GRID, MEDIA INBOX, and OCEAN are trademarks of Jeffrey Thomas Chipman.
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When I was thinking about the Media Inbox described in the column “The Age Of Content”, and how users could interact with it, I thought it would be an excellent application for voice recognition (Vo-R)/AI. I wanted to get rid of clunky log-on routines. But in a family situation, there will be mulitiple users, so what to do?
Since you’ll have Vo-R, the system will take a “snapshot” (like a fingerprint) of your voice. When you set up the Media Inbox it will ask, “Who are you?” You’ll say your first name, or how much of a sample of your voice it needs to identify you. Then if you say “Wake up!” or “I’m Here,” it knows who you are, and loads your Bot. That’s the log-on, and after that your Bot responds to your commands. (If it’s a one-user system, the “voice stamp” wouldn’t matter.) It’s all local, so don’t worry about Big Brother or the cable company putting your “voice stamp” into some secret database. If someone else is using the Media Inbox through the audio speakers when you want to log-on, there are various ways you can temporarily mute the system and sign in, so that your Bot appears. A high quality wireless headset with an unobtrusive mike can allow multiple users. A lot of listening today is done through headphones anyway, so it’s not an inconvenience.
What’s a Bot?
It’s a visual representation of a robot, an artificial entity who processes your commands. It could be something original, or licensed—like HAL from 2001, or R2D2 (you’ll need subtitles for him), or maybe Kermit the Frog.
When the Bot loads, it checks your permission level, so it knows what content you’re permitted to access. The Bot can scan various tables of content.
There’s a simple Bot language, and it’s your gateway to the operating system I call GRID.
In the morning, you tell the system to “Wake Up” or “Good morning Hal.” Hal appears and tells you if anything has been dropped into your Media Inbox ™ and asks you what you want to do with it. If you’re not sure, say “Archive” or “I’ll think about it.” If you want to think about it, the icon for the content will go into a box, and stays there until you do something with it. If you want to archive it, there will be a command tree system, and folders you can drop content into.
If you want multiple windows on the display, say “Grid.” Then you tell your Bot what you want running where, and how big it is, when you want it to run, etc. (like “Nintendo, 50%, 3 o’clock, A2″). When you’re done, you say, “Thanks, Hal,” and the grid disappears. The grid can be configured so that the “boxes” are whatever size you want to work with, so that you could run a grid that might be like a tic-tac-toe layout, or something more complex. It will use a system like you see in a road atlas to identify position, with letters across the top and and bottom and numbers at the sides. If you want to move the content you say “Grid” and then “Nintendo to C6,” or just “A2 to C4.”
When someone else wants to use the display and says their name, the Grid appears again and you shuffle things around. If your son and daughter start fighting over display space their Bots appear and tell them to work it out. Something like that. When a working parent dials in from the office via their cell phone, their Bot can appear and say, “There’s pie in the fridge. I’ll be home at 5:30. Your videogame shuts down in 30 minutes. Crack the books.”
If your 5 year old is working with Kermit the Frog, Kermit’s going to make it easy. But other Bots can be far more complex.
You don’t have to have a Bot as your GUI for the Media Inbox, but I think Bots will become a reality quite rapidly, and it’s why you don’t want to lock the GUI to the underlying OS. It will sound (and will look) like Star Wars, but we have the technology to do it now, so this is a good place to use it. There aren’t any rules. Imagination is the key, but we need Bots and we need a simple, flexible Bot language. But if someone wants to write and sell a really complex Bot for propeller heads, they can do that, too—as far as Vo-R technology will allow.
The Media Inbox isn’t something you hunch over like a laptop or PC or Mac. It’s something you interact with, that you customize to your needs, that brings the mix of media you want into your environment. For families, it can be something to gather around, to touch base with, to serve the varying needs of family members, instead of a chaotic noise box.
