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Sunday, April 28, 2002
Why regulators outweigh lawmakers 
| | Which is worse: the legislature that passes a nasty law, or the enforcers who put you in jail for it? |
| | That's kind of the point Cory makes when he paints the CBDTPA ("Consume, But Don't Try Programming Anything") red, as in herring. The real scary party will be the FCC, which the BPDG ("a consipiracy of 15-some tech and entertainment companies") is asking Senator Hollings to "advise" to require the BPDG's recommended "standard" for "tamper resistant" technology. |
| | "Open source will be illegal," Cory says. |
| | Some context... it's pretty much always been that way with consumer electronics. A few big, patent-heavy market-leading suppliers make closed, non-hackable boxes full of IP from all over the place. What we got with the PC (something open and hackable) is utterly new. A mutant. |
| | Let's hope Michael Powell shapes up as the sort-of-libertarian he so far sort-of seems to be. |
| | And let's hope Steve Jobs, who recently said he will advocate "the middle ground" inside bodies like the BPDG (Apple is a member), will side with his new UNIX friends — as well as the whole Internet constituency — rather than the Hollywood types with which he has also been partnering for years. |
Aw shit
Subtracting value
| | My bank used to be Great Western. Then they were eaten by Washington Mutual, so WaMu (as they like to call themselvers) has been my bank for the last few years. I've had a few complaints, but on the whole they've been okay. I've even appreciated a significant upside to the company's aggressive acquisitions strategy: ATMs everywhere. |
| | But yesterday they started pissing me off, big time. |
| | While they've been bragging about "surcharge free" ATMs, the company quietly removed a service just about every bank provides for free every time a customer uses an ATM: an account balance on the transaction slip. |
| | Before I withdrew money yesterday, I decided I should know what my savings and checking balances were, so I could decide how much to transfer from savings to checking. In the past, the ATM just would have told me. Now it asks if I want a "mini-statement." |
| | I thougt, No, I'll just make a withdrawal from checking and see how much I've got left. Turned out I had less than I asked for, and it gave me a negative balance along with my money. Then I made a transfer from savings to checking, and then it told me exactly nothing about how much either account had when I was done, but again tried to sell me a mini-statement. |
| | Bet they charged me an overdraft fee, too. |
| | I think I'll start hunting around for other banks. |
Here, this is yours. It seems to be ticking.
| | I've had a rash of 'returned' emails I never sent. They come with .exe or .scr attachments. I assume they're viral. |
Exactly the kinda guy you'd wanna write a book with
| | The test's author is Jacob Shwirtz, who explains things here. |
Did you no?
| | Were you aware that Adobe was bludgeoning Macromedia for infringing on Adobe's patent for "tabbed palettes?" Or that Macromedia was countersuing, claiming Adobe's GoLive and Photoshp infringed on Macromedia editing patents? |
| | Steels my resolve to continue avoiding both of them as much as possible. |
Geeking around
Clues
| | ...corporate America now no longer principally seeks to create value by building businesses over time through marshalling human capital, investment and innovation. Instead it tries to extract value by financial engineering and sweating assets in an increasingly feral form of capitalism. |
| | Interesting piece, although I think it paints American business with too broad a brush. Most businessesfolk on this side of the pond don't think of themselves as dividend-grubbing capitalists, and don't act that way, either. |
| | The board majority unceremoniously dumped Walter Hewlett after his challenge to the buyout of Compaq. Everyone took this move for granted. |
| | The HP that helped Silicon Valley rise to prominence is gone. Today the company is run by the financial wizards and mercenaries who've taken over American business. Tradition, to them, is a dead weight. |
| | I hope for the sake of the good people at HP and Compaq that the merger will work. Odds are it won't. Says the same Guardian piece, |
| | ...evidence shows that far from creating value, takeovers and mergers destroy it. The management consultant McKinsey's, for example, reviewing 160 mergers between 1992 and 1999, discovered that only 12 of the merged groups succeeded in lifting organic growth above the trends before the merger; the other 148 failed. |
| | Here's the heart of the piece: |
| | The problem is that American conservative economists, in assessing the causes of productivity growth, look in the wrong direction. They want to prove that markets are economically and morally superior to all other forms of organisation. Economic efficiency, for them, is about the permanent freedom to complete the most cost-effective contract and to move on to another if there is a better opportunity; in this world the issue is to allocate resources effectively through buying cheap and selling dear. |
| | Yet the heart of productivity growth is what happens inside the firm, and firms are first and foremost organisations of human beings. Mary O'Sullivan, assistant professor at Insead, Europe's leading business school, argues that how businesses organise their social capabilities is the key to success; James C Collins and Jerry I Porras, leading American business school academics, make the same argument in their best selling study of 17 visionary enterprising companies. What characterises all of them, they say, is that they have an organisational reason to be that transcends profit-making; a core purpose around which the business is organised, motivates its people and from which it then makes money. The current organisation of US business, seeking to maximise profits in the shortest possible time, is undermining its great companies. The structures in Europe that American conservatives attack as holding back "enterprise" prove to be fundamental in assisting Europe first to close its productivity gap with the US, and then begin to open a lead. |
