Some tips for Vista (which I don’t have and don’t intend to any time soon). Most will work for XP as well.

In March it will be 4 years since I first started jetting around the world for a living. I had always wanted to travel with work. Someone once said “be careful what you wish for, you might get it”. I know that is very true. The travel has been good. I have got to see loads of interesting places, and unlike most holiday travel I get to work and socialise with people from all these places. But it isn’t a 9 to 5 thing. Business trips eat up your life. Friends and family see less of you. You can’t commit to any activity or event mid week because you never know what country you are going to be in more than a week or two out. Back in 2003 I was getting back into rock climbing. I have a regular Tuesday night thing at the UCD wall. Now I haven’t climbed in over a year and a half. To climb you need a partner and I can’t make a commitment to anyone.

One of the more subtle drawbacks is travel is losing its sparkle and allure. There was a time when the night before I went somewhere I could hardly sleep with excitement. Now Laura despairs of me in the run up to holidays. She has to poke and prod me to get excited about going anywhere. Travel has become a chore. To most people a suitcase represents freedom, fun, new things. To me it is my wheeled ball and chain.

Bye bye HD-DVD. In the end, the end was surprisingly fast. From Warner ditching the format, to Toshiba offering an unconditional surrender, there was only 2 months.

Everyone has been using the Betamax vs. VHS comparison for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. I was wondering if Betamax will be retired as a term now, and will people refer to HD-DVD in the future for the runner up in technology format battles. Probably not. Betamax sounds better.

Outside of consumer devices there are a few other less well known technology wars. One I have been a foot soldier in is the CDMA vs GSM war. I had better come clean and say that I work for a company that has a vested interest in GSM network technology. Having looked at the technology, its possibilities and the business case for users I have to say they made the right call.

GSM and CDMA are competing mobile phone standards. CDMA was most popular in the US, Korea, and a few other markets around the world. But everywhere it came up against GSM (the digitial mobile phone technology used pretty much everywhere else) it was clobbered. CDMA is more efficient as a radio technology, and is better for data. But can you imagine your phone number being tied to you phone, or operator (because there is no SIM), or not being able to use your phone abroad? These are the things that had to be retrofitted to CDMA when they realised that GSM was running away with the market. GSM topped out at about 2.5 Billion users, over 85% of all mobile phones at the time.

Today GSM’s total market share is declining as 3G phones become more common. But at its best CDMA never beat 250m users. Even in it’s heartland, the USA, when GSM arrived users flocked to it. CDMA is down to about 0.6% market share globally today. My consulting colleagues and I have done plenty of projects to help operators figure out the business case, and best way to move from CDMA to GSM. CDMA is the Betamax of mobile technology, although to be fair, it was a far more successful technology than Betamax ever was.

What is the next battle in radio network technology? That has to be WiMax vs 3G (which mostly means High Speed Packet Access or HSPA). WiMax is the geeks champion. It is based on more (but not completely) open standards. The early hype talked about 54Mbps with a 50km range. And because the name (deliberately) was similar to WiFi people had visions of low cost wireless internet but with higher speed, and longer range. With a little funging it can even do mobile voice. My employer decided last year to get out of the WiMax game and back HSPA. For the last two months I have been managing the consultant and business case modellers that look at these things for a living. And I have come to see that we have probably made the right decision. There are a couple of reasons why.

The first is technology. As Scotty would have said – “you canna change the laws of physics”. HSPA and WiMax are radio technologies of pretty much the same generation. So they have similar capabilities. Each is optimised for different things, but neither is radically better. You can in theory and ideal conditions get 54Mbps from WiMax, and you can in theory get 50km range. But you can’t have both at the same time. As with HSPA bandwidth is inversely proportional to distance from the radio mast. 10Mbps is realistically what you can expect, and lower in built up areas. In fact in urban areas HSPA and WiMax have about the same performance. I am told, but I haven’t reviewed the figures yet, that over long distances in rural areas HSPA has the edge.

The second area is economics. In order to roll out a WiMax network with widespread coverage you will need a large number of transmitters, antennae and provision for significant data back haul. If you want to do mobile voice then you will need more equipment and software support systems for call routing, handoffs and so on. Eh, hang on, this sounds like the mobile phone infrastructure. Guess what? It is. If you were to try and roll out a WiMax network to give the same sort of coverage and bandwidth you get with a mobile network it will cost you something similar.

