© Menno E Aartsen January, 2012, prior and future years. Disclaimer, Fair Use and Copyright statement at the bottom of this page. Most product links courtesy of Amazon Associates. Entries from August, 2011 back to August, 2008, are
archived here. My photography is clickable.
The picture to the left has a food product I found in Seattle - an Indonesian dish, aimed at the Dutch market, made in... Italy, and dumped out to the American market cheap, why I don't know. It actually makes a nice base for real Nasi Goreng, and when you see this type of pouch, it usually contains freeze dried or prepared food. The (European) technology was developed to replace cans, as it is not only lighter, but due to its form factor takes far less space when shipped. The packaging allows for preserved or sterilized wet foods to be packaged safely as well, I've seen imported German Kartoffelsalat (potato salad) packaged this way on American store shelves, and the fruit product to the right is another example.
I am completely delighted Megaupload has been taken down, and Schmitz and cohorts arrested, but then I am a published author, I have written software, collaborated on patented inventions, so I have a vested interested in intellectual property that I do not want others to take and use without my being able to decide whether or not they must pay for it. I think the problem is that the distribution of IP is now so easy that it isn't possible to properly police it. Obviously, paying people to share files, as Megaupload and others do, is an invitation to rip off other people's stuff - not for nothing we "rip" a song or movie. And it isn't just an internet problem - we have mega-airplanes that fly people and freight around the world at ridiculously low prices. The days that it cost $10,000 to fly from Paris to New York on Concorde, and the days when it cost $150 to talk to your relatives in New Zealand for three minutes, are long gone.
But taking down sharing sites is only going to lead to more sharing sites - there is demand, for Megaupload to have 690 servers just in Amsterdam, there is a mega-market. I occasionally share stuff here at my webserver, leased from Network Solutions - except, the stuff I make available to others is stuff I own, and I password protect the share, so only those I authorize can access it. That's is how I distributed copyrighted NYNEX promotional videos, a couple of years ago, after a reunion - to former colleagues, folks who already had had access to it, all former employees.
As I said, it is too easy to share things you don't own, today, so perhaps we need to reinvent the way rights are handled - perhaps a movie producer will be paid once, once a movie is completed, and the movie is then released into all distribution systems, and you just pay for carriage. That means all those who might want to view it must pay a small amount, regardless of whether they are viewing or not. It would stop counterfeiters and movie rippers and sharers, as you can't charge someone for getting content that's free, and it would "encourage" countries like Greece, South Africa, and many many others that aren't very good at collecting money from their citizens. Surely, Republicans are going to yell "socialism" reading this, but having the FBI run around the globe taking down webservers really isn't going to solve the problem, right? In the interim, those who are "Anonymous", and other hacktivists that think they need to "retaliate" - as if we do not have a right to own our stuff - please keep attacking the FBI, DOJ, White House and industry websites. The more you attack, the easier you make it for us to find you. It may take a while, but since you can't do what you do unless you're connected to the internet, we will find you. What you do is an addiction, and you won't be able to go back to being an auto mechanic or accountant, or studying anthropology, and eventually, you'll make that small mistake that people make who do one thing for too long, and.. Gotcha! You need convincing, go talk to Schmitz, who is likely getting out of jail in time for his 60th birthday.
Speaking of "things you don't own", Facebook claims credit for supporting 35,200 UK jobs and adding £2.2bn in the British economy. That's actually not that much for an alleged behemoth, British Airways employs some 30,000 folks in Britain, and generates some £8bn in revenues - this apart from any revenue related to its activities, like travel agencies and jet fuel. Even more importantly, those jobs and pounds Sterling are generated, largely, by internet enterprises and entrepreneurs, not by Facebook, which acts merely as a service provider. If Facebook weren't around, that would read "MySpace" or "AOL" or "Ceefax" or whatever, there is little that makes Facebook unique, other than its size. One could even be nassty, and allege that if Facebook weren't so big, and doing so much work in the United States, there could be more jobs and pounds generated by the internet inside the UK. It is like claiming car tire manufacture and sales for Jaguar, instead of for the Britons who buy and drive cars..
So should Meryl Streep or Rooney Mara get the Oscar? My vote is (Ms. Streep's stupendous effort notwithstanding) for Ms. Mara - she created a persona, from scratch, rather than re-creating it. That's gotta come out tops. And Kathy Lee and Hoda should not be drinking alcohol, on live television, at 10am. Not. Tell Today. I am not a tee-totaler, but I've observed this before, on the rest of the Today show, and it is not clear to me why anchors have to drink alcohol while a celebrity chef who has not been to Stop & Shop in twenty years shows off their cooking skills in the studio, early in the morning. Why? Because you can? And while we're at it, let's elect a president who can sing. Curious to me, by the way, is that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
This is, for me, not unusual winter weather, but for Washington State natives it is a natural disaster. There are wide spread power outages - since it rarely snows or freezes, there are lots and lots of weak tree branches that break off - in NY and VA, I know those are trimmed every summer, but not here, by the looks of it. I discovered that quite a few Safeways have emergency generators, so they remain open when everything else is closed. I've noticed as well that saplings and young trees are watered, in summer - that's really a bad idea, as they develop shallow root systems when you do that, and trees with shallow root systems topple easily. Trees are very capable of "drilling down" deep, for water - if they're not, don't plant them... About the very first thing I noticed, after arriving here, is how close to houses trees are allowed to stand - much closer than we would deem advisable in New York and Virginia. I actually spent a couple of years cutting back the treeline, around my rural Virginia home, something the elderly couple I had bought it from weren't able to do any more. It may well be, being mercenary, that cutting back the treeline is more trouble than it is worth, considering the rare incidences of bad winter storms, but on the other hand, I spoke to someone today whose company spent the better part of a 24 hour day restarting its servers and networks after their emergency generator failed to take over from the battery backups. This happened in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where an entire town lost power. That's a bit steep, in my book - having dealt with phone company emergency power in my work, not being able to keep your systems up is a firing offence, in my bailywick. Anyway, the temperature is back up to the fourties, I got properly "winterized", and it is now a mess of melt out there.
Part of life, I suppose, is setting yourself realistic targets, so you don't end up frustrated over unmet goals. Insofar as the attainment is under one's control, of course. Feedback, I suppose, is one of the important facets, and that sometimes seems hard to come by. I wouldn't mind connecting with the Seattle developer community, there is a vibrant incubation environment here, but I don't really know how to. That's probably caused by my never being in an incubator, even though there was plenty of development going on in the runup to the dotcom era in New York City, way back when. I am likely too much of a sceptic, forever going: Remember AOL! Seriously, both in terms of AOL and the European Minitel / Viditel systems, they were closed shops, the open internet came along, and the rest is history. Will Facebook meet the same fate? It is a closed shop, has just launched huge numbers of new utilities to try and tie its users down inside their logins, and, like AOL, is widening its need for bandwidth to the point that most of its users, tied to handphones and relatively slow internet connections, won't be able to comfortably use it in the way Facebook wants them to. Heading, possibly, in the same direction so many American companies go - sell to millions of American users and Wall Street won't notice for a while that overseas advertisers defect.
What totally amazes me is that the morning television programs are largely produced back East, and large segments are broadcast on tape delay, cleverly juggled to look as if they are live on the West Coast. "Live EDT" I take to mean it is not "live anywhere else". I hadn't given it much thought, but there not being a mainstream program that is made here, by which I mean: "on this coast", what with much of Hollywood being here, is really truly astonishing. Why those presenters crews aren't split between coasts, and why they don't rotate across the country, given the amount of money involved, and the state of the technology, isn't really clear to me. I had been wondering for some time, living back East, why the programming is as New York centric as it is, but now that I am on the other coast it is even more of a question. For the kind of money we pay these anchors, they ought to be on airplanes all the time, couple days Chicago, a week in Atlanta, hopscotching across Minnesota, involve the rest of America. What do you think? Mail me via the "Contact" link above, I'll be glad to share your thoughts with the nation. Or my 11 readers.
Bad luck of the year, for me personally, was the interview that didn't happen, late last year, because the executive who (one assumes) had taken a liking to my resume died the weekend before in a plane crash. I swear to God I am not making this up. While I have no idea whether he would have hired me, and the company did end up interviewing me despite all that, I can safely say this is by far the weirdest job hunt occurrence I've ever had happen. I recall seeing an NBC report about the crash, and thinking how hard it is for a company when one of their gurus suddenly dies, little did I realize, at the time, this was the same guy who'd taken a shine to me. May he rest in peace, what can I say, I did express my condolences to family and colleagues, when I spoke with the folks who broke the news to me.
Can barely get over discovering new command line tools in Windows - well, new, hardly. I had been using Xcopy forever, but recently, when swapping files to an external harddisk between Windows Vista and Windows 7, it wouldn't work under Vista, writing to a file structure set up under Win7. I don't know that the operating system version is the issue, by the way, because on one machine the drive is connected using ESATA, while on the other it uses USB, one of those things that I have no patience to test. At any rate, somehow I ended up reading a piece on a Microsoft tool called "robocopy", advertised on Microsoft's Technet as a Windows 7 tool, but as it turns out my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate has it loaded too. And it does work, where Xcopy won't. Teehee. Except it scares me there are bits in Windows I've never heard of, I thought I was pretty familiar with most command line tools. If you've not set eyes on robocopy, there is information on it here (an MS Support document going all the way back to Windows NT, where robocopy appears to have made its first appearance). Provides a pretty good report file, too, if you output that to disk or mount point.
A strange week. I was hoping we'd have a snow free winter, which sometimes happens, but this weekend it decided to come down buckets. Then a friend is suddenly, for no reason I can figure, not talking to me any more (did you get Unfriended? Watch Oprah!), while some other friends I didn't know I had connected out of nowhere, my job search grinds on, I've managed to put some recorded TV onto DVD, this coming off the AverTV adapter, even though it was supposedly copy protected, I've made my first sojourn from Snohomish County down into Seattle, across into Bellevue and back up, bypassing the bridge that is now suddenly a toll road my GPS does not know about, I am scared something will break I can't replace but nothing has, although I dropped my Blackberry and screen and keys ended up sticking out, I managed to push everything back into place, but... in short, it is just hellishly confusing, but I am surviving somewhow. Gervais is mildly funny but the Globes are too long and boooooring.. Phew. (I don't blame Gervais, you can only do what he did last year once, truly. Being invited back, good for you, Ricky, and good for the Foreign Press Association of Tinseltown and Disneyland).
MLK Day, last Monday, is one of those non-holidays that makes you want to take the day off, since some do, and some don't, if you think about it it does not make sense to keep on adding holidays over the decades, then to eventually realize that isn't the way it works and you have to consolidate some. I suppose it is a sad state of affairs when there have been too many wars to commemorate, and they all get to be rolled into one Memorial Day. Good and bad at the same time.
BTW, I mentioned recording TV - I've only got a week or so of recordings, but if you're going to follow my example - cool, a $50 adapter
In general, as I have been extolling, a PC with a Windows operating system needs a fair amount of TLC. You remember those annoying commercials that try to sell you antivirus software because your computer slows down, and you have "blue screens of death"? Most of those things are caused by lack of maintenance, fragmented overfilled hard drives, unnecessary software - that's one of my pet peeves. Many devices you can connect to your computer come with software, but what nobody tells you is that for half of these things you really don't need software. External disk drives, cameras, CD drives, you name it, you're best off making sure your computer is connected to the internet, Windows is set up to automatically look for and load drivers (you do that in "System" in your Control Panel), and then simply connect the device to the computer, and wait to see what happens - another pet peeve, it can take Windows a minute or two to react to a connected device or service, if you're impatient, like me, do your connect or install, and if you think nothing is happening, don't click anything, go get a cuppa instead. You'll eventually see dialogs, there is an icon on the bottom right you can click to see what's going on, and in many cases the PC will go and find and install the correct drivers, and then you can see what, if anything, you need. If it fails to find and load drivers, turn the thing off, unplug the device, boot the system up again, and follow the instructions that came with the device. Then, run a Windows update - your device probably came with software packaged in 1997, another reason why so many computers don't work well. Something I do frequently is go to the manufacturer's website when I get a new device, download the latest software from there, and forget about whatever came packaged with the thing. Update, update, update. And most laptops bought a while ago do not have the maximum 4 MB of memory they can have (if you're running a 64 bit version of Windows some computers will let you install 8 MB), installing more memory, not an expensive exercise, can improve matters a great deal. Last but not least: if your computer "grinds to a halt" immediately pushing the on/off button until the system shuts down completely, then restarting it, may be a good idea, any virus install activity in progress would be stopped in its tracks, that way, and the restart should clean up any oversize spill files. Should.
I don't know if you've watched the new Rock Center with Brian Williams - pretty good program, and I am saying this as an observer who thinks the way Comcast - NBC - Jiffylube (Steve Colbert's words) is taking over the world with mostly Today Show drivel and alcoholic beverages at 7am is little short of horrible - but that's the view from the Rainbow Room you see around Brian, not a clever screen assembly - "Rock Center" - Rockefeller Center, get it? Makes me homesick, at times, that view. And Brian is providing some real reporting instead of cooking shows, lawyers tottering on high heels and homecoming uniforms. And, of course, Paula Deen combating her Type 2 Diabetes on the Today Show by announcing she "may only eat half a sandwich" and "use fresh whipping cream with a sugar substitute". Suuuuure.. This makes as much sense as touting the Cadillac SRX with 308 horsepower as a "crossover" with good fuel economy (17/24) at a time when oil is at $111 a barrel. The Fiat 500 gets 30/38. Although I should add the issue isn't the cars, but the commute. People who really could work remotely are still spending hours a day in their cars, something we really do have the technology to get away from, if we wanted to.
