Fernando sent the below message to the Neuros list, and its just another reason why an x86 (with a powerful CPU) continues to make sense for the LINK.  Until the world becomes more standards based, as a manufacturer, we'll continue to need to be flexible to keep our customers from having to deal with these headaches.  That means x86 and having enough space CPU cycles to be able to deal with some inefficiencies in the system.

I wrote previously about Innovation following Infrastructure and this is basically the other side of that coin. I recently was introduced to the pedal-a-watt device its a device that turns your bike into a stationary bike with resistance provided by a generator that actually puts power into your home electric lines, offsetting some of what you use. Its a neat little thing and as someone that uses a stationary bike with a very noisy fan, I was excited to get one.

Many years ago, my forth grade teacher gave us an assignment to write a recipe about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The next day, she took each set of instructions and showed how, without using any judgment, each set of instructions would fail to produce a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If the recipe said spread peanut butter on one side of the bread and then put the pieces together, she would put the peanut butter on the outside of the bread.

"Chicago was the place where all the classic games were made, because you could acquire all the parts that were necessary from local manufacturers" said Steve Kordek (who gave the world two-flipper pinball). It's a quote from the Feb '10 issue of Chicago Magazine. I'm sure it's something that went unnoticed by most readers, but I winced the second I read it. Why? Because 50 years later, Neuros moved its manufacturing (and a lot of the engineering) to China for largely the same reason.

The concept of an open home gateway is one of the least noticed and most important of the components of a national broadband plan, and I believe the US is at a critical crossroads. Please join Neuros in supporting a proposal for an open home gateway by voting or commenting on the FCC Post we submitted. The open home gateway is a standard that would mandate the cable companies deliver a box that other devices can integrate with in a seamless way.

On one path is an incredible opportunity:
to help close the digital divide,
to create an entire ecosystem of connected TV that allow a freedom of communication that can quickly reach virtually all citizens,
to create entire new industries for the US to pioneer

I recently received this message from defectivebydesign.org:

The MPAA is pressuring the FCC for the authority to cripple recording devices so Hollywood could shut off the video outputs on your cable box, DVR, or other recording device when particular movies or shows come on. If granted, people who wanted to watch those movies would have to buy special defective by design devices subservient to remote "Selectable Output Control," and a dangerous precedent would be set for even more control in the future.

Please tell the FCC to keep Hollywood's restrictions out of your living room: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/mpaa-drm-tv
Thanks for taking action!

Its pretty obvious to me that whenver you create "interfaces" of any kind that are open and available to all, innovation and experimentation and even entrepreneurship thrive. When you created a giant sealed off infrastructure of any kind, only the giant verticals that created them can modify them and things just naturally stagnate. It's pretty widely understood that big entities aren't good at innovation, so why would the FCC even consider shutting off an interface like the analog outputs that allow some level of experimentation (such as Neuros and others are doing).

The piracy argument is so weak here its just hard to justify. Its clear that effectively none of the p2p content available has been generated from analog recordings from set-top boxes, etc. Its just a big red herring to justify the fact that they simply want more control. Let's face a simple reality, innovation is mostly bad for entrenched interests, it changes things, and change is undesirable if you are doing well with status quo. And that's fine, I have no problem with doing whats best for your shareholders. But the fact that these folks have the gall to lobby a government entity to fight something that seems obviously a help to innovators is shameless to me. Can anyone dispute that this helps innovation or that innovation is vital to our national interests?

Neuros has long spoken about digital rights and their important roll in innovation. They are rights that have long been under siege from big media. Google, however, has long been a company that we, as Internet users, have invested a great deal of trust in. It's very disappointing, and even more scary to me, to see them, through YouTube, come down on the side of a more proprietary, restricted Internet. Recently they started excluding certain device manufacturers from displaying videos add this to the recent move to give partners more ways to block viewing. These actions are almost certain to stymie innovation and freedom of communication in variety of ways. We can imagine many of those ways, but the saddest of all are the ways we can't imagine which will never be realized because they were blocked from ever seeing the light of day.

Open standards are a practical necessity for innovation. If Google, or anyone else, is picking the winners and losers up front, we can be certain that precious clever ideas will be lost before they ever get a chance to grow, morph and become the next big thing. No one should know this better than the folks at Google and YouTube who once took some of the most unlikely ideas and made them central to our lives. Imagine if Microsoft, IBM or any other entity had been able to act as gatekeeper at the inception of Google and YouTube. I think just about anyone can imagine those services would never have gotten to market. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with Google profiting from YouTube, and we welcome their experimentation in a variety of means to do that, but they need to do so in an open, non discriminatory way that allows small and big entities alike to experiment and innovate.

It goes without saying that I want to see our own Neuros products get a chance at the market, but as an interested citizen I also want to see Boxee, Miro, Moovida and a host of other innovative services, applications and devices make it to market. I want to see a world where we go from being passive consumers of content to active participants in adding our voices to the news of the day. Google needs to quickly decide if they are to be a force that helps accelerate that or impedes it.

Those of you that follow Neuros know about our longstanding relationship with DVRupgrade, which has even included co-sponsoring some bounties with the Neuros LINK, we've begun to forge an even tighter relationship. As I said nearly 18 months ago, I believe that open electronics will follow the path of PCs in many ways, and one of those important ways will be with value added resellers. The concept of openness goes hand in hand with customization. Obviously much of that customization can be done easily by users themselves with simple plug ins and third party apps. But, it's clear there's also a place for more complicated customization that many users will be looking for the convenience of a reseller for.

In the nascent field of open electronics, there are few manufacturers, let alone the infrastructure of resellers, but Neuros happens to have the good fortune of being within a few miles of one of the world's few "electronics value added resellers." or eVARs Expanding on that luck is something we've been working on for years, and I'm proud to announce it's starting to bear fruit. So what does it mean to be an eVAR? and more importantly what does it bring to Neuros customers?

If you're like me, your first reaction to hearing that the web is available on your TV is "why?" The answer is quite a bit different than you might think. The answer is not that you want you want your TV to go out to the web to browse content, which is by and large not the most inspiring concept. The answer is that you want web content brought to your TV. In other words, the Web and all the interactive web 2.0 tools are tools that are well suited to bring rich content to your TV.

Ravenexus Summer of Code project is a great example. Check out this video capture of it in action and you'll quickly understand that the point of the web browser is not "browsing the web" per se, but as a tool that allows all kinds of participation in an integrated TV experience that hasn't existed before. Wiki information populating information about shows and artists is just the beginning. Links to shared favorities, community feedback, etc are all vastly more realistic when the tools to bring them are webtools rather than the typically embedded morass.

This Blog Posting from the BBC's Director of Future Media and Technology really illustrates the power of an open device. The Neuros OSD is being considered along with devices from the biggest brands in the world, and effectively leapfrogging a whole host of other global brands, both big and small. I'd love to take credit for this, but the truth is the credit rightly belongs to the free software movement. The BBC is right to consider the OSD because it is an open box. It's just natural that the BBC, all things being equal, would prefer to invest time and effort in integrating with an open solution v a proprietary one. It's also likely that if there are enough entities like the BBC, that the open solution will be likely to gain critical mass and prevail in the marketplace. The "ifs" and "all things being equal" in the previous sentences bear a lot of weight and we know that the big companies have a lot of resources to bring to bear to this, but the mere fact that we're in consideration speaks volumes. The BBC is not the only entity to inquire with Neuros and we certainly hope this is harbinger of more good things to come!