No, not that way you bunch of chain-smoking slackers. But buzzed by words. We have Voice Over IP, VOIP (which sounds to me like a small underwater fart). We now have TV Over IP, TVOIP (I’m not going there…). Then there’s ATA, SATA, LAN, WAN, Thank you ma’am. (Just seeing if you’re still paying attention.) Add ISP, PCI, PCIe, EIDE, IDE, IEEE, EIEIO (for agri-computing), DIMM, DRAM, SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2 XP, SP1, SP2… and on,and on, and on. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll run out of acronyms before or after I run out of tiny gray cells to store them in.

Oh well, back to work.

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Picture phones, video phones, okay… But now, smell phones? Yes, no lie. There’s a German company over in Munich developing just such a thing. It uses a small sensor that can detect nearby foul odors. Initially, it’s aimed at folk who want to know if their breath is bad. Apparently, cupping your hand over your mouth and breathing out isn’t an expensive enough test.

But here’s the catch… “It examines the air in the immediate vicinity for anything from bad breath and alcohol to atmospheric gas levels,” a company spokesperson said. So how about a breathalizer phone?

We’ll keep our nose to the grindstone on this story and report back as details are available.

Voice over IP is Sooooo last spring. The newest IP craze is TV over IP or TVIP and it allows people with broadband connections to choose their own TV shows on demand and download them to their PCs.

According to Reuters, “TV over phone lines, also known as TV over Internet protocol (TVIP), is already taking root in Europe, with offerings from France Telecom , Italy’s FastWeb, Britain’s HomeChoice and others. There are many more on the way, with Britain’s top fixed-line phone company BT Group in talks with content companies as it prepares to launch its own service. In Washington, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell said on Sept. 15 that almost every major U.S. phone company he has talked with is working to develop TVIP offering. Consultancy Multimedia Research Group estimates there will be 15.6 million TVIP viewers by 2007, up from a few hundred thousand today.”

“Warner Bros. has agreed to license some films to Netflix as part of a test run of the Internet company’s upcoming movie-download service, according to sources familiar with the plan. The agreement lends strength to speculation that Netflix and TiVo plan to jointly introduce a video-on-demand (VOD) service in the coming year.”

Dear Lord! Not yet another video on demand service! They’re multiplying faster than remedies for erectile dysfunction! Read the details here. I can’t go on.

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Alice Responds: Don’t worry Bill this is a natural progression and a great thing. I use Movielink to download movies to my laptop for when I travel, but then I rarely watch them. I use Netflix for DVDs, but rarely watch them because I have a ton of things on my TiVo. If I could download new release movies into my TiVo I would be in HEAVEN. So don’t be frightened. This moves the video download form the laptop to the home TV, or should I say the home Tivo. About time!

AMD’s Boston Design Studio is taking in the homeless. What? You didn’t know that AMD had a Boston Design studio? Silly Wabbit, where do you think many of the disenfranchised SUN and HP (nee Digital Equipment) engineers were supposed to go when the UltraSPARC and ALPHA processors were canned?

Having taken aim at a 10 percent share of the server market (currently, it’s not quite that close), these guys will be important to AMD. And not to overplay the “sloppy seconds” effect, but server CPU stuff almost always migrates down to (or up to, if you ask the parties involved) the desktop crowd –because gamers have such high requirements for processor performance and that’s a lucrative market.

No, that’s not another subtle plug for Doom 3….

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No pretty pictures in this one. A few blocks down I did a blurb called “Linux Reaches an Understanding” and today I received a reply from a reader. Thought the objections and my answer might be interesting. (Hey, what do I know.) Anyway, the answer is up top, the reader’s note below.
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I didn’t expect anyone who’s a Linux fan to agree with me. If they did, they’d have to admit that this Utopian concept they’ve developed about Open Source might not standup to close scrutiny. On that note, however, the first comment you forwarded makes no sense. Technically, Linus can’t own Linux if it’s Open Source. The agreement among that Linux consortium I described was to keep it from further forking –which it had already started to do (if not fracturing)– and bring it back to a selected baseline

As for the second comment, Linus took a job. Why? To make some money. Why? Because there was no money to be made from Linux. The end result of that (and it’s only going back a year and a half ago or so) was an overall uproar from the Linux community that Linus was slacking, taking too much time validating the kernels, and hurting the OS. Money moves the world.

