Posts tagged with theories

What would happen if a handful of ex-RIM employees started up new companies? Food for thought. Thousands have been laid off, we could get dozens of new startups. The groups would be experienced, knowledgeable, compatible, the ideal for a founding team. They would be connected to former colleagues wealthy from stocks from RIM's early days, making it easy to raise seed capital.

On the other hand, the RIM "diaspora" could drift away, getting jobs in the US, seattle, silicon valley… pulling valuable human connections, knowledge, and experience out of the local loop.

It's not hard to see that the first scenario is better for the region. The existing cluster grew because individuals, once they get a taste of the industry, cycle through many companies. In fact, this region has been an entrepreneurial centre since the industrial age. Electrohome for example, a major electronics company in the mid-20th century, was founded in Kitchener. While Toronto has more tech and sheer scale, KW has a greater concentration, and it's concentrated groups of entrepreneurs that create the upwards spiral.

I can't go without mentioning silicon valley, because I spent a significant part of my formative career time there. Around the time of Electrohome, there started a lovely chain of diasporas and virtuous cycles in the bay area. Shockley left Bell Labs to start his new company. The "Traitorous Eight" left Shockley to form National Semi. More left to start Intel and AMD. At SRI, Engelbart's employees skipped out to join PARC. PARC people left in many directions–including the Mac division at Apple, as well as Adobe and 3Com. Ex-3Com people are all over the place. More recently, there's the Xoogler effect, leading even to specialized ex-google-only VCs.

My point is this: if we can keep the xRIM in the area, then cool tech will be created, the cluster will expand, and new startups will grow. That's a good thing. So, let's see if we can see the silver lining in the cloud and open up some doors.

Oh yeah, and come out to StartupCampWaterloo12.

It seems like things that cause earthquakes are the ultimate in evil or hyperbole. But now we've achieved that end: human technology can cause earthquakes. Hurray!

A recent Scientific American article discussed a new way to generate free power called enhanced geothermal. It works great, there's just one minor drawback, it causes constant earthquakes. The project in Oregon is far enough from settlements that it merely annoys the neighbours with the small rattles. But still. A technology that causes earthquakes? That's fantastic!

Here's another one: geologists are worried that Taipei 101 may have torqued the earth so much that it opened up a new fault. Cool! The residents of the building will be OK because it's highly earthquake resistant.

All new technology presents benefits and dangers. People say that the atomic bomb is purely a danger. But think about the upside. Major international conflicts have ceased because they're too dangerous. And if we ever find a giant asteroid coming our way, we're probably going to need nukes to blow it up, right?

So I think we can actually measure our progress by the sheer destructive power of our technologies. Now that we can cause earthquakes, can the colonization of other planets be far away?

Nokia looks to be in serious trouble. They've delayed Symbian^3, which was supposed to be the sort or basic catch-up version of their main smartphone OS. Symbian^4 is supposed to be the move ahead again version and who knows when they'll release it. Meanwhile, Maemo or whatever they're calling it these days is more like vaporware even though theoretically it's out on a couple of devices.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Nokia just can't write good software.

Think about it ... when was the last great release of software from Nokia. The first version of Symbian S60. Which, if you remember your history, was actually written by PSION. Symbian has not improved in any major way since then. The first Symbian smart phones were epic—the Nokia 7650 was way ahead of its time in 2002 and make Nokia the smartphone kings. But after that they didn't seem to be able to put out a really substantial upgrade.

Big companies have a long history of not being able to complete operating system upgrades. Back in the late 80s early 90s Apple managed to fail to create a new OS not once but twice—Pink and Copland—were both epic failures of massive proportion. Making software is hard.

The question is, can Nokia learn how to do it. One option - which I have advocated in the past - is to simply ditch Symbian and get on to the Maemo train full stop. But it's not clear if Nokia has the guts to do something so drastic.

Well, they'd better grow some, because they haven't put out a competitive smartphone since the N95 three years ago. Their current offerings are jokes. Android, Blackberry and iPhone are way ahead of them. And, the investors are starting to figure it out. Hopefully Nokia's shareholders will beat them up until they take the drastic measure before it's too late.

I'm proposing a talk for TEDx Waterloo. The subject is Light + Music, an overview of visual music, the past and future, of this wonderful field where two of your senses get together and jam and have a good time.

The theme of TEDxWaterloo this year is Tomorrow Started Yesterday, which is pretty appropriate for this subject. The visualization of music certainly started with dance, which was probably one of the most ancient of human arts, although we cannot say for certain when it started. Music certainly existed over 50,000 years ago. On the other side, the future of music is certainly digital, and the digital signal lends itself to being interpreted in multiple ways—witness mp3 visualizers and VJs.

But I want to start with what is sound. In 1904 Heinrich Rubens created a tube to see the sound as light—literally—glowing from the flames of his curious contraption:

Sound is a wave through the air, and like all waves you can reduce it to a sum of waves at different frequencies. I won't get into sine waves and circles and cycles and oscillators because I don't have the time. But take waves of different speeds, some large and slow, others small and fast—just like in water—and add them up, you get sound. The rube's tube simply shows the amplitude and pitch of the wave as it creates a standing wave inside the tube.

An oscilloscope does the same thing!

Guess what, your iTunes visualizer does the same thing too. It just jazzes up that information into prettier pictures. The basic ones show an oscilloscope like the ruben's tube, or a "spectrogram" which provides much more information—it actually breaks down the signal into the component sine waves, and shows the strength of each. Usually frequency is vertical, time is horizontal, and the intensity of colour is the intensity of sound at that pitch. Here's a spectrogram of a violin:

And here's a video of a whiz-bang mp3 visualizer. It may look crazy but it's just oscilloscope + spectrograph driving it:

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Maybe you can look at the spectrogram and tell a flute from an electric guitar, but most people can't. That's why Anita Lillie made a program that tries to show the timbre of different instruments in colour against the notes of the scale. This is where the future of direct visualization is going:

Visualizing Music by Anita Lillie from S Woodside on Vimeo.

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All of that said… there is more to visual music than can be imagined by computers. Artists will surely have a word to say. And we can go back to the early days of film to find inspiration from Len Lye, famous for his abstract film, A Colour Box (1935):

And you might have already seen this one. Fantasia: Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, by Oskar Fischinger in 1940!

There is much more, such as the Star Gate sequence in Kubrick's 2001, Lapis by James Whitney, The Bead Game by Ishu Patel, Synchromy No. 4: Escape by Mary Ellen Bute in 1938. Bret Battey's Luna Series #3: Sinus Aestum is more recent—2009. After three quarters of a century, the art is being revived.

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Tomorrow though, it will be the other way around. Instead of looking at sound, you can go the other way, you make light and get sound.

The most significant entry in this green field is surely TENORI-ON, a completely new form of digital instrument created by Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori for Yamaha in Japan. It's being used in concert by artists such as Little Boots. I would like to leave you with these two examples, which might blow your mind.

