Sex, Drugs & Unix

Spokane gets shafted (redux)

Steve Stroh has made comments on the previous post.

Comments and corrections follow:

First, Mr. Stroh doesn't get my title right. While I wore many hats at Vivato, including the "Director of Product Development" one, I was also at various points VP of Software and Systems, and Chief Architect, the last was, admitedly, while I was on my way out the door, and Don was doing his best to strip me of any power. Not that I cared, since I knew that in his able hands, Vivato was doomed.

Next, Mr. Stroh quotes a message he received last April (not from me!) which apparently says, in part:

[Vivato employees] have been warned to keep their resumes tuned up because
the company is not sure its going to be around much longer. They are
selling their units at a loss, even at the bizarrely high price they go
for. The cost to build each of the units meets or exceeds the sale price,
which is definitely a harbinger of death for any company. There is no
real secret that the company is money starved, having quickly burned
through the $64 mil they got last year in 2nd round funding.

First, I doubt that any such warning came from management.
Second, the big funding was the third round, not the second.

Vivato is building a lesser model of the one approved by the FCC. Now
boasting only 20 radio/antenna pairs, it isn't the device that it was
cracked up to be. Where the prototypes played pretty nicely with other
users of the frequency, these fellas are simply high powered foghorns
--and the same exact job they do could be done with much less expensive
equipment without losing a bit of utility. That assumes that other
equipment would be permitted to blast out a 52dB signal as the Vivatos
are waivered to do.

The information here is flawed.

1) There never was a Vivato product that contained 20 radios. The first "beamforming" product contains 14 radios and 16 antenna elements. (This fact is easily discovered by looking inside a Vivato VP1200, or even by looking at the FCC website.) The second "beamforming" product (VP2200) contains 6 radios and 8 antenna elements. (Again, those who wish to confirm can either open a unit (once they start shipping) or simply peek at the FCC OET web pages.)

2) Both devices are FCC certified, not wavered.

3) Neither device puts out "52dB". Those interested can check FCC OET website.

Steve's anonymous source continues:

[There is serious convern about] the close relationship between Vivato
and the City of Spokane. The city is investing fairly heavily in
Vivato equipment as part of the WiFi-everywhere that Spokane wants to
build. There are two reasons for this concern. The first and foremost
is that they don't want [the City of Spokane] investing in a company
that isn't going to be around to support their product. Second, they're
perplexed as to why this project was developed without a single offer
to any existing companies that already have a sufficient infrastructure
to bid on it.

Bob Conley is a founder, and well-connected in the city. His family owns the White Elephant, and Bob always seemed to have a cousin in-town anywhere he went. Its likely that he knows people down at City Hall. I find it entirely possible that Bob promulgated exactly what he wanted, rather than what was needed, or even wanted or required. I don't know. Thats opinion.

I do know that Bob was in-charge of the downtown project, and I've heard reports that none of the configuration information for the units is written down anywhere. No network diagrams exist, etc. Again, thats rumor, but I tend to trust the source(s).

Steve's continues:

While I felt that Vivato had considerable potential... that's
now almost spent, apparently, the larger principle at work is the
incredible innovation at work in the Broadband Wireless Internet Access
industry. Vivato's passing will leave a void for only a short time.


The potential for WiFi (and WiMax, btw) is for situations where the interference can be controlled, either via deploying in licensed spectrum (and there are people who want to run WiFi as a service in 2.5GHz, btw) or by controling the deployment(s) such that interference is minimized. Note that this doesn't (and never will) include attempting to provide a service in large metro-area deployments using unlicensed spectrum. Never.

But the wet-dream of wireless broadband continues to exist. Many people and companies will burn-up attempting to solve the problems. Anyone who sits back and attempts to understand the physics will quickly "cotton-on" (as we said in Texas) to the truth. At one point (prior to Don showing up on the scene), we had the salesforce trained to politely say "No" if a customer identified themselves as a WISP. I assume that this decision has been reversed.

But Vivato isn't doomed, its just that the focus is still (aparently) in the wrong place, and the cash continues to run out.

