j. THE AGE OF CONTENT (The Human Mind Is The Factory)
Jeffrey Thomas Chipman is the exclusive owner of this intellectual property. No one (including any member of the owner’s family) has been authorized, or is authorized, verbally or in writing, to make representations on behalf of the owner of this intellectual property. All rights reserved. [See end of column.] The author has no relationship with Google ™ or any other company.
The packet switiching concept has been around since the early 1960s. While the network herein described does use some packet switching methods (although I think “cloning” and “wiping” are my unique concepts), the network itself is incidental and the co-op formed by the first licensees would determine the best available method. The uploads of “digital masters” of mass media such as CDs and DVDs, the concept of ordering and receiving content from those digital masters, and the way that content is treated by the terminus distributor, and its manipulation by the end user is not packet switiching. As many “digital masters” as are needed to meet demand can be created on the host.
Both my concept and packet switiching use blocks to transmit data; however, the blocks of content in my concept are stripped of run-time libraries and operating sequences (such as DVD menu operations), for which are substituted markers. The markers are read against a library and the operating routines are pasted in at the terminus. So I’m not disassembling digital content on demand. The “digital master” is already stripped and disassembled into blocks when it’s loaded before it’s read onto the network. It’s regular digital content (not software designed to run on Java, etc.). The blocks are reassembled at the terminus, but they are then transmitted to an end user and cleared from temporary memory at the assembly point. The assembled content is then parked in memory at the end user’s “Media Inbox” and read onto a hard drive, leaving an icon in the GUI. When packet switiching was first explored in the 1960s, the type of content we have today didn’t exist. The point is: we’re not sending a complete application. This is a method of delivering commercial grade content and piracy is impossible.
As far as I know, the concept of a “data block” isn’t proprietary. Reassembling blocks at the destination doesn’t seem to be proprietary. “Logical space” isn’t proprietary. Schemes for using contents of data blocks are proprietary. The size of the blocks useed in my scheme will be determined by content and network.
So, while one may conceive of a packet switiching network as a cyber-UPS, my concept is really a glorified vending machine for content.
This system doesn’t rely on optical disc technology, so it’s not necessary to reach licensing agreements with the holders of those patents. Properly implemented, elimination of laser/mechanical content delivery should provide a performance improvement.
In the discussion that follows, the terms “CD,” ”DVD,” etc., are only used to orient the reader to types of content, and not to the actual data structure required by a playback emulator. Since “DVDs” won’t be burned to disc, use of an existing hi-res optical disc video format like Blu-Ray is unnecessary. An “emulator” is defined as both the visual representation of a thing and the functionality of a thing.
Windows 7 should be the last operating system ever written for the personal computer. The PC as we know it is dead technology, a paperweight for the Information Age. We are about to enter the Age of Content, and it will be propelled by the cell phone and cable companies, not Microsoft and Google. The difference between the Information Age and the Age of Content is that the Age of Content is a means of production, rather than just a way to manage large amounts of information or automate complex tasks.
The next time you’re at the pump, fuming at the cost of a gallon of gas, I want you to consider the fact that you are subsidizing the bankrupt business practices of multi-national corporations. They make their profit by making what they sell you as cheaply as possible, by shifting production to China—an economy built on pollution and lack of industrial regulation. As more and more companies do this to compete, the Chinese demand for oil will increase, driving the cost of oil ever upward—while oil reserves continue to dwindle.
The Arab Oil Embargo was in retaliation against support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In a space of months, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled.
We can’t punch enough holes in the earth to save ourselves. Even conservative Republicans concede it’s not worth chasing off a few polar bears to pump oil we know won’t solve our problems. There’s a weary sense of resignation everywhere that the expected economic recovery will be shallow and short-lived. Though it’s claimed the current recession will have bottomed out and begin recovery by October 1, 2009, projections of significant unemployment extend into 2012. Had the government not bailed out GM and other failures, America would be in a Depression now. But there’s a practical limit to how much paper you can float.
Why? Remember the S&L bailout? The subprime mortgage problem? The $8 Trillion loss in stock holdings in 2008? The S&L bailout (a shock to most people) cost only $1.24B—but money isn’t worth as much now.