The picture to the left was taken with the Blackberry Playbook
Truly annoying, when you switch from the notebook to the desktop, then add a tablet to the menagerie, and then find that the notebook's display is beginning to act up... I am hoping for some kind of miracle, but if that does not happen I may have to be bold and take the darn thing apart. Wish me luck. And yes, the picture below shows the first snow of the season, here in Seattle. I had hoped I'd be spared, this winter, but... Owell, that's where the four wheel drive comes in handy, it was actually the reason I bought this thing, though not intending it to be my only vehicle.
So, after moderate use of the Blackberry Playbook
As Blackberry handset users know, the Blackberry specific plans most carriers offer include unlimited data via the Blackberry network, even overseas, which isn't called "data" on the carrier bill, and permit tethering. What's special about the Playbook is that it piggybacks on this, and you access the internet via the handset's existing data plan, transparent to the carrier. This data access uses the Bluetooth connection - "Blackberry Bridge" - and can tether that way, too (natively!), and at least my Bold 9700 is capable of taking and making calls and sending and receiving messages and email at the same time as the Playbook uses its internet. This combines with the Bold using a Bluetooth headset - all at the same time. I'll elaborate in my review, but to me this is a tablet with free internet (apart from its separate WiFi connection) provided you had the Blackberry phone with Blackberry plan already. For $199.99, that's pretty amazing - and you don't need to buy stuff from Amazon or Apple.
While there is an ereader included with the Playbook, I was particularly interested in reading free "epub" format books and publication - the Kobo Reader software that comes with the Playbook does not allow this - and as it turns out the online service bookworm.oreilly.com enables reading .epub freeware. Because the Playbook can be online all the time, either via WiFi or via the Blackberry handset, there isn't an issue with having to have an ebook downloaded on your tablet - I have to yet test how well or badly this works when on the road, but so far I am pleasurably reading a Philip K. Dick (lucky me, I am a scifi aficionado) novel using the Oreilly service, which is free.
The hard part in reviewing tablet computers and smartphones is that what really interests me isn't what I can do with them, I am more interested in "The Next Generation". Why? Well, that has always had my interest, ever since I discovered that the next generation does stuff with the things we invent that we never thought of. Putting technology in kids' reach is awesome, and I saw during a sabbatical at MIT's Media Lab what inquisitive minds do when you let them roam free. So I am looking at what I do with the tablet that it is really good at, but I am not "re-inventing the wheel", downloading and installing apps, and doing all that other good stuff that annoys the crap out of me when my staff does it, because it is such a waste of time. Twenty years ago, you could say it was a useful learning curve - but today, the average geek, or knowledgeable user, does this on various devices six times a year, and since there is little or no commonality between devices and people there is no increase in efficiency, it is largely a waste of time. Recent observations of the use teens make of laptops and smartphones have taught me we need to completely rethink the way we architect these things, as their priorities differ significantly from those of adults, and they have the simple philosophy that these things "just need to work". That means to that the geek factor is not a factor in the next generation of adults, and that the next generation of adults will end up using those devices that have endurance and auto-maintenance, it is a generation that isn't interested in maintaining anything. If you think about it, we're presenting them with all of this amazing technology, so they see no reason why that technology can't look after itself, and you know what? They're right. There is no technical reason why the devices cannot do the maintenance I do on them by themselves. There just isn't anybody willing to pay for developing that "missing bit".
Speaking of time wasting, have you noticed how many posters on Facebook and other places vacillate between copy-and-paste postings, and posting riddles? Why do some folks post completely cryptic pointers about something happening in their lives, but do not then explain what they are on about? That's gotta be Annoy One, closely followed by Annoy Two: people posting links without explaining why, or what they point to. The latter is a security issue, if nothing else, you can't count on the person having link detector software installed - part of most antivirus packages today, link detection software examines a browser posted link before you click it, and shuts down your browser window if the link is known malicious. I don't quite understand why someone assumes that their friends like the same things they do, anyway. I try to explain what I post and why I post it, but then I am a trained writer, and perhaps that is too much to expect of the average citizen.. can't be, can it? Perhaps riddles are a way of communicating, though not for me, I'll tell you.
Before I continue to ramble on about my first experiences with a tablet - again, for those who hold me a gadget freak, I too have to move along with the times - I should point out part of the reason I am concentrating on my computing and communications environments is that I think this may well help my job hunt more than looking at anything else I could write about. I am not seeing anybody getting an exciting new job - with the possible exception of a colleague who was relocated from London to Hong Kong, and another who went from Thailand to Dubai - and for those who think it all happens in Asia, a very capable friend just moved his backside from Australia to Thailand, in search of gainful employ and lower bills. It is probably better in Europe and Asia than it is here, but that is predominantly because "their" governments aren't being impeded in pumping money into their economies, whereas ours seems to continually be "discouraged" from doing that. The politicians continually referring to job creation without ever telling us what exactly it is these workers are supposed to produce, should perhaps be taken out back and, uhm... but I had better not finish that sentence, I've had my fill of Feds to talk to in my years in D.C.
I see, at any rate, that folks on this coast, like Amazon and Google and Microsoft, are providing significant economic growth, unfortunately many of the jobs they create are overseas, because that is where many of their customers are, and to some extent where their experts live. The classical "export" model is no longer valid - just look at China, which basically told German Audi they could have part of the market, but they had to build in China to do it. They do, so everybody happy. The Indians, well aware of the value of their market, pretty much do the same thing, while they're buying up England. So, we are going to have to think of something else, especially since we spent so many years educating the people who are now, back in their home countries, outcompeting us.
I am getting on this rant because I see the Blackberry Playbook work very well, admittedly as an adjunct to the Blackberry handset, even though it is being rubbished by "reviewers" all over. It works how it - I assume - was intended to work, and if you consider there are millions and millions of Blackberrys around the globe - Blackberry Messenger, which runs solely on Blackberry hardware, is estimated to have more than fifty million active users - the concept of creating a tablet that will let the Blackberry tablet user access the internet using the data plan on their existing Blackberry handset - most Blackberry plans include data - is pretty ingenious. I tested that today, both over 3G and using UMA, and I must say it's pretty smooth. At the time of this writing, I am in my first endurance test of the Playbook - it's been going for 40 hours, and still have some battery left. For a multitasking colour device with both WiFi and Bluetooth, that's impressive. Oops - it just went: 40 hours and 45 minutes, continuously online through my BlackBerry Bold 9700
What I think Amazon and Apple, by now, have proven adequately, is that there are two market segments: Apple, which is a niche market Apple caters to very well, where consumers are prepared to pay $500 and up for, basically, toys, and the rest of the market, where you have to provide products people can put to good use, at a $99 to $199 price point - people who pay less have to see better usefulness. I would not have paid more than $199 for this tablet - there is very little I can do with a tablet I cannot do with a smartphone or a notebook computer. The only thing I can think of that I can't do any other way is reading, as in e-books and e-magazines. The smartphone is able to facilitate this, but its screen really is too small, and there is a risk of running down its battery, due to the backlighting being on continuously, to the point that you might not be able to make or take a voice call. And a standerd laptop or notebook just does not have the battery power to facilitate your reading a book for six hours, putting the thing down while running, getting back to it, without ever compromising the battery until at least bedtime, when you put the thing under charge.
Amazon fixed that with its monochrome Kindle, and for years had the only real solution at that price point, it really is that simple. And now, I see the Playbook approximate this, with good enough battery life, considering it has high end colour - but, of course, the Playbook really was never intended to cost $199, and I would not have bought it at $500, which I think is where Blackberry originally put it. Having said that, if Blackberry can manufacture these things for less, and sell them through carriers as an adjunct to Blackberry phones (that's where I bought mine for $199, Sprint), they may have a formula that works. It is, begging your pardon, the KISS formula: Keep It Simple, Stupid!. Seriously. If Apple is covering the top end of the market, followed by a few other high end tablets competing for shelf space, all of the rest will have to compete at the bottom end, at a spot long since occupied by Amazon.
The core issue with tablets, then, is the network, and that has really only been solved by Amazon and Blackberry in a way that does not make you pay extra for a data plan. The Kindles, for the most part, have a built-in networking capability in that the higher end kindles all can use WiFi, as well as a wireless GSM network at a flat rate price point that is built into the purchase price. Blackberry achieves the same result by pairing the Playbook with Blackberry handsets via Bluetooth (while being able to use WiFi as well). That effectively means that if you have a Blackberry smartphone with a Blackberry plan, which most carriers offer, you've essentially got free internet for the Playbook. Because that's the issue with the tablets - for those that can use wireless telephony networks, you end up paying out the nose for wireless data. With the exception, that is, of the aforementioned Kindles, and the Playbook.
Now I have to take you back to my original gripe, that about the way reviewers review new products, and the endless litany of reviewers who appear to know why a consumer would want a tablet computer, what they would need or want it for. Then to go off at an angle endlessly talking about apps and chat and video, as if those are the pre-ordained uses for tablets. I, dear reader, beg to differ, there really are only two or three things I can't do with a smartphone or a laptop, and if a tablet can give me those, it would serve a real ($199, mind) purpose for me. Come on back in a few days, and I'll tell you more.
I've ranted, previously, about standardization, and it occurred to me - again - this morning that that is the primary driver between my use of both services and gadgets - umm, tools ;). I am mentioning this not because "I know better", but because I look at tools with some 30 years of experience, and then try to establish where they fit best in my life. I used to be known as a gadget guy, but find that, today, there are huge numbers of gadgets that serve little real purpose, or worse, that waste huge amounts of your time for very little benefit. To give you an example, from what I see in both the US and overseas the vast majority of smartphone users just use three facilities of their devices: messaging/email, talk, and Facebook. I keep emphasizing to users their smartphones really are handheld computing devices, frustrated by the user's lack of desire to keep their systems up-to-date, but that isn't because I want the consumers to use all those other facilities the smartphone offers. I don't believe in the "one size fits all" philosophy, you see, and I very much doubt you're going to take calls on your phone at the same time as you're using it to guide you from A to B in your car. Call me simple.
For example, I like using the mapping and GPS functionality in my Nokia C7 smartphone, because Nokia offers downloadable maps (it owns one of the largest mapping companies on the planet) and so can provide GPS routing without my having to use data services. But: I have to turn off the GPS facility when I don't use it, because Facebook, without asking permission, collects my location from the GPS chipset in the phone. Most users may not care, or even know, but I am totally allergic to service providers collecting data for which there is no purpose that serves me - it is nice to see all those posts that state where the user was when they posted, but I prefer letting folks know myself where I am, or use that as a facility I can turn on when I am meeting someone, or a group of people. So, this multi-functionality is continually being used by providers in ways you never signed up for. And in my case, using different devices and services for different purposes lets me control that better. It is important to understand that we are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of invisible cyberthieves, and that if your Facebook persona says it was in Yakima, WA, five minutes ago, it is likely you weren't at home. And that if you "like" the Chase credit card app, it is likely you have one or more accounts with Chase. And by the time you find out Nigerian scammers got hold of your social security number - they're moving - a Nigerian scam team was arrested in Chennai, India, the other day, moved there since they've found out there is far less effective internet monitoring in India, this after many of them were arrested and jailed in Amsterdam and London over the past couple of years - you're already in a world of trouble.
While I felt I really did not have a need for a tablet, I belatedly realized the Blackberry Playbook
At this point in my tale, I have to sidetrack you a bit, by asking: what's important to you? I've recently seen two teens struggle with smartphones whose batteries don't last a full day, in their case defeating the primary objective: keeping in touch with your parents when they or you are out. Apart from the other nice stuff a teen can do with a smartphone, much of which eats battery power. I see huge numbers of reviews where the battery life is kind of a side concern, real, but the Android version or the app availability are generally mentioned first, by the reviewers. I know it is boring, but I have to take you back to 9/11: if you're stuck in Manhattan, or Arlington, on that very long day, you want your cellphone to work. To put it in different terms: fuck Facebook, it isn't that important. Sure, you can reach other people using Facebook - but: they can't reach you. I was able to reach my staff, stuck in New York City from D.C., where I got stuck, that day, and that day, that was what mattered.
So: never mind the fancy stuff, prioritize your needs first - what is it in a mobile phone or tablet or laptop you can't afford to have break? That, by the way, is risk management 101 - if they drop a 110 story building on your switching center, what do you need first? And what second? And, apart from the obvious, I pointed out to the teen's Dad, a few months ago, that getting them a smartphone early on in life is an educational necessity - learning to operate a handheld computing device / communicator is, today, a necessary life skill, and in many jobs and professions is a must-have skill, even if only to be able to keep up with your students, interns, or staff. This isn't a luxury, it isn't a fad - I see job openings, out there, that require iOS or Android hands-on experience. Rupert Murdoch doesn't handle his own devices and computers - now you know how he screwed up MySpace - he had no idea what he was doing. You can't manage things you do not use and understand. Hence, in a roundabout way, my buying a tablet, something I can't really afford, at the moment, but the deal is good and I have to sit there and use one and understand what it is and what it does. Hands On.
I've been looking at bamboo for a while now - it is an extremely hard wood, it is one of the fastest growing woods on Earth, that makes it cheap, and it is extremely strong - in both India and China, scaffolding for quite tall buildings is made of bamboo, whose tensile strength exceeds that of steel. In the picture you see a bamboo cutting board, made of laminated bamboo, one I picked up at Carrefour in Beijing for $2.38, and bamboo chopsticks, from a Costco Business Center, 100 pairs of disposable chopsticks for $2.59. It occurs to me that one way of "being green" is to make sure you get all of your wood needs out of bamboo - flooring, furniture, you name it, it's available in bamboo. Think about it.
