Now, I was an early adopter of the Apple TV.  Since then I have had a love/hate relationship with the device, which I think is rather something Steve wishes he had not hit the launch button for.

There is an obscure feature (Steve has an aversion to buttons) wherein if you hold down the “PLAY” button for five seconds, the Apple TV appears to turn off.  But here’s the rub:  It doesn’t, really.  To perform its magic, the AppleTV needs to be able to sync with or stream from a remote PC/Mac.  However, this doesn’t mean it needs to be on all the time.  But it is.   

Strangely, Apple TVs cannot, under any circumstance, be turned off.  This is kind of a pain when you sleep in the same room as an Apple TV, or when it’s summertime.  Or worse:  both.  The tiny little fan desperately struggling to keep your Apple TV’s processor, hard drive and logic board from melting works pretty hard.  As a result, it spins .. well .. all the time.  The only way to give your Apple TV a break is to unplug it.

An OFF function that actually turns the Apple TV OFF (from a user’s perspective .. this would probably actually hibernate) would be a novel and downright sensible function, don’t you think Steve?

In the Apple TV’s world, the “standby” functions merely disable video output.  Otherwise the Apple TV functions as normal — chewing up power, creating heat, and making noise.  Most of this time it’s doing nothing … just waiting to sync.  How boring life as an Apple TV must be!

Myriad problems are created by Apple’s aversion to this simple function:

1. Frequent overheating of the device (this past August you could cook with it)
2. Unwelcome fan/drive noise (my ATV is in the bedroom) … which leads to
3. Media corruptions when users shut off the ATV the only way they can, by unplugging it or kicking the OFF button on a power bar

I admit that last problem afflicts me frequently, and I am on my second hard drive.. with such small hard drives (40GB or 160GB?  come ON) syncing a large library fills up the drive on the ATV pretty fast, and leads inevitably to various corruptions.. all made worse when power is roughly disconnected by sleepless owners like me.

There is nothing whatsoever to prevent the Apple TV from implementing a soft-power-off and waking the device sporadically to see if there’s new content on the iTunes library or store and then deep-sleeping again after a sync is done.  Nothing to inhibit a simple click of the all-powerful PLAY button on the remote from waking the Apple TV from its slumber within a few seconds, rising to the challenge of trying to render HD video — as it so often struggles to do.

The frustrating thing about the Apple TV is that it’s so very close to being the best product in the category — but inattention to detail and downright boneheadedness in its software implementation, combined with very poor hardware performance, make it almost useless as a mainstream consumer device.

I have hundreds of consumer electronics products in my home. The only other device that doesn’t turn OFF is my fridge.  Get with the program, guys.  Now that Apple is trying to “go green” and appease board member Al Gore, among others, the always-on AppleTV is a black eye.

You’ll notice the Apple TV is conspicuously lacking an EnergySTAR compliance logo.  Wonder why?

It’s a car so popular that it was requested for the upcoming Transformers movie by the director. Graceful, aggressive styling made it clear that, where Priuses and their ilk have become the equivalent of a worsted hemp-wool sweaters, this would not be your mom’s Hybrid.

… on the other hand, here’s a car I definitively would NOT buy:

Guess which one will be gracing showrooms of GM Dealers (if any remain) in 2010?

Sad, but true… while there have always been huge gaps between concept car vehicles and their production counterparts, this one is particularly disappointing. General Motors has proved that compromise was the victor during the prototype-to-production engineering for the Volt. It is, to say the least, about as unimpressive as other Hybrid designs like the Prius or the Civic Hybrid. It’s dull, homely, and familial.

I’m not sure who does the market research for Hybrid and Electric vehicles at GM, but they’ve got it wrong. With their stock price tanking, employees fleeing, plants closing, and sales dropping GM and its Chevy brand needed to pull a rabbit from their hats, and the Chevy Volt held out the best hope for shaking up the market with an affordable, cool vehicle with the thin veneer of environmental friendliness. That’s what wealthy, tech-savvy professionals want to drive on their long commutes… those same tech-savvy professionals who live in Blue States and went to see Al Gore’s movie.