Now I’m sorry to bring the harsh, cruel, light of day into the room, but trace back to when Linux actually started to make some headway against Windows. When was that? When IBM started pumping money into the development. Before that, Linux had chiefly dinged Unix and Netware installations and not really in any big way. IBM, however, is a business, a BIG BUSINESS. Right now it’s making money on its servers wrapped in Linux but, if you look back at IBM historically, that’s not where it will stay happy. Historically, IBM has positioned itself as the major consumer of a product and, thereafter, threatened (asked) the owner to either sell the business or it would stop consuming. That tactic failed with Intel and Microsoft because each had sufficient resources to weather the threat. To the point of Linux, IBM has more money than God. More money than Gates too. It can stop it’s Linux commitment at any time, write off the R&D expenses, and walk away without blinking. If you think there would still be a Linux after that, you’re mistaken.

The problem is that most of the Linux folk don’t have the experience that goes back 30-something years to be able to identify IBM’s ‘business plan.’ As well, they’re so happy that someone of prestige has joined “the group” that they’re in denial. I have no problem with that. Hopefully they won’t either.

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Bill,
Regarding your post titled “Linux Reaches An Understanding…”, you said the following:

“Well, it’s about time. What’s taken these guys so long to realize they need to work together? Beware the prediction, however: Short of IBM, few of this consortium can spare the money to do open ended funding for something that is theoretically free. Linux as Open Source will pass away in the not too distant future.”
I mentioned your remarks in the alt.comp.freeware newsgroup and got the following reactions:

“Unless Linus revokes his ownership of the copyright, it ain’t happening. The major distros do NOT control Linux. If they mess with it, it’ll fork and while they may not be wrecked, it will hurt their business as most of the developers will go with the forked version rather than give up open source. Open source is just that, John, nobody controls it.”

“You might point him to the example of XOrg. Once XFree86 adopted a license which was not GPL-compatible, they forked; XOrg was based on the last XF86 release which had a ‘good’ license. I couple of months ago, I switched from XF86 to xorg, and the transition was seamless. The major distros don’t control development of the Linux kernel, of the GNU OS components, or of the X server. I reckon they fund things like this standards initiative (and the XOrg Foundation) in hopes of having some influence over direction, but I don’t think they hope or want to make these things proprietary. By and large, ISTM that the involvement of IBM et al. in the GNU/Linux community has been a good thing.”

All three of us disagree with you on this one.

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Y’know, when I first named it, “The Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola” back in 1992 a lot of people said, “Hey, Bill! Why are you doing that? Doom is so passe now!” Well, the answer is simple. For the month of August, in the Year of Our Lord 2004, Doom 3 is the best selling software in the known universe.

I knew. Yes, I did.
Get the demo here.
(And if you even think about getting a bootlegged copy of the software you’re off the mailing list!)

Everybody stayed home, nothing to report. Tiger Telematics didn’t announce that it will collaborate with nVidia for its Gizmondo game pad; Dell didn’t announce that it will be bringing Oracle’s 10g Standard Edition One to those who want to start small but grow big in the future; and ATI didn’t announce the first PCI Express version of its All in Wonder line, the X600 Pro. See, just another boring day with nothing to talk about.

Okay, okay, stop staring at me. I admit it! I’m in the middle of reviewing a computer and I don’t have the time to do a couple of entries here right now. There, you satisfied? Don’t worry, film at 11:00 (well, before 11:00 hopefully). And I promise they’ll be from unimpeachable sources.