Back in the computer world, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) protects particularly your desktop from all kinds of mischief - if done well, the UPS turns your desktop PC into a good approximation of a laptop with battery, one that shuts down properly when the power fails, saving your files. I tend to, unapologetically, advocate for APC UPS devices because their drivers are integrated in Microsoft Windows - connect one to your Windows Vista or 7 PC or laptop, and the operating system will recognize the device, load drivers and enable you to set the battery parameters you want - time to shutdown, types of alarms you want, all conveniently grouped under the power icon in your taskbar. For most other UPS's you have to load software, APC's devices are automatically integrated - and before you comment, APC pays Microsoft for that privilege, as any manufacturer can do.
One of the other important issues that go with PCs is cooling. I've noticed, over the years, that vast rivers of users will park their laptops in their lap, on a bed, settee, lots of surfaces that prevent cooling air from being sucked into the devices. We have not, so far, been able to manufacture chips and chipsets that do not produce significant amounts of heat, and between the aforementioned impeded cooling, and the dust that eventually accumulates inside the PC, a percentage of computer failures are caused by overheating, often without the owner or user realizing it. I would go so far as to suggest cooling is a major flaw in the design of, specifically, laptops, which ought to have the ability to switch their entire forced air cooling system to different vents, it can't be that hard to design a system that will detect a blocked vent, and activate one that isn't. Be aware, as well, that an overheating PC or laptop will slow itself down - that's not wrong, that's how modern computers are designed, slow down the processor and bus speed and the machine will generate less heat. But most importantly, try not to use your laptop on a soft surface, and vacuum all of its vents, once a month or so.
Although I haven't owned or used a tablet computer, I've been consistently negative about them, similar to when I rubbished netbooks, a couple of years ago. In the netbook environment, I was correct - mostly outfitted with cheap Intel Atom processors, netbooks weren't able to be used for "serious" computing. I bought one cheaply in Beijing, and found that running multiple video and audio heavy applications, like Skype on standby while processing my high resolution Nikon D90 video and doing processor intensive Microsoft Office "stuff", just does not work on a netbook. My niece is happy with the thing, but her requirements aren't that high, and in her case the netbook was a cheap replacement for her old laptop, whose older version of Micorosft Windows couldn't run everything she wanted it to.
So I ended up having to run to the store and buying a usable replacement, having sold my original splendid ASUS to a friend in Asia who couldn't get this model over there, HP's Pavilion dv4-2145dx laptop
But I digress. I wanted to tell you that tablet computers are, like netbooks, nice "adjuncts" to either notebooks or desktop PCs, but they do not replace anything. They're workable for people who have limited computing requirements, say a high school student who has no computing needs beyond Facebooking and watching cartoons. Then I noticed that Blackberry has put its Playbook
You will agree that more and more of the everyday information you deal with is in your PC, be that a personal laptop or a "family PC". First of all, the concept of a personal computer did eventually come to pass, but it is high time that the concept of the "family PC", usually something shared by husband and wife, but sometimes even by Mum, Dad and the kids, is retired. For one thing, it is vital that children learn to set up, maintain and configure their own PCs. "Daddy knows best" and "let me help you with that" are no longer reasonable approximations of teaching life skills, and Daddy fixing Mummy's computer is, in 2011, a joke, obsolete roleplay from a bygone era. But then I have always insisted my wives hung on to their maiden name and changed their own oil, we no longer live in a society where one partner is serf to the other. It is pervasive, and I find myself doing it, telling someone "let me take care of that for you" when I should say "let me talk you through doing that", it is so much faster to do it yourself when you're the "expert" - but that isn't how you teach, and teaching is what we are supposed to be doing, not "helping". What I am saying is this: if you promote that all members of the family accept responsibility for maintaining their own gear, half the mishaps you see today simply wouldn't happen. I've noticed, as well, that in many old style relationships the "family PC" is part of a "command and control" behavioural pattern - if that's not a "negotiated position" in your house, you can register your disagreement by moving your software and your data to your own laptop. Simple as that. I don't mean to go morbid on you, but having been through 9/11 "close up", as it were, through a potentially deadly car accident, and two bouts of cancer, I can only emphasize that you can't take your partner's presence for granted, and should make sure you can "take over" when you least expect it, and have the family files on a centrally accessible server.
As I said: much of what you need to live is in your PC, email, tax receipts, coursework, you name it, and so you need to make sure you have access to that at all times. That is relatively easy, if you simply make sure you have a separate disk drive, powered from the PC, that is dedicated solely to backing up your computer, and you set that to run before you go to bed, as a matter of routine, you can really never lose files or information. For $60 or $70, you can have that complete peace of mind, just remember that the lower end versions of Microsoft Windows do not include backup software, so you should buy that, needn't cost the Earth. AISBackup, the English package I have used for some twenty years, costs $37.50 for two PCs, gets updated and upgraded for free, and will back up from anything to anything - it even handles Blu-Ray writable disks now. AIS has been around for yonks, has good and quick customer support, and what I particularly like is that it stores the backup as ZIP archives - in an emergency you can find the file you need without installing the software or restoring a backup, under practically any operating system. There are other things a computer should be doing overnight, when you are not using it, night time is maintenance time, I'll get to those in another posting. Yes, the computer uses power when it runs overnight, but you can set it up so that is minimal. Yes, it's easy, well documented, and you can make the effort and learn how to do that. The bonus is that you can now do it for Grandma, as well, and bedazzle her, so she will forever listen to you.
That "centrally accessible server" seems to most people related to business computing, but it isn't. I've always had a file server in my network, think of it as your central filing cabinet, and that can simply be an older PC one of you used in the past, outfitted with a larger disk, a new or upgraded operating system, with a copy of the software you most use (think Quicken for finances, Open Office as a free Microsoft Office equivalent, free XNView for graphics and video, etc.). Updating an old PC, which needn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars, can be a valuable training exercise, everything you could possible need in terms of how-to is out on the internet, you get to vacuum the insides of your PC, the installation of a new hard disk takes maybe twenty minutes, a Windows upgrade
Remember, as well, that your Smartphone is a handheld computer, that it comes with a cable and software, and that you can back it up to your PC, and that it comes with an operating system that needs to be maintained, and updated, on a regular basis. My Nokia C7 has had three rounds of bug fixes and updates since I got it, in May, and now runs better, smoother, handles WiFi more reliably, and has three times the battery life it did when I first received it from T-Mobile.
Yep, that is Microsoft's venerable Flight Simulator
I tend to not pay much attention to failing computers, these days, as experience dictates that most of the time, they fail early on, and if they don't, they're fine for years, with a bit of maintenance. Even with disks, I've really only had one significant failure, these past few years, with an Iomega RAID device, where one drive in the array failed right out of the box. Hard to diagnose, that, but that's another story. But recently, friend P. had a drive failure, in the middle of ordinary use of her Dell Latitude, and while her husband and I managed to recover most of her files, some were lost forever, and an attempt to put a new copy of Windows 7 on the disk, after a reformat, failed with a "bad media" flag. That meant the drive truly had developed what we call a "hard fault", something went wrong with the hardware or the electronics, most likely the former.
And that brings me to a long list of do's and dont's, and to the recommendation you do what I do, every day: back up. Incremental backups take minutes, but you have to do the full backup, which takes hours, when that is hardest, when the PC is new, you've installed it, and instead of playing with it, you now get to wait until it has backed up. I did that on the Vaio, just now, as it has been completely reinstalled - 70 gigabytes onto an external USB disk, it took from 4pm until the next morning 8am. But it is vital - this time, the backup sits on a bootable hard disk, from which the Vaio can be restarted, and fully recovered, in one operation. Teehee.
I'll try and give some pointers to "safe computing", over the next few blog entries here, but most importantly, whatever you do or don't do, BACK UP. It is just as important as virus protection. I've just set up a backup for the Vaio VGC-JS110J desktop PC I have begun using again, a desktop flat panel PC I bought at BJ's back in 2005 for $733.26, a couple hundred bucks off. These days, you can buy an external 320 GB USB
It is like the thumb drives and memory cards - they have limited retention capability, and if you knew how much crap is done to your information in a disk drive, I swear to God you'd never use one again. I've lost three or four drives over my career, the latest a Crucial 64Mb solid state drive which went South, end of story, one of those springs a leak there is no recovery you can do, like with elektro-mechanical devices. Scary.
As if the Grinch is looking over my shoulder I am presented with two of the best examples of file loss you can imagine. In one, an older Western Digital 2.5 inch 150 Gb hard drive that lives in a Kingston caddy - that came with the drive copy kit a solid state drive came with - fails to mount on the system it was created with, and I have no idea why. It had just received the full backup of my Sony Vaio desktop, so I had to dive into my stores, get another disk (this time a 750 Gb Seagate external, see the picture top right) to redo the backup. I'll try a bit later if I can get the Kingston device talking again, on another computer, I don't necessarily know the drive is bad, it could be Windows Vista "lost" the drive marker, something that does happen. And then, my Quicken financial file will no longer accept an online update. Here, too, that's something that very rarely happens, but often enough that I remembered that just restoring the latest backup of that file might fix the problem. Tried that, and it worked, didn't even have to use the database recovery tool that comes with Quicken.
Even though I still have not found employment, I've rented a place in the Seattle suburbs, and continue to be amazed at the support I get from the most unlikely of friends, which, I suppose, goes to show how little I understand those around me. Setting up my digs, I have canned the applications for a few days, moving my gear over Christmas, and now setting up a second PC so I can make sure I can work and have television - I left the Tivo and my large flat panel with my friends, as I have little use for them at the present, and the Vaio with an external tuner with Microsoft Windows' Medica Center gives me the same DVR capabilities the Tivo has. Forgot about the TV recording Windows can do, rather special, and the program information Microsoft garners lets me pre-program this device. The picture to the left shows you where we are - now that most of us have CFL lighting, and many have LED bulbs, still expensive @ $15 and up per fitting, here is where we should have been years ago: Wal-Mart sells a 3-pack of 10 watt CFLs (that's 40 watts in normal-speak) for a buck twenty-eight - yes, you heard it here first, US$ 1.28 for three. Now poor people can save money, too.
Of course, I wish all of you
the best for the holidays, especially D., who is in hospital, very
unexpectedly, with something serious, Godspeed, here's thinking of
you. Late Breaking News: they stuffed him full of antibiotics, and he came home Chistmas morning. Phew.
The recent articles in the Telegraph and other media about the “uptake” difference between the iPhone and Android devices is interesting, in that it looks like the iPhone is an “Anglo” device – doing the best in America, England and Australia, but lagging behind Android in other markets – which, for the most part, aren't native English speaking countries. That makes perfectly good sense to me, and would be an important phenomenon to study, if there indeed is a cultural factor in the interface design. I've always felt there was a cultural factor, but this would be overwhelming proof, and we'd then have to try and figure out how that works, I don't know that anybody knows that for certain – the computer industry, as far as hand held devices are concerned, is simply too young for anybody to have done statistically valid research. Fascinating.
So, Christmas has just about been and gone – as I spent the holiday moving, once again, it kind of passed me by, other than that I've seen how much of an effort those around me make of it. Some of it did include me, must say, P. and M. had a special pre-Christmas Christmas, something M. told me they traditionally do, but I like to think they moved it up a day so I could participate. 't Was fun and sweet, thank you guys, you're very special to me, you and your soon-to-be-adults children. Lord, does growing up go fast – although, if you're the parents I should think it's slower than it is in my perception. It seems like only yesterday the toddlers rolled off the plane..
So I spent much of
today setting up my new home office, had to “rekindle” my
Sony Vaio desktop, reinstalled with an “Ultimate” version
of Windows Vista in June, before I moved coasts, then a month later
tried to set it up as a Windows 2008 server, which failed, and then
went back to the Vista stuff. That meant my software and
customization were all gone, so that's what I spent the past couple
of days doing, that and the installation of the Avertv TV Tuner Kit for Windows
All in all, thanks to help from friends and some fortuitous circumstances (the Totem Lake storage unit rental place lent me a truck for four hours, which let me move my stuff up in one load), the move was fairly painless, but then I did not have to come 3,000 miles this time. I am getting pretty well acquainted with the Seattle area, too, and its suburbia, plastered all over the Cascades foothills, mountain passes galore, and many cars are driving around on spiked tires already, while everybody else has the snow chains ready (or, like me, a four wheel drive SUV).
Strange Christmas, on a Sunday of all things, slightly discombobulated as there are a few things I need and can't get until tomorrow. I've decided to make that a shopping day, not because of the sales, but simply because I need groceries now that I have to prepare my own food - although my Thai landlady, having discovered I've lived in Asia, and love Asian food, is showering me with Thai goodies. Can't complain there.. as I mentioned before now, the Seattle area has a huge Asian population, I sometimes think I am walking through Beijing suburbs, rather than America, despite what goes on in the rest of the country, this may well be, together with LA, the most diverse area in the nation.
I mostly read my news from news.google.com, which does not clutter up and slow down my computer with huge advertising blocks, that pop over, pop under and pop through the articles, and push unsolicited video - how about making them pay for the bandwidth they use? CNN has, of late, become virtually unusable, I now see CNN front pages that have two headlines in their initial view, the rest is advertising, and a banner proclaiming I am accessing from abroad - which is completely impossible for their server to conclude, as it can see I am on a U.S. network. By the way, the button to the right of this text leads to the Federal Government, not to an insurance scam - although some Republicans do think it is.
Now when you use the Google news, you can change locale - I read the U.S. version, the U.K. version, then switch to The Netherlands - but here isn't an immediate choice for the news subjects you want to read about. By that I mean that the American, English and Dutch version (or the Zimbabwean, for that matter) all have international news, the choice is one of language. I am wondering if there shouldn't be a choice for just news from as well as about England, or Germany, in the local language, and then a World version in English, German, French, Dutch, what have you. The way it is currently set up you get to the same new item in many languages or localizations, which isn't really effective. I know I can set up Google to give me what I want, but I refuse to provide Google with marketing information, so I do not log in for reading news pages, and I religiously log out of everything I log into, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, whatever, when I am done with that page.