The Volt concept vehicle was cool — even practically so. And it hit us where we live — at the corner of “hip” and “conscientious”. So most of us would not have been surprised to see it hit showroom floors pretty-much as-is and if so, it would have been red hot. With its aggressive styling and good looks, the Volt would have shown celebritards that there’s a much flashier way to show the world that you’re green; and with its Prius-esque price the Volt would have allowed the rest of us who wish we could afford (to wait for) a Tesla something reasonable and far less frumpy than the alternatives.

Chevy has shown the Production car now, which will hit the streets in 2011 with a design that is inferior to a Toyota that hit the streets in 2004. In 7 years — seven years!! — Chevy has proven that the best they can come up with is a pale, limp-wristed “metoo”.

Viva la mediocrity! How long before American taxpayers are asked to bail out their ailing auto makers?

The stupid network: Why I’m not sold…yet There may yet be a place for special packet treatment, and the silicon to do it

By Scott Mace, SERVICENETWORKS.com

You know things are bad in the Internet industry when the best-sounding idea out there is David Isenberg’s call for the return to or acceptance of his vision of the Internet as an all-IP-based “stupid network” – a network designed only to move packets from one place to another with no special treatment of special traffic.

It’s a seductive theory at this point in time. Let’s look at the evidence:

* Manufacturers and operators of “smart” networks – networks designed to treat some telecomm traffic, such as voice or video, better than other traffic – have taken an absolute drubbing financially. The Quality of Service Forum (for which I edited the last few white papers) is a distant memory. Multicast technology remains an academic curiosity, and traffic to the IP Multicast Mailing list has been fairly light of late. (This Web site hosts the list, and it is still the preeminent mailing list regarding multicast in the world.)

* Service providers have yet to roll out special-treatment packet delivery services to any large extent (a notable exception of late is anti-spam services). Instead, they’ve been turning to other techniques, such as route optimization and content delivery networks (caching plus monitoring), or simply overprovisioning their networks, providing surplus bandwidth at all but peak times. (I don’t consider services as VPNs to be special treatment. Although the packets are encrypted, they are otherwise treated just like other packets).

* Bandwidth costs continue to plunge. The fiber glut continues unabated. Predictions of the glut’s demise were predicated on Internet traffic growth estimates which themselves turned out to be false. (Listen to my interview with Andrew Odlysko for details.)

* Managing prioritized traffic in the end-to-end Internet is still too expensive and complicated, despite a surge of research and development aimed at putting the necessary software in silicon and baking it into switches and routers.

* The technology used to develop smart networking equipment is evolving too quickly and the state-of-the-art renders existing solutions obsolete overnight. This is not a solid basis upon which to invest in such equipment for a physical network which cannot be upgraded very often.

* The human engineering and management expertise needed to manage and optimize smart networks is in short supply and will remain so.

These arguments are powerful enough to sweep away most thoughts of implementing smart networking any time within the next few years. So why aren’t I buying the theory hook, line and sinker?

I won’t argue that anything listed above should compel any service provider or carrier to rush out and install smart networking gear. But conversely, I also know that carriers who have spent enormous fortunes installing such smart gear as voice switching equipment won’t rush away from that investment eagerly to embrace dumb networks.

Clearly, the pendulum will swing far in the direction of stupid networks. I expect the traditional telecom companies to continue to put up a front of championing smart networks for voice, while at the same time, inside these companies, they hollow out their infrastructure from the core, placing dumb networks with overprovisioned resources there and moving the intelligence to the edge – all very quietly.

At the edge (where, as Isenberg says, IP packets are broken apart and applications read and utilize the contents of the packets), I certainly would like to be able to prioritize my Internet traffic. If I’m involved in a critical data upload, I still want to surf the Web, but I want to be able to take away bandwidth from the Web surfing process and give to the critical process. The gear and software to do this exists today and there are many success stories in the enterprise arena, especially where a high-latency, low-bandwidth WAN is in place.

I also want route optimization and the ability to grab additional bandwidth on demand as needed, and I believe the technology for this exists too. There is an opportunity here for service providers to automate these processes and make them available in a seamless fashion to customers.

The most interesting action that Isenberg has taken in the course of his stupid network crusade was his October 21 call (with a few distinguished friends) for the FCC to allow the legacy telecommunications companies to fail. If they aren’t allowed to fail, the “hollowing out” I refer to above will take place at a much slower pace – for instance, the telcos will continue to slowly depreciate obsolete “smart network” equipment which should be written off as quickly as possible (bankruptcy would do it really quick) – and as a result the build-out of IP-based stupid networks will take years longer – years the United States may not have to stay competitive with a world where some stupid networks are being built out by governments in a fashion Al Gore could appreciate, the result being that the U.S. is now trailing Estonia in its rate of high-speed, always-on (“broadband”) Internet adoption, among other countries.

