GIT OFF'N MY TEEVEE!

"Do you mind my asking you what you paid for this item originally?"

"Just under $2,000, I think."

"And do you have any idea of the current value of this item?"

$29.95! Really??

Could that be right? Yep, there it was in the email bulletin from Goodwill ComputerWorks* store in Austin, Texas: "LC II - $29.95 IN STOCK! 68030 chip at 16 MHz, 2.5 megs of ram minimum, 10 max, 80 meg drive." (Yikes -- I have one just like it! All of $29.95, you say?) Down in Austin, Goodwill ComputerWorks is selling just that kind of relic and doing a bang-up business. And all from from email orders and walk-ins!

So many vintage Macs: how about a Lisa for $499? And Macs from the Mac 128K ("collector's item") at $74.95 all the way up to LCIII's and Quadras at $49.95 and $129.95. (VGA monitors for $9.95!) My favorite is a Mac Plus with the original keyboard, mouse, manuals, software, all packaged in the original box, for $49.95. You like PCs? They even sell Linux 486's starting at $200, including monitor. All this amazing gear.

These things work, or at least most of them do, so there's a ready market for them. But what about the DTC-5000's, are they headed for the landfill?? (the what?)

You know, the "set-top boxes"!!!

The DTC-5000 by General Instrument, currently being put through its paces at AT&T's laboratories, is the gizmo they want to put on top of your teevee to funnel all this cool digital stuff into your living room. Yes, now that everything is going digital (phones, Internet, television), someone has figured out that all these things can be delivered through the same "pipe," provided it's big enough.

Whether a phone line or cable, the arrangement is nice and clean from an engineering point of view and convenient for the consumer. There'd only be one bill to pay. There'd be plenty of bandwidth. We could have a constant Internet connection, watch digital teevee, make phone calls and do other things we don't know we need yet. The trouble is, this "improvement" is being promoted at the same time that billions of dollars are being invested to turn it into just another way to separate you from your money.

Outfits like Microsoft, AT&T, AOL and others figure that if they can take over this data pipe, this single point of entry into your home, that you will be grateful for having choices made for you. They are counting on you to adapt your lifestyle to fit their revenue enhancement strategies. Rather than viewing this high-speed digital information conduit as a glorious new thing, they see it as a "choke point." If everything comes in through one hole in the wall, they can meter it. They can deliver content on-demand, for one thing. They can charge you every time your browser launches. They can keep track of every show you watch, every Web site you visit, every product you buy, and use that information to sell targeted advertising and worse. This is like taking away everybody's guns, knives, and pitchforks and leaving the biggest, baddest, meanest S.O.B.'s with atom bombs.

Fortunately, the scheme is doomed!

You just have to look at the "set-top box" hype to see the desperation already creeping in around the edges. Microsoft is so eager to get into your homes, for example, that it has agreed to pay AT&T $5 billion to have Windows CE running on five million DTC-5000 set-top devices AT&T plans to sell you. As Scott Rosenberg at Salon has pointed out, that amounts to one helluva hefty bribe per unit! John Markoff at the New York Times says that inside the AT&T labs where engineers are testing the thing, the joke is that the DTC-5000 "has so many connectors that the physical integrity of its back panel has been compromised." (Yes, that's a real rib-tickler for engineering types. Try to be nice.) To wit, "the prototypes include connections for cable, power, Ethernet and Firewire networks, Universal Serial Bus, telephony, audio, video, infrared, PCMCIA card, smart card and computer monitor." This is supposed to sit on top of your television set, mind you, and all the complex interactive plug-and-pray gadgetry is to be controlled by Son of Windows!

This is the Joe Six-Pack gateway to the Internet? I don't think so. And why would you who are already reading this on your computer pay extra for the privilege of reading it in big fuzzy letters on your TV? Has anyone really thought this out?? I see URLs flashing all the time now on the evening news or PBS, but that doesn't make me want to stop watching the show and go off on a Web tangent. No, they'd have to say something like, "every 10,000th click wins a new car!" And I suppose they will, before this is all over.

No, I just don't trust 'em. And arm-linked megacorporations give me the willies. In this and everything else, monopolists count on your having nowhere else to turn. To me the alliance between Microsoft and cable TV entities (like the new AT&T) is about as unholy as you can get. Worse than a Stalin-Hitler pact! Worse than Serbs and Iraqis cooperating on mass migrations. Even worse than (God forbid!) two professional football team owners!! You know how they operate: they'll wait until they've got us by the modems, then lower the portcullis! A quotation from Gene Kimmelman, co-director of Consumer Union's Washington D.C. office, shows where this fat-pipe fakery will take us:

"The implications are enormous. Because of the price they're paying for all these cable companies and the price they're paying for the equipment upgrade, cable rates are going to skyrocket over time."

Well, DUH!

I actually have quite a bit of faith in the general evolutionary direction of things, believe it or not. The cable market is coming apart even as we speak. AT&T and others are hedging their bets with Web-ready telephones. Soon there will be a zillion other gadgets we don't have names for yet. If we're really lucky, the cheap, adaptable, reliable, and fun to use technologies will proliferate and bring the Internet to almost everyone. In the meantime, the übergeeks and power-users can go right ahead and take advantage of whatever's out there like they do already.

When something new and good comes along, you'll know it. That is, if you're lucky.

In this part of Mid-Atlantica, the winds bring invisible pollution from the far-away Great Lakes in winter and visible brownish gunk from Baltimore when the summer heat and humidity clamp down. Whenever the wind blows from the east, that's from off the ocean and generally means cold and wet.

Sometimes, though, an east wind doesn't bring clouds and drizzle. It all depends. Today, for example, there was a nice cool breeze out of the southeast from the ocean, maybe 90 miles away. There were only a few high, thin clouds and the air was dry. Dry and clean, too: no factories or cities out where this came from, I thought.

How rare! A year ago on this date it was 95 degrees and humid as hell, all white sky and blurred horizons. Today as we walked along our neighborhood's country roads the sun was hot, the sky was blue, and the air was cool, almost chilly. Very Westernesque (if you know what I mean), even if the wind was out of the east. It smelled clean and rinsed. I thought about the relative healthfulness of living in places blessed by similar winds, parts of the U.K. for example.

We once visited Scarborough (England) in late September. Scarborough is on the northeast coast of Yorkshire and used to be a favorite landing spot for invading Vikings. When we were there the weather was decidedly brisk, mostly cloudy with showers but interspersed with occasional periods of sunshine. All along the walkways by the sea were bundled-up people sitting in chairs, sometimes with blankets, facing into the cold wind blowing off the water. Brits at the beach, I thought, basking in the "Euro-sun" (clouds and drizzle). . .

But maybe they knew more than I realized!

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and welcomes any offers of fame and fortune. His own Web site, the ZOO ZONE, is worth having a look at. Get a move on before he sells it!

The Farr Site Forum is a fine place to rant or meet girls, and the Archives are always there if you need extra study materials.

*Yes, a Goodwill store that only sells computer gear!

January 08, 2009