My other favourite news sources, as far as the English language is concerned: news.bbc.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, smh.com.au - good reporting, no popover or other weird ad mechanisms, and no subscription format. The Times, Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal are mostly subscription now, and thus best avoided. I am not under the impression any of them, with the possible exception of the Wall Street Journal, are doing very well out of their subscription adoption, and the subsequent drop in readership, and thus advertising sales.
Take a look at recent research about the use of LED lighting in public housing - that really is excellent news, especially for the more Northern locales with short winter days. We've known for a long time good lighting promotes safety and security, but the new technology appears to be on track to provide a better quality of life as well as savings. For the moment, LED is still pretty expensive, even if the cost is coming down bit-by-bit, the article does not provide cost/benefit examples, and I just have a hard time believing LEDs will last "up to 100,000 hours". 100,000 hours is 12 years, running 24/7, they have not been around that long. LEDs for normal light fixtures run pretty hot, and I would really like to see a fitting that can take that heat for 12 years, 24/7, this is currently carefully not being talked about. There are, and this is important to noisily point out to the manufacturers, few commercial fittings that are rated for 100,000 hours continuous use, so..
Do you get the same feeling about the "Xmas Do-Goodery" I do? Yes, it is nice, toys for the kids for Christmas, but the number of displaced and homeless people has grown to the point it is, frankly, a bit obscene to worry about gifts. But then, what do I know, the longer term solutions just aren't exactly around the corner. I don't know, it is easy to criticize, some folks are doing something, even if only in the short term. It just bothers me that 80% or more of the dollars they spend on toys go to China and places. May they should get Groupon vouchers so they can eat at Denny's for free for three months, or sumtin', benefit the local economy. In our capitalist environment, companies and employers will need to start taking risks and expanding their product lines and create growth and a future for all these folks.
Last August, my two year old fancy Braun shaver, which I bought in Europe, suddenly wouldn't charge. I ran out and bought the Remington F4790, needing a quick cheap replacement. I have since managed to bring the Braun back to life - it turns out the thing isn't waterproof any more, and for as long as I don't wet clean it, it works fine - but much to my surprise, the Remington is a much better shaver than the Braun ever was, and with some time spent shaving, I get my face "smooth as a gravy sandwich", as they'd say Down Under.
The F4790 is large, not to say ugly, but fits in the hand well, and as it has nickel-cadmium (the old technology) rechargeable batteries, it has more power available than a smaller shaver with lithium-ion batteries would do, I have recharged it only once since buying it at a local WalMart! Nickel-cadmium technology does suffer from the memory effect, so you're best off running the shaver down until it dies, and then fully recharging it overnight, at least periodically. But I am well pleased, and haven't used the Braun since, except for when the Remington is charging. Note that I have light beard and moustache growth, I am not in the lawnmower/weedwacker category.
It has become a routine for me, over the years, going to Starbucks, using T-Mobile UMA on their internet (I have an account subscription to Hotspot services), then using Bluetooth with my laptop to use the internet. It is slower than using their WiFi direct, but encrypted and secure, I don't have to worry about anybody hacking into my laptop, which is, on an open WiFi connection, the easiest thing to do. WiFi off.. Windows 7 does have some kind of "secure" mode, on the wireless interface, but I don't think an awful lot of people use that, or even understand what the various options are. Even setting up the Windows 7 dialer so it'll go to the Blackberry via Bluetooth, bypassing the Blackberry Desktop Manager, isn't that simple. All of these things need to be addressed and resolved before we can have a secure internet, and as nobody wants to pay for security - well, nobody, but few people see it as worth their money -, same as with voice dialing and other "fancy stuff", there aren't any real solutions that do not involve government stepping in.
Dutch KPN stated it a couple of days ago - currently, cellular subscription revenues must exceed 40 Euros a month to be profitable. That likely is a good number - it'll be slightly lower in larger markets, Holland only has 16 million inhabitants, but the ballpark, which takes into account the massive investments necessary to accomodate, particularly, smartphones, is likely right. I've said it before - we've created a monster, competing on advanced capabilities, using a price point that has killed most smaller carriers, and may end up even killing large ones. AT&T Wireless may well see a real need to merge with T-Mobile USA, it isn't just a marriage of convenience, it may be the only way they can compete with Verizon Wireless on price. And that, from an investment perspective, may not be a good business model.
To some extent, it is a model that Apple created, at least in the computer industry - but while many companies try and compete with Apple on the equipment front, you really can't outdo a manufacturer that maintains a large profit margin and "guru" status. I would not try to "out-Apple" Apple. Perhaps it is possible, after all, diamonds sell like hotcakes, and Tiffany's is doing very well, but I doubt many have the expertise to operate at that high end. I certainly do not (but don't let that stop you from hiring me, though, always happy to learn new tricks).
It remains very much a question to me how much of this advanced technology serves a real purpose. While live TV broadcasts have made their way into the mobile environment, the cable has 3D channels and 3D broadcasts, even though "true" 3D screens aren't out in the real world yet. So we've spent untold sums of money creating both wireless and wired bandwidth for which no real purpose, other than entertainment, exists. In the past, the internet facilitated education, consumer information access, and functionalities such as online banking and communication services for families. We've progressed from there to have high resolution video conferencing with your aunties, online banking with interactive video advertising, online gaming with thousands of participants, and remote learning with high resolution graphics.
None of those last few examples serve a useful purpose, if you use the model of "useful" in which a consumer will pay for a service - gaming, probably, the odd man out, gamers will pay for things, much like cable viewers pay for premium channels.
So, Google released its 2011 rankings, read about it in the Daily Mail - I have just one question: why do people do searches on "iPhone" and "Justin Bieber" and "Casey Anthony"? I can see how you would do a search on the iPhone if you're planning on buying one - maybe even a search on Bieber if you want to buy his music, but that does not, methinks, explain the very large volume of searches. I tend to go to (amongst others) news.google.com, and read the news, and at that point stuff about Bieber and the Apple gear will come up if there is something being reported. But I guess others watch Bieber on the Today Show, and then go to the Internet? I just don't know, and I also don't know why anybody would do their Googly and then read about this, or watch it, for any length of time. But, I suppose I am a news hound, I want to know what's happening, but not necessarily what Amanda Knox was wearing in Court. For the heck of it, I'll do some of these searches, see what that throws up. Never do otherwise, swear to G*d..
Why am I asking this? The mechanism of wanting huge amounts of information about my idol or my favourite toy is completely alien to me - I'll happily accept I am the odd man out on that score - and so what drives people to do these searches isn't something I can "feel". Understanding, empirically, theoretically, sure, but it isn't something I do. I suppose I am not helped by being a database expert - I was using databases in the lab before the internet and Google were invented, worked on building them for "the phone company". So, when Google came around, I used it just as I would have done any database, and I guess I still do that today. I find, anyway, that the best way to find out about something is to try it out, buy it if you can - arguably, of course, you can't try out or buy the Bieber boy, or, more appropriately in my case, Doutzen Kroes. But then I like Friesians, even have some in the family, I discovered in 2009. I mean, if I wanted Doutzen's picture, I'd take one myself. But then, her mum visits my cousin's shop, now and again, so...
Behind me, as I sip a coffee at Starbucks, I can hear what sounds like a jazz band setting up, better go and check that out. Quite a bit of community stuff going on at this shopping center, not used to that - of course, I don't spend much "time at the mall", so there may well be things going on, here and there, I just don't know about. The music turns out to come from the Interlake High School Jazz Ensemble I, quite good, especially for a high school band. The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Going to a Wipro Technologies "open house" on Saturday, I found some 100 or so folks (mostly programmers) already there, and even though I had done an RSVP, as requested, many clearly had not, so the works got cluttered up to the point where the recruiters couldn't possibly spend more than minimum time with anyone. Wipro, a mammoth Indian outsourcer, is new to the Seattle area, as I understand it, they've been advertising all over for a few months now. Is it a trend - are the outsourcers now expanding into their original markets? They're still talking about "fresher's" in their mailings, Indian English for recent graduates, and not terminology an American job applicant will understand, so they probably need some back office resources to be fully successful. OTOH, Indian and Pakistani software developers will probably flock to their doors - 70% of applicants were South Asian, this morning - as they're well acquainted with Wipro.
So, I had the 30 second face-to-face, they said they'd like to call me back in, I left my card. Probably need to follow up on that one....
I noticed this morning, as I am wading through Amazon's cloud application, how Wired Magazine declares on its front cover that "Amazon Owns the Internet".. While that is a bit loud, I am certainly discovering that e-WalMart Amazon is branching out places I would not have expected it to go - certainly important as I am preparing to interview with them. You'll find some more on the subject below, in my November 28 blog entry, check out their cloud here. It is especially important as so many web information providers - Twitter the latest - attempt to capitalize on their "ubiquity", and to a large extent find that they can't, or, at least, how hard it is. Google seems to be the odd man out, they have a clear strategy where folks happily pay them for advertising, because you and I come to Google to find things, and Google gives us choices. But Facebook, Twitter, none of those vehicles is where people naturally come to find information - people are, if you will, purpose driven, it is extraordinarily difficult to make them do things they did not come to you to do. Try as they might, that little search box at the top of your browser, while giving access to many search engines, is used with Google much of the time. Even Bing - the latest I saw was that Bing, on the Xbox, will let you find, and run, movies. That's a far cry from being a search engine, more of a functionality thing. Nothing wrong with that, quite possible that voice commanding Bing to show you a show or movie is a valid and successful function, but not a "natural" search engine function. We're all looking for that gap in the market, but few find it..
What are Amazon's strokes of genius? The Kindle, which is not only cheap, but in various forms can pull down its content using both 3G and WiFi, without your having to worry about a network or mobile subscription, worldwide, and the huge cloud network Amazon built so it could run its own webservers, again, worldwide, and serve its books to the owners of Kindles and the users of Kindle software. Beyond that came Amazon's streaming video
In an interesting development, British Vodafone (mobile telephony mammoth, half owner of Verizon Wireless) have hired Michael Joseph, on the basis of the M-Pesa mobile payments system he pioneered in Africa - by itself, that system is responsible for payments to the value of 20 percent of Kenya's gross domestic product. The link above goes to Western Union's M-Pesa page, where you can transfer money to M-Pesa users - links at that page go to the three (at the time of this writing) carriers that offer the service, in Kenya and the Philippines. Nice to see this is a bandwagen that Western Union jumped on.. What's special about M-Pesa? It uses a network of local shops to "charge" phones with payment values, stimulating the local economy with "new technology" revenues, and it uses cheap, regular, non-smart handsets, no need for smartphones, which most cellphone users do not have, even in the West, I can't point that out often enough. As far as I am aware, any old GSM phone will work, and M-Pesa has grown to the point that it is a proven concept, and is easily transplantable into other third world countries - that's "emerging economies" to you. Where will they take it? Rural India, rural China would be fantastic places to go with this. Vodafone, of course, has a worldwide presence, something our American carriers decided not to get involved with - I remember, I was out there, my employers eventually sold all they owned in Asia, as did other carriers. Yes, in the growth markets.
If you read up on the wireless world, the Western markets have largely matured, there's only the push to get replacement handsets to the consumers, replacing "feature phones" with smartphones, and that, to me, is not a hugely successful business model, as it drives the prices of smartphones down, and thus the revenues of the manufacturers, as we can see with RIM and Nokia. Yet, Nokia has it right, in my book, it is pumping cheap phones into emerging markets, and that has to be where the remaining revenues are. If it can reclaim some high end profitable territory in its tie-up with Microsoft remains to be seen, but Nokia certainly have the expertise and technological prowess to make Windows Phone work better than before. That's still going to be an "Apple" model, though - expensive, niche.
A recruiter told me that one of the carriers put out a consulting requirement, the other day, that was met with 294 agency applications within four hours, when they closed it. A senior executive told me that for a posted sales manager position, he got applications from plumbers on the other coast.
It occurs to me this may not be just the recession at work. In the days before public facing HR systems, there were tiers of recruiters and managers that weeded out applicants, as their resumes, which themselves took more work to create, wended their way up to the decision makers. But today, you can create your applicant login, make stuff up, and just apply wherever you want. And I get the impression a lot of people, both applicants and recruiters, are doing exactly that. Doing nobody any favours, of course, but I sense there is a strong tendency to do "I-don't-qualify-but-what-the-heck" applications - many folks who have never been hiring managers don't really understand the amount of work and expertise involved in selecting candidates for your company.
I know jobsite software attempts to weed out the pretenders, but from what I hear I get the impression that does not work very well. It depends a bit on how much people are willing to "gild the lily", something I don't really have a clear view on. My hiring processes, the past fifteen years, have always been shielded by Human Resources folks, who did the heavy lifting. And I never second guessed them, as my work was in a very regulated part of the business, where the primary concern was 24/7 operations, which comes first in regulated customer facing networks, some folks don't - can't - fit into that. On top of that, there are clearly so many people applying that in the end, when a human needs to assess the applications, the job becomes impossible. And from my own experience, it is very hard to assess from what folks write what they're like, even if the process is computerized and well structured.
But even if you get it right - I once hired a very capable programmer, and then the person ended up setting up a hidden porn server inside my Operations Center, something accidentally discovered by a very capable system administrator and an equally astute "tight ship" webmaster. These are things you cannot "prescreen" or predict - and, stupidly, his skills were such he was more than able to hide things in plain sight. That is very very useful if you can find ways to make it benefit your employer, right? People can be weird. And I benefited from my staff reporting this to me - that does not always happen either. All I am saying is that I had no tools to perceive his risk, and even if I had been able to "look into his brain", how would I have established this was a real risk? I don't think that way, don't conjecture, but one is then dependent on one's other staff to "do the right thing". Those, I had hand picked too, so I guess, on balance, I had things under good control - and, of course, I had correctly assessed the miscreant's technical skills.
