Digital TV get a 4 month delay

(image found on Wired)
With the mad dash for Digital converter boxes the government has run out of coupons for the upgrade leaving around 2.5 million American viewers on a long waiting list. So the senate has gone and given the official date of February 17th a hold until June 12th for the big conversion. If people don't have the digital converter box and antenna by that time they can still be safe if they are using Satellite or cable to watch their programs.

President Obama made a request for the hold and the great thing is someone listened. People were first warned about the conversion to digital back in 2005.

"Senate Commerce Chairman John Rockefeller said delaying the TV switch is the right thing to do because the United States is not yet ready to make the transition.

"The Senate acted responsibly to give the Obama administration time to attempt to bring order to a mismanaged process," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement.

Many lawmakers worry that an estimated 20 million mostly poor, elderly and rural households are not ready for the switch, which requires owners of older television sets receiving over-the-air signals to buy a converter box or subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

Broadcasters are moving from analog to digital signals to give public safety officials more spectrum, especially useful for emergencies, and to improve viewing quality."

I have had the digital converter boxes for a few months now and the only strange thing i have encountered is that here in Chicago I can not get Channel 2 at all and also Channel 7 goes in and out all the time. The other channels appear to be working fine and I've noticed that many of them have several sub-version channels offered too.

Senate OKs digital TV Delay (bizjournals)

Digital TV Switchover Delay Gathers Steam in Congress (Wired)

Senate passes bill to delay digital TV switch (Reuters)

Glimps of the Obama Phone - General Dynamics' Sectera Edge

(image found on PCmag.com website - Inside Obama's Classified Smartphone)

President Obama will be the first US President to use a Blackberry while in office. But, he will be keeping his Blackberry for his personal social use and for official US Government business he will be using one of two possible phones: Either the L3 Guardian or the Edge Windows CE Smart Phones.

The Edge and the Guardian are the result of an $18 million, NSA-sponsored program to develop a top-secret smart phone, according to Randy Siegel, Microsoft's lead enterprise mobility strategist.

Most BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices can work with "sensitive, but unclassified" data, according to Tom Liggett, the Sectera Edge product manager at General Dynamics. Those smart phones work with the FIPS 140-2 standard, which encrypts both data traffic and voice calls to a certain extent. And there are a lot of government functions, even in war, that aren't classified. In Iraq, for instance, Windows Mobile devices are used for battle triage, roadside bomb detection, and even as sniper aids, Siegel said.

But about 300,000 Americans have access to a secret, controlled Internet called SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. What's on there? It's classified. And the Edge and the Guardian are the only smartphones that can tap into it.

"The BlackBerry device and the Windows Mobile devices currently are not cleared for SIPRNetSiegel said. "This is the type of communication that a General Petraeus is giving, or many State Department officials, or many DHS officials." communications,"

To make voice calls, for instance, the Edge uses an encryption protocol called SCIP, the Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol. It runs on any of the four national cell-phone carriers' – you can actually switch the cellular module out by hand – but the calls are encrypted end-to-end, so that they can only be decrypted by another SCIP phone.

All the data on the device is encrypted using "NSA Type 1 algorithms," which are forbidden to be used by civilians, Liggett said. This is real spy-movie stuff."

The phone will offer a switch option for classified or unclassified mode. The phone itself can still do many things that a Windows Mobile device can do including connecting to Microsoft Exchange server, edit and work on Microsoft office documents and play media using windows media player. So if you are thinkin of wow i would love to get one of these phones. It will set you back $3300 provided you pass the security clearance for obtaining one too.

Blackberry Force One is up to the Job (ABC news)
Inside Obama's Classified SmartPhone (PCmag.com)

President Obama asks about "Open Source"

(image of the President found on ipwatchdog.com)

The news just keeps getting better and better with our new President Elect, Barack Obama. He is now asking Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, to write a white paper on the subject of "Open Source" to explain some of the various advantages Government can gain by using it.

"McNealy, cited in a BBC News story, wasn't shy in identifying them:

It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software....The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability--all the benefits that come with open software."

I think its a move in the rite direction when the President is doing a complete overhaul of the current government to make things work more efficiently and help clean up some of the graft being passed around. Some people are wondering whether President Obama will listen. I feel that its a step in the rite direction to have in inquisitive mind of other options besides the current status quo for the job. Plus, this could help to open up some new company options for more cost efficient, stable and secure software to be put into the mix.

"For other positions on McNealy's open-source suggestions, see The 451 Group's Matt Aslett's blog and OStatic. "

Obama wants to know: Why open source? (CNET news)
President Obama: Good for Open Source (Linux Magazine)
Obama Wants Open Source IT Solutions for US (ipwatchdog.com)

Obama Brings Change to You Tube

(image found on igngear.com website)
With the success of our new President Barack Obama, google is presented with an amazing opportunity to test a download option on its famed video website YouTube. If a visitor goes to the Barack Obama You Tube Channel one of the options they will now see will be a "Click to download" link on the lower left side of the video play button on the individual videos offered for viewing.

The video format for download will be in a compressed MPEG4 format with H.264 so what you see in your video web page review is what you get when you download the video. This will be an awesome time to see how popular the download option really is to people and what kind of content is desired and not so desired in the download option.

In another political experiment on Monday "YouTube will be launching two new web pages in conjunction with Congress this upcoming Monday, one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Each Congress member will be given the opportunity to create their own channel, and then allowed complete control over it, including the ability to host live events such as a community chat."