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Everyone hates keyboards. People would like to use Vo-R to “type” documents on a program like Microsoft Word, but I think the problem is really how you look at it. A comfortable, “formatting” tool held in one hand to work in conjuction with the word processing program (or whatever you’re entering text into) will make it a reality. Instead of saying “Baseball, the first “b” is a capital letter,” you just hit a key on a remote that does the formatting as you talk. So you don’t say “Comma,” and worry about some convoluted method of making the program understand you want the formatting comma, not the word. You could just hit a comma key. Or a footnote key. You’ll need some dedicated keys and programmable keys.
Let’s look at a simple idea of how it works: You’re using a word processing program like Microsoft Word or Word Perfect and you’ve just finished a sentence using Vo-R. You hit the period key on the formatting remote. You hit “Space” once or twice and you”re ready for the next sentence. The program could automatically make the next letter a capital. But you could also do this: as you speak, tapping the ”Shift” key once on the remote makes the first letter of the next word a capital, but holding down the ”Shift” key makes the whole word in capital letters. It would feel comfortable before long.
Or if you want “1,000.25″ to appear in your document, and you don’t want the numbers spelled out, you hit a “Num” key as you speak. Programs like Microsoft Word have tables of special symbols, and they’re kind of clunky to use. You could just hit a “Special” key, and say the symbol you want, like “British pound.” If you want to change the font, you toggle a “Font” key and say “Arial 10 italic.” And if you want to return to the previous font you say “Return,” or you say “Courier 12 bold underline” if you want something else.
But there’s one major problem. What do you do with words that sound alike, such as “read” and “red,” or names, like “Smith” and “Smythe”? Or names like “Piatowski”?
There are various ways of handling that. I use Microsoft Word 2003. If I type “I red a book,” the program underlines that phrase with a squiggly green line to let me know it doesn’t make sense. It’s using context. “Red” is a noun, not a verb. That helps.
The program could default to the most common usage. When it sees a word that could have more than one meaning, it pastes it into a “buffer” and waits to see what comes next, and assigns the most common spelling. So you get ”if you’re coming to dinner” and not “if your coming to dinner.” Conventional word processing programs already do that.
But there are other ways to work with this software. A word flashes if it could have more than one meaning in context, and you say “OK” if it’s what you want, or toggle a “Variant” key until the word you want appears and then you say “OK.” You can create variants yourself if you want to—like “Smythe.” You can always use the backspace key, and then hold down “Spell” and spell out the word. Or hold down ”Spell” and spell out the word as you go along. If you’re using names, the program can learn “Piatowski” or buzzwords or catch phrases, and the next time you use it it’s automatic. When you’re done, you review the document, and visual signs can show existing errors or ambiguities, and you can correct them.
It’s a combination of Vo-R and conventional input. This type of program wouldn’t require sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence), but when you said a word the program didn’t understand, it could say, “I didn’t understand that word. Would you spell it?” And then you press the “Spell” key and spell it, and the program says, “Thank you. I’ll add it to my dictionary.” So it’s linking the word to the phonetics. You can load in dictionaries, specialized stuff, with their phonetic equivalents. The program would get better the more you use it. You’ll have some kind of cursor control on the remote, too: a trackball or mini-joystick or maybe a touch-pad.
It won’t operate at the speed of thought; even today’s most advanced word processor can’t do that. What we’re shooting for here is a program that’s much faster and more comfortable than a keyboard program, and one that learns and adapts to you. You don’t have to hunch over a laptop or PC/Mac to use it.
But here’s where it gets really interesting:
You could run a full blown word processing program on your cell phone by loading an app that makes cell phone keys formatting tools (like the remote I discussed above), and then ”write” your document and send it to headquarters or anywhere you want it to go via the cellphone network. Or a spreadsheet. Or PowerPoint, that kind of stuff. Use a noise-canceling mic if you’re on an airplane.