Little Boots .. watch her set it up :-) :

Jim O'Rourke ... a little deeper, but stick with it and your mind will expand. Steve Reich needed 18 musicians! :

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I've skipped over a lot of really cool stuff, so if you want to see more in a fast, wide-ranging and crazy presentation, head over to TEDx Waterloo and nominate me for the show :-) I might even do some live demos :-)

Movies are great for many reasons, but having a superstar actor/actress can make even a half-ass movie bearable or even good. There's lots of great actors who can pull it off these days. To give a few random examples. Benicio Del Toro. Bruce Willis. Brad Pitt. Clooney. Clint Eastwood, after all these years. ... much as I hate to admit it, Leonardo DiCaprio.

We used to have them. Just looking at the 80s & 90s: Sigourney Weaver pulled off many hits, including Alien, Terminator, ... Renée Zelwegger was awesome headlining in Bridget Jones, Nurse Betty... Jodie Foster carried Silence of the Lambs & Contact. Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, Kim Basinger.

Where are they now? They seem to have faded away. Julia Roberts seems to be gone. Zelwegger is doing voiceovers. Foster hasn't been seen lately. Hepburn is out of town, and Basinger seems to be mainly in movies I haven't heard of.

Does Kate Winslet count? Uma Thurman? My theory is that there's still great actresses out there, but they're not getting good parts.

I have a theory about this one. Because they can easily go to Matching and turn it off temporarily. But I think that some people leave it on, because they want the ego boost, even though they're going to shut down the match anyway.

So Merb developer Matt Aimonetti made a presentation at GoGaRoCu heavily laden with soft-core pornography and some people got upset. In particular, a woman got upset—Sarah Allen. It didn't help that she was one of only six women at a 200 person conference. Holy shit!

Don't put sexual images of women in your slides. If you must do it, then put just as many sexual images of men in your slides. Be fair. Unless of course you're presenting to a club that only allows male members. Which in a way is what pisses off the women who are reacting to this incident—because it implies that Ruby/Rails/whatever is a men-wanted-only club.

If I had been there, I suspect I would have walked out. I've walked out of presentations, movies, plays, etc. for less. I have low patience no pride.

Why the lucky stiff posted a summary of women rubyist's reactions, and there's discussion aplenty there and elsewhere on the net. Hopefully the positive outcome will be a community that is more aware of issues that differ between men and women, and therefore has more women in the future.

Well, apparently I've achieved the vaunted and much-desired "trusted user" status on DKos. That means I can rate people down, as opposed to just up. I'm probably not going to do it much, just like I rarely troll rated people when I had privs on SlashDot (back when /. was interesting...)

Daily Kos probably gets as much traffic as /. did back in the heyday, but their rating system is much different. Ratings are simply thumbs up as far as normal users are concerned, so the higher the number, the more recommended that comment is. Whereas in /., every comment was rated from 0-5. /. allowed you to quickly filter to view only comments above a specific level, which filtered out a lot of gunk but also meant that most people were actually reading less. This I think probably led to a situation where important and interesting comments were not seen by many people, and it was almost a competition for cleverness, etc. Whereas the system on DKos leads to much more of an actual dialogue.

Anyway, what lead to this was my analysis on the subject of the 46-page 2005 "torture" memo by White House "attorney" Steven Bradbury, which you can read here, if you have the stomach for it. (it's really nasty stuff, to be honest, and I felt ill after reading it and writing about it).

Update: trusted user status is gone! Thank god, the stress was getting to me.

So Dubai isn't a wonderland and actually is a vast petrol- and credit-funded nightmare that is on a knife's edge of sinking into the sands, forever gone? I'm shocked! Who could have thought it.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

— The dark side of Dubai (in The Independent) via The Cartoonist (see also Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down)

Here's a thought. Don't build a big city in the middle of a desert. And here's a prediction: Dubai will be gone in 50 years.

I absolutely hate the latest Facebook redesign. And, for the record, I loved the last one, so I'm not some kind of knee-jerk negativist. The new facebook removes the single most important feature, the live news feed. Facebook's major contribution to the online world was the live news feed. Everything—updates, pictures, interests, links, notes, etc. etc. etc. all in one time-sorted feed. It was brilliant, and obviously I think so since I make some kind of minimal replication of it on my own front page.

And now they have removed it. The new... thing ... whatever it is .. that I get is more like twitter. I don't need another twitter. I already have twitter. What I want is my live facebook feed. Now, if I want to see what photos people have been tagged in, what apps they have been using, etc., I don't know what to do. The right hand side seems to have some stuff there ... but I can't filter it.

Now what kind of idiot would destroy their company's chief asset in an eyeblink? When you've got something that good, you don't change it, you nurture it. Look at google's home page. They are so careful in making changes. They do statistical A/B tests on every single change they ever make, and only keep the ones that make people's results better. When they make a change that sucks, it's also minor and gets rolled back quickly. So my point is this: for FB to ruin their own user experience is really out of the ordinary and insane.

Who would do such a thing? Only a tyrant who's lost touch. Which means Mark Zuckerberg has become a tyrant and lost touch. For evidence that he's become a tyrant, we can look at the following evidence:

Gawker: A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were "stupid" for "listening to their customers."

TechCrunch: Facebook says this is about getting a CFO with public company experience ("We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."). Which is complete nonsense (and poorly thought out nonsense at that), because [Gideon] Yu, after a short stint at YouTube and an even shorter stint at Sequoia Capital, was the treasurer and SVP Finance at Yahoo. Which is very much a public company.

For evidence that he's lost touch, well, there's plenty. As of now over 1 million users have gone to the trouble to install an app specifically to complain about the new layout. I know that facebook has ~ 175 million users, but that's still a HUGE user backlash.

Now apparently they are going to roll back some of the changes... we'll see how that goes. Presumably at a company of that size the investors are going to force Zuckerberg to back down. See this Joy of Tech comic for an idea. But people are also going to compare Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs of the 80s, when he was forced out of Apple for being an asshole.

Let's be completely clear on this. Steve Jobs WAS an asshole in the eighties! My impression is that the film Pirates of Silicon Valley is quite accurate. And from working at Apple during Steve's second coming, I can say that he still could be a real asshole, the kind that gets things done and doesn't have patience for idiots. The difference is, that Jobs never did anything really stupid to his user base.

So, what's going to happen now? I suspect that Z won't back down very easily, and that we're going to see more conflict, clashes and problems in the future. It's unfortunate, and I hope that wiser heads prevail and FB recovers the truly awesome user experience that it used to have.

Update: Gawker thinks Zuckerberg should go. Strong stuff.

And Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg has begun "believing his own hype," a source says. He believes he is the genius the magazine covers say he is. Mark has always been an executive who made life difficult for those he disagreed with. "Mark is a very demanding person to work for, if you screw up, one day you are in, the next day out, persona non grata," says one former employee. Now that he thinks he's Steve Jobs, he's unbearable.

Cross-posted in my Daily Kos diary, where it will be almost certainly ignored (because kossacks mainly care about breaking news).

A Metaphor

Suppose I had a car company, Woodside Cars, Inc., and we discovered an amazing new way to power cars using a miraculous substance called unobtanium. We'd roll out a line of new cars, and everyone would buy them, because they never have to be filled up. People would buy shares in the company too. The cars are great, they're well made, they save money, and have a high resale value. But then, after 3 years, suddenly the cars start to fail. It's mysterious. Some of the unobtanium is corrupted. It's unpredictable. Some of the cars just stop, others keep going. Overall there's a 50% failure rate but no way to predict which ones will die and which will keep on going. Suddenly the resale market vanishes, no one wants the cars, and the stock price collapses overnight.