And yet, there are some questions that swinging to a stupid-network model raise, that give me just enough pause to avoid becoming another one of Isenberg’s troops. These questions include:

* What do we do about IP-based distributed denial-of-service attacks? In my interview with him this week, Isenberg admits that stupid networks are more vulnerable to DDoS attacks than smart networks are. In a world where all critical applications including telephony are collapsed onto a single pipe, some fancy redundancy will be necessary to thwart DDoS, raising the overhead costs of a stupid network. For this reason alone, it would be worth attending next week’s SERVICE NETWORKS / ISPCON conference, to hear three different views about how DDoS attacks can be pre-empted.

* How will carriers grab market share in any fashion other than speed or price? Providing “five nines” or more of service may become less compelling if all a customer has to do to insure a reliable pipe is to “buy as many nines as you want” as Isenberg puts it, by having redundant connections open to the Internet. As bandwidth becomes even more of a commodity, thanks to Moore’s law it will be less and less profitable.

* Isenberg’s solution is to treat it like other money-losing infrastructure: the highways, the airlines, the airports, Amtrak. In other words, let governments build and operate the Internet as a key national infrastructure. Isenberg touts a public/private partnership in Sweden, but the heavy hand of government is there as well. Can the United States stomach that sort of government role in this day and age? More importantly, must it? It’s one thing to build sewers and roads, but these facilities aren’t effectively made obsolete overnight by technology. Can the same be said about Internet carrier equipment? Maybe the government ends up owning only the conduit, but as wireless comes on strong, might even conduit in the ground be worth less than it is today?

* Wireless spectrum may eventually be reallocated into smaller and smaller pieces that can be shared by smart radios at the edge, but today’s regulatory reality is that spectrum remains scarce, a fact that 802.11 radio users are likely to run up to in a hurry with the exponential growth of that technology. The Open Spectrum movement might change that, but it’s got its work cut out for it.

* Firewalls exist to filter traffic far away from edge devices. Yet, in Isenberg’s perfect stupid network, a firewall exists only on the edge device itself. This to me seems as nonsensical as expecting every edge device to be able to combat a DDoS attack by itself. (Imagine if G.W. Bush’s IPv6 cell phone address ever got out.) Whether the unwanted content is spam, adult content, or malicious code, it’s evident that firewalls somewhere inside the edge of the network, which peek not just at packet headers but somewhat deeper inside the packet, serve a valuable purpose. Any stupid network which throws them out or expects to shrink them into each device is imagining a technological future beyond what I can foresee.

* I’ve often written about how smart networks and QoS are needed to carry the low-latency “killer apps” of the future – everything from videoconferencing to immersive applications ranging from telepresence to gaming to simulations – and along the way, they will break the monopoly held by legacy content distribution networks such as the TV networks. But Isenberg says the killer apps of the Internet have already arrived – email and the Web among them. Are we content to let the others struggle without special network consideration until bandwidth is virtually free? That’s a pretty poor return-on-investment for Internet2.

The answers to these questions elude many. For the past four years I’ve examined the potential of smart networks for the Internet (not just voice), to optimize a resource I considered scarce at bottlenecks. All the time, others such as George Gilder have argued, to limited effect, that bandwidth was becoming free and we will simply add more bandwidth everywhere any time we need it. The truth remains somewhere in between. By examining stupid networks more closely, I too am joining the ranks of those who believe that bandwidth may be too cheap to meter. And yet, some vast surge of silicon innovation may yield a solution which sweeps away all the concerns about the high overhead of metering bandwidth, or the lack of human skills to manage such systems. As always, the pendulums in technology swing back and forth.

Last week, my colleague David Kopf gave some advice to service providers which could be a saving grace in the short term: get your own data center facilities in order. As improbable as it may seem, Web hosting could emerge from the current downturn as the one area of business where service providers and carriers can make a buck, if they work hard, keep it simple and figure out how to maximize their use of an Internet which remains, for the time being, pretty stupid. So, the other SERVICE NETWORKS / ISPCON panel that I recommend to you would be Next-Generation Web and Application Hosting: Distinguishing Hype from Reality.

