Many otherwise nice people are dizzy about RFID, which, they think, will see worldwide pervasiveness in the all-too-near future. Think again.
In a unique essay about the real world, Larry Shutzberg of Rock-Tenn Co. (consumer packaging, promotional displays, and recycled paperboard) notes that the costs of RFID include “tags, readers, printers, middleware, infrastructure, consulting, R & D, system changes, implementation, training, change management, and service provider fees.”
So just settle down, people: ubiquitous RFID will only follow ubiquitous funds to put it there, which is quite a long way off.
The New Millennium Research Council is hosting an event next Wedneday (Oct 27) in Washington on “The End of Regulation? Reforming Telecom Policy and REgulator’s Roles to Meet New Market Realities.” Speakers at the half-day conference–including TLFer’s Braden Cox and Adam Thierer–will discuss the future of regulation and of regulators in the coming IP world. I will be moderating the shebang, but it promises to be an interesting day anyway. If you’re in the Washington area, it’s worth dropping by to see.
The GHz race officially came to an end this week. No, really. Intel, who has held the speed crown for more than 5 years, has thrown in the towel, announcing that they would break the 4 GHz barrier… well, never.
This is a development that analysts have been predicting for years. Since the late ’90s, CPUs have been much faster than the memory and buses that feed the CPU with data. That means that more processor speed is mostly useless for the vast majority of data-intensive tasks. Worse, Intel cheated in designing the Pentium 4, ramping up the speed mostly by reducing how much the chip did on each cycle. The result was a chip that had a higher clock rate, but didn’t actually perform any better than slower-clocked chips that did more with each cycle.
The design of the Pentium 4 was driven by marketing, not engineering, considerations: GHz was an easily understood metric for judging processor speed, and so having the fastest chip was an effective selling point. But the reality has become so obvious that even marketing people can’t ignore it. If they had continued on their current path, they would have needed ever-more-elaborate cooling technologies to keep the chip from melting.
From now on, expect chipmakers to focus on greater parallelism– putting more than one processor on a chip, executing multiple instructions per cycle– and on non-performance features like reducing power consumption. Both IBM’s G5 (which is in Apple’s new Power Macs) and AMD’s x86-64 architecture do a better job of getting more performance out of fewer clock cycles. The shift to non-performance-related features is already apparent with Intel’s Centrino line, which is targeted at mobile devices and boasts lower power consumption and wireless features.
An important component of Apple’s iTunes Music Store and competitors from Microsoft, Real, and Sony, is “digital rights management.” Under DRM schemes, music or other content purchased online is encrypted in a way that only authorized devices or programs can read it, and tagged with rules indicating who the rightful owner is and what may be done with it. If it works as advertised, such schemes allow copyright holders complete control over how their content is used, even after that content is sold to consumers. In the case of iTMS, Apple limits how many computers are allowed to have a copy of each song, how many CDs with a given playlist can be burned, and which devices I’m allowed to offload my songs to (at present, only iPods).
Many analysts on both sides of the intellectual property debate blithely assume that DRM works, both from a technological and a business perspective. They assume that DRM can prevent unauthorized copying of protected works, and (more crucially, in my view) that doing so makes business sense. I’m going to argue that both of those propositions are wrong.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.