Why did the stop price drop so precipitously? The problem with unobtainium existed all along. But no one knew about it. One morning everything was fine, Woodside Cars was worth $50 billion, the next morning, it was worth $25. The details aren't important, the important thing is: the world collectively decided that the company wasn't worth as much as they thought. The wisdom of the market took care of the rest.

Now we might pity poor Grandma Joe who had her life savings tied up in Woodside stock. But only stupid people invest their net worth in the shares of a single company, right? Not so fast. Many people had their money in Woodside. Woodside has been making cars for 70 years and has always been stable before. Even charities, and small companies, have their money in Woodside shares. In fact, millions of people had their money in Woodside. Fortunately, they still have half their money left.

And then the lawsuits start. People are mad that their cars are broke. They start a class action suit. And it looks like that suit could drag down Woodside's remaining business in regular cars, even though those regular cars run on gasoline and electricity. This is bad news for Woodside shareholders. They run the risk of Woodside's "toxic business" dragging down its regular business and making their shares worth a big fat zero.

So the government steps in. "Woodside is too big to fail" say prominent business leaders and politicians. "Just think of the economic damage that it could do." First they loan Woodside money to buy back the bad cars, and then the split Woodside into two companies – one to carry on with the good business, and the other one to deal with the broken cars and the lawsuits.

Of course, in reality very few people would put all of their money in a company like Woodside. Woodside was free to develop and trade in new kinds of cars, based on any kind of fuel they like. Banks, on the other hand, have restrictions. They are regulated and insured and subject to constant scrutiny. Banks aren't companies... they're banks.

They used to be.

Now they are companies.

In fact there's even a phrase for it: the "shadow banking system". It sounds scary, and it should because it's regular companies, with all of their exposure and foibles, pretending to be banks. These so-called "financial services companies" are just as innovative and subject to unexpected losses as any high-tech, manufacturing, or services company, just as they wormed their way into the heart of the world's monetary system.

Too big to fail? Yes, Dorothy, they are too big to fail. Like Woodside, if they fail, suddenly a lot of individuals and businesses – perfect good citizens who truly believed that they were investing their money wisely – are going to be broke. And through no fault of their own. The effects will spread. People who never touched a Woodside car will suffer.

Yes, the executives should be axed. Yes, the regulations should be changed. But the company is really a bank, whether it's Woodside Cars, or AIG, and needs to be treated as such. If it's allowed to fail, then the economic costs will be massive. Certainly the company made mistakes, and there's good reason to punish it for that. But. They didn't break the law. Unobtainium was legal when it was introduced. Maybe it shouldn't have been, but it was.

Of course the real situation is much worse. It's like unobtainium has been added to the fuel of every car that anyone makes or drives, except that no-one knows which cars are good and which cars are bad. Unobtainium has become so essential that there's no way to quickly remove it from the transportation system – it will take years. Car companies are struggling to figure out which of their suppliers have tainted parts. Even the government can't figure out which parts are good and which are bad.

That's more like the actual banking crises. Unobtainium is bad debt. Oh, there's a million ways to name it – CDOs, MBSs, CDSs, etc., etc., but it's all fundamentally bad debt. These shadow banks, running amok, have infected the entire system. When no one knows which accounts are good and which are bad, they won't borrow and they won't lend.

The knee-jerk reaction is to save the system by destroying it. Let them fail. That is short sighted. All of our so-called money is inside these companies. If they fall, we fall. Yes, we must fix the system, punish anyone who broke the law, and  change the rules so this won't happen again. But that's a very big job and won't happen overnight. In the meantime, unobtainium has infected the system so badly that it needs heroic measures to stave off total collapse.

Next time I'll talk about why the fundamental rules of executive compensation created this problem, and how I think they must be changed to make sure this "never happens again".

It seems like the truth is slowly emerging about all of the horrific things that went on during the boom times and are now emerging from the muck as the swamp is drained. Someone like Bernie Madoff can always cover his debts while the market is rising, but suddenly his ponzi scheme fails when it crashes. It seems that there is now a laundry list of semi-legal crap that is similarly being outed.

A lot of these terms might sound like stupid jargon but they are actually useful jargon, because they are the name for a specific thing, and that thing is fucking up your bank account and making you lose your job.

You should probably already know a few terms of useful "jargon". To start off with, "debt" is not just what you have on your house, it's something you can buy and sell. The value of the debt is based on someone (a ratings agency, a market)'s assessment of how likely to be fully paid over time, and how much the interest is. So the "best" debt (most expensive) would be say a government bond at 10%. Options (e.g. call and put), and Short Selling (which is much like a "put option"), these are both kinds of Derivatives. Briefly, options and short selling allow you to make a stock market trade where you benefit if the stock goes DOWN. Think about how evil that is for a moment, will you? Normally you only buy shares if you think they're going to go up. Derivatives is a broad category, including options, which allow you to trade things on the stock market which aren't actually company's shares. So, you can trade options, or you can trade debt, or the price of oil in 10 years, or whatever. "Downside risk" is the bad stuff that happens if the market does poorly, people default on loans, or whatever.

Secrecy

Underlying all of the below is that no-one knows what the fuck is going on. Most of these tricks don't require reporting to anyone, any market operator or regulator. You can mess with the stock market in so many ways without telling anyone. Maybe the insiders at the other big financial companies on Wall Street will figure it out or hear rumours. But the general public, and even CEOs of normal companies, rich people, readers of Wall Street Journal, normal people, poor people—know nothing until years later.

Naked Short Selling

You can short sell stock you don't own? Are you kidding me? Have a look at The Story of Deep Capture. Basically, I own a big financial company, say a hedge fund, and I want to kill your company. So I short your company and naked short sell it, which adds massive number of shares to the pool, driving down the prices of the existing shares. Then I transact my real shorts or put and make a killing while your stock suffers big time.

Credit Default Swap

OK, this one is a kind of insurance. I loan money to someone but I'm not sure if they'll pay me back. They might go bankrupt and default. So, I get "debt insurance" (like a CDS) and if the default happens, you the insurer pays me instead. Except that CDS isn't exactly like insurance, because (a) I don't actually have to be the lender and (b) you don't have to actually be a regulated insurer. In addition, there is no central place where CDSs are tracked, and you can resell them on and on, making it VERY confusing to know what they're really worth. Which is one of the reasons why banks won't borrow or lend right now, because they have no idea what their CDSs are worth. And of course, they are priced based on "normal" default rates, which go out the window when there's a crash. Why is that a big deal? Because EVERYONE has their money in them ... CDSs were recently valued at $55 TRILLION. Needless to say, Bear Stearns, Lehman and AIG were huge into credit default swaps.

Collateralized Debt Obligation

Wonderful stuff. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, the bank that loaned you money was personally responsible if you defaulted. But no longer. Now that bank can package up your loan and many others into a "CDO" and sell it to other people. Theoretically they will tell you which CDOs are good debt and which aren't so good. But, to be honest, they don't care. They sell someone else the debt, and then it's not their problem anymore if the borrower defaults. So, people get sloppy. And then, the various companies that are supposed to asses the risk in a CDO did/do a very bad job of modelling the downside risk. So when for example the housing market drops by 20% suddenly the CDOs are completely underwater and no one knows any more what they're worth. Maybe they're worth nothing. Who knows? And it doesn't help that some CDOs are actually made up of ... you guessed it ... other CDOs.