| | I've scrambled my bookshelves here, so I can find Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century and Post-Capitalist Society (both of which argue that organizations need to be more humane and responsible to their employees and society as a whole), but can't find any of my Milton Friedman books (which argue the "conservative" case). So let me just vent from my own understanding of things here. |
| | Once again we've got an OR story about an AND issue. There is no reason that a highly competitive company can't be an organization of human beings. Volkswagen and Nokia (the poster companies fo the author's case) prove that. So do Johnson & Johnson and SAS Institute on this side of the Atlantic. And yes, there is a difference between financial markets and the product markets where companies do their daily business. Conservative economists know that difference, and aren't going around arguing that the former should subordinate the latter. The author conflates the two. |
| | Still, politics aside, it's a clueful piece. |
Fearing aid
| | USA Today: Hundreds of Internet radio stations plan to go silent Wednesday to protest proposed record-label royalty payments they say would endanger their industry. Thanks to the head lemur for the link. |
Leveraging the nightmare that comes true
| | Rembember SIDS — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? It was news feature fodder a few years ago. Haven't heard much about it lately. But still, one baby in two thousand dies suddenly and with no aparent cause. |
| | One of those babies was Chase, son of Robert X. Cringely, who died on his dad's lap last week while the old man was doing email. |
| | Now Bob wants help making a more important invention than the Segway: |
| | It is my plan to devote much of my resources and a good portion of the rest of my life to combating SIDS. I can't cure it, but I think I can help babies to evade it. The trick is to first develop a very cheap, very accurate, recording medical sensor. |
| | I imagine a $10 device that can be strapped or stuck or otherwise attached to, 100,000 little babies, measuring and recording respiration, heartbeat, body temperature, and anything else we can think of. At least 50 of those babies will die of SIDS, but through the use of these monitors, we'll gather more SIDS data than has ever been gathered before. And rather than follow the traditional scientific method of first stating a hypothesis that we prove or disprove, I want the data to speak for itself.... |
| | It can be done, and once it is done, we can reprogram those same monitors into devices that actually CAN predict SIDS and help to prevent it, either through detecting babies most at risk or by literally predicting the onset of SIDS in time to evade it. |
| | That's my plan, but I can't do it by myself. I need your help. I need hardware engineers, software engineers, I need people experienced with biomedical sensors and sifting mountains of data. I need folks who make tiny processors and RAM chips. I need people who know more about this stuff than I do. Yet they must also be people who are willing to believe that there is an answer, since the medical establishment seems to have given up. |
| | Nobody will make money from this, but everybody will benefit. Whatever we learn will be given to the world for free. |
| | Meanwhile, my heart goes out. |
I've been around this thing about 100 times now
Because it's insane, or because it's sponsored by 5 Democrats and just 1 Republican?
Kid in a green shirt, 5000; birds, 0
| | Got back in time to go down to the harbor in Santa Barbara for dinner and a walk along the water. Beautiful place. There's a wide walkway atop the main breakwater, at the end of which is another breakwater that's nothing more than a long pile of rocks with a wide wooden bulkhead down the middle. Together the two breakwaters enclose the harbor. |
| | Normally you can't only walk easily on the second breakwater, because water encroaches on both sides, but this evening at low tide a broad sand bar was exposed on the seaward side. So I went down onto the sand with my kid, who had huge amounts of pent-up energy after spending the day strapped to a seat in the car. |
| | The far end of the sand bar, an area about 100 yards square, was covered with sea gulls, all parked facing windward toward the setting sun. "You want a big thrill?" I asked the kid. |
| | "Go run toward those birds. Watch what happens." |
| | I wish I'd had a video camera. Or better yet, IMAX. |
| | Conjure in your mind the sight of a green-shirted five year old running toward a vast carpet of gray-white birds. Suddenly one or two of the birds start to lift off the ground, pulling up the near corner of the carpet. Then in one quick wave the entire carpet lifts and disintegrates as all the birds take to the sky, suffusing it with countless flapping wings and squaking voices. In the background, masts of docked sailboats, the Santa Ynez mountains and the dark blue sky complete a scene of surreal beauty, brought to livid life by roiling clouds of birds. On the ground below a tiny green-shirted boy runs toward every patch where a few birds begin to land, scattering them back up to the sky, lifting and levitating an aviary mass so thick and huge it looked like weather. |
| | When I caught up with him, the air was thick with confused gulls, and the boy was saying, "Look, Papa! A ceiling of birds!" Later he explained to his mom that the birds thought he was a monster. He added, "Papa is a bigger monster, but he didn't do anyting to scare the birds." |
| | When asked him why the birds were so easily scared, he said, "they're not very smart." |
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