Cloudy Thinking

The aftermath of Katrina is impossible to comprehend. The situation is desperate, and getting worse. There’s a growing wave of anger and disbelief across the nation.

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Eric Kainerand Anton Wahlman are a couple of smart guys at Needham & Company. Their Equity Research Note (August 31, 2005) about Sigma Designs, Inc. (SIGM/OTC) caught my eye. In fact it triggered my screed below (Gigabit Ethernet to Your Living Room).

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Phone companies are thinking too small as they plan to roll out IPTV services. Verizon’s FIOS fiber to the home service uses passive optical networking. The specific PON flavor being deployed at Verizon taps out at an average of about 30 Megabits per sec (Mbps) per household. That’s not enough, as you’ll soon see.

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Microsoft is playing very nice with Hollywood by building special hooks into its future Vista operating system. Marcus Matthias of Microsoft’s digital media division puts it thusly:

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If (like me) you’re interested in computer gaming (bigger than the movie industry) click on this summary of a research report written by Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai of Parks Associates.

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Skype and Google Talk are great FREE PC-centric VoIP systems. Skype also has SkypeOut with very reasonable rates for calls to ordinary phones in many countries. Vonage, Broadvoice (which I use and like…), CallVantage or a dozen other VoIP providers are also low cost.

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We don’t know the full impact of Katrina yet, but things look grim. This will be an environmental disaster of the first magnitude, and will have a wrenching impact on availability and price of refined petroleum products.

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Microsoft, the 800 pound PC gorilla, is inviting itself into your living room. It is now best friends with Scientific-Atlanta, a leading set-top box outfit. SBC will be their lead dog IPTV customer.

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David McNett calls himself “a self-taught hacker from the Atari generation.” He’s wriiten this rant about Google Talk, and provides LOTS of details about instant messaging.

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This little online ping pong game is too much fun.

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I’m using a new service from FeedBlitz The observant reader (as you all are, right?) of Cloudy Thinking will notice a new Subscribe Me! box in the upper right corner of my blog. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll get an email when I post new stuff. How cool is that?

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Here’s an article by Ethan Zuckerman about pickling vegetables that you’ll enjoy, if you enjoy this sort of thing.

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