Synthetic CDO

Hey, let's kick it up a notch. The above are so boring. They're not, you know, complicated enough. So the financial geeks decided to make CDOs which contained, not actually debt, but Credit Default Swaps! Get it? Hilarious eh? Why would anyone want to do this, I don't know.

The Annual Bonus

I think this one is ultimately responsible for all the others. Financial company performance by the executives is measured on a YEARLY basis. That means, if you are CEO or whatever and you are making a decision, you think only at most ONE YEAR OUT in terms of what it will do for your company. You never think beyond a year, because you are getting paid in at most one year for your decisions, never beyond that. As long as you get your bonus before the shit hits the fan, you're laughing. I think that if these financial firms re-arrange their compensation system so that decisions have to bear fruit for a longer term—maybe 7 years—a lot of the shenanigans would never have happened. You could do that, for example, using employee stock options, locked-in shares, and I'm sure that the wizards can figure out other ways as well.

Well there you have it, my shit list for the financial market circa 200X. And if you want to read so much that your head will explode, try The Economists's Jan 22 Special Report on the Future of Finance. It's 25 pages (in the magazine) and the index is on the right side of your screen. See especially When markets turn. And don't be scared to learn a little more financial jargon. It might save us all next time.

Update 1: And let me add just one more thing. The banks don't know what their own assets are worth. In case you didn't get that above, a lot of banks own a lot of CDOs, CDSs, etc., etc. They don't know what they're worth. That's why there's a "credit crisis" ... they don't trust each other, because they don't even trust their OWN balance sheet. No one will borrow or lend. And that's just how bad it is.

Update 2: You might find useful this video on CDOs and this one on CDSs from Marketplace.

Image from worthbak.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is about life, the universe, and everything, ... and the fact that it makes no sense. Life makes no sense. Nothing that happens makes any sense. There is no purpose, to meaning, no answer, just an endless series of coincidences, catastrophes, and occasionally good times which we just have to put up with until we die. This is the thesis of HHGTTG, and also a good bit of Douglas's other work.

The story is told through the Book, or rather, the Guide. The Guide is the voice of the narrator, who spends most of his time talking about the book, that most famous of all books to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor Beta, and which the narrator notes, is the subject of the whole story in the first place. Arthur is just a new reader of the book, Ford an old writer for the book, and the other characters embody it's general philosophy: that the universe is fucked up (Marvin), and you might as well just try to have fun (Zaphod).

All of them have essentially zero control over their own lives, even when they think they do. Trillian and Ford seem to have wilfully chosen to just hang on for the ride, and Zaphod seems to be doing the bidding of unknown voices in his brain. Even the hyper-intelligent trans-dimensional aliens can't figure out what to make the answer to the Ultimate Question, or prevent a bunch of bungling bureaucrats from messing up their shot at obtaining the Question. I'm not trying to belabour the plot here, just point out that it makes sense only if you realize that Douglas is trying to tell you that it doesn't make any sense at all. The Big It. Everything. Nothing Makes Sense.

It's like that moment in the Simpson's when the lawyer invokes the Chewbacca Defence. It doesn't make sense. That what the Hitch Hiker's Guide is all about.

So you can't shoehorn that into a movie about romance and character development and happy endings. All of the best material, what Douglas created, is the ultimate joke of the pointless randomness of life. And that's not only what Douglas' story is about, but what the book inside the story is about. That's why the backbone of any good retelling of the story must make the book itself the central fixture and the backbone of the narrative. Keep as much of Douglas's precisely crafted dialogue in place as possible, and don't worry too much about plot or character development. Make sure that when the audience finds out that the answer, after all that time, searching, questing, is 42, that they laugh in the knowledge that it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't have to, and you'll feel better if you don't worry about it and just go along for the ride.

And maybe, after the pointless early demise of the author himself, in a fashion so fitting that it ought to have been written by him, we'll eventually get an ultimate movie version that does justice and helps us all feel a bit better about losing him before he could write so many more great works.

Crazy eh?

Bachelor

The PC Police missed that one.

Making predictions is fun. I made some predictions a long time ago about the iPhone and it's fun to go back and see which ones came true. #1 was "Apple will design the plans, and they'll twist the arms of the carriers to make them simple to understand and attractive to Apple's users" — that seems to be accurate.

Now that Nokia has demonstrated that they can deliver a device to compete with the iPhone, the question is, can they deliver the rest of the solution to match? Not an easy thing to say. You need a lot more than good hardware to make the kind of great customer experience that Apple shines at.

So here's 9 things that Nokia needs to do to retain and win back their smartphone dominance.

1. Forget the carriers. Nokia has a great brand (outside the USA) in part because many of the carriers they deal with have virtually no control. They need to make the same deal everywhere, including the huge US market. When you get a nokia, it has to be a totally nokia experience. Just like iPhone.

2. In line with that, every unit sold must run the same firmware. Right now there are a zillion firmware versions for the N95 alone. This is insane and frustrating for users and developers. Everyone should be running the same version, just like iPhone.

3. Simplify product line. Again. Like Apple. Nokia has about fifty billion products on the market, all with insane numbers instead of names, and so none of them get any buzz. Names are good, small numbers of models are good. How about 3? Even 10 models would be a dramatic improvement, and probably enough to cover the gamut from $10 developing market to whatever is the highest in the range.

4. App store. Duh. BUT — this requires absolute cross-carrier uniformity and a way to ensure that every subscriber has a data plan...

5. Getting away from copying Apple here. How about they shape up their open source story? What they've started with is a good start, but it needs to be better. Developing for Symbian is just about the worst thing in the world. Apple's SDK is better but you still have to use Objective C. How about Nokia lets us code in a nice modern language like Ruby? They could really leverage open source excitement if they made that a possibility.

They can really jump the queue on Apple with this one, because OSS just goes against the grain at Apple. It's not that they don't like open source, but it doesn't work with the secrecy and the total control thing. But Nokia could leverage open source efforts to really turn their platform into something to care about as a programmer. Android is starting from scratch, but Nokia has a developer community already in place, loads of users, and all of those people would jump at the opportunity to make and use cool apps.

6. Open up the platform. If nokia is seriously about open sourcing Symbian, then they should let people go so far as to actually installing their own versions of Symbian OS on their phones. That would just rock, and the user mojo would be amazing. Of course the carriers will hate it, which is why 1. above is 1. And they'll probably have to keep key sections of the OS (radio functions probably) under control.

7. Continue the content creation story, and back it up with better web integration. Keep pushing the megapixels and the video capture, etc. But, I should also be able to, with no setup, upload my high resolution movies I make with my Nokia directly to a Nokia-branded website (or flickr, if I so choose). Not using some stupid PC tools, but directly, over my WiFi network. There's no reason Nokia can't do this, and they've already made a good start with the kick-ass Sports Tracker app/web site combo.