Reading up, again, on search engine optimization, or SEO, after my previous entry on Facebook's attempts at selling advertising, the world seems to be trending away from search engine reliance for online sales. A large part of the problem, one I have never seen addressed, is that the consumer isn't trained to use search engines, and all too often uses a personal vernacular, or a foreign based type of English, to find information. Typos are common too. Search engine algorithms, meanwhile seem to be mostly created by native American English speakers - go to google.com and try this out for yourself. Search on "coming into season" and you'll find English English sources (which may stretch as far as India, Australia and New Zealand), while "coming into heat" will land you with American English sources. It's got better, searchwise - the British idiom might have not yielded any results, a decade ago, but now think about how a Jamaican or a Ghanaian, both native English speakers, might express this... We have a long way to go, still.
Here is a question for you: if you were to run for president, and win, would you change "everything"? I am watching the prognostication on CNN of what Newt Gingrich would do to make things better, and I really ask myself why exactly people think you can improve an economic situation by making massive changes. I just do not think it works like that. I recall the few times I took over someone else's job, or department, or staff, and I've always made sure I didn't make major changes, until I had a good understanding of how things were working, and had analyzed what wasn't working, and why, and most importantly, communicated. In my small universe, what you do when you "come into power" and make major changes is alienating your staff - the people who do the work. You're much better off not making those changes, even though maybe you know they'll work, and finding out first what changes your managers and staff are looking for. Get buy-in, communicate, listen. It is, after all, they who do the work, not you, or your predecessor. And people tend to have a good feeling for what should change in their job, and their manager's job, to make it better, if you can get them to express that. Analyze, find the stress points, lubricate the machine, replace what's broken. Then, you can start looking at "the bigger picture". After all, from the inside, things always turn out to be different than you thought, looking from the outside. It is not the direction you need to worry about, when leadership changes - not breaking things, should be Priority One.
All I am saying is: don't put someone in the White House who is going to "change everything". Remember it is your money they're going to use for this, what's left of it. We've gotta make money, sell stuff, and I don't mean cups of coffee made with Brazilian beans and French vanilla, or computer software written onto Malaysian DVDs packed in boxes made in Honduras. Identify what we can make here, soup-to-nuts, that people overseas need. I don't care what it is, toilet paper, software, just make sure it is made right here. Forget about Black Friday sales increases - all that stuff was made in China, and they're just not getting that, these politicos. Revenues are not profits, they're not money-in-your-pocket. And Chrysler is no longer an American company, it is Italian. It really is simple, and it isn't going to come from "shrinking" or "growing" government - whatever that means.
It is very nice for the principals in the Eurozone to speak of a tougher treaty, but among member states there really isn't any way that I can see one could police compliance with pan-European financial rules. You can't fine people who are financially unsound, and I can't see there is anything else that would work. If an entire country, Greece, Italy, whatever, isn't behaving fiscally responsibly - which ought to not be rocket science - all you can do is boot 'em out. And that would reduce the power of the Europe, which is based on this very large conglomerate of countries. Those of us old enough to remember the "old" EU have always wondered why the Western European governments were so desperate to add countries whose finances have always been marginal, and I guess there now is fairly solid proof that wasn't the smart thing to do. Greece was always poor, so was Spain, so was Italy, Yugoslavia, Ireland, and by "always" I mean the knowledge I grew up with, post WWII. And by "poor" I mean by comparison with ourselves, the Dutch, and the Germans, the Scandinavians, Belgians, perhaps not surprisingly mostly post-colonial countries. Even when I moved to the UK I found its wealth marginal, by comparison with my home country - there was extra small food packaging for pensioners, for instance, and electricity meters you had to put coins in, something I had never seen in my life before.
Seen outside the Microsoft store in Bellevue - a custom Mustang with an Xbox in the trunk, and a Zune in the dash... no, didn't have Kinect steering.
It is, in my mind, perfectly valid that the worst thing in management is not to take a decision. It really isn't vital whether the decision one takes is right or wrong (deliberacy excepted), if one does not take a decision at a juncture, things grind to a halt, nothing moves, no progress, no regress, and that in itself is regress. Most things short of death are reversible and fixable, provided, of course, you "get there in time".
It is important to understand where the need for a decision comes from. It is a point at which the "flow of things" encounters a juncture, and the choices presented by the juncture, be they two, three, or one hundred eleven, are usually all in some way valid. You're offered an apartment. You need a new place to live to begin with, the person offering it to you knows this, but what basis do you now use to decide whether to accept the offer? What analysis, what steps, lead to the decision? How much time can you take? Do you negotiate, and if so, exactly why do you negotiate? To get a concession? To establish the flexibility of the other party? To establish a working relationship?
It is curious to see, in the avalanche of information that comes to use due to the internet, how much information there is that purports to be "boilerplate". All that does is fire masses of varied opinions at the consumer, who lacks not only the tools to process the information, but now, due to the amount of data, the time as well. It is not at all unusual, today, to gather information on a subject, and find totally contrary advice, all based on perfectly valid opinions, statistics and research. Go figure.
One of the more interesting discussions is that surrounding Facebook's presumably forthcoming IPO. I can't help it, but I am getting a distinct "deja vu" feeling, remembering the dot-com collapse we all went through. After years of development and innovation research, suddenly everybody started asking: "Best thing since sliced bread, but who is paying?". It turned out the consumer was not, and poof!, half the internet went bankrupt on the spot. AOL, Yahoo, Myspace, once the darlings of the nascent internet, are an excellent example, I don't quite know how they both survived, but they did not go where they were supposed to, and ended up as commodities, very large mailing lists, like Hotmail was when Microsoft bought it. So - how will Facebook fare? It is a brilliant product, by now it is the internet-within-the-internet, but again, the consumer won't pay for it. Advertising? I don't know, we're bombarded with advertising, that has not prevented the recession, and I am not seeing manufacturers and stores paying huge sums of money getting those little postage stamps on Facebook user's news pages. We're up to six ads at a time, with, I think, Walmart paying extra to sit there by itself in the runup to Christmas. Not, to me, a way to run a reliable business. Not when people fast forward through most commercials on their DVRs. You've got to understand this means they do not like advertising.
And as I am writing this I notice that, suddenly, Facebook has truncated my news feed. At the bottom, there now is a dialog (to your left) that tells you to "bring your friends". Duh - Facebook forcing me to divulge more of my personal relationships? Why? It isn't to make things better for me, these are relationships I already have - and while social networking began as a way to connect with old friends, and find new "like minded" people, it is now morphing to enterprises mining your information to sell stuff to you, and to find, through you, others to sell to. Through you - and not voluntarily. And it is using an inelegant and blatantly manipulative way to do it. Which emphasizes, once again, that Facebook isn't your friend. You don't have to pay Facebook money, but you must give Facebook personal information about other people, which is what you do when you make your relationship with them known to Facebook. Not a nice way of doing business, Zuck. Note that advertisers think that "targeted" advertising is more effective - but these friends and others all are being advertised to anyway, something that is not going away, so the net effect is likely more advertising, and that may not have the desired effect. This "more advertising" trend may well be a recession feature - but if people don't have money they're not going to buy your stuff, not unless you make it cheaper, which you can't do by spending more money on advertising.
Like popping ads over things consumers want to watch or read - do we really believe this sells things? I cannot conceive of people buying products or services that annoy them - friend of mine complained, loudly, that Google Maps put an irremovable pushpin in his map, pointing to a local OB/GYN doctor. I mean, my friend is male.... and I have a hard time conceiving of anyone finding an OB/GYN doctor in the Yellow Pages, that isn't how that is usually done.
I am not being critical of the new technologies, far from it, I helped invent some of this stuff.. But it is important to understand that the only way we can sell more to folks is reading their minds, and that every time an organization attempts to do that, there is a privacy backlash. Not only that, I do not believe we have the algorithms and software that can predict human behaviour, no matter how much data we collect. Apart from anything else, unless you take competition out of the equation, Walmart is going to try to get you into their store, while Macy's does the same thing. And since you normally only buy something once, or at least once at a time, there will be a winner and a loser. And the loser will have spent millions of dollars on tools that haven't worked, or that haven't worked well. Looked at like that, advertising doesn't make a huge amount of sense, right? It isn't "informative", it is "manipulative". And apart from anything else, that is a dangerous practice, because people really do not like to be manipulated. The geo-locational advertising I worked on, back in the '90s, needed the customer to dial in to a call center, and ask for information. A deliberate act on the part of the consumer. Not this stupid stuff - you stop in front of a Chinese restaurant, so you get their menu on your cellphone - unsolicited. And the poor deluded marketeer thinks that that will now entice you to go there and eat their food - not just once, but repeatedly. Never mind you were only stopped because you had to pick up your dog's poo - that's not part of the "intelligence". Which really isn't intelligence at all... Think about it. How many restaurants you go to on a regular basis (or stores for that matter) did you first go to because of advertising?
An interesting aspect of the Seattle area is that it is wildly diverse - so much so that I am able to simply Google for Asian supermarkets, and find plenty that sell everything indigenous to the Pacific Rim, from the Philippines and Japan to Cambodian, Thai, and everything in between. I am writing this half choked by an instant noodle dish that is as spicy as can be, I love things that bring tears to my eyes. Even the Nescafe and Indofood coffee sachets I used to get in Indonesia and China are available here. Bit the long way around, Nescafe instant coffee by way of Singapore, but it gets here. I am noticing this as it is a very defining difference between the coasts - reading about it is one thing, but up close it is amazing. The picture up top shows one of the many APAC stores in the Seattle area - down below, nighttime traffic down 8th Street, a main artery in Bellevue, overlooked by a full moon.
So did Black Friday do something for the economy? Will the "Holiday Shopping Season"? Is hype a good way to bring back prosperity?
I honestly don't think so. That's all stuff that works when things are going well, but we should know that what works "normally" is probably not going to work when things aren't "normal". When consumers are under an avalanche of bad news, and millions of consumers have no jobs, or no money, or both, expecting things to be "normal" really isn't all that smart. Right now we need to do better than companies with problems selling stuff to consumers with problems. That's left hand / right hand, and more money leaving the country. We do see the "amazing" numbers in the news, but what the cost is of these numbers, and how they affect "normal" spending... We must not forget that the holidays aren't what supports the economy. We may be overhyping ourselves again...
A CNN commentary on shopping I saw had it that stores, particularly supermarkets, have loads of tricks to get you to buy stuff, from making you slow down in certain sections, to directing you into impulse shopping areas first and last. Perhaps. I continue to wonder what the real correlation is, if you consider the name of the game is to part consumers from their money. Few stores have a true "cheap as can be" policy, and I have to wonder if consistently providing savings isn't a policy that will work best, over time. Walmart long ago fell to the "impulse shopping" syndrome, fine for people who have too much money, but in the long run, you really do not need more TVs, and if there were a store that could save you money and did something different, like put money into your 401K at the same time, who knows how that might work? The problem is, forever, the shareholders - Apple is the industry darling because it takes the money you pay for your iPhone, and gives a good chunk of it to the stockholder. That's nice for the stock market, but not so nice for the many that can't afford this stuff - because Nokia and RIM, champions of the cheap gear, deserve to do better - we should champion enterprises that make cheap gear available to Indian cabbies and African farmers, because that is where future economies are created...
AWS. Amazon Web Services. They've scheduled an interview for me, or rather, are threatening to, so I have set myself up an account with AWS, and now I am trying to get some time in figuring out how what works. Much to my delight, new customers get a bunch of services for naught, so they can get acquainted with the systems and the services, and learn to build environments and applications under AWS. In The Cloud, as it were. Something I found a buzzword, but don't take that to mean I don't think it exists - I know it does, and I guess all it needed was an Amazon recruiter's email for me to take it really seriously.
First URL:
http://meneef.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
which I now need to point my domain at, using some other tool in the huge array AWS has available. Sheesh. I don't think I'll distribute it worldwide, just yet, that might blow up my charge card.
If you're interested in AWS, you can get more information here and here - the second URL outlining the services that are free for you to try out and build (I am sure they hope) a use model and/or an application using Linux. Cool stuff, and the cloud is expanding worldwide, though I am not (yet) seeing an African node on their map. Would love to work on that ;)
I am trying to maintain my 2 terabyte backup drive, the disk I schlep around with me to back my laptop up to. It's a habit originally necessitated by phone company requirements - some data has to be retained for a very long time, some up to 30 years, and as a consequence I made sure, throughout my career, to back up the large volumes of data especially our human factors folks created. It stood me in good stead when the tax auditors came to verify the code my developer boss had written - I had implemented a huge (at the time) storage device in our network, and since the folks in my team had actually used it, I was able to give the auditors access to almost ten years of code. That was enough to prove we absolutely deserved our tax-exempt status...
Anyway, as it turns out Windows has a hard time defragmenting said drive - if it were connected to a permanent desktop installation it might not be an issue, but as I normally only hook the thing up to my laptop to make a quick backup, once a day, it never gets enough time. What with the Thanksgiving holiday, I am trying to give it one full run-through, so wish me luck... It is an issue, it'll eventually fragment to the point it may run out of table space - even Windows 7 has limitations, although I must say I've never actually seen that happen - previous versions of Windows, sure, but not Win7. Fingers crossed.
Happy Thanksgiving, of course... a special thought for my friends, who so kindly, and unselfishly, have invited me into their home to weather my storm... I really don't have the words to thank you, not least for teaching me a lesson about being human, and the "soft" side of the coin. "Home for the holidays" has an entirely new meaning to me.
