6,000 years ago and the web about 20 years ago.

So the next big leap should be about 10 minutes from now. Oh wait, that's the Singularity.

My personal bias, probably arising from reading John Hawks, is that our brains were changing a lot over those 90,000 years. The odd bit is the false start.

BBC's annotated version of Obama's speech to the Islamic world

BBC NEWS had the full Obama speech with clickable inline annotations.

We're luckier than we deserve to have this President.

Kristof was at Tiananmen square - his memories

I don't remember him writing this story before. It's very powerful. One day China will remember, and one day China may honor those who fell.

Op-Ed Columnist - Bullets Over Beijing - Nicholas Kristof

It was exactly 20 years ago that I stood on the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square and watched “People’s China” open fire on the people.

It was night; the gunfire roared in our ears; and the Avenue of Eternal Peace was streaked with blood. Uniformed army troops massed on the far end of the square, periodically raising their assault rifles and firing volleys directly at the crowd I was in, and we would all rush backward in terror until the firing stopped.

Then the volley would end, and in the deafening silence we would stop and look back. In the hundred yards between us and the soldiers would be kids who had been shot, lying dead or wounded on the ground.

Some protesters shouted insults at the troops or threw bricks or Molotov cocktails that landed ineffectually in the open area. But none of us dared to go forward to help the injured as they writhed. I was the Beijing bureau chief for this newspaper, and I was cowering behind a layer of other people whom I hoped would absorb bullets; the notebook in my hand was stained with perspiration from fear.

Troops had already opened fire on an ambulance that had tried to collect the injured, so other ambulances kept their distance. Finally, some unlikely saviors emerged — the rickshaw drivers.

These were peasants and workers who made a living pedaling bicycle rickshaws, carrying passengers or freight around Beijing. It was those rickshaw drivers who slowly pedaled out toward the troops to collect the bodies of the dead and injured. Then they raced back to us, legs straining furiously, rushing toward the nearest hospital.

One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn’t have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.

That was happening all over Beijing. On the old airport road that same night, truckloads of troops were entering the city from the east. A middle-aged bus driver saw them and quickly blocked the road with his bus.

Move aside, the troops shouted.

I won’t let you attack the students, the bus driver retorted defiantly.

The troops pointed their guns at the bus driver and ordered him to move the bus aside. Instead, he plucked the keys from the ignition and hurled them into the bushes beside the road to ensure that no one could drive that bus away. The man was arrested; I don’t know what happened to him...

... When you educate citizens and create a middle class, you nurture aspirations for political participation. In that sense, China is following the same path as Taiwan and South Korea in the 1980s.

In Taiwan in 1986, an ambitious young official named Ma Ying-jeou used to tell me that robust Western-style democracy might not be fully suited for the people of Taiwan. He revised his view and now is the island’s democratically elected president.

Some of my friends are Communist Party officials, and they are biding their time. We outsiders also may as well be similarly pragmatic and patient, for there’s not much we can do to accelerate this process. And as we wait, we can be inspired by those rickshaw drivers of 20 years ago.

Fifteen years more. I hope to live to see the day.

China's perspective on North Korea

Via James Fallows, I came across a Washington Post columnist's summary of how China sees North Korea.

Superb. Seems some of today's best newspaper journalism never sees newsprint.

Fallows contrasts this piece to a dangerously stupid article that did appear in print.

I'll have to start reading Pomfret now. I stopped reading WaPo a while ago, they're a 3rd rate paper. Seems they do have some good journalists though.

Wisdom from the flames - a different OS X future

Gizmodo had fun recently comparing Windows 7 buzz to the disinterest in OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The photo of a demonic Ballmer about to devour a sleeping Snow Leopard kitten should hang in his office.

It makes for lots of links and traffic, but I think there's a deeper lesson.

Windows 7, aka Vista 3.0 is very important. XP is decayed and too vulnerable to attack. Vista has gotten a bad rap and is not much used by businesses. Windows 7 will either be immensely successful or one of history's great corporations will go under. That deserves attention.

Snow Leopard? Ummm, tell me again why I need it?!

Sure, I love scalable UIs -- but I'm not sure that's in Snow Leopard and it should be an update to 10.5, not yet another big migration. Yes, 64 bit would be nice, but I can wait a few more years. We could do a lot with 4GB of memory if we were a wee bit less sloppy. I wouldn't mind putting those GPUs to use, but I suspect that need not require a big OS revision.

To be honest, I'm a bit tired. The 10.5 transition has not been a pleasant experience. There've been too many problems with OS bugs and hardware incompatibility. Too many parts of OS X 10.5, from iChat to accessibility to managed users to security usability (why can't one escalate privileges to modify a locked Dock?) need rework and finish.

I don't need 10.6. I don't want 10.6. I want Apple to pour a few millions in to making 10.5 better.

Ahh, but there's the rub. Apple needs to make money.

So here's my proposal to Apple.

Sure, keep working on 10.6. Maybe ship it this year if you need to, preferably ease off and wait until the summer of 2010. Meanwhile, find a way to make money off 10.5 updates. I don't know how Apple can fudge this and live within accounting rules, but there must be a way. Maybe Apple could bundle 10.5 enhanced with MobileMe, so that MobileMe subscribers get a steady stream of 10.5 fixes and improvements.

Please Apple, do something to make my life better. The current arrangement really ain't working that well for me.

Unheard stories of the 19th century - Irish evacuation to Montreal

Sometime in the 20th century, I was a medical student at St Anthony Hospital in the north of Newfoundland. The Hospital was a legacy of the Grenfell Medical Mission, so I read Grenfell's (sometimes fanciful) stories of the late 19th and early 20th century european hunter gatherers of those remote lands.

