With the rise of popularity of 802.11b, there are two promising work on higher speed Wifi: 802.11a that on 5Ghz range and 802.11g that on 2.4Ghz range. Both boast of similar speed at around 54mbps but 11g is backward compatibility with 11b whereas 11a isn’t. And as 11a runs on different spectrum, you need another chip which makes the hardware more expensive.

Sony is an early adoptor of 11a (with its Vaio a/b base station which I dont think was sold outside Japan) and on the other side is Apple Extreme with 11b/g. Because of the backward compatiblity with 11b, and cheaper cost, it is obvious (including to me then) that 11g is going to win the market. Other hardware vendors jump onto the 11g bandwagon and so we started to see the poliferation of 11g hardware.

But now, I believe the war is not over and 11a may win out afterall. The reason is simple: The greatest strength in 11g in its backward compatibility is also its greatest weakness.

Because of the backward compatible, we often use 11g devices together with 11b devices. What is not obvious (until you pushed the network) is that in such mixed enviroment, all devices are “downgrade” to operate at 11b (ie 11mbps) which negates the reason you buy 11g devices in the first place! It is like buying a sportcar that can do 180mph but you never get past 60mph because you are struck in the traffic jam. Such problem does not exists in a/b network.

So Sony might be right afterall. I forsee we will start to see a/b (or even a/g) devices coming back to the market.

I am here at the Apple WWDC 2004 in San Francisco. The stuffs Steve Jobs revealed are amazing: from 30inch Apple display (drool) to multiparty video conference in OS X 10.4 Tiger using H.264 codec. Tiger also feature stuff like integrated Search in the file system which makes Sherlock like childplay and cool stuff like Dashboard (suspiciously like Konfabulator). And finally, RSS comes to Safari, altho I am a bit disappointed they didn’t integrate it with Mail.app instead.

Some of the developer tools available are really cool, including iSync SDK (finally!) and I can see Automator been a useful tool. CoreImage and CoreMovie are breath-taking, and it is difficult to explain them without a live demo. Put it this way, imaging watching a video clip, and then you can apply effect, like enhance edge and gaussian blur, and see it been rendered in real time.

I lost count how many times my jaw dropped…Just a couple of days ago I told my friend that I probably won’t upgrade to Tiger since I am very happy with my Panther but after today, I am going to install the Tiger the first thing I reach home! (Some of the folks here already installed Tiger :-)

Telepocalypse has an interesting article about when it’s dumb to be stupid.

This was observed and codified by some smart people at Sun over a decade ago as the Eight Fallacies of Networking.
1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn’t change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

Interesting read, except it is important not to confuse “stupid” here with Stupid Network. One is saying you should not trust the network too much whereas the other is saying the design of the network should not interfer with the applications.

Was about to leave for the pre-WWDC party tonight when I saw someone wandering at the corridor with his Apple notebook, scanning with Mac Stumbler for an open Wifi network he can use. So I asked him wait while I go back to my room, turn on my Airport sharing and let him access the Internet via my room connection.

It is a strange feeling..when you would allow a stranger to use your Wifi but not let him into your room. I mean, I have much more valuables on my powerbook then in my bags…something to think about…

ps: Oh yea, met David Beyermeyer this morning. We have a lot more in common then we realise. I am glad we managed to meet up! :-)

Reservation : An arrangement by which accommodations are secured in advance as defined in dictionary.com but apparently not the same definition used by San Francisco Marriott who cancel my room reservation. They bumped me to the Palomar Hotel across the road for tonight and I still have problem for Monday night. This really sux!

Anyway, despite this, it has been an eventful day. After Supernova ended yesterday (oh, many people told me my duckie was really cool!), I went over to Keith Teare’s house for dinner. We went back quite a bit, back when he is still CEO of Realname. He just resigned as CEO of Santa Cruz Network and looking for new stuff to do.

After a nice breakfast and saying goodbye to his two lovely boys, I went over to Palo Alto and have lunch with Maynard. Maynard is another old friend of mine who just moved to the Bay Area and now working for HP. After a visit to Frys and amazed by zBoard, we went to watch the controvisal Fahrenheit 9/11 (hey, if I dont watch it here, I dont know if it will ever reach Singapore). While the show could be pretty manipulative in the story telling at times, Michael Moore did a great job putting the clips together with candidness and humor. The audience applaused at the ending….Outstanding and highly recommended!

After the show, I rush over to have dinner with David Conrad, Adam Peake and Roberto Berger and their other halfs. Rushing is a bad idea especially when the italian restaurant is very well-hidden and it does not help when the GPS gives wrong directions. I ended up nearly 1 hour late and I feel pretty bad. Randy informed the group he tendered as CTO of Nominum but haven’t give much thoughts what he is going to do next. While I began to worried a pattern forming (friends resigning from their job whenever I meet them), Bob told us he raised 8M USD for his startup in a Round A. Yes, Round A…feels like dotcom all over altho he really need/deserve that…Congralutions! :-)

¹ The picture above is from a scene from F911 : Michael Moore, with an army recruiter (not in the pic) is about to request Congressman John Tanner to send his sons to Iraq. Some of the facial expressions are unforgettable :-)

Loic Stealth Disco Liz! Sweet! (He definately looks cooler then me :-)

Rule 1: Don’t join IRC channel when you are on a panel or you be forced to Stealth Disco your fellow Panelists. Well, luckily Jeffrey Blumenfeld, a partner at Crowell & Moring is pretty cool about it. (Jeff Ganek, CEO of Neustar is sitting beside Jeff Blumenfeld)

(Photo taken by Loic)

See more photos here and here.

The Future of Work by Thomas W. Malone

Thomas distributed some of his book after his keynote speech at Supernova 2004. I like his speech and I am sure I will enjoy his book too.

Finally, I understand why Supernova has a “Get Connected” tagline. (Oh, check out Supernova blog. Fast Company also have a very good blog transcripting the event.)

The human network here is incredible, many cool people, many CEOs, MDs and VCs and many bloggers. And it is nice to meet some old friends (John Patrick, Adam Peake), finally meeting up some others whom I either know by reputation or chat online (David Isenberg, Dan Gillmor, Kevin Werbach, etc, etc) and of course, making new friends!

Lots of interesting people, lots of companies doing very interesting things; It is definately an event I cannot afford to miss in future.

Read more in this eMarketer article about who are the Bloggers (via Loic)

“Exactly 61% of the blog readers that responded to the survey are over the age of 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year. In fact, nearly 30% of the respondents are between the ages of 31 and 40, and over 37% spanned the ages of 41 to 60. And nearly 40% have a household income of $90,000 or higher.”