7. Keep converging. Turn by turn GPS navigation is good, I can throw out my garmin. Keep going! They'll naturally stay ahead of Apple because they are inherently conservative on features, not wanting to add too many, each one has to be perfect and the market mature enough. Nokia can stay ahead here. I only want two electronic devices — my phone and my PC. And hey, if I can get rid of my PC that's great (integrated projector??). Unlikely, maybe. But Nokia should aggressively continue to add core features.

8. Keep innovating form factors. Another nokia advantage to stay with. Although I admit this conflicts with simplifying the product line. Wild and wacky form factors ARE cool...

9. Keep drinking whatever they are drinking. Somehow Nokia is the most Apple-like company that isn't Apple, even though they are a massive decentralized conglomerate with no dictatorial genius at the helm. Whatever they feed their people, keep doing it.

The last time I blogged about mesh networks was 5 years ago (almost exactly!). I was pretty pumped about the possibilities in those days — like the idea of creating a 2nd internet using mesh protocols, routing from house to house using WiFi, circumventing ISPs.... hey, it's still a cool idea, and maybe even possible still, especially with the excess capacity that we have with e.g. 802.11n. Latency would probably be pretty high..

Anyway, back then mesh was a DREAM but now it's a REALITY. The OLPC "XO" laptop for developing nations uses it! The perfect use case actually. And we have 802.11s, etc., etc... cool.

In the long run I expect that "self-forming" (if not exactly "mesh") networks over wireless will be a VERY important part of the internet and future networks, if not the most important way that data gets moved around in local and regional areas.

Yes, I use eHarmony. I have my match distance set to something like 200km so I get about 5-8 matches a day. I try to sift through them pretty quickly to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here's my current procedure:

1. First pass is to eliminate people who are definitely not an option. Starting with the most recent match, I command-click (middle click) to open in a new window and then I look at the small photo:
   1. If they closed me, I close them, don't bother looking at photo or description.
   2. If there's no small photo, I close. It's not worth the hassle to request photos. A picture is worth 1000 words.
   3. If it looks like I wouldn't like them, I close without reading anything.
   4. If they look potentially interesting, I don't do anything (so they stay in the queue).
2. If I closed in the above action, I switch back to the original tab, because eHarmony is too slow in closing, and also it doesn't return you to the right place in your list if you go back. Once I'm done going through everyone, I close all the tabs, reload the main page, and get ready for the 2nd pass.
3. Now I'm on the second pass. All of the women left have passed the first sight test. Now I look at the photo details. I find it's very important for me that there's both a closeup face shot and a shot from father back so you can see what they look at. I include these in my profile. Without both, I close. If I don't like what I see (and this can be facial expressions, the context, as well as more normal attractiveness levels) I close without reading anything.
4. OK, finally, after doing the above step for everyone, the people who are left are worth reading about. In fact, at this point I only really feel the need to skim what they wrote because as I said, your character is written all over your face and the context of the photos. So I usually contact anyone who's made it this far.

So there you are. I do this in phases, because it's annoying to be really interested in someone, and then the next 5 people are horrible. So, I save myself the pain by going in passes and only increasing how much I care after I've eliminated the uninteresting people already. After all I need to manage my own sense of involvement or I'll just get tired of it.

I actually at one point wrote a pretty nifty greasemonkey script for firefox to add various close buttons at the top of the page to make it easier to close people. But it made me nervous. A couple of times I clicked the close button when I meant to click something else. Also, I just don't like Firefox—prefer Camino. So, no more of that.

Apple uses a form of DRM with the iTunes Music Store . While I love iTMS, I can't stand the DRM. The files come down as .m4p files which are AAC with an Apple DRM system called Fairplay .

Now with iTunes prior to version 6.0 there was a great program called JHymn which would strip the DRM from all your iTMS song automagically. Cool! It was built on reverse-engineering work by DVD John and enhanced by other people. Unfortunately, Apple messed around with FairPlay in iTunes 6.0 and JHymn no longer decrypts it.

But wait—says I—I have an old Airport Express and it plays my encrypted music just fine! It was made a long time before iTunes 6.0 came out. Is it possible that the music is being transmitted over the WiFi connection unencrypted?

The AirPort Express contains a little computer that can translate mp3, AAC, and AIFF files into an analog output. I know that it only supports certain formats, because I have audio files in other formats that iTunes will play on my computer but not on my stereo. That means that the Express must contain hardware/software that understands AAC. But it would only understand the old Fairplay, not the new one.

That means that iTunes 6.0 is taking out the new DRM before it sends it over the air to the express. And that means it should be possible to write a program that finds that stream of unencryted data and read it back into an unencrypted AAC.

I'm always super pissed off with the Camino bookmarks browser because I can't organize my bookmarks and view the pages at the same time. (Safari is no better.) In fact I was never happy about the transition from drawer to bookmarks panel but hey, what can you do. The drawer wasn't popular.

Anyway, here's a new idea which I think would make organizing my bookmarks a lot easier . I can never remember what all my bookmarks are for, and having a little preview would make it a lot easier to sort them out. So, with this floating around in my head somewhere I was pretty impressed with the "now playing" box in iTunes where you can see a live preview of video podcasts that you've downloaded.

So, here is a concept drawing of what Camino bookmarks browser would look like if it had a preview pane. Thoughts? Email me! sbwoodside@yahoo.com (my public/spammable email address).

I actually made up a design for a unified drawer design for the Camino browser, ages ago, which I thought was pretty cool at the time. Unfortunately at this time Camino was about to ditch the drawer (against my wishes). I don't browse full screen, and I think most people don't ... but I lost that argument.

This is one of my original concept drawings. The idea was to merge the HI for three things (bookmarks, history, and tabs (aka "sessions") into a single list. One part of this design which is still innovative is that the list of tabs (or "sessions") was universal to the whole app, and it didn't matter what window you looked at them in. I thought that was cool.

A later iteration took the merging a step farther. Note that this was drawn before tabbed browsing was invented!

Finally, a contribution from someone else (sorry, I have no record of who..) which clearly is a precursor to the Omniweb thumbnail tabs. I bet Omni ripped it off... They have the guts to make this kind of leap.

First up. Could marquetry be automated? It's the process of making very complex patterns with inlaid veneer wood . I've always though of veneer as being a bit cheap, because of all the veneer particleboard furniture you can get these days, but real wood veneer can actually have aesthetic purposes if you're mixing different kinds of woods. Or, you can use it to have a surface of some very high quality wood (like oak) which would expensive to get solid. And also destructive to the environment. So, question is, could you make a machine that could automatically do inlaid veneers on a production line? As complicated as these exhibited at the Getty?

Next. University of California at Santa Barbara. Party school? No doubt. But nonetheless their library has produced this fine online collection of ancient cylinder recordings from the turn of the 20th century. Voices out of the past. Too cool.

Finally. ISOC is the Internet Society , a non-profit organization based in the US chartered to uphold the principles of the internet. It's an organization that has a slightly bizarre history, like a lot of techie organizations that try to do something non-technical. Oh well. I want to draw your attention to the year 2001. Put yourself in Salt Lake City, Utah, December 8 and 9.

Prior to that year ISOC was a membership organization . Technically speaking that means that the members have ultimate control over what the organization does. (This is non-profit lingo.) But at that meeting, the Board of Trustees of ISOC decided to change the rules. Using a virtual majority vote they exercised their power to effectively eliminate membership oversight and put in place a self-perpetuating board . Which means that the board as of that meeting can now stay on the board basically forever and maintain control of the organization perpetually.