Honestly, all I think you can get out of this Solyndra story is that we might talk about the government and its capacity to invest in risky projects. Is government out there to kick start new technologies, as it did successfully with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or should government just sit on its hands and step in when an economic disaster happens, and it needs to rescue the banks and the automobile industry. Off the cuff, I would think that the tax environment favours angel investors kickstarting new technologies, and that the government is there to take care of "we the people", and be somewhat conservative. Rules that favour the Solyndras of this world is one thing, but if those solar panels really are the cat's meow there should be funds to be found outside the taxpayer's savings account.
The LA Times article blaming this on having a brainiac in charge of energy - I am sorry, just because somebody got a Nobel prize does not mean he can't think straight. The Department of Energy has a very large number of chiefs and indians - having said that, the Chinese government invests in alternative energy, so does the German, and so our competing in that space is not strange, though perhaps not really useful.
Facebook, if you hadn't noticed, is now up to six advertisement buttons on a news page. The Dilution Has Begun.
Commentator and analyst Fareed Zakaria, in a recent article, has it that China "is expected to play by the rules - indeed, it is expected to help maintain the rules". I am not so sure that that's relevant.
The comparison between the United States and China isn't invalid, but Zakaria has perhaps Americanized to the point he no longer sees that China is pretty much doing what the United States has done for many years - making the rules. You can do that when you're the 800 lb gorilla in the room. So, while the Chinese keep up a dialogue with us, they certainly make very clear what they need and want, and make it very clear that Asia, in their book, is their hemisphere - not strictly speaking true, in a "global economy". Never mind we're just on the other side of the Pacific, we're kinda "not close", as far as they are concerned. And they foster better ties with the EU than they do with the US, even though millions of Chinese and Chinese born people live here, all over, but especially on the West Coast. I was never as amazed as when I discovered that all Chinese officials that rate a government car drive, or are driven, in an.... Audi. Made in China. The Chinese have no problem with doing things differently - having foreign cars for officials, here, would be anathema. We need to learn what their philosophy is, though, and respond to it appropriately, rather than in our usual xenophobic manner. I personally was surprised to see the Aussies agree to Marines based on their soil - they are, after all, regionally considered White Asians, and trusted. Then again, with a population as small as theirs, perhaps they're not feeling quite secure, wedged between large Indonesia, and larger China. Click the link and get the local's view on what China does, it is different.
Another day in the trenches - hours wading through job advertisements - there is some duplication between sites, but worse is that some employers post hundreds of jobs a week now, and that the best way of dealing with them is going trough each invididual description, as they aren't categorized well, if at all. For instance, Microsoft has something called "Trustworthy Computing" - you and I would call that "IT Risk Management", and I had no idea to even look for it until a Microsoft executive mentioned it to me. Thanks, though, Steve... ;)
Then, on to updating the resume - in about 14 places, the way I have set it up. It turns out the various websites push your resume each time you refresh it, but you do have to make changes, and some websites then require you to redo all sorts of forms. Then, you get the inevitable avalanche from phishing scammers, which try and get you to divulge your personal information by promising a job writing cookery books for an Alaska fisheries company, or sumtin' else contrived. where they get it from.. They are easy to recognize, as the perps never provide the recruiter's telephone number, which any recruiter needing you would do, right?
Next, the apartment hunt - which is mostly taken up by identifying buildings, getting their restrictions and requirements, finding out about waiting lists, and getting the application forms - which, in most cases, are not on the internet, but will be sent to you when the manager thinks you're A Real Candidate.
Today's highlight was an astute consulting agency recruiter on the other coast, who sent me a very cryptic job requirement I was able to decipher for him. You know you're doing well if you end up chatting on the phone, it is nice to have somebody pick your brain, as that means your skillset is being taken seriously. In a day and age when a consulting position, four hours after posting, is closed because agencies submitted 294 applicants, this isn't a luxury. And in this case, better still, he put me in for the position, something that requires trust. As he said, there are so many desperate folks who write buzzword resumes, which, in the end, hurt the recruiter, who isn't going to be happy when his phone rings and he finds out from his client he just submitted a fake....
The pictures - top right, the Microsoft store in Bellevue Square, more of a showcase than a shop - with the tablet to the left, I like it having an accessory keyboard, one of the Windows 7 showcase devices. Didn't even check who the manufacturer is... That may be the future of notebooks - tablet-cum-keyboard-tethered-smartphone, makes sense, that's how I am writing this, on a laptop with an external, larger, wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo, and Bluetoothered Blackberry.
I greatly enjoy (if that is the right word) the new BBC series "24 hours in the ER", broadcast on BBC America. It may well be this is partly because I lived in London for so long, it is almost a real world "East Enders", but their use of some 70 remotely controlled cameras, and the way in which patients and relatives are interviewed once back home, make this a very well executed type of reality television. If you're not familiar with colloquial London English, though, some of it may be hard to follow, or you might miss some understanding. The series takes me straight back to living in London, among Londoners, and the for me strange experience of living in a huge metropolis, something very different from the life in The Netherlands I had been used to. Once there, the term "big city" acquired an entirely new meaning to me, and in many ways prepared me for New York City, where I would move next.
Bollocks. It seems once a week or so I get closer to finding work, and then it evaporates again. One assignment got canceled the day before I would start. An interview with a senior manager didn't go the way a director wanted. The entrepreneur I got connected to, thanks to a friend, is himself on hold. And that's just what I know. A job I was shortlisted for last year never got started, and never closed, either. It is infuriating. And I do believe, when I look at the positions that are advertised, that the majority of enterprises have put their growth on hold, I wish they would listen to Jeff Bezos and his business philosophy. An interesting read, and the beauty is that you can take his words and derive your own conclusion. Think what you like, after all this time, having built an empire, he has launched the Kindle Fire for a mere $199 - and that is the top end of his line. IOW, he understands a tablet is one of the things you need, it doesn't replace anything. At least, that is my view of it, I said the same about Netbooks, a view I tested after picking one up in China
Google, please enlighten me how the search "engineer searching women in arab@yahoo.com.ir, @hotmail com" ends up with my archive as a result? When executed from Senegal? If that even has anything to do with it...
The picture at the top of this piece was taken in Seattle, not far from the Space Needle, - I did not even know there is a streetcar line here, a "tram", as we say in The Netherlands. It was kind of strange, I was in town for a Microsoft meeting, and walked across the tracks, and then realized I was checking to see if the tram was approaching, as I was used to doing in The Hague and Amsterdam, when seeing railcar tracks embedded in the pavement. Streetcars are heavy and don't stop easily or quickly, so one gives them a wide berth, you see. Later, I did see the actual tram, proof, therefore, and shot that picture. To the right is a garden in my neighbourhood, I just liked the design, and hope you see how heavily Asian influenced this part of the world is. It had some of that 20 years ago, but, walking around, or shopping, today, I sometimes think I am in Beijing or Singapore. Swear to God.
Have I gone bonkers, or are there really rather unusually massive changes going on in the world around us? The United States is on its economic knees, unable to translate business success into citizen prosperity, in Europe some of the mediterranean countries have combined political and ecnomic problems, the Middle East and North Africa have a somewhat baffling Arab uprising going on, and it seems in much of Asia prosperity continues unabated, almost as if they're on a different planet from us.
Here in the US, it is going on wherever you look - yet another church in my neighbourhood is starting up a soup kitchen, and that is not something you do unless there is a need. In the meantime, funding for public works is being reduced all over the country - and that, my friends, will have significant repercussions, because you cannot create prosperity without a well maintained infrastructure, and once you have to start closing libraries, laying off police officers, stop subsidizing housing for the indigent, and turning empty storefronts into charity outlets, you're on the slippery slope. I was at the Factoria Mall in Bellevue, the other day, where I noticed that the 2008 closing of Mervyn's department store, one of the anchor stores, completely killed foot traffic in that side of the mall, and that mall management, apparently, have not been able to get any other large store to move into the property. It is a good indicator for where we are, today - ten years ago, the space would have been occupied in months, and I am sure you can get a good deal if you wanted it today. One wonders if Global Warming is perhaps the least of our problems..
An interesting clip from BBC News talks about the future of gadgets, considering that mobile phones can do much of what individual "gadgets" - cellphones, digital cameras, navigation units, laptops - are capable of doing. If you watch the clip, there is a bit of a giggle towards the end - the reporter puts a sizable zoom lens on a mount on the mobile phone that has that capability, and then the phone rings. I personally don't use one cellphone for all of these purposes, but three - I like my venerable Blackberry because it has a tactile keyboard for messaging, it is my primary voice device, and I have a charging stand so I can use it as a clock / alarm clock; then I have one older Nokia Navigator that I use as my primary GPS - it has my Asian travel SIM card in it just in case anybody over there sends me a text message - and then there is my new Nokia C7, which backs up all of the above, has my local number at my new home, and lets me use a very good mobile browser. It may sound weird for someone to have a backup phone, but the cellular companies make it very cheap to get a smartphone, and because I was facing a 3,000 mile drive through unknown territory, back in July, with just the Navigator to guide me. I figured it was worth it getting a spare phone with navigation capability. Nokia, after all, owns venerable digital mapping company Navtech, and provides free downloadable maps of the entire world with its smartphones.
Especially with Facebook, I like the browser on the C7 - I won't use a Facebook application, since that passes on all kinds of information from your mobile phone to Facebook, and I really don't need Facebook to tell all of its "members" and advertisers where I am, and who my "friends" are. Facebook's latest trick is that it can look for the navigation chipset in your cellphone from your mobile browser, access it, and find out where you are - whether you want it to or not. If you have your GPS turned on, you won't even know it is doing that, and Facebook never told you about it. Apart from which, let's say you're using your phone for navigation, and now three applications - the camera, Facebook and Twitter - are accessing the GPS chipset for location information. What happens? Errors? Crashes? And then the phone rings? As a computer expert, I can tell you those are aspects that really have not been tested well, and they can get very messy in your smart-thing. I recall driving cross country, in July, and having my navigation phone crash as I left the interstate and got onto local roads. Not knowing where I was or where to go, I had to park and reboot the phone, and reset the destination, once it "knew" where it was. It happens, but you really don't want to do anything with your phone you don't have to, when you need it for one function, be that talking to your boss, or finding your client.
Is it important to block Facebook off? Or Twitter, or Google? I think it is, to some extent. While basically innocuous, the amount of data that all of these services collect on you could be used maliciously, and is available to others - like potential employers - to misinterpret. That's a bigger issue than you might think - one thing you can't control is the impression someone gets from connecting the wrong types of information. Just look at the screen capture to the left - that may be me, except the "Spoke" service seems to have connected part of one of my past titles from a colleagues' website, one former employer's partial company name, and somehow decided the word "wireless" was nice to stick in there. Rochester? The mind boggles, and there is only one of me in the USA, so it has to be me. How do these people put this together? What purpose does it serve, except to deceive you into thinking they have information they don't?
After all, a researcher may know nothing about you, and all they have is the tidbits of information that live on forever, in the internet. Just think about the strange things you've seen friends or colleagues do, on social networks, the opinions that surprised you, their friends and family, their political views, things that, before Facebook, you did not know about them, and things that made you re-evaluate your relationship with them. Now if some of their antics surprised you, think how you might surprise them. And think how easy it is for someone else to come to a completely different conclusion about you than you'd like them to have...
Eventually, governments will succeed in mandating that privacy maintenance from the social networks, but it will take time. And in the interim, the Facebooks and Googles of this world will continue "pushing the envelope" - in their quest for advertiser money. It is a quest doomed to fail, because at some point the advertisers will understand that Facebook's new practice of putting five or six advertiser buttons on your News page simply dilutes their chances of anybody ever clicking on them. It's already gotten to the point where Facebook lets you block future postings by advertisers - which it then doesn't block. Apart from which, in my opinion, vendors and manufacturers that think social networks advertising, and SEO - search engine optimization - is going to help them sell more, and weather the recession, are sadly mistaken. If the economy is as much in the doldrums as it seems - toppling dictators and prime ministers alike - we've got to come to ways to increase income and reduce expenditure - see my November 7 posting for an example, where I discuss the introduction of RFID technology, which to me appears a totally wasted investment, since it did not replace anything, and didn't add value (as in, monetary, revenue) to an existing methodology. If anything, it probably increased data theft risks, considering new cellphones have RFID chipsets, so do passports, and consumers will carry or turn them on for no reason. I need to repeat it here: you are paying for all this. With the consumer always having had problems with the security of their PC, we have no hope in hell of securing their smartphones, which, after all, do not come with a keyboard, a mouse, or decent screen real estate that lets you see what you're doing.
In a way, this resume stuff is a bit annoying. I try to avoid endless rewrites, as I think, or like to think, that I am who I am, and if I apply for a job in telecommunications I am not really a different person than when I apply for an editing job. I happen to have both skills - if you're old enough to have had two or three careers, you may have two or three skillsets. Perhaps less common in the United States than in Europe, but people have many interests, and some try to pursue more than the one society thinks they're best at. I've always thought doing the same thing for 30 years could be indescribably boring, but then one's field is supposed to evolve, so perhaps there are two sides to that argument. It is very scary to see that 99% of employers won't look at Project Managers that do not have a recent certification. Project management needs to take changing parameters into account, like a recession, and "going with the flow" isn't something you can certify for. It matters not what you teach your gunner, beyond the basics, you won't know how she really functions until she has to perform under fire. You've heard the argument. But we are now at the point where an applicant has to have certifications as well as endless references, all of which to me means the employers have reached a record (overkill) level of insecurity - HR is a people skill, it is not painting by numbers. We need innovation, they say, to put America back on its feet - I have news for you: employing only "certified" people prevents innovation from happening, because we don't teach or employ people to think outside the box. In other words: Steve Jobs "made" it because he started a company, had he been employed by someone else he'd have likely taken his talents to do woodworking in his garage on Saturday afternoons. I had an interesting conversation with a Managing Director, the other day, who emphasized that the name of the game, in the current economic climate, is "risk avoidance". He is right, for the majority of enterprises - but the problem with not taking risks is that you don't grow, and the old rule is that if you do not grow, you shrink, because the world, and the world's population, do grow, and someone will step into that vacuum, and if that is not you, etc.
