To DIsney, Apple, Hulu, Ultraviolet and the rest of you:

Please, please stop the madness. All of us folks on the Internet are glad that we're finally seeing ways to get and access movies online and then watch them across PC, smartphones, tablets and sometimes connected TVs. It looks like the industry is generally heading towards the model of a video locker, which stores the set of movies I'm entitled to and then allows me to access that locker across a set of devices. The problem is, the various studios and digital providers are driving towards increasing fragmentation so that I cannot have just one locker. I need lots of them.

This week, I gave a two hour talk to the Freehold High School Computer Science Academy on how VoIP works. This ended up being quite a bit of work actually, since I needed to distill my existing tutorials to something a high school student could understand. I ended up needing to explain a bunch of core IP concepts first. Here's what I came up with. The feedback from the students was positive - many said they understood it! You can find the PPT here. Comments on the content are most welcome.

IP communications services - voice, video and chat and the many variations therein - are all the rage again. Startups are sprouting daily. Though some focus just on mobile, many are building cross-platform applications.

When building such a service, the first and most important capability that you need to build is perhaps not so obvious. It is not wideband voice. It is not chat. It is automated (and silent) client software upgrade. 

The venerable operating system has been around almost as long as the computer has been in existence. Though the "computer" has changed - from mainframes to PCs and now to mobile devices and tablets - the role of its operating system is largely similar. The OS abstracts the underlying hardware and provides applications access to those hardware services. These services typically include file system access, network access, graphics and sound, and of course memory and compute. These are accessed via APIs provided by the OS.