Now you can argue plenty that the board is well meaning but the Salt Lake City meeting minutes show that only one or two of the trustees seem to have been concerned about the change.

Another point of contention is the definition of the election or nomination to the board: Manuel points out that the proposed wording would in theory allow for a self perpetuating board. This is however mitigated by the term limit provisions of the bylaws, but Marty points out the term limits allow someone to serve on the Board for six out of every seven years, and therefore a group can control the ISOC Board almost in perpetuity by having Trustees take one year off after every two consecutive terms.

Marty's analysis is correct, by the way.

Another interesting point is that if you look at ISOC documents (bylaws, etc.) from before the Salt Lake City meeting, you can do that using the Wayback Machine at the awesome Internet Archive. According to the bylaws just prior to the S.L.C. meeting , the bylaws require that notice be given of proposed changes ... presumably so that people who are concerned can raise their voices. In this case, notice was not given . So, you can easily form the opinion that the change from a membership body to a self-perpetuating board was made in a slightly undemocratic way.

[UPDATE 2006-02-19: I was wrong about notice, because the bylaws don't actually require notice of the changes to be given to anyone but the Trustees. They were (apparently) given notice.]

You might well ask "who cares?" and I for one might not care all that much, because as people have pointed out, ISOC is doing good work. Right now. However it bothers me that this change was made and it seems that ISOC doesn't want to repair it. ISOC's Board claims that they are membership-driven, and operationally, they are ... for now. But what will happen in the future? Another Salt Lake City-style power grab? It's hard to say. And they are in charge of .ORG registrations because of their speaking-for-the-public cred.

What can you do about it? Well, start by complaining, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Or considering running for the board on a reform platform. That's what I would do if I didn't hate travelling so much (they fly you to meetings around the world).

I came up with these six conjectures about wikipedia one night. It kept me up. I'll admit that some of them are somewhat opaque to a casual reader. I might write some commentary later.

By the way—I have no idea if any of them are true.

Motivational questions:

1. Social networks conform to the "six degrees of separation" principle. If wikipedia does, what does that say about its social roots / the way it's constructed?
2. See Cyc and others. Is there enough formally coded information in wikipedia? What about the semantic relationship between the source sentence containing a link and the summary of the linked article?
3. What does "low entropy" mean anyway? More structured? Simpler? More redundant? More readable? What about the entropy across wikilinks?
4. Does an article behave like DNA?
5. Can we "prove" Reed's law? How do you measure the size of the content?
6. Is it accurate more than average? Can you predict the accuracy of an article?

I was just reading Larry Borsato's blog (from seeing the Communitech Chapter 3 blog ...) and I saw his post about jargon . Jargon actually does have a useful function as culture. For example, recently I've been writing a business plan for my company and I've had to learn some new words, like valuation. Valuation is a bit of a jargon word since it really means the appraised price. The person on the street knows what "appraised price" means but not "valuation" ... but that's actually valuable because it's a cultural clue. If I go up to someone and start talking about valuations it tells them that I know about business culture, VC culture, and whatever.

The same thing goes for social culture... if I start talking about chavs to someone, they would probably assume I'm british (I'm not but I think it's a funny word).

There's also another strictly practical use. If I type "valuation" or some other jargon-term into google, I will restrict the field of the search to the cultural context I'm interested in, in this case, business planning, VCs, M&A, etc. If I put in "appraised price" or even "value" I would get something different.

Follow das link, below, to learn why Manhattan is ultra green. Here's the first two paragraphs of the monograph. Got this from Veritas et Venustas a blog about smart growth and, if you want, US baseball.

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.

Choosing Tunisia for the 2nd phase of the ITU World Summit on the Information Society ... good move? or not?

Well, you can argue that since the other side of the digital divide definitely lives in Tunis, among other places, it's good principle to hold the summit there. There is, however, one slight disadvantage. Tunisia has a less-than-optimal record on Human Rights . In particular the government engages in internet filtering (like China) (apparently they use SmartFilter ) and has a terrible record on free expression .

Whether or not that means WSIS is a waste of time or a negative thing I'm not sure. The first WSIS was most interesting as a struggle for the civil society to claw their way into place amongst the governments and organizations. Now the 2nd one might wind up being dominated by the theme of a free internet. That might not necessarily be a bad thing.

Engadget has a good story on this new linux gadget . The question really is, why the hell did Nokia release this thing? (For a contrarian point of view, which I haven't read yet, see this PC Mag article .)

I'm inclined to think that Nokia is generally speaking on the right track these days. The Nokia N-Series , despite the horrific flash on that page, looks really, really solid. They seem to have settled on a design aesthetic that's actually pleasing again - witness the Nokia 8800 . Their open development platform strategy with Series 60 is a definitely winner.

So, the new device. It's a small tablet-style device with a substantial screen (800x480) suitable for watching TV and movies on, and surfing the web. It's got Wi-Fi and bluetooth. NB: no phone! It's got 128 MB RAM but only 64 MB flash card. It runs linux! And not only that but the whole OS, dev kit included is GPL top to bottom, and Nokia seems keen to make this into a real open source community process.

So, that's a pretty different set of specs from any other Nokia offering. It actually looks a bit more like something Apple would make.

So why is Nokia doing this? Speculation follows.

First there's the ambition angle. They want to be more than a mobile phone maker. They're breaking out into new markets. So, they leverage their ability to make clever small hardware. It's a bit odd they would choose this particular niche to move into though, because it's not a game device (PSP) and it doesn't have a hard drive (iPod) so it doesn't really seem to compete with any existing products.

They might be doing it to push forward open platforms . I think that Nokia is pretty seriously committed at this point to be pro-open and anti- walled garden . Which is good for us, whether by "us" you think I mean consumers or developers.

But the reason i think they're really doing it is a power play against the operators . One of the major underlying stories of the mobile phone arena is the power struggle between operators and manufacturers. Both want to have all the customer loyalty and make all the decisions about what goes on and in the phones. Each one has their own revenue needs which conflict, because manufacturers don't care about ARPU and carriers do.

Now, consider the Nokia N91 . I recently wrote a blog entry about Wi-Fi wireless VoIP cell phones and as it turns out (thanks Chris ;-) the Nokia N91 does everything that I asked for there. Who knew? There is of course one small problem, which is that the operators are none-too-pleased about the prospect of people stealing their ARPU by using wVoIP on home, office, and municipal Wi-Fi.

So how does that affect Nokia again? Oh yeah - they have to avoid getting slapped in the face like Apple and Motorola over the iTunes phone. If the operators feel too threatened by the N91 with both Wi-Fi, cellular, and also incidentally Skype ... which they should! Well, then, they might refuse to carry the N91. And that would be a Bad Thing.

To finally get to the point, by releasing a completely non-cellular Wi-Fi convergence 770, Nokia can make the carriers look stupid if they don't pick up the N91. Because they'll still be selling a Wi-Fi device that has Skype or whatever on it, just not through the carriers.

It was a conference held in March in London. Subject: Animal intelligence. Obviously (if you've been reading this blog) you know that it's a subject of great interest to me, particularly information entropy , or more generally, information theory . But I was concerned when I read this:

that the burden of proof should not be on those trying to prove the sentience of animals, but rather on those seeking to disprove it!

