At issue for consumers is how the companies that provide the pipeline to the Internet will ultimately direct traffic on their system, and how quickly consumers are able to gain access to certain Web content. Consumers could also see continually rising bills for Internet service, much as they have for cable television.

The prospect of a Google-Verizon agreement infuriates many consumer advocates, who feel that it would concentrate in a few corporations control of what to date has been a free and open Internet system in which consumers decide which companies are successful.

“The point of a network neutrality rule is to prevent big companies from dividing the Internet between them,” said Gigi B. Sohn, president and a founder of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group. “The fate of the Internet is too large a matter to be decided by negotiations involving two companies, even companies as big as Verizon and Google.”

The FCC’s meetings with big internet providers were recently called off, so it’s unclear how Net Neutrality legislation will move forward.

I am somewhat divided on this issue. Currently, the more resources a content provider has, the better experience it can provide to end-users (more servers, etc.). So the internet playing field isn’t really level right now. However, in cases where ISPs are also content providers or have exclusive deals with content providers there does seem to be a risk that competing content could be restricted or even blocked. So that’s bad for competition and innovation. I had previously thought that the content companies like Google would have a vested interest in preventing ISPs from blocking content, but now I am not so sure.

The sad truth is that competition is great for society and thus business in general but bad for any specific business. The best outcome might be for the FCC to re-assert the authority over ISPs that they gave up under the Bush administration.

What do you think?

Ernest Hemingway at his standing desk

Stand up desks have been used to counteract back pain and improve productivity for years, but there might be a more important reason to consider changing the way you work.  A recent study suggests that more time spent sitting increases mortality risk regardless of physical activity.  So even you exercise a lot, your health may be negatively impacted by sitting at a desk all day.

“Several factors could explain the positive association between time spent sitting and higher all cause death rates,” said Dr. Patel. “Prolonged time spent sitting, independent of physical activity, has been shown to have important metabolic consequences and may influence things like triglycerides, high density lipoprotein, cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose, resting blood pressure, and leptin, which are biomarkers of obesity and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases.”

I can’t say that I have ever noticed much back pain from sitting all day myself.  However, I tend to prefer decreasing my risk of death.  When I heard about this study, my stomach dropped thinking about how much time I spend sitting each day.

I decided to look into standing desks and explore some alternatives.  Some of them were fairly expensive, but I feel that it’s foolish for me to not spend a little money to improve my health and possibly improve the experience that consumes most of my day.

Here is a gorgeous desk from Stilvoll that I haven’t found the price for yet.  I have a feeling that if you need to ask, you might as well not.

StilVoll Crescendo C2

An uglier but utilitarian desk is available from GeekDesk.com for $799.

Geek Desk

And if you are really on a budget, Lifehacker has a $20 solution.   I showed this to my girlfriend and she nearly strangled me.

Stand up desk on the cheap

Finally, don’t forget the ergonomic mat to stand on.

It’s hard to picture changing the way you work, but I for one am going to give it a try by assembling a trial version using some inexpensive cabinets and a desk top.

Whenever we do an migration like this, it’s always nice to have the old system available in case something is forgotten.  In the event that we need to do an in-place upgrade, and we don’t have extra hardware standing by I like to use Virtual Machines.  (Note: When I say “in-place upgrade”, I mean a clean re-install of a new OS on the existing hardware.)

So the idea is to:

1. Convert the OS running on the existing hardware (i.e. XP sp3) to a Virtual Machine (confirm that it is functional and copy to a USB drive or network location)
2. Install Windows 7 on the existing hardware
3. Move the VM into the Win 7 environment, run it whenever a missing application or configuration is encountered

Now Microsoft does offer XP Mode based on their free Virtual PC product. However, their Disk2VHD tool to convert physical disks to virtual disks seems pretty basic. It’s not really a full P2V tool. If you don’t mind spending some extra money, there are plenty of good 3rd party apps for P2V such as Acronis Universal Restore.

VMWare is a more robust and mature virtualization platform and their VMware vCenter Converter Standalone product is an excellent free P2V solution. Also, the free VMWare Player actually seems to have more configuration options than Virtual PC. So I chose to use the VMWare products.

Now you may run into Windows Activation issues if using OEM Windows licenses because OEM licenses are not transferable. In this scenario where the VM is running on the OEM licensed hardware there does appear to be a way for VMWare to pass the physical BIOS info into the VM. You can add the following to your .vmx config file:
smbios.reflecthost=”TRUE”

One positive feature of Microsoft virtualization products is the lenient licensing. You can run multiple servers with Windows Virtual Server products and up to 5 VMs on Windows 7 when you have Software Assurance. But I don’t want to get into Microsoft licensing right now, that might be a good topic for another post.

