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Advertisers in the US are growing more concerned about the planned digital television (DTV conversion in the United States on 17 February 2009. The date is carefully timed - it’s after the Super Bowl, but before the NCAA basketball tournaments.

Unfortunately for broadcasters and advertisers, the conversion comes in the middle of a sweeps month. The Nielsen Ratings service, which calculates television viewership a broad-based sample of American households, has released some surprising figures. Senior citizens seem more prepared for DTV than previously believed. Households with two or more television sets are more likely to have at least one set that is not ready for DTV, despite an endless barrage of television announcements about the conversion plan. Hispanics and African-Americans and younger households are more likely to lose their television service:

Using its ratings panel, Nielsen found that 9.4 percent of households, or roughly 10 million homes, were “completely unready” for the switch as of April 30, meaning that all their television sets would go dark next year. An additional 12.6 percent of households were partly unready.

See this New York Times article for more information.

Related pages on billso.com:

• Digital television

I don’t want to get on a rant here, but I’m just someone born very late in the baby boom. Frankly, I have more in common with Generation Y than with Generation X. But both generations have their faults. I saw this yesterday, while I attended Peter Kay’s presentation on crowd sourcing at the May 2008 HTCA meeting. Peter kept asking the audience what web services they had used. The number of hands got smaller with each service he named. Everyone had used Wikipedia. A few people knew about Twitter. Peter mentioned a few sites I had never used, like InTrade and IdeaScale.

I was the only person who raised his hand for Ning, the social networking portal that hosts TechHui and Peter’s latest project, HawaiiConCon.org. The Honolulu Advertiser’s article about the site is available here. and I mentioned TechHui in my billso.com post on 31 March 2008.

The generation gap

A few members of the audience got nervous when Peter discussed corporate wikis. I have heard and read similar questions as managers and academics struggle to keep up with the digital generation.

Tammy Erickson has a top 10 list on Business Week with some excellent comments about generational conflicts in the workplace.

More of the precious little snowflakes - and they’re so many of them in Gen X (the generation born between 1965 and 1982) and Gen Y (those born between 1983 and 1997) - need to wake up and smell the coffee.

It’s not Starbucks coffee.

It’s not even a maple nut crunch latte from the 7-11.

It’s Maxwell House scooped from the big blue can, brewed in a vat, simmered to the consistency of loose mud and served in a tiny styrofoam cup.

If you’re lucky, you get a little red plastic stir stick and some Coffeemate. Denis Leary would be proud of this coffee-flavored coffee.

And if you’re really lucky, someone made some Sanka because you can’t handle the caffeine.

Life sucks and it’s not fair

Many Gen Xers are hitting the ceiling in in their climb up the corporate ladder. There’s fewer CXO spots than there are Gen Xers. It’s not fair, but those stubborn folks in Generation Jones (born between 1954 and 1964) got there first. Their heroes are folks like Bill Gates, who would blow off his Harvard courses and try to make up the study time with end-of-the-term all-nighters.

It’s bad timing as the children of Generations X and Jones are going on to college and getting jobs. Members of Generation Y have feelings of entitlement and privilege that crash against a wall of indifference and disbelief in the real world.

The heroes of Generation Y are people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has bragged about skipping most of his Harvard art history course while he built a Facebook prototype. Zuckerberg passed that class after he built an online study guide that his classmates poured their notes and content into during the end of term reading period. Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Zuckerberg got rich much faster. See this New York Times article for more details.

Helicopter parents

Gen Xers hate how the Generation Y calls their parents to ask advice about everything from class schedules to work responsibilities. It’s awkward when a college student’s helicopter parent calls a professor to intervene on their child’s behalf. It’s dumbfounding when this happens in the workplace. This 2006 MSNBC article about helicopter parents who manage their childrens’ job searches is a great example.

The current recession only makes matters worse for all involved. The home equity line is tapped out. No one wants to buy that piece of investment property that looked like a sweet deal 3 years ago. Bonuses aren’t as common at work anymore. This year’s vacation became next year’s vacation, and that’s just a maybe.

And yes, they’re buying Maxwell House and brewing their coffee at home.

Escape - if you can

There is hope. A few Gen Xers escape from corporate jobs to start their own small businesses. But many of the Xers are uncomfortable with modern technology. Text messaging and social networking are too much to handle. They can deal with their Netflix queue, but email is more their speed.

Members of Generation Y have kept up with the changes. Some Gen Xers are jealous that their younger Generation Y can navigate the Internet so easily and use online services to find new opportunities.

Some members of Generation Y are overwhelmed with communications options. Just read their blogs and feel their pain as they realize that everyday life is hard. ReadWriteWeb has a great collection of Generation Y links and RSS feeds, along with a video and some additional discussion.

But as I mentioned on 19 May 2008 in this billso.com article, many Americans don’t read blogs or send emails. To them, all of this conflict between generations may mean very little at all.

Images courtesy of Roadside Pictures and mark_the_legend_foster through a Creative Commons license.