I have to say that I totally disagree with this. I'm not an "animal rights" person although I believe that animals should not be abused (and I prefer free-range meat). But I think that it's more than likely that MOST animals are not conscious, which is a good definition of sentience in my opinion.

Another way to look at it is that in order to understand and communicate with animals, we must work at it. And that would be a key step in proving that animals (or certain animals anyway) are sentient.

It really bothers me when people argue for protecting animals, or for animal intelligence, from an emotional level. What I want is scientific evidence and useful tools to communicate with them.

And of course, I think that engaging in this exercise will be very helpful in SETI .

Witness the first mobile phone + wVoIP . This is a mobile phone with two radios, one for GSM and the other for Wi-Fi. So when you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, you Skype. When not, you cell. It's brilliant.

The slight problem is that mobile operators are not going to like this too much. You see, it means that when people are at home especially, and also at work, and maybe at the coffee shop, they're not going to be paying for airtime.

But so what? The technology is so compelling that the public is going to be kicking and screaming until they get it. In case you're not up to speed yet, wireless VoIP is internet telephony that runs over a Wi-Fi style network. It's also know as wVoIP and Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN... keep up the crazy acronym work, people).

Now so far Microsoft looks like it's doing very poorly in the mobile arena. But, they seem to be the leading OS for Wi-Fi enabled cell phones. And there's already a not insignificant number of Pocket PC style devices that are being used for wVoIP, even if they don't have cellular yet. And you should note that this first phone, jointly developed by Skype and some tiny manufacturer called i-mate, runs... Windows Mobile.

I certainly that Nokia et al get in gear on this one, no matter how unpopular it might seem with the operators. Because otherwise they might let microsoft out of the cage that it's been so cleverly manoeuvred into.

(Some notes... of course it's already being done in Japan . And check out this announcement: Orange to offer 3G, Wi-Fi palmtop smart phone again running .... Windows Mobile.)

OK, I'm tired and I still haven't really started digging into my email pile, so here's my prediction of the hour. Push To Talk on mobile phones will never be popular. Mobile operators seem to want this to happen, but it's not going to. It's just an unwieldy way to communicate. It will probably keep a niche in field staff verticals but otherwise, forget about it.

Disruptive technology has a bit of a buzzword reputation. On the other hand, the Christensen book is always on people's lists as a good book. So I bought it and checked it out.

As it turns out, most people seem to be either wrong or only partly right when they define disruptive tech. There's big gaps missing in the Wikipedia entry , Dvorak gets it wrong , and even Cringely (surprise surprise) misses the boat .

Based on my new understanding straight from the book, I drew up this infographic / visual explanation (click for hig-rez PDF). I decided to zoom in on camera phones, since they are clearly a disruptive tech and show signs of blowing away the digital camera business the next year or two.

The graph is basically three-dimensional. The vertical axis is megapixels. The horizontal axis is the progress of time. And the third dimension (represented here with colour) is the market.

The point is that disruptive technologies initially enter into a new market that has different values. With camera phones, the highest value is that it's always at hand, wherever you go.

The disruption occurs when the new technology suddenly meets the needs of the old market as well. Then it suddenly (and seemingly "out of nowhere") takes over completely.

Susan Crawford blogs Mary Ann Allison's neologism "gecybershaft". Germans are horrified . But the transition of your personal society from village, to friends and family, now to your attention and purpose groups is worth looking at. A lot of this is related to what Rheingold was saying 10 years ago with virtual communities.

I'm going to throw caution to the wind and make another prediction ( see previous ) about Apple. I think that their new headless system is going to be a PVR (like TiVo).

First, though, let me explain why it's not going to be just a cheap iMac. Basically Apple has an image to maintain. Literally. Quality imaging is very important to the brand and to Jobs personally. The vast majority of PC monitors are not really up to the kind of quality video that Apple ships with their machines. They would have to go against their established principles to ship a Mac that's intended to run with third-party monitors.

On the other hand, there are several reasons why an Apple PVR makes sense.

1. The PVR is a successful product, but also one ripe for expansion into the mainstream. Apple can dominate.

2. Most people now have an integrated Audio/Visual setup, where the TV and the stereo are connected. An Apple PVR can serve as an iTunes hub for the iPod and connect with the stereo. And it would also integrate with iPhoto with the TV screen as a slide show viewer.

3. The iApps are adaptable to a TV screen resolution. That would include iTMS.

4. If Apple's going to make a Video iPod, where's the video going to come from? Why, the iPVR, of course. Video to go, as they say.

5. One more thing: look either now or in the near future for an iTMS-like store for downloading movies.

Form factor? The usual connections, plus some kind of TV tuner and A/V spots. The software form factor will need to be set up for low-rez display and remote control input device.

I was dreaming about Apple again last night (which I often do, since I worked there in my capacity as a busybody). If I were in charge of apple, here's what I would do.

• their core business is selling computers. the main competition to computers is smartphones but apple is safe because smartphones have small screens. until roll-up large screens are made, apple is safe.
• they pick small markets with low-hanging fruit. Easy pickings. what's next? a video camera is next. the video cameras on the market suck. apple already has experience with optics from the iSight. they'll make a video camera
• they lose tons of money on Mac OS X. they spend upwards of $100 mil a year on it, but make almost none of it back. instead they make money from the computers. OS X is a loss leader.
• they aren't doing squat with weblogs. that needs to change.
• they will not make a cell phone. cell phones are fine, there's lots of good cellphones already on the market

The main problem with RFID is remote hacking. You can just walk by someone, or aim an antenna at them, and pick up their RFIDs. So in this example a malicious user can find out a kid's unique ID, and potentially their full identity, just by walking by the kid.

Programming for symbian may be a hassle, but it's kind of cool to write apps on this device. The smartphone is really a completely new platform, with new possibilities never really achieved on any other device. I mean, if you were writing for a vertical market, you could conceive of doing something like this on a PDA before but the number of net-connected was never very high. Whereas there are maybe 10 million smartphones with cameras already sold, and the number should continue to skyrocket.

The smartphone, I want to say camera phone, but I've discovered that there really is a need to distinguish between the two. There are an awful lot (100 million or more?) of camera phones out there, which take crappy small pictures and have a very limited operating system and developer platform on board. Even the Nokia Series 40 range, while it runs Symbian, is not open for C++ development. You can use the j2me API, but then you discover just how small the memory is, and of course the APIs are limited, probably don't implement MMAPI on those phones, etc., etc. Whereas the smartphone is a different beast. They still cost at least hundreds of dollars, but they are smart in part because they come with a development platform that's worth paying attention to.

Will all phones be smartphones at some point? It seems likely. As the technology gets older it will get so cheap that the makers can throw it into all their phones, as they are now doing with colour screens.

Meanwhile, there's enough of them out there, they are cheap enough, and they work in enough places (basically everywhere in the developed world has GPRS) that it's a good enough platform to write apps for. With Symbian specifically, it's geared towards open access so that the phone users can download any programs they want. That's a big contrast to the "walled garden" approach that I think will eventually fall by the wayside.