This is a pretty amazing time now for millions of viewers to get more politically in tune with the times and also learn a lot more first hand by viewing things as they happen in politics to be as well informed as we can as the American public can be. I am personally glad to see the US government working with Google in this effort and finally coming on line. Who knows this may open the door to other governments coming on with their political channels on YouTube too in the soon future. Knowledge is power and a well informed public is a priceless option.

New Features coming to YouTube? (IGN gear.com)
The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? (Wired.com)
YouTube rolls out download feature on Barack Obama Channel (tgdaily)

Obama Rocks the Web Big-Time today

(photo from CNN snipped grabbed on AD Week website article)

President Obama has shown the world that he is the man. Earlier today at the office i noticed that the web was crawling away in speed. I've never seen it this slow. But, then it hit me. BAM all the video feeds were eating up bandwidth on the web like a crazy fireside sale where everything must go.

After doing a little bit of pocking around the web this is what I've found out so far about the web feeds being shown today:
CNN - reporting more than 18.8 million live feeds

MSN - reporting over 9 million live feeds and over 80 million page views

Facebook - reporting over 600,000 updates at a rate of 4,000 / min

This is a new high usage mark in video feeds.

I have been keeping up with the events all day via AP video feed which has worked best for me. They have had a great live video feed all day from a link off the Chicago Tribune website. Many various cell phone users were also affected by the usage from either not getting service or in and out coverage in their area. With the excitement and information in the air today's technology got a good workout from the web to mobile phones they were in full use and delivered on demand.

So i end this post with my hat off to all the people in the technology sector that kept us up to date on events today and made our day a bit more complete with knowing what was going on as it was happening. Thank You for a great job well done.

Obama's Inauguration Rocks the Web (Ad Week)
Inauguration pass or fail? Social network, streaming video report card (zd.net)
Inauguration Taxes Mobile Phone Networks (PC World)

Cloud Computing an alternative for Government Computing

(image for cloud computing center found on brajeshwar.com)

President Obama's tech team is looking into incorporating cloud computing for Government use and efficiency. Cloud computing gives users a great advantage of security and ease of use from anywhere when requested. Check out the YouTube video by the Obama Tech Team.

Cloud computing has been around for a while now, more and more people are starting to look into the valuable use it offers. One of the great things is basically having as much computing power as you need and only paying for what you use. Allowing a company to put on their own custom version of the operating system they require and even create custom versions of various OS's and then leasing it out to perspective customers too.

I was at a lecture last year at my Chicago Java Users Group and we had Mike Culver a representative from Amazons Cloud computing giving us a great talk on the in's and out's of using this technology.

One of the great examples he gave was a well known newspaper's desire to digitize a great amount of old papers into pdf format. By incorporating cloud computing into the mix they were able to use an array of super computing processing for a small cost to get what they need done. The interesting thing was the whole process which would have taken weeks on regular PCs took just 24 hours using cloud computing technology from Amazon. They realized that there was a mistake in how they did something in their process and ended up re-doing it in another 24 hours and still saved a bundle on the whole process.

I am glad to see government finally start to look out at the great technology that is available for use at a fraction of the cost of purchasing aging hardware and replacing it as its breaks down.

More about cloud computing at Obama Tech Teams Touts Cloud Computing

Obama gets a sweet new phone

(photo obtained from PCmag.com Security Watch website)

The new president will be getting a new phone for work because it seems his blackberry just doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to security. The photo above shows an example of the new windows mobile NSA approved pda phone.

As reported by PCMag.com: Security Watch

"One report notes that there is a Windows Mobile phone that might meet the requirements. General Dynamics Corporation's Sectera Edge is NSA-certified "...to protect wireless voice communications classified Top Secret and below as well as access e-mail and websites classified Secret and below," giving secure access to classified networks, your e-mail and web browsing via high-speed GSM or CDMA cellular networks worldwide."

Looks like a sweet device for the lucky owner of this pda. This device even has two screens on it too, with a warning of secured network connections and some extra features to fight off service attacks and possible un-authorized intrusions.

The only thing though is it doesn't include a camera with the pda but, it does have a windows media player. Hmm i wonder if someone could make a hack for some other media player for the unit so that the user doesn't end up with some typical windows codec error when trying to play a video.

Welcome President Barack Hussein Obama

(screen cap photo from ChicagoTribune.com)
"We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.'’
Tuesday January 20, 2009
Our Great nation today welcomed its 44th President to his new office, President Barack Obama. The first African-American President of the United States of America. I had a chance to catch the morning event at work today and it was an incredible scene. I have never seen so many people in Washington, DC in my life. The power, passion, love and joy was overwhelming. People of all ages, sexes and types gathered, united as one, to celebrate the country's new leader come into office. It was quiet the site to see and i will cherish this memory for years to come.

The other thing that hit me as i watched it on television is that i could see every part of today's events and forward for this administration will be remembered not only in its hollowed halls but also on the worlds new choice anytime TV - YouTube. I feel that this is a great thing for generations to come to be able to see footage taken when it was happening and then saved for future generations to see at their leisure.

Our new President takes office as our country is involved in two major wars and the economy is in the dumps. But, the one thing that he offers besides his words is Action. He is a man of action as well as speeches. Yesterday, in our country was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States and our President elect even before being sworn into office was out doing community work with his wife by his side showing us as citizens of this great country that we need to get out and help others too.

I believe that our new President has a Big job ahead of him but also if anyone can pull our asses out of the fire it will be him and his power to get people to get the lead out, do something good, do something wonderful to make us whole again as a country and as a people too.