Morph3ous’s Weblog

In the post View from the Peak, WorldChanging brought to my attention a story at Salon about a report by respected energy research group John S. Herold, Inc. about peak oil estimates of various oil companies.

The Salon article makes a few conclusions from the research.

Herold’s projections have enormous ramifications both for stockholders in the major oil companies and for every energy consumer on the globe. If Herold is correct, and the world’s biggest oil companies cannot increase their production in the coming years, then several things appear certain:

• Oil prices — which are already at record levels — will continue rising as demand outstrips supply. In a few years, gasoline prices of $2 per gallon could seem like a bargain.
• State-owned oil companies like Mexico’s Pemex, Venezuela’s PDVSA (Petroléos de Venezuela) and Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco may be unable to increase their production enough to meet burgeoning global demand.
• The producers who belong to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and Saudi Arabia in particular, may have even more leverage over the global oil market in the coming years.
• The United States will be ever more reliant on oil imported from countries filled with people who don’t like George W. Bush or his policies.

The author, Robert Bryce, concludes:

Of course, scientists, pundits and oil men have been predicting that the world will run out of oil ever since the gusher blew at Spindletop in Texas in 1901. Despite those predictions, the last century has been one of unbroken increases in supply. Each year, the oil industry has produced more oil than it did the year before. Today, the industry is producing about 83 million barrels of oil per day. New oil fields in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, in the Caspian Sea and in Saudi Arabia will soon begin pumping oil onto the global market. Plus, huge deposits of oil are available in the Canadian tar sands and American oil shale.

But turning tar sands and shale into motor fuel is a very expensive proposition. And those new, unconventional oil sources may be insufficient to replace the decline in production from existing fields, which deplete by about 6 percent per year. Further, they may be too small to quench the demand from the developing world — China in particular. Last month, at a conference in Houston, Zhu Yu, the president of China’s Sinopec Economics and Development Research Institute, said that between January and September of 2004, motor fuel use in his country soared by 20 percent. Yu also predicted that China’s oil consumption will double over the next 15 years to more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. Meanwhile, the Energy Information Administration expects India’s oil consumption to increase by nearly 30 percent over the next five years.

That we continue to turn a blind eye to this problem is truly astounding. We will run out of oil one day.

President Bush is an easy target with his oil background; however, attacking Bush will not solve the problem. This problem is much larger than silly politics. Without political support there will not be a solution.

Politicians react to the people. Our people have become näive and self-absorbed. We have become so used to being prosperous that we have lost sight of the big picture. It has become common to think that things will stay the same. Americans are still buying SUVs in droves, many just don’t seem to have the ability to think long-term.

It is said that once the price of gas reaches a certain point we will react and reconsider our ways. I strongly believe this; however, it is sure to be a rude awakening. If we start the process of reducing our dependence on oil now, then we will be creating a cushion for our inevitable rough landing. The technologies will be there waiting. Switching to them will still be painful, but not as painful as it will be if we continue to ignore the looming problem at hand.

DSLReports.com has recently come under a few DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Some have speculated that it relates to their coverage of the Pluto Data credit card theft coverage. The coverage made it into an article at MSNBC.com that mentioned BroadBandReports.com (same website as DSLReports.com).

Regardless of why it happened, it has happened. The attackers could not have picked a worse target. DSLReports.com is a wonderful site where industry professionals chat and help each other solve technology problems. The site is chock full of useful FAQs and intelligent users waiting to help out.

DSLReports.com proved to be very resilient through all the attacks. It was slowed down somewhat but available most of the time. The investigation to catch the attakers is still ongoing and as such the site has smartly been quiet on what they have found out so far.

I hope that this will not be a continuing trend in the years to come. I fear it will be. Website A says something that Annoyed Company B does not like and so they hire BotNet Operator C to set Unwillingly Infected Home User #1-4,000’s computers to attack.

There are many ways to combat these problems. I do not favor government regulation of the Internet. I believe, perhaps naively, that we can force computer software and security awareness to change. Microsoft has been doing some great work to clean up its operating system mess. If Microsoft is able to make it harder for a home user to have their computer unwillingly hacked, then this problem will be less pervasive.

BotNet operators will not be able to rent out their attacking bot infested computers if they find that it is next to impossible to infect other people’s computers quickly and efficiently. They will have no army of co-opted computers.

We’ll see how this all pans out. It is things like this that scare many people away from the Internet. Was all of this ordered by the Pluto D Nicosia scam artists? I doubt we’ll ever know. It is still a big deal either way. Smaller sites can easily be shut down or monetarily hurt by these sort of antics. We were lucky this time that DSLReports.com is huge and has some great minds behind it.

I purchased a D-Link DSM-320 Digital Media Receiver some time back. This product interested me as it was a video thin client of sorts.

The DSM-320 utilizes Intel’s UPnP AV protocol which attempts to create a standard method for consumers to distribute media throughout their homes.

Devices like these will likely play a large part in our future much to the dismay of many a large media conglomerate. The Internet has reduced the cost of distributing data significantly. The role of the traditional media company will lessen if they do not adopt the new technologies.

The DSM-320 upon first examination was absolutely horrible. The video refused to stay synchronized with the audio. I almost gave up on the product after playing around with it for hours trying to figure out what the cause of the problem was.

I learned that the product did not work properly with videos where the audio was in MP3 format but not CBR (constant bitrate). The problem was with the firmware. D-Link had rushed the product out too early. My best guess as to what was causing the problem was the demuxer. This is run in software and is the part that separates the audio from the video. The video is decoded in hardware, and it is my hypothesis that the audio may be decoded in software.

D-Link is not the OEM for this product. The firmware and reference design are actually by a company called Redsonic. This means that the product is by no means unique. An Australian company, Zensonic, also produces a digital media receiver based upon the Redsonic design that they call the Z400. Early firmware releases for the Z400 had the same problems with audio synchronization.

Zensonic was likely more active in their dialogue with Redsonic as they were able to release a viable firmware for their device before D-Link was able to do the same. I was able to flash my player with Zensonic’s firmware and the synchronization problems went away.

I was not very content with this solution. It angered me that D-Link was not able to release a workable firmware as quickly as Zensonic was. It took D-Link a while, but they finally released firmware version 1.05 and the device became usable. I put D-Link’s firmware back on my DSM-320 at that point.

The other main issue with all of the digital media receivers on the market is the server software. You need to run a server on your computer in order to allow the device to access your media. These servers differ in quality and ability. The D-Link server in its current incarnation works well. My main gripe is that you can not set it to run as a service. Thus, my machine which is set up for multiple users needs to have one user logged in at all times running the server program. If that user logs off, then another user needs to make sure to start up the server.

If the server could run as a process, then it would be available even if there were not any users logged in. This would make the device much easier to use, and less of a techie toy.

The media server also needs to figure out when new files have been added to a directory so that it can reindex them. If you add a new video and the server has not reindexed, then the video will not show up on the menu of your digital media receiver. The D-Link server has two options. You can either tell it to manually reindex your videos, or to reindex them automatically every x minutes. It would be better to tell the server to check if the directory has changed and then reindex if need be.

Right now I consider the DSM-320 to be more of a proof-of-concept. It is possible to create a working digital media distribution system in one’s home; however, much work needs to be done to make it practical for the non-techie.

There is also a more comprehensive review of this hardware over at Mirror World.