One thing is for certain: the world isn’t waiting for answers to my questions or Isenberg’s. Every day, in the proving grounds of Wall Street and world economies, technologies, businesses and even national infrastructures are being tried, tested, and many are found wanting. The important thing is to keep asking the tough questions, and not to let any one factor, least of all mere campaign-contribution-stoked politics, dictate the answers.

———–

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.

The pieces just didn’t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations’ territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.

And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we.

Among the architects of this would-be American Empire are a group of brilliant and powerful people who now hold key positions in the Bush administration: They envision the creation and enforcement of what they call a worldwide “Pax Americana,” or American peace. But so far, the American people have not appreciated the true extent of that ambition.

Part of it’s laid out in the National Security Strategy, a document in which each administration outlines its approach to defending the country. The Bush administration plan, released Sept. 20, marks a significant departure from previous approaches, a change that it attributes largely to the attacks of Sept. 11.

To address the terrorism threat, the president’s report lays out a newly aggressive military and foreign policy, embracing pre-emptive attack against perceived enemies. It speaks in blunt terms of what it calls “American internationalism,” of ignoring international opinion if that suits U.S. interests. “The best defense is a good offense,” the document asserts.

It dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.”

In essence, it lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.

“The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”

The report’s repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire.

“At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals,” the report said. stated two years ago. “The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this ‘American peace.’ ”

Familiar themes

Overall, that 2000 report reads like a blueprint for current Bush defense policy. Most of what it advocates, the Bush administration has tried to accomplish. For example, the project report urged the repudiation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and a commitment to a global missile defense system. The administration has taken that course.

It recommended that to project sufficient power worldwide to enforce Pax Americana, the United States would have to increase defense spending from 3 percent of gross domestic product to as much as 3.8 percent. For next year, the Bush administration has requested a defense budget of $379 billion, almost exactly 3.8 percent of GDP.

It advocates the “transformation” of the U.S. military to meet its expanded obligations, including the cancellation of such outmoded defense programs as the Crusader artillery system. That’s exactly the message being preached by Rumsfeld and others.

It urges the development of small nuclear warheads “required in targeting the very deep, underground hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries.” This year the GOP-led U.S. House gave the Pentagon the green light to develop such a weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, while the Senate has so far balked.

That close tracking of recommendation with current policy is hardly surprising, given the current positions of the people who contributed to the 2000 report.

Paul Wolfowitz is now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton is undersecretary of state. Stephen Cambone is head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross are members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

‘Constabulary duties’

Because they were still just private citizens in 2000, the authors of the project report could be more frank and less diplomatic than they were in drafting the National Security Strategy. Back in 2000, they clearly identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as primary short-term targets, well before President Bush tagged them as the Axis of Evil. In their report, they criticize the fact that in war planning against North Korea and Iraq, “past Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power.”

To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform “constabulary duties” — the United States acting as policeman of the world — and says that such actions “demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations.”

To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed.

More specifically, they argue that we need permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, where no such bases now exist. That helps to explain another of the mysteries of our post-Sept. 11 reaction, in which the Bush administration rushed to install U.S. troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil war in Colombia.

The 2000 report directly acknowledges its debt to a still earlier document, drafted in 1992 by the Defense Department. That document had also envisioned the United States as a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush.

Effect on allies

The defense secretary in 1992 was Richard Cheney; the document was drafted by Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy.

The potential implications of a Pax Americana are immense.

One is the effect on our allies. Once we assert the unilateral right to act as the world’s policeman, our allies will quickly recede into the background. Eventually, we will be forced to spend American wealth and American blood protecting the peace while other nations redirect their wealth to such things as health care for their citizenry.

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy — he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project — acknowledges that likelihood.

“If [our allies] want a free ride, and they probably will, we can’t stop that,” he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.

“You saw the movie ‘High Noon’? he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”

Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena. Candidate Bush certainly did not campaign on such a change. It is not something that he or others have dared to discuss honestly with the American people. To the contrary, in his foreign policy debate with Al Gore, Bush pointedly advocated a more humble foreign policy, a position calculated to appeal to voters leery of military intervention.

