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Saturday, January 26, 2002
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 Saturday, January 26, 2002
started 1/27/2002; 1:39:03 AM - last post 1/27/2002; 4:36:43 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, January 26, 2002 
1/27/2002; 5:39:03 AM (reads: 4533, responses: 2)
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Defogging the clarity issue 
| | Paul Snively picks up on "transparency". I agree with what he says. I also think there are some things that need to be transparent in order to make infrastructure with them. Certain protocols, for example. I'm not sure about operating systems, but I think they are now so commodified that making their base workings clear is a good idea. I think Apple is moving in the right direction on this one (basing the OS on freebie Unix) while Microsoft is not (pushing out the frontiers of intellectual property enforcement, among other things). We'll see. |
Not that they didn't shoot their feet off at the crotch
Shelf criticism
| | There's a New York Times story here. And a Guardian story here. |
| | Question: does a service that does such an equivocal job of explaining its own failure deserve to live? |
| | Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the links, by the way. Soon as Jerry gets a blog together, expect me to roll it shamelessly, since Jerry is a good friend, an A-1 human being, and one of the Wise Ones. |
Raising the Red Flag, sort of
| | Not all that coherent, either. I like this, under "Success, because of Red Flag": |
| | The heavy fist attack pirates greets into world challenge Red Flag Linux attacks city slightly forestall machine |
| | Which in turn leads here: |
| | In November, goes to the (untranslatable) buy machine consumer discovers, in the (untranslatable) each big computer market brand machine " turns hostile " in abundance. Turns on the computer power source, greeted the consumer is " the smiling face " all turns the domestically produced Red Flag Linux tabletop operating system. It is reported, this is enters border the world in China, initiates by the Beijing electron chamber of commerce computer profession branch, the Beijing association soaring science and technology limited company is responsible for the brand computer which organizes refuses to pirate the operating system the unified action. Starts from in this November, to include 800000000 space and times.. |
| | (By the way, if any of ya'll can point to, or help with, a real translation here — or better yet, the real story about Red Flag and what it's up to — I'd like to hear from you.) |
31,400
Journalism as Usual
| | The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services; it has not added a single widget to the world widget supply. Enron is in the business of "financializing," making markets, trading in wholesale electricity, water, data storage, fiber-optics, just about anything. One Enron executive told The New York Times the company's achievement was to create "a regulatory black hole" to suit its "core management philosophy, which was to be the first mover into a market and to make money in the initial chaos and lack of transparency." |
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Glenn Fleishman - Enron not done none
1/27/2002; 6:09:17 PM (reads: 1375, responses: 0)
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The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services...
Bull crappy panties. Thank you for putting me in the position of defending this heartless, horrible firm. In fact, Enron has thousands of employees who do things every day: they own PG&E (Portland Gas and Electric in Portland, Oregon), several pipelines, and a few related firms that make power.
As much or little of an environmentalist as one may be, we all live and die by electricity and gas. Enron was trying to transform itself entirely out of owning stuff into owning the price of ideas, and that was (thankfully) the last stupid part of the failed dotcom revolution. If Enron had succeeded in fooling people for another year, they would have divested (and reaped billions upon billions) all of these physical assets; PG&E's sale was alread underway.
Of course, just as Miliken and Drexel Lambert turned junk bonds into a dirty word that, 10 years after their start, was forgotten and junk bonds are reasonable convertible debentures, so, too, shall Enron's ideas of derivatives probably get taken up by firms that can actually do something with them.
There's some good ideas in making derivatives of the ebb and flow of instantly perishable commodities (electricity, bandwidth, etc.). They just weren't doing it right. They were basing their business on screwing around, not on actually hedging their bets.
For instance, there's a good point in Cable and Wireless having a hedge investment that would allow them to buy 100 Gbps in 2 years at price $X, especially if their internal projections put bandwidth at 2 times $X. Perhaps they have to pay a small premium for this right, but it's a valuable tool for balancing risk in larger companies.
That's exactl why futures markets are so popular: they get used by speculators as arbitrage, but mostly by firms that are trying to make sure they are acting resposibly even if the tides of fate turn against their prognostications.
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Paul Snively - Re: Saturday, January 26, 2002
1/27/2002; 8:36:43 PM (reads: 592, responses: 0)
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Hi Doc!
Shameless plug time: I have a comment about "transparency" on my new Radio blog. Please see <http://radio.weblogs.com/0100136>. First of all, we're getting back on to my old hobby-horse about capability security and digital reputation management. It's amazing to me that this stuff is still treated as Vernor Vinge SF when people are actually building systems, but that's just another of my hobby-horses: the ridiculous amount of credit for "progress" that the tech sector, and the software industry in particular, receives when my perception is that the software industry has ossified orders of magnitude faster than the Petrified Forest.
Anyway, I'd appreciate it ever so much if you'd take a look, even though I've beaten this drum on your watch before.
And gimme a holler next time you're in LA, eh? BTW, my new addy is psnively at mac.com. Simpler and far less spammy than Earthlunk.
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