Let me put it differently - the middle of a recession, with no end in sight, is THE time to jump into market openings that aren't being exploited. There isn't an easier kill in the world than the insecure manager / director / businessman.
Funny to see Hoda Kotb
In many ways, this story highlights the fact that we develop technologies that are good at a single pupose, but are never tested extensively in the real world. Sony's Asimo robot, seen here in a recent demonstration, shows well how hard it is to get a device to do what comes naturally to humans, even after an astonishing 12 years of development - not to mention the 20 or so years of research that preceded Asimo's rollout. But yes, the nerds at Sony are ecstatic at their creation's new capability to hop on one foot. As I would be, to be honest.
Much to my pleasant surprise Microsoft invited me to join a developer meeting here in Seattle - one for and by Xbox/Kinect developers. This is where today's pictures come from - the one on the left is the Seattle Space Needle, seen from the terrace at Microsoft's 320 Westlake facility. It has been so long that I hung around lab environments, back in New York and Westchester, I'd forgotten how nice that informal, single purpose, talk-and-mingle environment is. And the guys (few women on the team, as is often the case in system development) are passionate about their box. Never having paid much attention to the Xbox, it was interesting to see how this is morphing into an advanced broadband social network, with software "offshoots" that facilitate all sorts of things, from the cloud, up to and including TV, cable networks, and the unavoidable Netflix. Of course, that's an attempt at an "all things to all people" product, which may work, considering gaming pays (one hopes...) for the direct development of the platform, so then living room capabilities are a perk, rather than a primary target. Like most gaming consoles, the Xbox is a full fledged home entertainment console-with-everything-that-does-everything, and Kinect, as a user interface, was very impressive to watch and use, especially since a version for Windows is on the way. To me, the more an interface is non-device specific, the better it is - I am, after all, one of the people who worked on technologies to put speech recognition in the telephone network, where you could pick up any telephone in downstate New York, dial 411, and have a recognizer on the line, should you want to use it. Imagine having Kinect on your Blackberry... I shall have to talk to my Microsoft friend about some of this.
The BBC's Mark Mardell has been broadcasting a series of retrospectives about Obama's presidency, presumably in light of the upcoming elections. While I understand the criticisms of Obama he mentions, it is kind of hard to figure out what the Prez could have done differently to improve the American economic situation. Much of what ails us today has its roots in previous administrations, and I believe especially in the ill advised Iraq war, while our very long and costly sojourn in Afghanistan will not have helped much either. Yes, going after Bin Laden and his cohorts, after 9/11, was a good thing, but the "re-countrifying" that happened there since, I don't know that that has helped anybody, in any way. Paying the bills for those two "adventures" will take many years, and the only reason we didn't get run out of Dodge, like the Russians, is allies, and an endless supply of money from both the US and the EU. Money that provides no benefits to anyone that I can see.
In the meantime, my job search nearly yielded a consulting gig, but one that was postponed the day before I was supposed to start. I do have some interesting conversations going, but nothing that I think will result in some advancement by tomorrow. Yes, it would be great to eventually get a new career move going, at the same time, I really would like to be back in the workforce, and able to kind of restart my life, which has more or less been on hold since I left Virginia, and gave my house back to the bank. There are, indeed, huge employment opportunities here in the Pacific Northwest, specifically with the computer companies that seem to sprout here every weekend, the other day I noticed Microsoft posting over 1,000 local jobs on LinkedIn, and that trend is followed at a slight distance by Amazon and T-Mobile, to name just a few technology companies local to Seattle.
Speaking of jobs, I walked past a gas station, and was reminded of the RFID readers that practically all gas pumps in the nation have, these days. As you can see in the picture, the pump has both a card reader and an RFID reader, so that set me to wonder what the point of introducing this new technology is. We've created a technology that is capable of being read remotely - on my EZPass, I can see the point, especially now that you can roar through the toll at 50 miles per hour, but for as long as I have magnetic stripe cards, why did the gas pump, and my new Nokia phone, get RFID capabilities? Don't get me wrong, I think the technology is nice, but I am not seeing how RFID solves any existing problems (it isn't replacing anything), or save money, and I wonder how much RFID has cost to develop en deploy, additional to the existing stripe technology. Note how RFID is called "Fastpay" in my example - but that principle, one swipe with the chip, hasn't worked for a long time, as security precautions now require you to go through the same steps as you would with a swipe card.
What's the issue? We seem, in the USA, to have gotten fixated on creating new technologies, in the hope we can repeat the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, when new internet technologies spawned new industries, and generated vast income for the country and the industry. Judging by what I see, we're not being successful. RFID isn't needed, so it's not generating income. Same for Facebook, Twitter, GroupOn - it reminds me of Voice Dialing in the phone network, great technology, the consumer liked it, but the consumer did not want to pay for it. Today, these technologies are used to sell smartphones - hey, kiddo, your Smartphone comes with RFID, Facebook, and Twitter!! Sure, but "kiddo" isn't going to pay for all that, nor are Facebook and Twitter - the phone provider, and the phone manufacturer are. And the advertisers? They pay Facebook and Twitter millions, in the faint hope that their logo on a two inch screen held by someone texting their boyfriend is going to sell snow tires.
Dream on.
Not going to happen.
Look around in the business world and you see that many providers of advanced consumer services get into trouble. I can't prove it off the cuff, but don't you think it is strange that mobile telephony stalwarts, like Nokia and RIM, who are among the producers of bread-and-butter mobile telephones, seem to no longer be able to hack it, financially? The smartphone, which carriers are encouraging us to use, may be replacing the "regular" phone, but I think both carriers and information providers are hoping to increase revenues through these devices, and to be honest, I am not at all sure that's possible. If you look at what companies spend money on, it is not on advertising, but on the capabilities to track the consumer, and predict and influence their buying behaviour. What nobody seems to want to think about is that even if you can successfully predict that Joey is going to buy asswipe at Walmart in Hicksville, Joey still isn't going to shit more than he did before, so the amount of asswipe he needs is completely stagnant. But: you've subsidized Joey's tool to find cheaper asswipe, so you now make less money, and it costs you more to sell it to him. This makes sense? How?
I know somebody who made a fortune selling snowtires, but he did it by figuring out where there wasn't a handy supplier, and set up shop there. He knew it would snow there, with a level of guarantee - he did it in Alaska. The idea that you can do the same thing in places where it doesn't always snow, then somehow (on the internet) convince people to change their tires in November, then somehow (on the internet) convince people to come to your shop - when you don't know which interweb these folks use, and you don't know if it's going to snow or not, is - umm, a gamble? Not, I am afraid, a business model. The guy who did the snow tire fortune, an avid activist on the early internet, and a great friend of mine, ran into something he could not control - he got skin cancer, and died three months after being diagnosed. Neither here nor there, I know, but it is important to understand there are many things you simply cannot control or calculate, and that is almost "first base" - don't try, go for what you know, and what and who you can rely on. Again, I said it before - incubators are a great way to get new technology ventures off the ground, but what happens with them after that is a very large unknown, whatever the Pivot Table Guru tells you. Hotmail, my favourite example, in the end was never more than a very large people database, that was acquired as such by Microsoft. From there, it went nowhere, and it and Yahoo Mail became mostly spammer paradise, both are today virtually unusable due to the amount of advertising Microsoft and Yahoo try to insert into the interfaces, and the resultant need to access them using a broadband connection - reason why Google's GMail is the unequivocal winner. 90% of the Earth's population, if not more, after all, does not have broadband - apart from which, only a couple of years ago a 64 kbit ISDN link was called broadband, in India.
The pictures, today, have absolutely nothing to do with anything - they show some of the amazing fall colours and skies I am discovering, my first autumn in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy....
Apparently, Apple and Microsoft have both taken out patents on "touchless" control technology - the computer-human interface that involves gestures and motion, rather than keys, buttons and touch surfaces. This is a much more involved issue than it appears at first glance, because keys, buttons and touch surfaces are all based on ways of manual control that humans have used for tens of thousands of years, but "touchless" technologies are not. They're fully in the realm of science fiction, and nobody knows what in all that comes natural to humans. Or even if anything in all that can be natural. Perhaps we should teach all children sign language in schools, and create an app that can read that.
You may not have noticed this, but when you look at the displays that are used in aircraft cockpits, they are for the most part representations of analog instruments. That's not accidental, and has nothing to do with wanting to emulate "old style" aircraft for aging pilots - years of research yielded the result that those circular displays with coloration can be read much faster, by humans, than numeric displays. While the only way to tell that it is exactly 08:22hrs is some kind of numeric display, in most cases that level of accuracy isn't necessary. What is, in this example, is that it is morning, and that it is after 8, but before 9 - you have no idea how much work the brain has to do to determine the math for that, if the information is numerical rather than segmental. And as it turned out when Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, IBM, Raytheon, and probably half a dozen other aircraft and computer manufacturers did their research, is that the human brain is an analog device. It "knows" the locations of noon, six o'clock, nine o'clock and three o'clock, referenced to shadows, light and dark, and sun and moon phases, that's our natural universe. We don't think in terms of accurate readings, we don't need those unles we're engineering, we think in approximations. That doesn't mean "inaccurate", analog can be very accurate, but much of the time the exact numerical reading isn't really relevant. With a threshold set at 180 degrees, the issue isn't when a temperature is 181, but the fact that the threshold is exceeded, and in which direction. The human brain is very good at discerning thresholds (for "good", you may read "fast"), but less "acute" in terms of gauging the exact state or amount of a reading. You have to, after all, realize that we are asking our brains to measure and determine things for which it was never designed.
The human brain was designed to deal with the consequences of human locomotion, at 3 miles (walking) to 6 miles (running) an hour. The aforementioned airliner - take the Boeing 757 I looked at in my research - moves at 530 miles per hour, or at least 88 times faster than a running human. And that means that the response time necessary to deal with unexpected events, in the airplane, is far smaller, something like 1.1 percent, way beyond our physical capabilities. Let me put it another way - you may, like I do, know somebody with the dexterity to grab a flying insect from the air. Now create an insect that moves at 88 times that speed, from 4.5 miles per hour to 396 miles an hour, and see if your flycatcher can still catch the fly. To be honest, in all likelihood the flycatcher won't even see the fly - it will be covering 176 meters every second, almost two football fields. If you've ever driven on the German Autobahn, looked in your rearview mirror, seen the headlights shining far in the distance behind you, looked again two seconds later, and noticed that Porsche 911 Carrera now right on your tail, you'll know what I am banging on about.
So: there are things we know about. They include circular displays, levers, buttons, keys, lights, things that have been around for millenia. And there are things we do not know about - how to control things by thought, or touch, or viewing, things we are beginning to technologically understand, but have no "built in" way of controlling or using.
Antilock brakes are probably the best example - the majority of people don't use them, because the impulsive human response in an emergency on a wet road is NOT to brake as hard as you can. I have taken to exercising this, taking my car out to an icy or snowy or sopping wet parking lot (one that is empty, or largely empty) at the beginning of the rainy season, accelerating hard, then stomping on the brakes and letting the car do what it wants. Then repeat. And repeat a bit more. The only way to teach your brain that this is OK is doing it, over and over again, year after year, and doing it with your loved ones, as well. Otherwise, by the time you think to use your anti lock brakes, it will be too late, and all you have to look forward to is your insurance bill going up. Think, too, that these brakes work on paved smooth roads, on sandy roads, on gravel roads, anywhere your tires can lose grip. But as I said, all of that is completely counter to what your brain, with its limited motional capability, will want to do, given that it wasn't even designed to deal with 40 mile an hour speeds. We have cleverly gone beyond our design limit, and leaving the solution to manufacturers really is not where it is at. I've seen several studies that have it the installation of antilock brakes on modern cars has had no discernible statistical effect on accident and death rates. It is something I am willing to accept, since using ABS brakes isn't part of driver training, but I do not know how you would prove something like that.
And here is one for you: the country of Australia
Happy Halloween!! ---->
Jeff Bezos the next Steve Jobs? I don't think so. I'll grant you the man is technologically savvy - likely more so than Jobs. I can't help but repeat that Jobs took existing concepts and repackaged them - the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, were all "revamps", variations on what was there before. Done very well, but Jobs' genius is that of a marketeer, not a technologist. Sticking a tiny hard disk in a music player, instead of the tape player that was there before, is innovation, not invention.
Bezos is an entirely different kettle of fish. He has built an empire based on narrow profit margins in a technologized delivery pattern - you could be nasty and say that Jobs had it easy, because he only made expensive gear with high profit margins - Apple is for its shareholders, not its customers. Bezos used technology to build his mail order company in such a way that he was able to kill the brick-and-mortar bookstore, making use of the absence of sales tax on out-of-state orders, and his ability to store-and-forward cheaply. Then the Kindle came - the article may say Amazon doesn't have a band of followers, like Apple does, but you'll see folks reading things on Kindles wherever in the world you go, millions and millions of them, with its amazing battery life, and no need for WiFi and iTunes, as you get a lifetime subscription with the thing, if you buy the 3G version. No frills, no nonsense, no "apps". Just a simple monochrome electronic book - in the world of Apple, nothing is simple. The primary reason you don't hear a lot of the Kindle evangelists is that their devices always work, night and day, wherever in the world they are. If you want to know how impressive that is, look at the recent Blackberry outage...