Really bad things will happen as more and more corporations attempt to deploy 802.11g in the enterprise. 802.11g isn't simply faster 802.11b, the deployment characteristics are very different. In specific, the difference between the CCA boundry and the top modulation rate coverage area is HUGE. Another problem is that the adjacent channel rejection performance of 802.11g is terrible compared to most 802.11b (only) devices. Massive interference will be the result i most deployments. Sivash Alamouti (Vivato's new CTO) understands these issues well. If the company will listen to him, they have a chance.

Vivato has a product (the new '11g' switch) that can overcome these problems, if those in-charge at Vivato have the balls to price it agressively. I should openly admit here that this product (the 11g switch) is (or was) my "baby". I had to fight inside Vivato in order to make it happen.

Bob Conley was one of those that attempted (time and time again) to put an axe in it.

The simple fact is that if Vivato can manage to re-break its salesforce from looking for the easy kill (metro wifi deployments), and instead look for situations that are a good fit for Vivato's products (these are mostly indoor, though there are some outdoor deployments that make sense), then Vivato has a chance, because the products they build can solve real-world problems that are difficult to solve with ordinary access points.

I'll also mention here that I was also in-charge of Vivato's "Bridge/Router", which I am told has sold out of its first production run. (More are on the way.) Vivato actually makes money on this product. Fun fact, back when I joined Vivato, I bet Ken Biba (then the CEO, now departed) that the Bridge/Router product would have more contribution margin than the (1st generation) switch.

That was true the moment the first bridge/router sold. Heh.

The screed continues...
Jim on 06.30.04 @ 07:38 PM PST [link]

Spokane gets taken for a ride (again)

As seen on Slashdot

Spokane International Airport is getting wireless connectivity (another link) just before the city will expand WiFi coverage to 100 blocks in Spokane downtown. It will be the largest urban Wi-Fi zone in the United States, said Bob Conley, a founder of Vivato, the company that made the antennas for both installations. Vivato's press release mentions the service will be useful not only to casual downloaders. The downtown 'Hot Zone' will improve city services by facilitating intelligent policing, quicker fire and rescue response, and will support e-government initiatives and a more productive mobile workforce.


I like the comment farther down in the /. story:


They mentioned this on the news earlier this week, said that downtown was already wired. So my wife and I went war driving downtown.

Out of 4 random intersections downtown (well within the listed coverage area), 3 had no signal and the 4th was so weak it kept coming and going.

I suppose you get what you pay for...


Um well yeah. Exactly.

Kids there is NO WAY to make this work in unlicensed spectrum. Most of what is wrong with Vivato is that Bob Conley hasn't given up on the wet dream of wireless residential broadband. Its a little-known fact that the whole reason for Mabuhay/Vivato's existance is that Bob and Skip couldn't get anything but dial-up in Liberty Lake, WA. So these two Agilent engineers decided that they could build a phased-array 802.16 device (Vivato's telephone number still contains a reference to 802.16) and unwire the masses. The VCs wouldn't fund a 802.16 company, but WiFi was hot, so Mabuhay became an 802.11 company.

But there is a big problem: 802.11 is a listen-before-send protocol. If an 802.11 device detects an 802.11 signal (or even a high-enough level of any signal on or near the channel its operating on), it will decide that the channel is in-use (the 802.11 standard calls this CCA (clear channel assesment), and not send.

Vivato's "antenna" provides more gain across a "100 degree" FOV. Now, if you will, estimate the number of APs within range (even at 1Mbps or lower, since all the radio must do is decode the preamble on the front of the packet to set CCA for the duration of the packet) of a single Vivato switch, all sending beacons every 100usec, as well as the traffic to and from any associated device.

Now add all the other 2.4GHz signals in the air, and the opportunites to transmit (even an ACK of a received frame) become quite scarce.

Its a huge problem.

And with other recently-discovered flaws in 802.11, making emergency services, or revenue-bearing services (such as notification of parking meter violations) is just dumb, and may even put lives at-risk. The recently "discovered" "flaw" in 802.11 that allows any station to set the collision window to a very large value, coupled with the Vivato range, means that an attacker could be anywhere. :-)

Bob's other problem is that he won't give up on the first product being "multi-channel", even though "multi-channel" is a 120dB problem. For the non-engineers in the audience, that translates as, "not in our lifetimes". Bob attempted to get me fired by going to Vivato's board about the product that I championed (the new 11g switch) that is only single-channel. The truth is that the first-gen product only works well in a single-channel configuration.