You can have the keys on a touch screen, or pull down a template over the keypad when you want the formatting tool. I looked at some next-gen cell phones on C/Net, and they were all “me too” products (with lousy cameras and lousy MP3 players), except one. I don’t remember who made it, but it had a clear keypad. And then it occured to me that since the keypad is operated by touch, you could load an app for this formatting tool and the formatting keys would appear on this keypad, and you have the formatting tool.
And now you have your word processing program running on a cell phone, too. Which is running on someone’s mobile platform. If you buy my cell phone docking concept, and get an IT/Office Automation manufacturing firm to make it, you’re in the lucrative corporate IT market, with your operating system. Everything changed just by following the technology. You sell it on the basis that you’re reducing redundancy, it’s less expensive, and you get incredible management reports.
Although use of a keyboard would be optional (for the deaf, for example), the goal should be to perform even the most complex tasks using Vo-R and a comfortable remote—and when interacting with the Bot, just Vo-R. Bear in mind that people who’ve never owned a PC or Mac (because they’re intimidated by computers) will have a Media Inbox.
Touch screens are great for cell phones, but you don’t want a 4 year old smearing PB&J on your display. And people who don’t know how to type (like your 6 year old or your grandmother) can use this software, which opens up markets. And it could be used for email, too.
But the the following is the best way to implement Vo-R:
Just hit a “Format” key, and use VR to do the formatting. So when you come to a period in your document, you press “Format” and say “period.” Or “Font Arial 10 italic.” Or say “Comma.” Or “Left paretheses.” Or “Footnote,” ”End footnote.” Or “Exclamation.” Or “Quotation mark.” Or “Home.” Or “Text center.” That kind of thing. Because when you hit “Format,” the program isn’t expecting regular text entry, it’s looking for commands. So at the end of a sentence you press the key and say “Period space space.” And you’re ready for the next sentence.
A combination of dedicated format keys and Vo-R formatting will make this program fly. Consumers won’t go back to old style keyboard entry. Let consumers assign keys on the formatting remote to suit themselves. You can have macros, anything you’re doing now, but much easier to use. Looking at a conventional PC keyboard, you can see that it can be replaced with a relatively small remote just by using Vo-R text entry and a FORMAT key and Vo-R formatting commands, and a few dedicated keys, like SHIFT, NUM, VARIANT, SPELL, RETURN, and programmable keys.
You can operate even the most complex tasks with the remote. For instance, when you press down on the “Format” key and say “Tables and Borders,” that menu drops down with options and you say your option. If you keep the commands unambiguous (within the command structure), and there’s something to look at as you go along, you don’t need an encyclopedic memory, and you can bail out with some key that returns you to the program proper. You don’t need to know shortcuts or use a mouse.
To highlight text, position the cursor, press “Format,” and say “Drag,” then highlight the text with the cursor, hit “Format” again and say “Times New Roman 14 center,” and “Format” “Exit.” Like that. It’s just organization, and it operates on the principle that the program always knows the difference between ordinary text and a command. When you press “Format” (or one of the dedicated keys), you’re sending a program interrupt which is routing your speech into a subprogram that recognizes speech as commands, rather than editable text (athough you could enter editable text and work with it within a box created by some command tree). It can be as flexible and intuitive as it needs to be.
It’s not just a speed or convenience issue. It’s also an ergonomic and health issue. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a serious problem in the workplace, and this system will greatly reduce it, saving on time off for illness and insurance claims. I had to give up a conventional mouse for a trackball due to pain, and it really helped.
The Vo-R/Formatting remote concept is the kind of software the Media Inbox is going to use, and cell phone docking will integrate office systems. It’ll be easy to implement and you can blow Word and that PBX out of the water, and be positioned for the Media Inbox. And you’ll get a large part of the business that’s now going to laptops.
What is proprietary here isn’t speech recognition. The formatting remote can work with any method of speech recognition.