Meanwhile, although the Symbian API is a beast, it does pretty much work. You can more or less do whatever you want to be able to do. That's a big difference compared to Java at the present stage. But I fully expect java to surge forward as the implementations get better and the phones have enough memory and processor power to easily runs those apps. Right now it's marginal, but in a few years that will be a different situation.

It's pretty much a cutting edge platform. Similar to the early days of PCs and the web, when a lot of the software that gets written is a first.

The idea that legislation is useless against spam has reappeared on my radar. It's a ridiculous notion. Many spammers are operating in the open and they need to be caught and fined and shut down. Nay-sayers on spam legislation argue that there are too many spammers, that they'll just move off-shore and make it harder to catch them. Harder? If you're not trying to catch them in the first place, there is no harder.

As for pushing them offshore, fine. That just makes it that much easier to stop the spam. If it's coming from certain countries it's easier for technological measures to identify the spam and kill it off.

Meanwhile, you get double benefit. First you get to make some government revenue off the backs of spammers. Secondly you create a situation where technological measures can actually have some teeth. It's all well and good to block spam at the local network level but it's far better to stop the spam at the source. And spam blocking tools can help identify the source and aid in prosecution.

So the idea that anti-spam law is pointless is misguided and misses the big picture. What we need is a broad spectrum approach to killing spam. Meanwhile I'll continue to appreciate the fantastic spam filter in OS X's Mail.app.

It's not the dolphins. It's the people who study them. The whole field of people who are interested in dolphins are slightly weird. It doesn't take much googling to divide into some special camps: the protesters, the romantics, the healers, the fun-seekers. The noise makes it difficult to find useful information on the web.

With that said, hopefully this article about dolphin basics will succesfully encapsulate some hard scientific evidence in an easy-to-read format. And yes, I found peer-reviewed papers for all of the claims that are in there.

I never wondered about that until yesterday. But now I have the perfect hook for one of the stories that's been swimming around in my head. Follow the link.

Imagine there were some kind of mysterious link between open source and open spectrum. Now read this .

I just had this brainstorm that open spectrum should be thought of like an open source license. So that, the government would issue an open spectrum license for anyone to use a specific technology (e.g. spread spectrum) on a specific set of frequencies (e.g. 2.4GHz). But what would be the "Free Software Guidelines" for open spectrum? What is essential and what isn't to have open spectrum. If you're interested in the intersection of open source and open spectrum, check out (and reply to please :-) my post on the Open Spectrum mailing list at OpenICT.net .

Connectivity is not the right word

I was thinking recently about fate sharing in a number of contexts. One of them is this server. It goes down occasionally. What's nice is that a number of people who all have the technical expertise to make repairs share the use of the server. So, when something happens, any one of us can step in to make repairs. Each one of us is motivated because we all share the same fate. If the server is down, it's down for all of us.

Next is the context of a technology incubator. In Waterloo, there has for a long time been a desire to build a technology incubator, which is basically a building or a small campus with lots of small technology companies at one shared location. There's all kinds of good reasons for doing this. One is because all of the people and companies start to share their fate. Small technology companies fail all the time for reasons that are just "because". Not because the people weren't good enough, but just because the market is random and lots of good ideas don't work out. But, with a shared fate situation, people can graduate from one company to another easily. Reputations are known through the social networks that build up in a close environment. In addition, things like internet connections, server rooms, IT infrastructure in general can be shared and you get the same reliability gains that I get with my server.

I wrote this timeline of the UW CECS.Online project up over period of time but actually I was able to assemble most of it from past research I had done. I refrained from editorializing so far in the post on UWS (which they posted to reader-directed content without telling me...) and on uw.general but now I'm going to do it here.

If you read the document you might notice that there's a lot of predictions. In fact official sources predicted that they'd be done with CECS.Online in the following years: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, and now, the latest estimate is 2004. In other words, since 1997 they predicted they would be done within a year, almost every year. Estimating software completion is difficult and lots of projects take twice as long as initialy thought. CECS.Online, at latest estimate, has taken 7 times longer than initially estimated, if you accept the latest prediction.

What causes a foul-up like this? I think that the external Review of IT (PDF) was very insightful when they stated that UW no longer has an IT department capable of writing new applications. They make their point very subtly on page 6. I remember reading it initially and coming away with this implication quite clearly, but it's difficult to pull out a direct quote. I can only assume that the authors did not wish to offend anyone directly. But their conclusion is clear.

What can be done? The matter rests in the hands of the provost and the other top administrators at UW. They will be appointing a new head of IST shortly as Jay Black's term is just about up. It's tempting to wonder who in their right mind would take the position without a clear mandate to clean up the mess. If the administrators give the new IST honcho a clear mandate to implement the recommendations of the review, I think that change can be made. One major change must be in personnel, in order to sideline the IST managers who are getting in the way of progress. Another must be an increase in budget so that IST can hire and retain quality people and give them space to do their job and do it well.

IST is an organization in the trenches. From the outside, it's impossible to say for sure but they seem to have some serious personnel problems with some of their senior managers. It's extremely difficult to get rid of people in a university bureaucracy. Aside from their internal problems, they have high expectations and low levels of respect. The rest of the university community quite rightly feels that it is an expert computing community. IST can be only of the highest quality to be respected in such an environment. And equally, to satisfy what must also be high expectations for results with lots of opinionated observers who think they could do it themselves (and probably can). There may well be a long-standing siege mentality at work.

In order to crack that open and restore functional IT service at Waterloo, changes are necessary. The external IT Review is a good roadmap for those changes. It will be interesting to see if the senior administration follows through.

The parable of the net , a new article on ICT. The nets people use to catch fish are a lot like the nets people use to catch information. A net is a big thing made of lines with lots of holes in it.

I might as well have called this entry voice chat != IP telephony. I've been think about Voice over IP for a while now and reflecting that the IP telephony people are kind of wandering around in the giggly weeds because they keep taking about crazy things like sending DTMF tones over the internet, and needing special hardware and all kinds of crazy stuff that totally goes against the e2e (end-to-end) principles of the internet. I mean, why bother with all that when you can just set up an e2e connection between two computers and start talking? Finally I got the answer, which is that internet telephony people are not talking about voice chat, they are talking about telephones.

Whoa, slow down. Telephones are not a best effort network, they are a guaranteed service network. The internet, if you use it, will try its best to do what you want but if it can't, hey, too bad buddy. That's a fundamental operating assumption, you can't change that without changing the nature of the internet. If you want to build a guaranteed-service network over top of the internet you're going to have a lot of trouble, because the internet is build up and down on best-effort systems — like ethernet for example.

So I think that when people talk about "Voice over IP" they need to be really clear about whether they mean a best-effort system or a telephone-like system. Some people seem to think that VoIP should keep working if the power fails. And so on, there's a lot of assumptions built in when you talk about telephony. The other side of the coin would be something more like a voice chat, where you are able to talk to someone anywhere at any time on the internet, but it's just like any other internet services, so you can expect there to be glitches. That's a fundamental part of best-effort networking, and it's also part of why it's so efficient and inexpensive.

So can VoIP be done over the internet without all kinds of crazy hacks to make it act more like the telephone system? I think so. The codecs are finally here to do reasonable voice quality over a modem connection, using Speex . IPv6 will hopefully help us get around the NAT barrier.