By 1974, our country had taken a pay cut, in the form of shelling out more money for oil. To maintain our lifestyle, we’ve increasingly turned to riskier fiscal policies. How many more catastrophic failures like GM can we absorb before this house of cards collapses? The deficit we all try to push to the back of our minds isn’t going to be dealt with by our grandchildren. The bill has come due.
The next worldwide depression might not be triggered by the failure of the banks, but by the Chinese defaulting on their manufacturing contracts. At some point, China won’t be able to make the TVs they sell to Wal-Mart cheap enough so the average consumer can buy it.
So how do I infuse real value (as opposed to credit) into the economy? Because software as a commodity has retained its value, unlike PCs where profits are challenged and the future is bleak due to a moribund platform.
If a rock band sells a CD at Best Buy for $12.99, the band probably sees less of that purchase than you might think. There are so many middlemen that chunks of money evaporate. I’m challenging the notion that people want a physical CD to hold in their hands. If enough value was added to their CD (in the form of SACD-quality sound, graphics, etc.), I think people will pay about the same price for it on a platform which greatly reduces operating costs, and the resulting profit is real money. It’s already happening to a limited extent wth MP3s, but MP3 is a low-fi product for portable music players, prone to piracy and based on downloading, an inefficient concept.
The videogramer who’s paying amazon.com $37.00 for Grand Theft Auto IV will pay the same for it in a new system—all they want is the play. Sony, Sega and Nintendo can still have their consoles, but they’ll be virtual products that will never wind up in a landfill. These companies will become what they really want to be—an experience.
Audiophiles and videophiles don’t drive the consumer electronics market. What most consumers want is control—and we’ll give them lots of it in ways they never considered possible.
Every time the price of oil goes up, our standard of living goes down—and the shots are called elsewhere in the world. We are deluded if we believe that we can compensate for increased demand for oil by increasing the efficiency of how we use it. Demand is going to outstrip technological advances in its use. We have plenty of coal, but it costs a fortune to build a coal fired electrical plant. Electric cars are fine for short trips, but they still use a relatively large amount of energy, and battery disposal creates a waste problem.
We can beat it, and we can beat it now. Within years we can tank the oil market, pull the rug out from under terrorists, and stop terra-forming our planet with pollution. We need to shift production to a new platform.
We should utilize a high capacity, wide bandwidth computer communications network. It’s not going to replace the existing Internet. It is, as noted above, a vending machine for software. Content. The best available transmission schemes can be used—it’s a transportation system paid for by the people who use it.
Content is data sent over the network. It can be a software program, a TV show, a college lecture, a video game, a CD/DVD player or video game console emulator. Most existing conventional commercial websites will disappear, and become interactive catalogs. Unless you’re doing something which requires a real-time virtual link, you can do it on this network. You can still pull the evening news, a football game, pay-per-view event, or presidential address off satellite.
This system is incapable of real time data transmission. The use of the term “block” is to designate a pre-determined segment of machine code only which will be uniform regardless of the type of content.
We should abandon the concept of downloading. As long as the product arrives at the terminus, the end user doesn’t care how it got there. There will be a set of standards appropriate to the type of content. Everything from the package that isn’t unique to the content will be stripped. The package will be disassembled at the host and reassembled at the terminus, using whatever delivery method is best. The network is the replicator. A node on this network is a logical distribution and/or processing point. Satellites as will carry the traffic.
Let’s say a rock band wants to market a 12 track CD accompanied by a video, artwork, anything you can do. That package will be analyzed, everything that’s not content stripped out, and markers placed in the package telling the terminus what routines to paste in to make it an actual product. It’s then split into blocks and loaded for sale. An order for the product is an instruction to the computer to replicate the blocks. The order is just a block traveling in the same data channel with content. At the terminus the content is reassembled and dumped into somebody’s inbox. We can have as many markers and operating sequences as needed, and they can change at any time.
We won’t waste network resources streaming 50,000 copies of a CD from LA to Moscow. Cloning takes place only when and if necessary. The blocks we’re cloning just aren’t that big—you’re not ripping a CD. It’s a dynamic condition and piracy is impossible. It’s just how the data is handled. When a block passes a processing point a decision is made whether to route it, clone it, or wipe it (the purpose of cloning and wiping is to eliminate redundant blocks on the network—whether that actually results in overall performance improvement should be tested, but the network can support it). We don’t want processing points to have to make a lot of decisions with a commercial grade traffic load, so it seems keeping blocks uniform simplifies processing and determining link capacity, and there will be protocols for routing blocks into a memory dump in case the network is congested, and then read back out. Again, the network scheme is up to the licensees.
