Artist: The Faunts

Track: Alarmed/Lights

Album: Feel.Love.Thinking.Of.

Discovered & downloaded on:
KEXP Song of the Day

“Alarmed/Lights” by Edmonton band The Faunts is one of the songs I’ve been listening to in repeat while working, and driving through all of the sad parts of Vegas. So, pretty much everywhere outside my neighborhood. It’s dark and moody, running almost 8 minutes and beginning much like it started, flowing in, out and back so seamlessly that I can tune out and not know I’ve been listening to the same song for 4 hours.  Feels like an out-of-focus snapshot of the sadder Vegas that tourists never see.

Whenever I come across a news story that sounds both ridiculously futuristic and unbelievable, I post a tweet with the #futureisnow hashtag. Here’s a recap of recent tweets:

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Israel using unmanned, 60-ton bulldozer drones to clear roads of land mines and other explosives. http://is.gd/pSOJ

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Production on the Chevy Volt set to begin on June 1, 2009. http://is.gd/pjnx

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow RT @gavinpurcell: I have a Kindle 2 and it is awesome. Physical books = another piece of the old world I can do mostly without.

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow New MMCC barcodes will transmit audio, video, text and games. I’m totally getting a tattoo of one. http://is.gd/nzsa

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Pentagon inks deal on portable milli-wave raygun tech. http://is.gd/nq74

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow The United States has shot down its first enemy unmanned drone aircraft, controlled by Iran http://bit.ly/152yjf

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Pattie Maes presents the Sixth Sense wearable computer by the MIT Media Lab at TED 2009. http://bit.ly/LiOPj

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Jerry loses a finger in a motorcycle accident, so he gets a prosthetic finger – with a 2 GB USB drive. http://bit.ly/T7a6X

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow @kevinrose does a speed test from Virgin America’s in-flight wi-fi from SFO to NYC (while streaming): http://twitpic.com/1zcmw

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Robot Overload Appreciation: the US has deployed 17,300 drones in the Middle East, just in the past 5 years?! http://is.gd/hSnN

andrewmackenzie: #futureisnow Berkeley Bionics partners with Lockheed to produce their awaited HULC high-endurance exoskeleton for soldiers http://is.gd/laKQ

Current assessment of the future: frightening.

Ars Technica is reporting that Time Warner Cable is expanding its tiered, bandwidth-capped internet service to more cities, following trials in Beaumont, Texas. The trial allowed 40 GB per month traffic caps to residents of Beaumont for $55, and charged $1 per gigabyte of excess traffic. The new plan will expand to Austin, San Antonio, Rochester (NY), and Greensboro (NC) this year, with tiers of service ranging from 5 GB to 50 GB/month at prices ranging from $30-$55/month. Time Warner claims these plans are part of an effort to curb “infrastructure costs.”

Ars Technica was extremely skeptical. Cable internet is provided by existing cable lines (and expanding fiber lines) and is cheap to upgrade with replacement DOCSIS gear. And it’s only getting cheaper to maintain every year. So where is all of the supposed cost burden coming from? Sounds like they don’t have any – they just need a new expandable profit model.

“We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business. We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension” says TWC CEO Glenn Britt, to Business Week. Read the whole Ars Technica article here.

This news is becoming common. Comcast’s relatively generous 250GB bandwidth caps are already in place, and other ISPs are considering it. So, in other words, the country’s internet infrastructure is moving backwards. This will be a huge limitation for individuals and businesses alike – it was one of the biggest questions about the emerging OnLive gaming tech I posted on last week. How are bandwidth-hungry sites like Hulu.com and CNN Video supposed to expand their traffic when everybody’s too afraid of surpassing their caps?

The answer: tiered internet. If ISPs can reverse their offerings on bandwidth today, what’s to stop them from forcing content providers into exclusive partnerships tomorrow? What if they charged Hulu.com, or you, the end user, a fee to include their site in your service without counting towards your cap? Soon enough we’ll basically be charged for visiting any sites not under content provider fee structures. Mark my words on it. It’s gonna suck.

So far, Cox Cable here in Vegas doesn’t have a cap – knock on wood – but I’ve started tracking my bandwidth already for just such an occasion. LifeHacker has a nice article on how to do so – I’ve started using SurplusMeter for my Mac today. We’ll see where I’m at after 30 days of Hulu-watching, podcast-downloading, radio-streaming fun.