For the same reason, Kagan and others shy away from terms such as empire, understanding its connotations. But they also argue that it would be naive and dangerous to reject the role that history has thrust upon us. Kagan, for example, willingly embraces the idea that the United States would establish permanent military bases in a post-war Iraq.

“I think that’s highly possible,” he says. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. That will come at a price, but think of the price of not having it. When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

Costly global commitment

Rumsfeld and Kagan believe that a successful war against Iraq will produce other benefits, such as serving an object lesson for nations such as Iran and Syria. Rumsfeld, as befits his sensitive position, puts it rather gently. If a regime change were to take place in Iraq, other nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction “would get the message that having them . . . is attracting attention that is not favorable and is not helpful,” he says.

Kagan is more blunt.

“People worry a lot about how the Arab street is going to react,” he notes. “Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up.”

The cost of such a global commitment would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military, which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our expenditures will have risen to $378 billion. In other words, the increase in our defense budget from 1999-2003 will be more than the total amount spent annually by China, our next largest competitor.

The lure of empire is ancient and powerful, and over the millennia it has driven men to commit terrible crimes on its behalf. But with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, a global empire was essentially laid at the feet of the United States. To the chagrin of some, we did not seize it at the time, in large part because the American people have never been comfortable with themselves as a New Rome.

Now, more than a decade later, the events of Sept. 11 have given those advocates of empire a new opportunity to press their case with a new president. So in debating whether to invade Iraq, we are really debating the role that the United States will play in the years and decades to come.

Are peace and security best achieved by seeking strong alliances and international consensus, led by the United States? Or is it necessary to take a more unilateral approach, accepting and enhancing the global dominance that, according to some, history has thrust upon us?

If we do decide to seize empire, we should make that decision knowingly, as a democracy. The price of maintaining an empire is always high. Kagan and others argue that the price of rejecting it would be higher still.

That’s what this is about.

———–

The watershed events that I see as making the internet meaningful to the public were:

– Internet Service Providers allowing dialup access – SLIP and PPP – Affordable 28.8K modems (and faster..) – The World Wide Web

… these all came together in the Fall of 1993 and really hit home in 1994.

But as I started looking into the things Gore did and said in the early-mid 90s I began to realize that he actually did have a role in keeping government out of the internet. It’s not so much what he did do as what he and congress didn’t do that is significant.

He essentially advocated and succeeded in creating a free economy where internet-based companies were neither regulated or taxed in any meaningful way, which one could argue was the best thing government could do. I think that the lack of government oversight into the internet economy was a major enabling factor in allowing the organism and the ecosystem to grow and flourish (sort of…). It was necessary to create this kind of opportunity in order to push the technology further forward and cause it to grow fractally.

The interesting time for IP will be the next five years, when government does start to get more involved with their growing understanding of its influences and opportunities from a governmental perspective.

-Ian. (Paid $400 for a 2400bps Supra external in 1990 and used it for 3 years!)