Considered abstractly, when a block reaches processing point, the processing point simply reads the routing header and sends the block down the appropriate “channel.” The processing point knows what the load is on the link and will not route more traffic than the link can handle. Since all blocks are the same size, it’s not necessary to read the data within a block to see what the load is; reading a header equates to block size and tells the processing point what it needs to know. If network conditions demand, it can run down a protocol and decide whether to route the block alternatively or shunt it into a memory dump. It’s not necessary for the processing point to know the origin of the block, so if it is re-routed, the next point treats it as ordinary traffic unless it too has to check down the protocol.
“Cloning” and “wiping” are my unique concepts. Whatever network design the licensees agree on, if there are fees and royalities to be paid to the inventor of the network design, that will be their responsibility.
At the terminus the CD is assembled in temporary memory and then dumped into the mailbox. Every block knows how many blocks constitute the content, how many markers represent how much of the stuff you need to make it run, and each block knows where it fits in. So it doesn’t matter if the blocks arrive out of sequence. As soon as the first block hits the buffer, the computer at the terminus knows how much logical space to assign to the finished program. When everything arrives, it just assembles it and dumps it into the inbox, and the buffer is clean.
The computer doesn’t wait to assemble the CD, it just take blocks, and when there’s enough blocks to form the program, it pastes in the right operating code where the markers indicate and sends it to the Media Inbox. You can throw as much cheap memory and processors at it you want. Before temporary memory runs out, the computer opens a gate and shunts the unprocessed blocks into memory where they stack up, and when temporary memory is cleared, the blocks are read back in and the content is assembled. It’s an industrial model that’s transparent to the consumer.
And we have the pieces right now: HULU, Windows Media Player, iTunes. The technology hasn’t been put together, and it’s crude. Right now, HULU is streaming video, but it can be a TV program dropped into a Media Inbox, designed to be played 3 times before it vaporizes. HULU is the death of the conventional TV network. TV networks will become brand names, distributors. Most shows will be free, because they’ll contain advertising.
The Media Inbox is offline, just a terminus on the network accessed via the cable company. The Media Inbox is the platform operated by a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which isn’t wedded to the platform. GUIs can be designed for different situations ranging from the needs of a family to students, etc. For example, a parent can program a video game emulator to shut down after two hours, or use a password to lock a file they don’t want children to use.
This allows companies to desgin and market GUIs, unlike the current Windows environment in which the GUI is tied to the platform. A large LCD display can partition activities controlled by the GUI.
The Content dropped into the Media Inbox is stored locally. The emulator is a software program running on a computer. If you can use email, you can use this. We have the software engineers right now who know how to do it. Windows Media Player is a freebie, but there are people who can design a fully functional audiophile grade version of it—they haven’t done it because no one’s asked them to.
Businesses will be part of the network through their own GUIs designed for business, allowing cable companies to penetrate the commercial marketplace, where their presence now is usually limited.
Catalog data will be entered at the entry point and sold to subscribing companies to manage the data and find ways to target and deliver it to customers. Internet search engines like Google ™, Yahoo! (r), and Bing ™ won’t function on this network.
A difficulty with Internet search engines, regardless of sophistication, is that a customer’s ability to locate merchants of interest is partly dependent on their ability to input search terms. Customers aren’t always finding those they wish to do business with. Domain names, URLs, and HTML aren’t required to do business here, and the end user doesn’t need a browser. Structures that control the presentation of today’s Internet aren’t required either.
However, nothing happens on this network unless somebody makes the end-user aware of the content, and provides an ordering “form.” So perhaps internet search engines which regard themselves as information access brokers will become just that, marketing not only availability of content but the way to initially communicate with the provider, and that creates opportunities for marketing that do not now exist. Such ”catalogs” can be delivered to the cable or telephone company, since the ordering “form” is embedded in the catalog, and those local distribution sites will distribute the catalog to their customers. Once the relationship is established, the end user is part of a virtual community wanting content, and that will drive increased choice of content. This is a result of the cost savings of the design, but since advertisers will be paying fees directly to content provider, the virtual community is a marketing segment, and end users can be part of many virtual communities. Demographic groups which support dedicated programming only in certain markets now will be joined with those same groups in other areas to form a large virtual community.