My MacBook Pro is on all the time, running a variety of net-dependent apps:
• Adium and Skype handle my IM services.
• TweetDeck updates my Twitter feed along with 3 or 4 auto-updating searches.
• I’m streaming the KEXP feed over iTunes right now.
• iTunes also updates any of the 18 podcasts I’m subscribed to – some monthly, some weekly, some daily.
• I watch most of my TV on ABC.com and Hulu.com.
• I get most of my music from free KEXP songs of the day, and Music that Matters podcasts.
• Evernote syncs my notes when it’s open.
• I regularly download huge texture files and photo resources for work, and receive ridiculously large files like PowerPoint presentations for reference and official high-res product shots.
• Worse of all, I’m an info-junkie – Firefox has 8 tabs open right now for random crap from tech news to wiki entries on Middle Eastern politics.

So I think if I ever have to use a capped service, I’ll be screwed well within 30 days. The bandwidth meter test begins now.

The pessimistic writer in me wanted to title this post “The White House wants you to think that it wants to know what you think.” But this vote at least appears to be a genuine effort to reconnect the government with the American people… even though it won’t actually solve any issues. There, got my pessimism in. More to come.

The White House has created a new sub at their web site called Open for Questions, where visitors can submit questions about the economy, and vote for questions already written. The most voted-on questions will be answered by President Obama personally, during an online townhall meeting at 11:30 AM EST, Thursday. So far, 58,788 people have submitted 60,901 questions and cast 2,308,620 votes. Nice idea to personalize the office of the president. No doubt the answers will be well-prepared, highly comforting, terribly vague and without actual action-items. Unfortunately all the web campaigns the Obama online team can think of won’t change that – it’s just how American politics work these days.

The structure is pretty much the same as Digg’s townhall webcasts, wherein users will submit and vote on questions, which are answered by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson during quarterly online townhalls. The difference here is that there are way too many questions for all readers to view, so once your question is at the top it’s pretty likely to stay there.

Submit your questions and votes by 9:30 AM EST tomorrow anyway. Who knows, maybe somebody will read it. The site will report back on how many votes and questions you submit. Note that you’ll have to create a WhiteHouse.gov account that requires your first name, e-mail address and ZIP code, which the White House will keep on record. Google will be hosting all of the questions and voting information.

[UPDATE] WhiteHouse.gov now has the full video of the town hall on YouTube:

What if PC and console gamers could be liberated from the cost of hardware upgrades? What if game publishers didn’t have to develop within the restrictions of console hardware and physical media? OnLive aims to do both with its cloud-gaming service, set to launch in Winter 2009.

Using a box about the size of a paperback book, or a lightweight web plug-in, OnLive will stream the gaming to you and do all of the processing at their three national data centers. That means you can play any graphics-intensive title (yes, including Crysis) on an HDTV or low-end PC or Mac. The demo above uses the OnLive box for HDTV play, a lowly Dell Studio 15 and a current-generation MacBook for laptop-based play. The only information that your home PC has to process is the 720p video it receives and the controls it has to send. Their box uses an HDMI and optional optical audio port on the back, and 2 USB ports on the front for game controllers or keyboard and mouse combos.

Of course, the crutch will be latency. OnLive claims to deliver video and control response at imperceptibly-low latencies, using 3 massively powerful GPU-centric data centers, on the west coast, east coast and midwest. Current broadband speeds in the US allow about a 1,000-mile range for the service. As fiber service expands, OnLive says its range will increase to about 1,500 miles, and can transition its services to the single data server in the midwest. In response to an Australian reporter during the Q&A session, OnLive also says they plan to expand their service internationally after the US market is established.

The last question in the demo was a great one: what about bandwidth caps? OnLive claims they’ve conversed with most ISPs and they’re “pretty good citizens.” OnLive is central server-based traffic, which isn’t the complex peer-to-peer cross-traffic that ISPs claim to have trouble managing. That doesn’t mean the traffic won’t count against users’ caps, however. OnLive requires a minimum 5 Mbps connection but they claim it usually uses a couple hundred kilobits at a time, putting usage well below caps. How quickly a beta tester will burn through their 250 GB Comcast cap is yet to be seen.

The service includes numerous other features, like community areas, multiplayer pairing, “brag clips” of your frags, renting schemes and real-time observation of your friends’ gaming. It’s all pretty slick, I recommend watching the demo to get the full picture.

More info is at www.onlive.com.