Actually it will cost more. Because while there may be lower technology licensing costs, the infrastructure will be more costly. HSPA is already in wide use around the world, and the number and scale of roll outs is growing all the time. This gives HSPA a massive boost in terms of economies of scale. Even by the most optimistic estimates of WiMax backers, WiMax networks will only have about 5% of the users of HSPA networks in the near future. This means it will always be cheaper to buy HSPA transmitters and receivers (either data cards or handsets) than WiMax ones. This is what will ultimately limit the adoption of WiMax.

This is the same problem that strangled CDMA as well. We saw it in the business cases we developed. CDMA phones cost more than GSM ones because the phone manufacturers were shifting bucket loads of GSM phones for every CDMA one. As well as being more expensive they tended to have poorer features and/or came out later. The CDMA operators had to counteract this with higher handset subsidies to ensure consumers kept joining their networks. This meant their Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC) was higher and they struggled to keep their networks as financially efficient.

WiMax has a place. If you want to provide rural broadband to fixed users then it will work well. But it will not replace cellular mobile networks as some journalists who have been re-writing WiMax association press releases seem to believe. But then don’t just take my word for it. The analysts are starting to say the same thing.

I had always said I wanted to visit Cuba while Castro was still in charge and it was a Communist country. After 49 years in power Laura and I made it with 4 months to spare!

Of course maybe I have this the wrong way. Maybe he always said “I will remain as leader until Seamus visits”. Now that I have been and gone he was finally able to retire.

Today is the feast day of the Patron Saint of Hallmark. A more significant anniversary today is that 18 years ago the Voyager space craft was told to take this photo:

At the time it was over 6 billion kilometres from home and it was being asked to take a look at where it had come from. This gave a “family portrait” of shots that showed each of the planets of the solar system. This picture is the one that contained Voyager’s view of Earth.

In case you can’t see it, Earth is the tiny spot of white, on the right, about half way down. (The “sun beams” are artifacts of how the image was put together). Humbling isn’t it? To think that all our world is reduced to something so small, about .12 of a pixel in the original image, a minute speck in a vast cosmos.

Or as Sagan put it:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I think it is a far better image for making us realise how fragile our environment is than the more famous Pale Blue Marble one.

Last year the iPhone sold a total of 5 million handsets in their first 12 months.

Windows mobile devices shipped 14.3 million in 6 months, with a target of about 20m for the full year (Christmas is when most handhelds are sold).

Symbian managed to ship 77.3 million devices in 2007.

I think that makes them the hands down winner.

Good first time performance by the iPhone though. That isn’t bad for a device with a limited launch footprint and a very stiff price tag. Interestingly the iPhone’s penetration is about the same as that of the Apple Mac – around 5%. Now as lock in with a phone is much less than with a computer Apple will find it easier to attract people to their device. It will be interesting to see in the medium term how well it penetrates beyond the hard core Apple-fans and well-to-do trend zombies.

Here it is.

An overdue website. And there are too many Irish people turning up dead on it.

When I flew out to Stockholm on Monday the SAS flight was pretty empty. There were 5 rows put aside for “Economy Flex”, where I usually sit. But there were only 4 passengers in the 25 seats (SAS use MD80s with a 2-3 seat configuration).

Some SAS person in their wisdom put one of the other 3 passengers in the seat next to me. As soon as they announced “Boarding Complete”, and it was obvious that there were empty rows around us I went to see if the woman wanted to move.

I ran into a problem though. How exactly do you politely ask someone to sod off elsewhere in the plane?

Being a worm tongued consultant I came up with some form of words. But I couldn’t tell whether or not the woman had taken offence. She probably did, and now thinks I am an asshole for not wanting to talk to her on the flight.

http://www.darwinday.org/

I didn’t get to go to Barcelona for the big mobile technology conference. Maybe next year. My brother is there. Git!

If I was there then this would probably be of use to me – a review of the free pens being handed out.

I am sure someone will do something similar for the mobi suppliers pens next week.