You don’t have to find customers for this—they’re already here. Show a kid a cheap CD player from Wal-Mart and a slick high-res emulation on a flat panel display and you know which one he’ll pick. Nobody had to truck the CD player to a store, there’s no box, no disc drawer to repair, no fossil fuels were used to produce it, we don’t have to find landfill for it when it’s obsolete, and there is no pollution or trace metals leeching into the soil. It’s just a clone, and it can be produced in Muncie, Indiana or Darfur. When you no longer want it you hit delete. You still have amplifiers and speakers and your home entertainment system.
It will free our colleges and universities from the dilemma of cutting back programs and continually raising tuition costs. There is no reason for anyone to drive to a campus and sit in a lecture hall where the interaction between student and teacher is minimal—most of the real teaching is done by assistants. We can drop that lecture into the Media Inbox, where it can be scheduled to be viewed—and the professor can be anyone from anywhere. Students can still visit the campus to meet with TAs, and the college can afford to retain music and arts programs and even expand services to students. Students won’t have to leave college encumbered by $80,000 of debt. We can give them a better education for a lot less money.
We can drop a modular school into the middle of an Afghan heroin poppy field with nothing more than a concrete slab and a couple of service helicopters. It’ll be powered by solar panels and communicate with the network by a satellite dish. The content will be created by people anywhere who will communicate with those children in their own language speaking to their problems, and the children will get the rest of the world along with it—a first rate education for almost nothing.
It’s just shifting everything we can onto this new production platform. It will revive the conventional economy because the cost of oil will plummet.
The cell phone companies can design the network, and the cable companies and operating telcos will be the gateway. The cell phone itself can be a remote GUI which accesses content through a dial in port, enabling a student to access a college lecture anywhere, or a parent to control and program the home system, or leave a message and make a calendar notation.
We need to adopt the concept that digital content is a real product and stop unauthorized duplication. Fining a kid a million bucks for piracy is excessive, but our current swiss cheese digital environment isn’t commerce—it’s just a large operating system with little security.
In this scenario, the people who produce digital content pocket most of the profit, rather than watch it go up in smoke in manufacturing, distribution, and piracy. When you buy a CD, you can burn a copy you can use in the car or a conventional player, but the copy can’t be cloned or ripped. Since you can’t burn a dual layer CD, only an ordinary CD will be burned. In return, the CD you buy comes with artwork (which can be anything) you can’t get from a paper insert in a CD case. Most of the people who produce digital content won’t be big rock bands, but entrepreneurs, and they need to be protected.
The music industry can’t sue its way out of the problem because the way they’re delivering the content is fundamentally flawed. A CD isn’t a better version of an LP. It’s a completly different technology. Record labels are selling MP3s (a low-fi product not suited to a wide-range home playback system) and CDs with no copy protection or DRM. Those MP3s and CDs can be duplicated and resold anywhere. I sympathize with someone who’s angry with pirates, but they’re giving their work to the thieves themselves. It’s not really fair to slap a $1M judgement on some idiot when you’re being mugged all over the world by street vendors and rogue MP3 distribution networks. The best solution is to move digital product to a new platform.
Piracy on this network is virtually impossible because the traffic isn’t a standalone product. Even if a pirate could hack it, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. Every person who ships billable content (like albums, “DVDs”, software, emulators, etc.) on this network must be assured that they will get paid for everything they ship. High volume producers are going to make a lot of money, but it will also allow a comfortable living for those who can’t make it now, creating real jobs. If you fail, failure isn’t going to be as big a problem as it would be in a bankrupt bricks-and-mortar venture.
Wal-Mart is going to have to exit some businesses, because they can”t compete. Even with most of their labor paid minimum wage, at some point volume won’t cut it. Wal-Mart’s Achilles Heel is the giant network of stores and distribution points they operate, and that forms a practical ceiling to how much proft they can generate.