Those were, and are, tough lands. The native population was small even before the european plagues.

Foreign to those all but uninhabitable lands the europeans hunted fish and seal, lived as debt slaves in squalor and misery, and died in droves on the ice. I was not long from a stay in 1980s Bangladesh, then a synonym for misery, and I though that hot misery had its advantages over cold misery.

No-one in those days, incidentally, would have predicted Bangladesh would do as relatively well as it has. That's worth remembering.

The stories of Newfoundland's back country are fascinating, but they are all but forgotten to our time. Just like this glimpse of the Malthusian agony of Ireland's 19th century, seen from Montreal, Canada in the years before America's immigration-amplified civil war ...

Seeking hope, they found death Rene Bruemmer, The Gazette

The Irish came by the tens of thousands in 1847, packed like cordwood below deck in fetid ship holds meant for timber....

... There were so many corpses, trenches were dug to dispose of the dead in what is now Point St. Charles. Twelve years later, labourers building the Victoria Bridge would uncover the bones of their brethren and insist the remains be protected. To make sure of it, they planted a massive 30-tonne, 10-foot high boulder dredged from the St. Lawrence River over the burial site, and inscribed it, in part: "To preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever."  [Epidemic Typhus, a Rickettsial disease transmitted by human lice]...

... In 1845, potatoes were struck by a fungal infection that caused half the crop to rot in the earth. In 1846, the blight returned, wiping out almost the entire crop, followed by one of the harshest winters in living memory, and the people starved....

... Most would have preferred the well-established promised lands of New York and Boston, but America had set strict standards and fares for passage to the U.S. were too high for the impoverished. But British traders who shipped lumber from Quebec City and St. John's were happy to have emigrants paying a low fare to serve as ballast for their return trips to Canada. Many passage brokers told passengers food would be provided for the 45-day journey, which was untrue...

... Canadian immigration officials, who had no say in emigration policies determined by the British colonial authorities, were sorely unprepared and underfunded for the deluge of emaciated Irish. At the immigration depot on Grosse Île, an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence 50 kilometres east of Quebec City, the medical officer in charge of the quarantine station prepared beds for 200 invalids, thinking 10,000 emigrants had departed from Britain. That summer, more than 100,000 would flee to Quebec.

By the end of May, there were already 40 ships lined up for three kilometres, awaiting to discharge passengers. The ships kept coming till the river iced over in October....

... The ill overflowed the quarantine stations, lying outside on the grass and sand beaches. Healthy passengers were stuck waiting on the ships for 20 days, a death sentence for many. Bodies were pulled from the holds with hooks and stacked on shore. Between 3,000 and 5,000 died on Grosse Île...

... Overwhelmed health officials started waving many ships with "healthy" passengers on to Montreal.

They disembarked, malnourished and diseased, dying in the streets and on the wharves, begging for water on the steps of churches. Worried about an epidemic, authorities constructed three wooden "fever sheds" 150 feet long and 50 feet wide at Windmill Point, near where Victoria Bridge now stands in Point St. Charles. The sick and dying lay two or three to a bed, side by side with the dead, leaving hundreds of orphans behind. The number of sheds grew to 22. Military cordoned off the area so the sick couldn't escape.

Seeing the ill dying alone, the Grey Nuns went to help, attending to the sick and carrying women and children in their arms from the ships to the ambulances. Thirty of 40 nuns who went to help fell ill, and seven died, writes historian Edgar Andrew Collard. Other nuns took over, but once the surviving Grey Nuns had convalesced, they returned...

When a mob of frightened Montrealers threatened to toss the fever sheds into the river, Montreal mayor John Easton Mills quelled the riot, and later went himself to help in the evenings, giving them water and changing their straw bedding. The father of a large family, he died in November.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal urged French Quebecers, linked to the Irish by their Catholic faith, to help the orphans. Many came from the country to adopt one or two children, accepting them in to their families, in some cases passing their land on to them...

... Grosse Île, site of the largest Irish famine graveyard outside of Ireland, is now known as the Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada...

I grew up in Montreal, but this is the first I read this story. John Mills was born in deeply Protestant and English Massachusetts twenty years after the American revolution, but ended up in Canada. Were his family loyalists fleeing the rebels?  At 50 this presumably Protestant mayor of English descent died helping starving, diseased and exiled Catholic Irish. I wonder if any of his family survive to tell more of what must a remarkable life.

The movie almost writes itself, doesn't it? There would be worse ways to remember those people and those times.

There's a long way down from where most of the world is today. It would do us all well to look over the edge once in a while, the better to inspire our kindred ascents.

Videotron torments and choice in broadband markets (revised)

I wrote the original version of this post as a cautionary tale of miserable experiences with my mother's Quebec-based Videotron customer service. I related my personal story to broader concerns about lack of choice and competition in most broadband markets.

After I wrote it Videotron service did somewhat better. My original post was too one-sided. Things work differently in the old country.

Instead I wrote a technical summary of what I learned about managing a (Quebec) Videotron cable modem that's dropping connections.

There's one part of the original note I'll retain, and I expect to return this theme over the next few years. Most broadband markets in North America are increasingly served by only one or two providers. These at best oligopolies, and in many regions there's an effective monopoly.

This is a very bad thing for customers, and not such a good thing for employees who want to deliver good service. Oligopolies are corrosive. Always.

There's a role for government here. If we can't avoid oligopolies then we'll need regulation -- but that's a desperate solution. We need to encourage competition, even if that means breaking up companies that currently hold monopoly power.

Broadband is too important to become a part of a monopoly market.