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November 13, 2003
Why the Bells Should Be Very Scared
A recent article in Business Week discusses the impact of VoIP on the RBOCs. The article highlights IBM's recent announcement to move to a VoIP network:
When IBM talks, Corporate America listens. So Big Blue created quite a stir on Nov. 7 when a top exec told a tech conference in Atlanta that it hopes to move 80% of its 300,000 employees to voice-over-IP phone systems by 2008. ... When the largest tech company on the planet announces it no longer needs the phone company to manage its calls, you can bet the communications landscape has fundamentally changed.From BW Online | Why the Bells Should Be Very Scared
Referenced Thu Nov 13 2003 13:46:52 GMT-0700
I've been experimenting quite a bit with VoIP. I've got 200 VoIP phones going in a project that I'm working on and I'm learning a lot about the technologies and the vendors. The bottom line is that the technology is easier than many believe. Once IT departments figure out how flexible and simple this stuff is, there will be no holding them back.
01:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Technology Behind the Segway Human Transporter
I attended the BYU CS Department Colloquium today. The speaker was David Robinson from Seqway LLC. David is a BYU grad who got a PhD from MIT and then went to work on the Ginger project which eventually lad to the development of the Segway Human Transporter. David's in the Core Technology Group. The talk is about the technology behind the Segway HT.
Balance is the easy part. The Segway is an inverted pendulum which is a classic problem appearing in Chapter 1 of most control textbooks. The motors not only provide the motive force, but also the torque necessary to balance the machine. The problem is that there is a speed where the motor has no torque left and looses it balance. The trick is to figure out how to limit the torque-speed curve so that users don't fall down.
The battery provides sufficient power for the Segway to climb fairly steep ramps. more interesting, the Segway regenerates power to the batteries when the machine goes downhill. This is good on two fronts. First, you get longer battery life. Second, generating power causes a braking effect, when needed.
An interesting aspect of the design was creating the gear train in such a way that it sounded quite. Part of making the acoustics right was picking gear ratios to that the noise that the machine makes is "in tune." That is, the two primary sounds that the gear train makes are two octaves apart. David says that getting it wrong really sounds bad.
The processor is a TI2406 with 32K of memory and fixed point math.
The battery last about 12 miles depending on terrain. There have been some issues with batteries causing system failure (i.e. people fell down). The recent recall fixes the problem. David reemphasizes that this is a machine, not a magic carpet and it does have limitations.
David spent a fair amount of time talking about Segway's cultural principles. I thought they were good advice for an engineering team.
- Go fast. Mario Andretti said "If you feel like you're in control, you're not going fast enough."
- Expect conflict. The only way to truly tolerate design failure is to do it fast and early.
- Expect to fail. Be tough on issues, easy on people. Cross-functional conflict must happen early to work out the right ideas.
- Have fun.
- Let people be different. Ideation people vs. execution people. (Innovation vs. delivery)
- Hire the best. Jeff Bezo's said "A's hire A's; B's hire C's; C's hire D's"
- Be humble as an individual; be proud as a team.
Innovation is hard. You spend a lot of time out of your comfort zone.
11:48 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Phase 2 of Liberty Alliance Specification
The Liberty Alliance released phase 2 of their work on identity federation. The latest installment is called the Web services framework, ID-WSF (complete list of documents). ID-WSF provides a framework for identity-based Web services in a federated environment. There will likely be some conflict on this between the work of the Liberty Alliance and the WS-I framework proposed by Microsoft, IBM, and others. Liberty adopted the WS-Security specification after it was turned over to OASIS (although there's reason to argue that even that isn't enough). Liberty hasn't adopted WS-Federation, however and last month, published a white paper comparing their approach with WS-Federation. Liberty refuses to adopt standards like WS-Federation unless they're turned over to a standard's body. I think that's wise.
10:08 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Open Source Meme Map
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Open Source Meme Map (Click to enlarge) |
Clearly the map is not exhaustive, but meant to be representative, particularly for the green "example" bubbles. One thing I'd add, that I think is important is that many (most?) Open Source Software (OSS) projects fail---and that's OK.
One of the things I'd like to understand is how this map changes for internal projects built on an open source model. There are a number of companies, like HP, using open source development ideas and tools for internal development teams that are distributed. Clearly some things change. I think the strategic positioning is the same, but the user positioning is clearly different. Likewise, the core competencies are still important. This raises the question of how much of this is specific to open source and how much is Internet-era, distributed development methodology and whether that ought not to be studied in its own right as a necessary, but not sufficient component of the OSS movement.