The OS and mating GUI must be compatible with anything running anywhere on the system. However, as long as the OS and GUI meets standards it doesn’t have to be the same or developed by the same company. The OS here is more like a browser. The needs of a student running a home system off one 1TB hard drive are different than an elaborate system running five 1TB drives. The platform should be as open as possible to encourage innovation so that the churn cycles of PC operating systems which have become de facto software development points can be eliminated. Existing PC makers who can merge PC and server technology will do very well in this environment.
One idea for marketing is as follows:
Permanent licenses will be issued to cable and telephone operating companies. A licensee doesn’t have to be a resident of the market to operate a license. An owner entity can operate any number of licenses. The licensees will form a co-op for common objectives, inclding financing, construction, and operation of the network according to their requirements, and determine in/out traffic fees in their area of operations. Licensees control catalog data sold to subscribing marketing companies.
The licensor’s financial interest is limited to a one-time license fee. Licenses may not be subdivided but may be resold by the licensee as part of the business when the cable company or operating telco is sold. The licensee, subject to stipulations required for uniformity, is operating a stand-alone business and not a franchise and is not required to report to the licensor. Licensor does not oversee or regulate the network, has no management role, and does not interfere, except to ensure license conditions are met (see below), with the licensee. Licensor does not require venture capital.
Licenses may only be revoked under certain conditions: (1) The licensee refuses to operate a business delivering content into their operations area. (2) The licensee refuses to allow content running anywhere on the network to run in the licensee’s operations area. (3) Content containing child pornography, hate groups media, and terrorist media is prohibited. (4) No licenses will be issued to religious or political organizations. A licensee may not show preference to any religious or political group. (5) Use of the network for fraudulent activity is prohibited. (6) Licensee cannot deviate from “digital master” and “Media Inbox” protocols unless modifications are system-wide, respect the integrity of the system, and don’t devalue current and future licenses. (7) Licenses sold through infringement of the licensor’s rights will not be honored and will be sold by the lawful licensor.
In ages past our ancestors sailed for new worlds. That world, which reached its zenith in the dead factories of the rust-belt, is gone forever. This is the new frontier, and there are no limits. If this is implemented, the world we have now, the world dominated by the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line, will pass away. The world that will replace it will not be Utopia. We will reduce many problems to a manageable level. It will be a greener world, with less pollution, garbage, heavy traffic on infrastructure, and much lower conventional energy costs. And the amount of money to be made is incalculable, both in products now consumed and products not yet imagined.
A 24-hour live action news feed could deliver news about the network.
Initially, the entry-level Media Inbox will be just another A/V component, with hi-res video and audio outputs, bundled with a basic GUI allowing scheduling, admin and permission levels, and timing of content, etc., fed by the cable company or telco. Since the Media Inbox will have a new OS/GUI environment, productivity software can be written for it by any vendor. Productivity software should have a customizable interface; by this I don’t mean the skin, but the way the program is used by various individuals which can be toggled without going through macros, etc. Windows/Mac users can continue to use their existing computers as long as they think those environments are meaningful, and existing Windows/Mac applications can be ported (adapted) to the new OS if there’s a market for it. That doesn’t preclude someone writing a Windows or Mac emulator. Subscribers will still be able to use their existing CD and DVD collections (and players). Although hard-drive technology is reliable, they can fail, so premium content could be backed up at the feed or some other service. It’s hoped a better, non-mechanical, method of mass storage will be developed.
The Media Inbox will feature an easily accessible, fully modular archictecture, with no integrated graphics controllers or sound cards. The processor itself will be parked in a slot and swapped out by the consumer when a better one is developed. If emulators are developed which require new support electronics, this system will allow those cards to be deployed.
The OS has two principal functions to run content: (1) to set up the support electronics to run the emulator, (2) to access content ordered by the GUI and feed it to the emulator in whatever mode the GUI orders.
To begin, along with bundled directories and catalogs, subscribers will be given forms to query catalog and directory companies for content providers. As relationships are established, providers can reach end users in a myriad of ways. Although browsers, search engines, URLs, domain names, and HTML aren’t required on this network, nonetheless search engines on the Internet could still be used to return forms to end users on this network. Although you’ll receive results of your search, what you’re being offered isn’t a URL, but a “brochure” to be dumped into your inbox that will contain whatever the provider wants along with a form to order the product. Search engines need to provide a better description of content than they do today.