Google's Nexus One Android Phone

I finally decided to dump my trusty BlackBerry Curve, which I have had for two years, and upgrade to a Nexus One Android phone from Google.  I received the phone on 2/16/10 and have been using it for 10 days at the time of this post.  I stuck with my carrier T-mobile, which is actually the number two carrier in the Bay Area according to Consumer Reports.  In spite of the poor perception that many people have of T-mobile, I generally find good voice coverage.  I thought about getting an iPhone, but the AT&T network is just too spotty.  Calls to colleagues who use AT&T are often dropped or poor quality.  Anyway, here are my initial impressions:

PROs

• The Screen – Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode, 800 x 480 resolution, 100,000:1 typical contrast ratio!  This screen is simply amazing.  Crisp and beautiful.
• Web Browsing – The pinch to zoom feature is excellent.  This is my first experience with a 3g phone and it is vastly superior.
• GPS – The GPS navigation features are so good that Tom Tom’s stock took a tumble.  Navigation mode has turn by turn voice instructions, large buttons, great voice search, etc.
• Voice input – I am really impressed by how good the voice recognition is (for short phrases).  You can say things like “Call Gretchen” or “Navigate to Whole Foods” and it will pull up that contact’s number or show the directions to that place.  I understand that the audio is uploaded to Google for processing, but that doesn’t explain why the same feature on my BlackBerry worked so much worse.  Voice recognition  even works well to input one sentence at a time when composing messages.
• Media – The wired headset that comes with the phone has a three-button-controller to play/pause music, answer and hang up calls, and move forward and back in the track list.  My only gripe is that I often leave the headset attached and the play button is always active, so I accidentally start playing songs quite often.  However, once a playlist has been selected, it is nice to be able to start listening to music without having to unlock the phone and open the media player.  My friend John told me about a great tool to sync media with many types of smartphones called DoubleTwist.  It is like a good stripped down iTunes, they even have Amazon MP3 store integration like the Nexus one itself.
• Google Apps Integration - Our company uses Google Apps and the Nexus One has as good an integration with that Google service as one would expect.   You can even start a draft e-mail on the phone and finish it on your computer.  It was trivial to sync my contacts and calendar.  The only problem I had was with the Android Apps store.  I needed to set up a separate gmail account to use Google checkout.

CONs

• NO PHYSICAL KEYBOARD – I always looked with envy upon those iPhone users with their slick multi-touch interface and giant screen (by smartphone standards).  But I would console myself by saying that I liked my physical keyboard and mature, stable BB platform.  Well I was really right about the keyboard.  In portrait mode, with my fat fingers, the Nexus keyboard is nearly unusable.  The landscape mode is better and I am actually getting better at using it, but there is definitely a learning curve to get used to.  I can’t compose mail nearly as easily as I used to on my BB.  The dictation feature is good and I want to explore it more, but it’s not always convenient to be speaking a message aloud.  That said, the voice search is a saving grace, so I won’t toss the phone out yet.
• Flakiness - Andoid 2.1 on the Nexus One is simply not a mature platform.  The buttons don’t always respond properly.  They are often either over-sensitive and launch commands you didn’t want, or under-sensitive and require several taps.  I feel that I have to type slightly above the keys when using the keyboard.  The 3G cuts in and out at random even when I am not moving around.  Overall, it’s a slightly clunky experience to use the phone.  These are all things I expect to get smoothed out as updates come along and are typical of immature platforms.
• Visual Voicemail – This is really a T-mobile app, but it is pretty weak.  It doesn’t work on WiFi and it doesn’t offer transcriptions like Google Voice does.  Until I can port my number to Google Voice I guess I am stuck with this.
• Can’t edit Google Docs Documents – This seems silly to me because you can edit Google Docs Spreadsheets on the phone (via a web app) but not documents.  Maybe this shouldn’t matter to me given my problems with the keyboard, but it does.  We use Google Docs quite a bit and it just doesn’t make sense that Google hasn’t delivered this yet.  There are forum posts going back over a year with people screaming for this feature.

Overall, I really love the phone.  Just having such a rich web experience in the palm of your hand is outstanding.  Over the next few weeks I will talk about the Apps that I am exploring.

Tell me what you think.  Is anyone else interested in the Android platform?

A disturbing news story about computer security came out this week. In a high school in Pennsylvania, the students were given laptops with webcams to use outside of school. It was later discovered that the school was turning on the webcams remotely and spying on the students inside of their own homes! Hopefully the school administrators will be appropiately punished and prevented from doing this again. However, there is something simple you can do right now to prevent this kind of spying from ever happening to you. If you borrow a laptop with a webcam from someone, just tape a small piece of paper over the lens. You could just use tape for privacy reasons, but the paper will prevent damage to the lens from the glue on the tape. It’s a simple solution that will give you peace of mind. – Gretchen Bily, 18 East Web Design

Read full article: School gave kids laptops to spy on them at home