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So OCEAN is the network, the Media Inbox is the digital hardware, Bots are your GUI, and GRID is the operating system. IF the Media Inbox system is deployed, GRID won’t be something anyone licenses per se (if it isn’t deployed, I’m hanging on to the OS). The end user pays for a GRID OS on the Media Inbox , but GRID is a set of specs anyone can run with. The developer doesn’t have to pay a license fee, just respect certain common specs. And you have an open system that rewards bright ideas.
I want to answer a question that might be troubling some readers:
“Isn’t GRID an infringement on Microsoft Windows because you’re placing multiple panes on a computer screen?”
No. It isn’t. Placing multiple panes on a screen is a standard representational method. It’s used in Picture-in-Picture TV sets, and has been used in TV shows and in film for many years, pre-dating Windows, and even in classical art. It’s a very common technique. Different stuff in different panes is also common, and movement in different panes is common as well. There was a recent movie that was 4 panes of story lines. The fact is, digital hardware and software has been, and is now, used to load content into panes with systems unrelated to Microsoft.
The interesting thing about Windows—and I’m dating myself here—is that in the beginning it wasn’t an operating system at all. Microsoft started off with DOS (Disk Operating System). IBM had it and called it PC DOS. Then it went generic and was called MS DOS.
DOS raked stuff off the hard drive or the floppy by using a cumbersome command system. I won’t discuss the legal history of Windows, but basically the bright idea was to replace DOS commands with fun icons which did the DOS drudgery for you. Over time the Windows desktop sank so deep into the underlying OS that few people remember (or would want to use) the DOS command line. But In The Beginning, DOS and Windows were separate products.
What fascinates me is that since Windows became a commodity, nobody else ever mated their GUI to DOS and marketed it. Occasionally competing operating systems attempted to challenge Windows dominance, but none were a serious rival. And when the Justice Department filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft, it wanted them to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows, so Microsoft didn’t control how people surfed the Web. After all, the Web isn’t a Microsoft product, but the launchpad is from Windows.
When I was working at AT&T, they brought out a computer and did the same thing that Microsoft did, only they parked a Windows icon type interface on top of a Unix derived OS. It flopped and wound up being used in an early automated attendant application.
It would be infringement if GRID used the method Windows does to move panes around the screen and orient them. But it doesn’t. I realized that when you have GRID in a multiple user environment, especially families, you don’t want hands all over the display, so touch screen is out (but it’s great for cell phones), and mice weren’t practical either. A PC can handle multiple users, but not at the same time. You can set up different accounts for people, but you pretty much have to stand in line to use it. Even when PCs are networked, it’s you there and me here, and it’s done to share software like a notes program, or printers.
Although I’ve given the above examples of using GRID with just V-oR, using V-oR and the formatting remote can actually handle the most complex tasks within GRID for advanced users (and you could have separate “channels” for remotes). So where the rubber meets the road, GRID and Windows are completely different. The content I’m placing in a pane isn’t low quality compressed stuff, it’s hi-res. What I do with it when it’s there is schedule, size, and time, and it’s backed by an admin program that has over-arching control on the Bots or other GUI system. And here’s the thing: GRID can actually set up a schedule of content to run in order within a given pane. The content could be a TV show or it could be opening a URL for an Internet radio station—be creative.
If you think about it, you’ll realize that even DOS isn’t going to work here. Some people are going to fill up TB (terrabyte) hard drives, because this content isn’t MP3s or MPEG video. There’s no reason to use the file system that DOS uses.