Spam is a major problem on the Internet. Rules will have to be developed for this network to prevent inundation with unsolicited content.
One function of today’s Internet could be to provide a “gateway” with this network. There are some things the Internet does (like social networking) that this network isn’t designed to do. While much traffic on the Internet wil be off-loaded onto this network, the Internet is still a vital resource and can complement this network. Content providers who must use the Internet won’t be resident per se on an Media Inbox hard-drive, but can be represented by icons that are scheduled and timed and handled in new ways by the GUI. E-mail should also remain on the Internet, with easy access to the provider. Programs like Windows Messenger and Gmail Notifier notify users of e-mail even when the browser is closed, so those can be represented in the Media Inbox as well. Instead of trying to “shoe-horn” everything onto this network, it should be easy for the Internet to interface with this network and market to the users of this network. For the Media Inbox user, the Internet experience will focus less on the browser and more on bringing services directly to the GUI.
For example, an Internet radio station could be tossed into the GUI mix, scheduled and timed like any other content, if desired. Although Internet radio is presently mainly amateurish, pro-quality Internet stations (with advertising) would probably supplant XM and Sirius in the home, and greatly expand their coverage; conventional broadcast radio is plagued by poor reception and a dearth of formats.
In areas served by telcos not allowed to provide cable services, DirecTV and Dish could provide real-time feeds; those services would be under pressure in areas served by cable companies.
Home entertainment and distribution systems will flourish. Wireless trackball mice and keyboards will eventually be largely supplanted by voice recognition. Existing flat panel TVs with high-res inputs won’t be obsolete, but migration to larger monitors and subsidiary monitors are a key part of the system, so touch screen technology can allow sizing and positioning of content windows. Windows running different content will feed audio channels used by wireless headsets if required.
[There can be various levels of Admin in "Ocean." These can be constructed to meet the different needs of age groups within a home. Right now parents have almost no practical control over content entering their homes. Taking away game controllers or locking a console in the laundry room isn't an elegant solution. So to people to whom all this sounds Orwellian, I'd like them to know it's the exact opposite. The V-chip is a band-aid---but assigning your own ratings to content before it's played in a family GUI environment could meet the concerns of working parents.]
The price of a key element that drives our economy is controlled by a cartel. This isn’t a free market, and it isn’t going to change. There’s nothing philanthropic about OPEC.
As I survey today’s digital products and services, I see a lot of glitz, and touch-screens with scrolling graphics—but how do they contribute to solving our fundamental economic realities? And now, the prospect of a VAT is being floated—like that in the United Kingdom. I believe the best way to do the things that we want to do as a society—like access to health care for everyone—should be financed through growing the tax base with profit, rather than more taxation. When we discuss something like the VAT, as an alternative to defaulting on public debt—where are we going? Instead of promising to cut emissions by X% by 2050, why don’t we just start now to pump less of it into the atmosphere? Population pressure alone is going to exacerbate present problems, and create new ones. At best we’re in a holding pattern. We need a plan.
We don’t have to live like this. I call this concept “Ocean.” It’s prime time all the time.
Questions can be directed to:
Considering the future of the laptop, which is not directly part of “Ocean,” I think the cell-phone should morph into a business class PC CPU, which can be docked into Display/Keyboard/Media Drive arrays at office workstations, airport terminals, coffee shops, hotels, libraries, and on airplanes, taxis, etc., taking the cell-phone battery offline and allowing it to recharge while working at the array (and it could be docked into the Media Inbox computer of “Ocean” as well). If an actual laptop is required (less often than imagined), a Field Kit comprising the hardware array can be a docking station for the cell-phone. Additionally, expansion of inter-unit communications capabilities might allow companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to penetrate the lucrative business workstation/PBX market.
Corporate IT managers who dislike data product churn cycles and duplication of devices might embrace this concept, as well as millions of students. Obviously the main engineering challenge is running a full-blown PC CPU off a cell phone battery when it’s functioning as a cell-phone; the remaining problems being primarily organizational. It could be sold on the basis of saving a company money and finally giving them hard data about how their IT resources are being used specifically and generally, and how to spend the money—a useful management tool. The heavy taxes on cell-phone users are a big mistake—they should be rolled back to encourage innovation and use.
