Circuit Writer Version 6.0
by Jim Scheef

Is Barack Obama good for Us?

Please note that I define "us" in this case as people who use computers both professionally and for pleasure, in other words, DACS members like you and me.

Much of Senator Obama's success in the primaries has been attributed to his "use of the Internet". So if he, or really his campaign, is so technically savvy, will he make the best President for us as computer users and consumers of online media? Will an Obama administration make policy favorable to "us"? So far we have several ways to look at this question.

The Obama campaign was derided by a Clinton campaign official for looking like Facebook. We know who won that battle, but many people feel that the social networking model has been a key factor in the Obama success. So let’s look at his Facebook page (tinyurl.com/5986ou). You will need a Facebook account to view this. (Don’t lie when you sign up, it only causes problems later on. Use your real name and age.)

His Facebook page is typical for a politician (one of the page types you can select when opening an account). There is little real information about policies and it appears that the page is really just an anchor for Facebook members to become “supporters” and a convenient place to read news and comments. Becoming a supporter sends a notice to your Facebook friends that you have done so, which is how social networking works. For information, the Obama Facebook page has links to the official campaign Facebook group, to the campaign’s mySpace page (myspace.com/barackobama), and to Michele Obama’s Facebook page. I suspect that all this is exactly what the typical obsessive Facebook user wants. To see more information as news clips, videos, etc., you can add Barack Obama to your Facebook page. Without extensive experimentation, I have no idea what this might entail.

The “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” Facebook Group has more information; however most of it is about how to volunteer for the campaign at several levels. Again, this is what social networking is about but does not answer my question.

So back to the official campaign website (barackobama.com) we go for a quick dose of policy platitudes. There is a PDF, The Blueprint for Change, that has more detail than the website and I urge all of you to read it thoroughly.

From our standpoint he does address several issues:

• Net Neutrality – an open Internet. This is paramount and most of the right words are in the statement. As always, the devil is in the details, but at least he has it as the top technology issue.
  
• Patent Reform – Basically, he suggests giving the Patent Office the resources needed to do a better job. Nice, but how about eliminating trivial software patents?
  
• Copyright protection at home and abroad – Here he does a good job of defining some problems without much on the solutions side. He seems to be dancing on the fence here although at least he is not railing about digital downloads and trivial software piracy while ignoring the factories that pump out fakes in quantity.
  
• Protecting children versus the First Amendment – this has been a tricky issue since the nineties. The statement says Obama will “give parents the tools to prevent reception of programming that they find offensive on television and on digital media.” No one can be against this, but how to do it?
  
• Broader broadband – This is interesting. He notes that the FCC “defines ‘broadband’ as an astonishingly low 200 kbps. This distorts federal policy and hamstrings efforts to broaden broadband access. Obama will define ‘broadband’ for purposes of national policy at speeds demanded by twenty-first century business and communications.”

This is a very narrow look at some of the computer user issues I’ve talked about here over the months. Obviously there are many, many more issues that touch all of us like voting machine technology and immigration reform (H1B visas), to name just two. There are position statements on these and more, so I urge you to take a really good look.

Next month we will look at Senator McCain.

WiMax is the Next Big Thing - maybe

You can think of WiMax as Wi-Fi on steroids with a potential range measured in miles rather than feet. As the market for Wi-Fi subscription services like T-Mobile and Boingo disintegrates (have you noticed?), WiMax is a new way for an ISP to get you on the Internet. There are two forms – fixed and mobile. The mobile version works like a cell phone as you move about, transferring your session from one tower to the next. I see no reason for anyone to offer the fixed version. Sprint, the only cell phone provider without a “high” speed data plan, planned to implement WiMax, then backed down, then did a deal with Clearwire and WiMax is back on. Intel has been really pushing this for some time <pun>(they got the chips!)</pun> so it is bound to happen eventually, even here in the USofA.

Another Next Big Thing

The SSD or solid state drive will become standard for laptops any day now. An SSD is essentially a really big flash drive that replaces the hard drive. Battery life gains will drive the change as costs for such devices drop. Capacities are already there with Dell offering a 128GB SSD in selected notebooks. Much smaller SSDs have been standard in ultra-mobile notebooks like the OLPC XO-1 (laptop.org), ASUS EeePC (eeepc.asus.com) from the beginning. The XO-1 used a SSD for durability as well as battery life. Many pundits predicted the technology in the XO-1 would become mainstream. It has begun.

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done Department

Seagate has introduced a 1.5 terabyte hard drive. Just a few years ago, you bought this kind of capacity from one of the high-end enterprise storage specialists like EMC who sold you a cabinet full of drivers configured in an array. The new drive is the regular 3.5” size that has been standard now for about fifteen years. The new drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording – not Pimp My Ride) to increase the areal density (bits per square inch) of the drive platter.

Equally amazing is a 500-gigabyte notebook drive. Yes, you can now walk around with one-half terabyte of whatever amuses you in your laptop. Soon it will be possible for one lost laptop to contain personal information about every person on earth.

As you can see from the version number, this begins my seventh year writing monthly for DACS. This column is available as a blog at circuitwriter.spaces.live.com/Blog/. Comments welcome.

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