The GRID system is designed to chain drives until some better mass storage comes along. So what we’re going to do is have the system read the overall storage capacity and instead of drive letters (like C: and E:) we’re going to have an archive based system that operates across drives. It’s a logical entity, not a physical entity. As long as there’s enough storage on your system you can build archives. When you run out, GRID will tell you to do something about it, which means installing another drive, or wiping content to regain more archive storage. Scrolling through all those icons or other cute stuff to get to what you want won’t work. When a better device for mass storage comes along, the read/write routines will change, but GRID as an operating system will continue to function in the same way. I don’t want to tie the operating system to the type of storage device, so the notation GRID uses is spatial, rather than just directing to the hard disk: “An icon was clicked. Here’s what we need to make that work. Load those files.” Obviously at some point GRID is writing to or loading files off a drive, but what you need could be located on more than one drive, and loading files off mass storage isn’t proprietary. When I was at the University of Illinois, engineering students were fumbling with punch cards to run COBOL programs.
Copy protection for premium content is necessary. Copy protection can be in firmware at the drive level. A flag in the content tells the drive to scramble it using a randomly chosen algorithm. Once a drive is initialized in a system, it can’t be removed and installed in another system. Unprotected files can be sent to someone else, or copied onto removable media.
There has to be a compromise between the legitimate rights of digital content producers and the consumer. Some people feel copy protection is an infringement of their right to use the capabilities of the product they’ve paid for. I think it’s really a legal issue. The law has to face the fact that digital technology allows easy duplication of digital content, and define what separates a digital “product” from a digital “file,” and are there different classes of “products” and “files”? The answer isn’t obvious. Once that’s resolved, the question then becomes: Is it legal to sell equipment that allows unauthorized duplication of a digital “product”?
I can buy a MP3 of any current hit CD for less than a buck off a rogue MP3 network, use a program like Windows Media Player to write it onto a CD, and hit the streets. Or you can buy one of the new LP to CD turntables with a USB bus, convert any LP into an MP3, and sell CDs that haven’t even been issued on CD. To handle this on a case by case basis is absurd—it’s impossible to sue enough people to make even a tiny dent in the pirate marketplace. Music industry lawsuits are intended to scare off pirates by making an example of some of them. It’s a very messy issue, and the law needs to address it with something more practical than chasing people around for copyright infringement.
The ultimate solution is the province of Congress and the courts. The only thing I can say to a content producer is: “If you want this content copy protected, you can do that.” Whether you actually have the right to do that is beyond the scope of a designer.
The Media Inbox should have some kind of expansion bay reserved for mass storage yet to come. When it arrived, you could start reading off hard drives until the new device was filled, remove the hard drive and then place the device into the vacant bay, and so on, until the hard drives are gone. So the bus system here could be a selling point. I’m not an EE, but here’s an opportunity to have a new modular plug and play design, and what’s at stake is a market for cards and drives. Everyone loves cards, but cards are too hard to install, which hurts sales.
When your kid opens a present on Christmas 2015, he says: “Wow. A Class 5 Emulator Card.” Before you can say Santa Claus he’s got it installed in the Media Inbox.
This type of card doesn’t exist now. It’s a sub-system, a virtual circuit board or motherboard of the device, a computer within a computer. Manufacturers will get a CAD program. Since the video, audio, memory, power supply, and input chores are off-loaded to system resources, the main concern is custom chips. I think that could be addressed with a flexible custom chip architecture—something like an IC breadboard for custom chips. A lot of products are just code in firmware. I haven’t torn apart a modern game console, but I think most of the custom chips are in the video/graphics controller, which the manufacturer isn’t going to have to develop. Rather than burden the Media Inbox processor, perhaps use a lower end processor like a Celeron on the board, optimized for this application.
Among other things, this card will run the videogame ”consoles” of the future. It allows a manufacturer to load and run the proprietary parts of its system in firmware and it will have brickwall copy protection. Which means limitless new opportunities for manufacturers and a lot more profit. And for manufacturers to bring new products to market at a fraction of the cost of doing it now. Modular design will allow new emulator cards to be developed to keep pace with technology. A major part of GRID is linking this card to other electronics to make a complete virtual product. The video and audio systems need to be robust, but cost-effective when mass-produced.