USB ports are handy, but only when they are fully powered. On some models of the MacBook Pro, it’s the left USB port that is the primary port. If you’ve got an iPod, a headset, a USB-powered hard drive or an external USB hub, plug it in to the left USB port.

The right USB port on the affected MacBook Pro models is hubbed. That means the USB port is sharing the some bus and power source as the keyboard, trackpad, IR receiver, Bluetooth and the iSight video camera. There’s not much power left to run a hungry USB device.

The problem was reported by Andy Ihnatko during the 8 May 2008 MacBreak podcast.

On older MacBooks, the fully-powered USB port is towards the keyboard. The USB port that is nearest to the MagSafe power socket is the hubbed, underpowered port.

I read a Wired article called The MacBook. All USB Ports Are Not Equal and a ZDnet article called (wait for it…) All USB ports aren’t created equal for a few more details, but I checked Apple’s documentation (also at http://snurl.com/appleusb) for the official version. According to Apple, the USB implementation may differ depending on the computer’s model number. It looks like the problem affects older models made in 2006 and 2007. The Wikipedia pages for the MacBook Pro and MacBook can help you determine when your model was built.

The MacBook Air has only one USB port, but it is fully powered.

Image courtesy of wGa HK through a creative commons license.

Related pages and posts on billso.com

• Mac
• 3 March 2008: Building the perfect laptop
• 21 January 2008: The MacBook Air does not impress me

Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, is arguing that ISP content filtering is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Statute. That’s a five-year felony sentence for the ISP, and perhaps for any ISP network administrators who actually set up and performed the monitoring, because the statute personal and corporate responsibility.

This seems like a steep price to pay for monitoring traffic, throttling P2P apps and serving up highly targeted advertisements on web pages, but AT&T, Charter and Comcast seem willing to take the risk. Perhaps they are betting on amnesty from President McCain.

Verizon hasn’t implemented content filtering because of the legal issues. Read this article on Wired for more information.

Will video kill broadband?

According to another Wired article, ISPs and telecoms are growing more concerned about IPTV - television over the internet - as a potential showstopper. Content filtering a la Charter and Comcast is a good example of bad blocking by ISPs. Demand for Internet video keeps rising while bandwidth growth hasn’t kept pace.

If ISPs do get to use deep packet inspection (DPI) to insert their own ads in web pages, Google and other web advertisers may retaliate by using SSL to encrypt their web pages. That prevents content filtering, but the cost in the server farm may be worth the effort for Google.

The rank-and-file residential user may not like a slower, encrypted search engine, however. Jakob Nielsen pointed out in this BBC article that Internet users are becoming more aware of latency and search accuracy. Users want faster, more relevant search results so they can go straight to a web page without visiting the target site’s home page first. Users have alredy learned to ignore banner ads, according to Nielsen’s discussion in this 20 June 2007 Wall Street Journal article. Content filtering won’t help matters.

Image courtesy of bryankennedy through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts on billso.com

• 14 April 2008: Virgin Media CEO claims net neutrality is “bollocks”
• 9 April 2008: The all-seeing advertising cookie
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 19 March 2007: About e-commerce part 2: US ISPs sell web analytics data
• 28 July 2004: Stalking the P2P users

Gas prices are going up all over the US, and Honolulu is no exception. Prices in Honolulu are over US$4 a gallon, while prices on the neighbor islands passed that mark in April 2008, according to this Honolulu Star-billetin article.

Some Hawaii-based researchers believe that prices will continue to go up, as the era of “peak oil” ends. See this article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for more information.

Since the state of Hawaii gets 90% of its cargo from boats, higher oil prices will lead to higher prices for almost every good and service, including gasoline. I have seen and read about more people who are consolidating trips, carpooling, taking The Bus, or walking during the day.

Suck it up

Petty thieves have shifted their attention from copper to gasoline. earlier in 2008, the Hawaii Legislature increased the penalties for copper theft, and required scrap metal dealers to keep better records of transactions. So the criminal element has armed itself with boxcutters and siphons. With some vehicles, it’s easier to cut the plastic fuel line to drain the tank. Cars and trucks with large fuel tanks are a tempting target, especially when they are parked on quiet streets or unsecured company lots.

This Honolulu Advertiser article has some more details, including an indication of how well-organized some fuel thieves are:

“In Waipi’o Gentry we’ve been hit several times by a white pickup truck that has a big tank in the back of the rig,” [U-Haul district manager Don] Rickard said. “The same guy just pulls up, sticks in the hose, turns on his pump, siphons the gas and away he goes. We’ve turned in video of him doing it three or four times a month, but he keeps using stolen license plates. It’s extremely frustrating.”

The usual common sense measures are listed in the Advertiser article: video surveillance, vehicle alarms, and parking in well-lit, secure areas.

There’s one more good suggestion: get a steel fuel line made and installed under the vehicle. Anyone who is dumb enough to cut through a full steel fuel line with a metal blade will trigger an explosion.

Related posts on billso.com

• 4 January 2008: Copper thieves kill Sugar Bowl cablecast