So Spokane is being abused by its own child. There is no way in hell that this metro-area network will work, even in the backwater of Spokane, WA. In the meantime, Bob is helping Vivato unload a product that they otherwise wasn't really selling. All with the federal government providing the funds. While its not as bad as Spokane's parking garage debacle, wherein the Cowles Family managed to fleece the city out of several million for a parking garage that can't break-even unless its 100% full, year-round, the waring Irish Conley faction appears to be out on its own cash-grab mission.

Amazingly, one of the proposed uses for all this equipment is to have all the parking meters in Spokane send notification to a central dispatch when they expire, so the meter maid can come write a parking ticket more often. The goal is that the meter maid will be at the expired meter within 60 seconds. Spokane's Parking Nazi's are legend, and the city has decided to attempt to pay-off the Parkade debt by running the surface parking enforcement as hard as possible.

See how it all ties together? Spokane buys a lot of dead-end gear from the local high-tech "great white hope" (Spokane being 90% caucasian, after all), and gets the federal government to pay for it under the guise of improv(ing) city services by facilitating intelligent policing, quicker fire and rescue response, and will support e-government iinitiatives and a more productive mobile workforce.

So there is another problem. WiFi runs in the ISM band, so to get free parking (or at least avoid the meter maids until they care to look at the flag on the meter, rather than being dispatched to the most recently-expired meter by radio), all you need is a small continous transmit device running 2.4. The Vivato switch (at least in the direction where *your* car is parked) will be unable to hear the meter's notice, and the parking attendent won't visit your car.

And yes, its 100% legal to do this. With a little bit of software running on the device, you can determine which channel the meter is using, and block that channel.

Meanwhile, Vivato is exiting Spokane as fast as it can. The executives are now ALL either located in the bay area, or are being moved there. I'm leaving too, of course.

If you're going to build one of these metro-area networks with WiFi, there is only one way: Mesh.

Jim
p.s. Liberty Lake now has cable modem service.
Jim on 06.19.04 @ 04:34 PM PST [link]

Misunderstanding all you see...

I've been sleeping a lot during the day lately, getting a full 9+ hours/day for some reason. Very unusual for someone who used to retort to the "When do you sleep?" queries with "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find there's no need

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Jamie refuses to wake me unless there is a pressing appointment.


She's a woman who understands.
She's a woman who loves her man.

She's a woman, she's a woman.

Jim on 06.14.04 @ 02:10 AM PST [link]

Doc Searls, and his son, on WiFi Everywhere

I didn't see the metaphorical bottom line in this thing until my seven-year-old son told me to look up something on the Web when we were driving in the car. "What makes you think I can pick up the Web here?" I asked.

"You don't pick it up," he answered. "The Web is everywhere in the world."

"Why do you think it's in the world?" I asked.

"Because people put it there."

link
Jim on 06.12.04 @ 12:50 AM PST [link]

Day one vulnerability in IE

Will someone please explain why this POS is still in-use anywhere?

Two new vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer which allow a complete bypass of security and provide system access to a computer, including the installation of files on someone's hard disk without their knowledge, through a single click.

Worse, the holes have been discovered from analysis of an existing link on the Internet and a fully functional demonstration of the exploit have been produced and been shown to affect even fully patched versions of Explorer.

It has been rated "extremely critical" by security company Secunia, and the only advice is to disable Active Scripting support for all but trusted websites.


link
Jim on 06.10.04 @ 03:52 AM PST [link]

The GPL is science

Says here that Linux is a leprosy.

It also says:

"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source. Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation."

Which is, I think the root of the matter. Namely, that the persons who funded this crapfest are really attempting to convince the U.S. government that the GPL is bad for the country. Stated differently, it is the GPL that they fear, not "Open Source". Code that can be stolen with only credit given (e.g. that covered by a BSD or MIT license) is good, because Microsoft can use BSD code in their OS, leveraging the work of others, with nothing given back.