We’re not simulating a game “console.” We’re replicating or creating a game “console.” And a lot of other products, like home automati0n. It really just depends on the design of the emulator card (or cards). As long as the cards are backward compatible, new developments are simple to implement. The advantage for video console companies is that serious gamers will want all the major systems (minus clutter), bringing companies customers they don’t have now. The emulated “console” and the games to go with it will be extremely profitable. The “console” and games are software (content). The generic “PC” videogame will probably disappear.
I want to make an important distinction: there is a difference between emulating a product using software and existing PC architecture, and using this architecture, even though in both cases the “product” is software. Emulating a complex product using existing PC architecture involves many compromises. Many “PC” videogames today require graphics card upgrades to run smoothly. Those cards are expensive (in some cases costing as much as a videogame console), because they’re not a high volume accessory. The Media Inbox is going to run smooth, hi-res, full motion video. The entry level Media Inbox graphics and sound cards will be high quality, but high volume products, which will bring the cost down dramatically. That doesn’t mean an end user can’t upgrade those facilities at some point.
The Bot’s job is to access those archives for you using Vo-R. That will translate into the drive(s) where the content is located, but you can see that an archive can occupy more than one drive, and even a given piece of content could straddle drives. Let the Bot find it for you, and don’t worry about its location, or where the Bot writes the content—for almost everyone, the “address” of a drive is of interest only to the Bot.
The Media Inbox will have (probably) optical disk systems to read in software that isn’t loaded off OCEAN, and you can write to it too, but it will be handled in Vo-R as well. Over time the optical disk will be more for just storing spreadsheet files and word processing files, because almost all software for the system will come in off the feed and be installed without the optical drive.
This is the skeleton of the GRID OS, but it’s very flexible and adaptable. I want users to set up their own archives and command trees, in whatever way suits their content mix. Teach it to the Bot by using the admin panel to set up tables of commands. There’s a couple of ways to train the Bot, but one way would simply be to reference the command number in the table with your spoken command. So you get into a sub-program referencing that table and you say: “Command 1 Hard Bop.” Like that. Software is organization and logic. It sounds difficult, but it really isn’t. It all goes back to a simple Bot language—you’re not going to discuss War And Peace with your Bot, but within its parameters it can be quite useful. Archives can contain any type of content, including Internet radio stations, shopping websites, or programs, and they can have sub-archives. The user really determines what they need. The archive isn’t a sophisticated database—it’s a command tree with folders, and what you see on the GRID display will be prompts referencing the content you’ve archived, not things to be clicked on. Macros can be set up to access content you use a lot.
When “Ocean” and the Media Inbox are first deployed, most people will use an existing TV, and many TVs are too small, so as a practical matter the GRID feature set for TVs will be limited. But it will be there when consumers migrate to large displays.
You can run Windows as a secondary OS on the Media Inbox if you want, but I think if you use GRID you won’t run Windows for very long. You’ll have to pay for Windows, and drive space will have to be allocated to work with its file system. You’ll create a virtual “hard disk” to work with Windows. If the Media Inbox is installed in a home that’s never had a PC, they probably won’t want Windows.
Some of these things aren’t easy for someone with no tech background to understand. What you need to know is:
(a) GRID isn’t Windows, and no licensing fees are going to be paid to Microsoft. GRID can use anybody’s browser, including Internet Exporer.
(b) You can run Windows on a Media Inbox, but if you do, you’re going to pay Microsoft just like you do now. You could purchase a Media Inbox with Windows pre-installed, and some will be sold that way. When you operate in “PC” mode, it will be like the Windows computer you have now. You can surf with IE or some other browser, do Windows updates and all the other things to maintain and use the “PC.” But unless Windows software (regardless of vendor) is adapted to use Vo-R and the formatting remote, I don’t think you’ll see a lot of it modfied to work on GRID. It’s easier just to write new programs.