>From: “Wilson Zehr”
>To: “Ian Andrew Bell”
>Subject: RE: Fwd: Bill [Clinton], Al, Bill [Gates], Larry, Jim,
>inventing the Inter net et all…
>Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 11:52:22 -0700
>
>Ian:
>
>In 1985 one of my jobs at Verdix (my first technical job) was to maintain
>the usenet newsgroups. We were the local news feed. This system ran on a
>Vax 750 running 4.2BSD which we had source code for (very cool at that
>time). From 1:00 AM to 5:00 AM every morning the news feed brought this
>system to its knees. This was in addition to the already nationwide email
>network.
>
>The Internet was here WAAAAY before the Web. Gore certainly had no role in
>creating the Internet (it was already well established in 1985). The growth
>of the Web appears much more organic to me. First there was the Internet,
>then the browser, then a gigantic snowball-o-stuff. The only thing he could
>have done was slow it down — that’s what government is for after all…
>
>Wilson
>
>—–Original Message—–
>From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:chimp [at] ianbell [dot] com]
>Sent: Monday, October 16, 2000 12:23 PM
>To: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
>Subject: @F: Fwd: Bill [Clinton], Al, Bill [Gates], Larry, Jim,
>inventing the Inter net et all…
>
>
>I tried to find Al Gore’s NII white paper from 1994, to no avail.
>Friendship points to anyone who does. Not surprisingly, it ain’t on
>his White House web page.
>
>Whether Al Gore “invented” or “pushed” the Information Superhighway,
>it is pretty clear that he has morphed this foggy notion to be able
>to capitalize on the popularity of the internet, first by
>encompassing the internet into his Information Superhighway and
>later, by positioning the internet as the Information Superhighway
>incarnate. On the flip side, I don’t think that many of us in 1994
>could have predicted what the internet might mean to our daily lives
>in 2000, so why bash Gore for that?
>
>In fact, I remember the fall of 1993 Sebastian and Gersham got some
>money from an airline pilot to build “Helix BBS”, which sold shell
>access for $22.95/mo and offered Internet email as a subcomponent.
>This was what set us all on our career paths. None of us then could
>have predicted what would happen, and the degree to which having
>access to that network would affect peoples’ lives.
>
>Nobody invented the internet. It’s a bazaar. Gore was wrong, Jim
>Clark was wrong, Bill Gates was REALLY wrong, and Gil Amelio wasn’t
>even in the ball park. Even Tim Berners-Lee, in trying to solve a
>simple problem, didn’t anticipate the reach of his creation. But
>each of their contributions to the internet’s evolution pushed and
>pulled to shape it into the blob that it is today.
>
>Jeff Pulver has lately been fond of saying that he woke up one
>morning recently, and video on the internet started to “happen”. If
>this is true, and it is starting to happen, then one day Al Gore’s
>vision of a true SuperHighway with a heavy emphasis on Interactive
>Video might actually come to fruition, using the internet as a
>backbone. Then he’ll be able to say he knew it all along. 🙂
>
>-Ian.
>
>>From: “Zhang, Yangkun”
>>To: “‘kragen [at] pobox [dot] com'” , fork [at] kragen.dnaco [dot] net
>>Subject: Bill [Clinton], Al, Bill [Gates], Larry, Jim, inventing the Inter
>> net et all…
>>Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 10:58:41 -0400
>>Status:
>>
>>I posit that what Al Gore was pushing in congress had little to do with the
>>modern Internet, but was something more like France’s failed Minitel
>system.
>>Note the two following quotes from the Sept 12, 2000 issue of Red Herring:
>>
>>>From this issue of Red Herring:
>>
>>http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue84/mag-gore-84.html
>>
>>The Red Herring interview: E-Gore
>>

Whether Al Gore “invented” or “pushed” the Information Superhighway, it is pretty clear that he has morphed this foggy notion to be able to capitalize on the popularity of the internet, first by encompassing the internet into his Information Superhighway and later, by positioning the internet as the Information Superhighway incarnate. On the flip side, I don’t think that many of us in 1994 could have predicted what the internet might mean to our daily lives in 2000, so why bash Gore for that?

In fact, I remember the fall of 1993 Sebastian and Gersham got some money from an airline pilot to build “Helix BBS”, which sold shell access for $22.95/mo and offered Internet email as a subcomponent. This was what set us all on our career paths. None of us then could have predicted what would happen, and the degree to which having access to that network would affect peoples’ lives.

Nobody invented the internet. It’s a bazaar. Gore was wrong, Jim Clark was wrong, Bill Gates was REALLY wrong, and Gil Amelio wasn’t even in the ball park. Even Tim Berners-Lee, in trying to solve a simple problem, didn’t anticipate the reach of his creation. But each of their contributions to the internet’s evolution pushed and pulled to shape it into the blob that it is today.

Jeff Pulver has lately been fond of saying that he woke up one morning recently, and video on the internet started to “happen”. If this is true, and it is starting to happen, then one day Al Gore’s vision of a true SuperHighway with a heavy emphasis on Interactive Video might actually come to fruition, using the internet as a backbone. Then he’ll be able to say he knew it all along. 🙂

-Ian.

>From: “Zhang, Yangkun”
>To: “‘kragen [at] pobox [dot] com'” , fork [at] kragen.dnaco [dot] net
>Subject: Bill [Clinton], Al, Bill [Gates], Larry, Jim, inventing the Inter
> net et all…
>Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 10:58:41 -0400
>Status:
>
>I posit that what Al Gore was pushing in congress had little to do with the
>modern Internet, but was something more like France’s failed Minitel system.
>Note the two following quotes from the Sept 12, 2000 issue of Red Herring:
>
>>From this issue of Red Herring:
>
>http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue84/mag-gore-84.html
>
>The Red Herring interview: E-Gore
>