Author: Bob Martens

Categories
Life

We Want Details

Over at the Daily Yonder today, an article was posted about the National Rural Assembly being held in St. Paul, Minnesota right now. You can read Fighting for the ‘Disconnected’ at their site.

The basic summary is that the FTC is again talking about setting up new rules for how money currently collected for bringing phone connectivity to rural areas to bring broadband to rural areas. If I am correct, this has been discussed ad nauseum. What has been missing is any movement, plans or details about what is going to be done.

That’s what rural communities would like to see, or a freeing up of communities to start to come up with their own solutions to this problem. I’m not holding my breath on this one, but I can hope for the best.

Categories
Technology

The Hubbub Around Google+

I really hope that every person who is praising Google right now and clamoring to get invited to join Google’s latest project has never fallen into any of these camps:

  • berates Facebook for knowing too much about us
  • laments the power Apple exerts on the web and technology companies
  • laments the size of Apple and other large companies
  • stresses privacy and ownership of content

If you have ever fallen into any of those camps you should be looking at Google’s latest offering, Google+, with increasing suspicion. This has nothing to do with how good the service will be, but more about how many people are fawning over the latest offering from Google.

I think it is safe to say that Google has taken the place of the “good guy” for many people, and maybe deservedly so. However, never lose site of the fact that Google makes money doing pretty much one thing … selling advertising. I think it is a fairly safe bet that all of the information Google will be gathering through its new Google+ service will also be to gain just that, more information on users so that their advertising can be both more effective and more lucrative. They have to make money after all, otherwise they can’t continue to offer their services.

Apple and Microsoft are both pretty straight forward, they want your money any way they can get it. That’s pretty transparent, and they say as much. Google has never been that transparent with their motivations (and neither has Facebook or Twitter or many other tech companies for that matter). A lot of time is spent on “don’t be evil”, but that’s a corporate slogan, not entirely the company’s motivation.

I hope that Google+ brings to light some good ideas, I don’t know what they could be because I haven’t used it at all, even though I probably will. However, with Google again trying to bring more of the web under its umbrella, I can’t help but fear that this could be another step toward the siloing of the web into larger and larger companies. I hope not, because losing the truly distributed web would be a damn shame.

Categories
Life Technology

An Opening for Rural Communities

Rural communities are dying, or at least that is the accepted wisdom within the mainstream media and those who live in larger cities. I’m not going to get into a pissing contest between what is better, rural or urban, but to deny that there are unique challenges facing rural communities today that they have not had to deal with in the past would be both incorrect and extremely shortsighted.

The questions should be what can we do to change things? The demographics are not going to change drastically for many reasons, but what can rural communities do to both keep those people who are currently there and maybe even grab a few from outside to bolster their ranks?

I’m going to focus on one opening where rural communities are in a unique position (I think) to take a huge step forward and encourage innovation in the technology realm: symmetrical, high-speed broadband.

I understand that there is a capital expenditure that is needed in such endeavors, but in the USA, asymmetrical broadband is the norm and is borderline criminal. People speak of the web as a publishing platform, but the current infrastructure leans HEAVILY toward only consuming. The paltry upload speeds keep people from doing two things: uploading large files and hosting their own stuff in-house.

Rural communities could turn this problem on its head by investing in networking infrastructures and then opening them up for people to use as they would like. Not only would it benefit schools, libraries, law enforcement agencies, government offices, health services and any other public services, but it would also open it up for the citizens to try to build companies in these areas because bandwidth is plentiful and affordable.

It’s time for rural communities to band together and start to think outside of agriculture and natural resources as the only viable economic activities and invest in something that can benefit everyone. Their small size would allow for cheaper roll outs, so less capital is needed to get going. Being smaller also would keep larger telcos off of your back (hopefully).

The future is quickly coming, so let’s get on board!

Categories
Announcements

Disqus Comments

Comments have been moved to Disqus so that I don’t really need to worry about them anymore, plus you are able to log in with other accounts (e.g. Twitter) and they handle the spam filtering as well.

The old comments should be exported over soon. Thanks!

Categories
Technology

Final Cut Pro X Reactions … Reaction

First off, the disclaimer: I have not used prior versions of Final Cut and I probably won’t be using the newest version for a while either. iMovie has fulfilled my needs for a long time and will probably continue to do so.

This short post has more to do with the reactions coming out right now to the release of Final Cut Pro X.

I tend to get a good laugh out of people when something new, rewritten or different is released. The backlash is predictable and funny to read.

Yes, a complete rewrite of a program is not going to have all of the features of the last version. If they wanted all of the features of the last version, they would have kept the old codebase and just added more features. That’s not what happened here.

No, your specific needs did not probably come up in a discussion about how this rewrite should go and what features should make the first release. Will they in the future? Maybe. However, just be aware that your specific needs might not be met by this particular piece of software … and that is just fine.

Yup, Apple might be giving up your little segment of the market and moving the goal posts again. I think they’ve been pretty clear that an entirely digital distribution system is where they see things going, and new versions of their software are probably going to represent that philosophy.

However, let’s step back for a second and just imagine that Apple is doing exactly what they said they were going to do: rewrite Final Cut Pro. Looking at what is there, it looks like a solid foundation to build on top of, and one that is far more modern than the old version.

I expect that some major additions are in store for Final Cut Pro X from this point forward. The reactions have been over-the-top and reek of people who jumped when they should have waited.

I for one, look forward to using it in the future … like most new products from Apple.