(c) The BIOS (Basic Input Output System) is designed by the CPU chip-maker. I run an old Windows XP system, and when you watch the screens start to load, you see the BIOS load before the OS. That won’t change, but it will be tailored to the needs of the GRID—it worked with Windows, and chip-makers will be happy to work with GRID.
Why am I giving the GRID OS away? Because I want to encourage people to get OCEAN and a Media Inbox, and get content providers to use OCEAN and network traffic is where most of the revenue of the whole thing comes from.
Finally, a simple illustration of how “cloning” and “wiping” would work on OCEAN:

Let’s say two people order the same music album, one person at Node C and another at Node D. A block of the album passes Node A, and before that block hits Node B, an identical block reaches Node A. Node A wipes the second block, and a sub-carrier tells Node B to clone the first block and gives Node B the routing information. This is done on a block by block basis, and doesn’t mean the entire album has to be cloned, but individual parts of it might be cloned. It’s done using simple header code, and performed at the node, because the exact route content takes to the end user can vary according to network conditions. But you can see that “cloning” and “wiping,” in addition to being an efficient use of network bandwidth, could also be faster. This would be especially useful when packages of content (like a TV sitcom) are released on certain days. For instance, it’s customary to release DVDs on Tuesdays.
This really isn’t classic packet switching. Breaking the content into blocks is done before the content hits the network. The blocks are of uniform size to reduce activity at the nodes to a basic level. Uniform size allows easy “cloning” and “wiping.” The node doesn’t have to analyze the contents of a block to determine how much of its contents could be cloned. Processing is done using simple header information. OCEAN is delivering huge amounts of content, and this design favors fast delivery. The nodes just keep a running table of content block headers as the blocks pass. Properly designed, this nework shouldn’t crash.
It’s my policy not to approach companies to market my products. If you’re interested, contact me directly at:
acmenuklearblimp@gmail.com
and I’ll arrange to discuss it with you.
Compact discs, like the recent Beatles resissue series, can contain embedded video content, and a proposed successor to the MP3 format will allow embbeded content. While some consumers might find that useful, OCEAN and the Media Inbox aren’t competitors of portable music formats, even if those formats allow accompanying video or text content on a digital portable music device. Such content could be delivered by OCEAN and read into a portable digital music device if the developer of the format wants to distribute it that way. OCEAN would be a very cost-effective way to launch a new format. My personal (rather than technical) bias is that I’d prefer not to convert portable music formats within the Media Inbox unless the artist allows it. If the consumer orders an album over OCEAN, it could have an MP3 (or whatever format) option, or they could just order the portable version. It’s largely a pricing issue. Today’s MP3 is an invitation for piracy. More than one pirate CD being peddled on street corners is a low-fi MP3 read onto CD format which can be endlessly duplicated. A would-be pirate can buy that CD from another pirate and re-rip it.
So this isn’t just the concept of “Let’s make everything software and use emulators to run it.” These are specific blueprints of how to do it. It’s a complete media delivery system for the 21st century, combining innovative methods of working with problems and leverages the best existing technologies. You can do it without violating the rights of a contemporary OS. It’s not necessary to seek the permission of any contemporary tech firm to do this. If this system is implemented, as with anyone else, they’re welcome to make a contribution, but their involvement isn’t necessary, either.
The reality is that every day this system isn’t implemented, content providers (world wide) are losing many millions in profit (from drastically cutting the cost of production, reaching new markets, direct ad revenue, etc.), our economy is sinking deeper into the abyss, good jobs continue to be lost, and the only beneficiaries are those firms heavily leveraged in the status quo. (And you thought it would never work.)
It’s OK to rock the boat. Make waves on “Ocean.”
[The contents of this column and all contents of ACME NUKLEAR BLIMP, except quotations from other authors, is the intellectual property of Jeffrey Thomas Chipman. All rights reserved.
Nothing in this column or any other column should be construed to mean that my products are to be marketed to any specific company, or that the use of any company's product as an example means the manufacturer has been or will be approached to market my products.]
1/16/2010