This isn't possible with the GPL. It's always there, blatantly in your face, telling you "You may not use this code in proprietary ways.'' If a company takes your work, repackages it and sells the repackaging and service for it, your code is still available. It isn't legally permissible for them to take your code, incorporate it into another product and sell that product without also making the code to that product available for the cost of distribution.

One of the major differences between the GPL and the MIT and BSD licenses is that the GPL requires distribution of the source code, while the MIT and BSD licenses permit same. If you read permit as allow, you'll get the right gist of the difference.

The GPL is rooted in science. Modern science was born in the 18th century when scientists began openly publishing their methods and results. Before the arrival of modern scientists, the pseudo-scientists of their day were known as "alchemists". These deluded individuals insisted on keeping their work proprietary for much the same reason that latter-day pseudo-scientists keep their work secret.

The GPL forces re-distribution of others work that you incorporate in your work, but only if you decide to distribute your work (for gain or not). The BSD and MIT licenses do not, and thus, great work, like the TCP/IP stack from BSD can now be found in Windows.

Stallman created the GPL because he realized that maintaining the progress due to this open scientific tradition is far more important than providing free labor for rip-off artists. The freedom of the GPL is the same as the freedom of true Science--progress through open sharing of knowledge, allowing us to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, so that we may see farther than they.

This is the reason why I think that Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others involved with the term "Open Source" have done the computing world a great dis-service. Fighting words, I know, but their reaction against the GPL and its "confrontational attitude":

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

was basically a tip-off that we should have all recognized, but didn't. "Open Source" is not simply a new name on the idea that the source must be available for any program that incorporates code that is licensed that way. Rather, it dilutes the freedom that rms sought. Eric and Bruce positioned that they were making Free Software safe for business, when in fact they were working to confuse the rank and file with a new term, a term that they controlled, and could use for their gain.

Quoth RMS, "Unlike some of you, I am not an open source developer. I'm an activist in the free software movement."

See Why Free Software is better than Open Source for more explanation about the difference between the free software movement and the open source movement.

Stallman says it all far better than I.


Jim on 06.09.04 @ 02:05 AM PST [link]

Microsoft in league with Internet foes, film at 11

It says here that Microsoft has "decided" that its upcoming SP2 won't work with "the 20 most pirated product IDs" for Windows XP.

The article quotes Paul Randle, Microsoft's UK manager of all things XP as stating, "The situation at the moment is that we will block those". Mr. Randle goes on to state, "Whether it will change between now and launch I do not know".

Its obvious that Microsoft is floating a "trial ballon". Testing the market to see what the reaction will be. Its also semi-obvious that they could block far more than the 20 "most common" pirated product keys (who would know how many are blocked?)

The situation can be summarized thus: "You didn't pay for our crappy software, so we're not going to fix it for you." Fair enough, until you look at the larger picture, which is that the Internet has gotten to be a very scary place, with hijacked PCs for sale (in bulk) to spammers and those who would like to launch a DDoS attack against a foe, commerical or otherwise. Microsoft, while not entirely to blame for the situation, is at least culpable. Windows (all versions) is best described as a large collection of flawed software, and nobody but Microsoft can fix the problems with Windows.

This leaves a large part of the world looking for a solution. If they pirate Windows, then their computers will be prone to behing hijacked for ill-use, and possible disclosure of information contained thereon. Nor can they afford to pay for Windows, since the situation now is that Windows can cost as much as the hardware for a decent PC.

Linux, however offers no such bargin. Linux, as free software, not only offers itself for the actual costs of distribution (e.g. the cost of making a copy), but further, the source code to linux is available, under the GPL, such that flaws can be fixed by anyone skilled in the art of programming.

Doc belives that "the computer business will ultimately mature into something resembling the construction business"

Think of the situation this way, if you could only call the contractor that built your home in order to fix the plumbing or make an addition, how would that change the way you feel about the building you live in?

Personally, I live in a 116 year-old house, so the architect, and all the tradespeople who worked on it, are dust in the wind by now.

By its actions above, Microsoft has aligned its interested with the parties who are most dangerous to the Internet, those who cause the most havoc. If you run Windows on your computer (I don't, but ther are several Windows XP computers in-use here) then you're part of the problem.



Jim on 06.05.04 @ 09:49 AM PST [link]