Silicon Valley still sucks

No recovery in Silicon Valley so far:

Employers in Santa Clara and San Benito counties added 200 jobs to their payrolls in August. But compared to a year ago, Silicon Valley has 2,400 fewer jobs, a decrease of 0.3 percent. Economists say the annual comparison is more important than the monthly one, which is easily swayed by seasonal shifts in employment. And for the past five months, the year-over-year changes has stayed fairly close to zero, wavering on either side of it.

But the stock-scammers are still active:

EBay Inc. said it agreed to acquire Internet-calling start-up Skype Technologies SA for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, posing a new threat to phone companies and expanding the online-auction company’s revenue sources.

Somebody’s smoking drugs at EBay.

Vint Cerf on the future of the Internet

I don’t know about this stuff:

A couple of things are pretty clear: One of is that what we call broadband today isn’t going to be broadband tomorrow. It’s not just a matter of speed; it’s a matter of symmetry. A lot of the broadband services are asymmetric, which means you can’t do things you might want to do. If you look at BitTorrent, which is one of today’s most popular and demanding applications for exchanging large files, you’ll see that it’s symmetric in its use of the network.

BitTorrent is mainly used for theft of copyright material, so I’m not completely convinced that it legitimately demands a re-wiring of America.

Airgo re-writes the laws of physics

My friends in Palo Alto have topped themselves with a new chippie:

Airgo Networks today announced its third generation True MIMO chipset with support for data rates up to 240 Mbps. The company said its technology makes wire-free offices a reality…

“When MIMO was first unveiled, it reversed over 100 years of scientific thinking by harnessing natural radio wave distortions, which were previously perceived as interference, to deliver dramatically increased speed, range and reliability,” said Greg Raleigh, President and CEO of Airgo Networks. “With True MIMO Gen3 technology, our team has achieved a scientific milestone by proving that wireless can surpass wired speeds.”

WiFi+MIMO may be literally like a rocket ship, but not really faster than all wired networks, or even as fast as the UWB wireless network, but Greg can dream.