In many ways (and this is pure conjecture on my part) it seems to me Jobs was a prima donna, and Bezos is more of an engineering type with a business bent. Jobs saw someone else's idea, and improved on it - it is Bezos who is, of the two, the real ideas man. I do keep reading that Apple is the technology company with the largest valuation - I honestly don't know what that means, by the way, other than American journalists trying to "write up" American enterprise better than it is. GE is larger and makes more money, HP is larger and makes more money, and if I dig around enough you'll end up wondering what "technology" really means.
A teen told me, the other day, that using GPS when driving around is too much technology. Umm, yes, but then maps are technology, too, especially since maps, today, area created using satellite technology, the day of the surveyor (which I suppose you could call a "craftsperson") are long gone. Maps, for a very long time, have been pure databases you can output in a variety of ways - one is a printing press, another is a small computer.
Going back to the Kindle and the iPad, consumers buy Kindles so they can read books. That's a very simple purpose, and not one you can "re-define" or talk about as "what it could do" - it is the ultimate niche device - key factor one was battery life, nobody is going to buy an e-book from Amazon if they have to recharge their reader three times to be able read the whole thing. The iPad is a handheld computer, as is an iPhone, and as such tries to be all things to all people, at a huge markup. The Kindle is an affordable vehicle for Bezos to make more money. iPad and iPhone try to make more money for Apple, too, using iTunes, but not by being affordable. Economically, at least in my book, it is the choice between being a supermarket, and a designer store. Bezos does the supermarket, Jobs the designer store. That, my friends, is about the largest difference between business models you can have, and that makes Jeff Bezos a latter day Sam Walton, not a latter day Steve Jobs - what ties the three together is that they sell to the consumer.
While both business models require a great deal of skill, I have always felt that being Dior - or Lady GaGa - is a lot easier than being Walmart. I may be wrong at that - I spent much of my early career in Europe in the upmarket world, then came to America and learned the excitement of being in the phone company, in an era when competition in the world of the telephone started. I felt the mass market to be more exciting than the niche market, but that is very personal, of course. You have to remember that I come from the Netherlands, paradoxically a country small enough that the size of its mass market is equivalent to an American niche market.
The Wikipedia entry for amazon.com has it that its business plan was unusual, in that the company did not expect to turn a profit for four or five years. Anybody who has ever started a business will tell you not to expect profits in the first few years, and Hotmail began the trend of selling things on the basis of content - when Microsoft bought Hotmail, in 1997, the company had never made a penny profit. By extension, if you decide it will take you five years to build to critical mass, that's fine - the key factor is that there is a business plan.
All of this, of course, leads me to a discussion that is bigger than a blog entry: the need for standardization. Manufacturers continually try to hijack both the world of the internet and the world of the mobile phone. Microsoft tried for many years to impose its own operating system extensions on the browser. Google is trying to do the same thing today, if it can get Chrome to become the browsing standard, especially supported by Android, it can take over the world. I guess Google does not remember Microsoft tried that already, with Windows and Internet Explorer, and failed. Condemning consumers to a world where they cannot get some information because they use one particular browser isn't really user friendly. It is a wonder that American consumers have accepted for so long that if you had a cellphone from AT&T you couldn't use the Verizon network - if you tried that in Europe, Asia or Africa you'd be out on your backside real quick.
I'll get into that a bit more in my next blog entry. Because: this one started with Jobs versus Bezos, and that, too, is in the end a story of standardization. If Apple knew how to work with the co-opetition, I'd have owned an i-Device a long time ago. As it is, I just won't pay extra money for a device I can only use the way the maker wants me to. That's kinda ludicrous.
I am seeing some amazing news items around, can't help it. Muammar Kadhafi was shot in the head? What did you think they were going to do? Retire him to Sharm El Sheik? Send him to Venezuela to give Chavez (cured? with a moonface? I don't think so) his cortisone? I am all for criticizing wrong-doers, but I am not sure this sad ending to a crazy era warrants "investigations". Bury them and be done with it, methinks. And Amy Winehouse did drink herself to death. I recall her father and boyfriend saying she'd "gone clean" recently. Yah. Stop interviewing relatives, I say.
No matter where you look, there's upheaval. The American presidential race is getting crazier by the day, with candidates united in not knowing how to "fix the economy", while the Europeans have their own economic problems, punctuated by countries that need bailing out. That latter bit, Greece, Italy and the like being in financial trouble, kind of reminds me of the times before the European Union, when those countries were known to be impoverished, their currencies worth little, but great, and cheap, holiday destinations, in many cases run by dictators - Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Wonder if there is a correlation with where they are today.
Research published in the Dutch medical press has it that the flu shot (I got mine yesterday) has no provable effect on the incidence and severity of influenza. I apologize for this being in Dutch, the article does not seem to have been translated into English.
The article compiles statistics published elsewhere, much of that is in English, and I'll assume the results have been properly corrected for population growth and particular strains of influenza and the like. My issue with this is that, unless you have a real control group, one that is demographically similar and geographically and socially "in the same ballpark" you can never prove conclusively that something does or does not work, you can only conjecture. I think there is a good chance they have a point, but by comparing statistics whose baseline isn't stable - population growth, some due to immigration from less developed countries, for instance - you can't possibly arrive at scientifically valid conclusions. It is especially problematical when you take into consideration that other researchers come to completely different conclusions, again based on existing scientific research. It gets pretty close to "you can find what you want to believe" in terms of information available to the public. "No effect" in one article, and "preventing 59% of hospitalizations" in another simply cannot both be true.
I am mentioning this because I see the overuse of statistics in the presidential campaigns - look at the Perry proposal, where Americans will be able to choose between their existing tax rate and a 20% flat rate for income tax. How would you predict the effect of this? There isn't any way known to man that lets you figure out beforehand what choice the tax payer will make, so the only effect of this proposal, if it were to become reality, is that the Treasury will not in any way be able to predict what the national income is going to be. At the very least, there will be a lot of people who will be trying to pay less taxes. In a time where Section 8 Housing finance for low income renters has already dried up, you really have to ask yourself whether experimenting with the tax base and possibly reducing it without an emergency brake (which I think that proposal does) is a good idea. I think not. I think this is a huge risk.
Let me put it this way - the entire discussion about Steve Jobs
A BBC News article article entitled "Searching for the next Google" seems to address the issue of job growth in the United States - even the White House now talks of solving the economic crisis through employment. But that is not the way it works, this time - employment went to Asia, where the labour intensive manufacturing is done, and going to a technology incubator to create employment - well, as the BBC puts it: most new companies created are those that only employ one person: so called "jobless entrepreneurship". You cannot open up an incubator at MIT, and then expect an Apple Computer to roll out the other side - incubators are a gamble, not an economic model. Sorry, by the way, for reusing this picture, which I had on October 7 - couldn't think of a better illustration for computer manufacturing, at least not without spending hours and hours searching my two terabyte storage disk.
Let's look at the statistics again (these are from Wikipedia): Apple Computer, which has 50,000-ish employees, turns over US$ 108.249 billion (FY 2011), while its competitor Samsung turns over US$ 220.1 billion (2010) - with 344,000 (2010) employees - I'll leave the math to you. So, you could be nasty, and say Apple makes proportionally vastly more money, or look at it another way - Samsung, unlike Apple, manufactures its own gear, and so contributes much more to the South Korean economy than Apple does to the American economy - because the contract employees that make Apple's stuff aren't in their annual report. Apple does not manufacture itself, and the money it pays its contract manufacturers goes overseas. The economic impact of an enterprise should be in their annual report.
So if you absolutely want to think jobs mean growth for the economy, look at the reasons why so many companies don't manufacture themselves. I am not getting into that, for the purpose of this blog entry, save for to say that if "they" can do it, so can "we", and we seem more motivated to make money via outsourcing than go through the hassle of setting up plants and do the necessary engineering.
Other than that, Apple didn't come from an incubator, and you could say that the folks that started Apple were motivated enough that they created what they needed to get going by themselves. Same thing with HP. And both companies were successful, and have a "culture". We need to ask ourselves whether incubators enable softies to succeed, only to have them collapse down the road, "when the going gets tough". It is a good question to ponder.
In many ways, we deal with the economic crisis the same way we do with cars - with our congested roads and sky high gasoline prices, our cars are engineered so we can spend more time on the road while we commute, get the baseball scores, access the internet on our WiFi equipped smartphones, and are where possible turned into "hybrids" so they can be more wasteful while appearing more efficient. Because, kids, WiFi in the car takes energy, and we would not need WiFi if we didn't have 70 mile commutes - one way. For most of us, going into the office every day is totally unnecessary, as we have the technological capability to do all we need to do from home or grandma's. We would do much better, economically, if we got all those commuters out of their cars, and their cars off the road, but as you can see around you, that is the one thing nobody is working on. And that's what we see in the incubators - nobody is incubating end-to-end production, including manufacturing, all we do is teach people to make money. And that, my friends, is why the railway stations and the railways in China, one of the largest investment programs on Earth, are being built with the hired help from German and French engineers, and not Americans.
The picture to the right is just a random Seattle view, actually the first time I have been in Seattle proper in over 30 years. I was invited while working for the Dutch press, by Boeing, writing a series of articles about the (then) new Flight Management Systems, and Autoland 3B, something KLM and British Airways had adopted to cope with the frequently fogbound airports in Amsterdam and London.
To continue on the "lost data" track I started below, for years now I have been using Microsoft Outlook as my central repository, backed up using a couple of Google online applications, and I only buy phones that will synchronize with that package. Previously, that is, when I still worked for Verizon, I used Lotus Notes / Domino, our corporate standard, and that limited me to getting either Nokia phones, or Blackberrys, as both have a synchronization package that will talk to Lotus Notes as well as Microsoft Outlook. That made it easy to switch to Outlook when I left Verizon - I could have technically continued with Lotus software, but as my email, contact lists and databases were full of information I could not, from a regulatory perspective, continue to have access to, it was easier to ditch Lotus Notes altogether.
As if RIM reads my mind, the company that so many of us rely on for integrated messaging - it is what I like to call what the Blackberry does - springs a leak this week. First EMEA (a.k.a. "the rest of the world"), then Canada, then the US begin to lose Blackberry services. For those of you who don't use the device and its messaging, it was, for a long time, a smartphone whose data facilities you could use while traveling overseas, without having to pay those humongous data rates. A quick call to T-Mobile before a trip, a $19.99 transfer, and I am able to surf the web, tether my laptop, use my bill paying app, do whatever, in a Chinese restaurtant on the Polish border, or in a Finnish Restaurant in Beijing. There is such a thing, Take Five, a favourite expat hangout, though they do serve a mean Peking Duck. There is a subway stop very near there, on the corner of Jianguomenwai Avenue and Dongdaqiao Rd.
One thing you may want to pay attention to, in all this Blackberry mayhem - they are, apparently, from their wholly owned infrastructure, serving some seventy million customers worldwide. That is pretty impressive, even if they are, temporarily, not serving them. As I understand the reporting, they experienced some kind of switch failure, and now they're stopped down by the accumulated backlog of messages. That's painful. It makes good sense, as well, up to a point.
Something that should not happen is that a systems failure in one place cascades to other systems. If that is what happened. Blackberry says the failover did not fail over. That's possible. One problem with having 70 million users is that you cannot simulate what happens during a catastrophic failure. It isn't something you can try out on your Dell server at home. What especially worries me, in those types of scenarios, is the system's response when a large volume of failures occurs, and the users all start "retrying". You now have a system that is trying to get rid of its backlog, while an avalanche of new processes is hitting its "in tray". That can cascade very quickly, and very disastrously. It does not matter whether you tell users at that point to "lay off", they won't. They'll retry, they're human. And that isn't something you can engineer for - that is, you can, but the cost of providing non-blocking service is simply prohibitive.
Interesting in the article about Blackberry's systems problem are some of the numbers. Especially the 99.999 percent uptime ascribed to "the traditional telephone network (which) is considered to be the most reliable communications network". Sure. This is a good example of something that lacks definition. You see, if you look at the delivery - that is, the uptime of the telephone network from terminal to terminal, a.k.a. from handset to handset - you don't get anywhere near that number, commonly referred to as "five nines". If you consider the failures in handset, power delivery, and the distribution system, which is to a large extent dependent on poles, you can't get to "five nines". And that, end-to-end, is the only good way of measuring your reliability. 99.999% in the Central Office, sure, but not beyond that. Beyond that, the Blackberry calculation, 99.97, or "three nines", is probably more reasonable. As the article points out, that's 160 minutes downtime per year, on average - that is two hours and fourty minutes out of 8,760 hours.
I am saying this because that "five nines" stuff was part of the work I did in the phone company - work, by the way, that is done more by vendors than by the Bellheads themselves, who, these days, are relegated to writing the specifications, and testing they are adhered to. But the voice recognition system we designed and built was fully "five nines" - interestingly, for that to be guaranteed you need to include 24/7/365 service technicians, manuals, spare parts, delivery in a snow storm, and what have you, in your planning and calculations. It is, as I pointed out above, when I mentioned poles, an end-to-end calculation. It goes a bit like "when you pick up the handset, how high is your chance of not getting a dialtone". Once upon a time, when the emergency operator, and 911, were still under a government mandate, before cellular telephony took over the world, this is how we were required to guarantee that an ambulance or fire truck could get to a victim in record time - even the geographical distribution of public telephones, call boxes, once was part of that design - when your house is on fire, you may not be able to use your own phone.
I ought to add to this that we engineered operator services to be "high availability" - that is, if a failure occurred, we could continue to operate, but with half the capacity. This in contrast to "fault tolerance", which is engineered to continue operating through a failure, without any loss of capacity (and no, that's not just building redundancy, there's more at stake). I calculated, at the time, that the "HA" platform cost some $400,000 to build, and the "Fault Tolerant" system $ 1.4 million. You can see why Directory Assistance got the "cheaper" treatment, but Emergency (where there are lives to be saved) the more expensive one. After all, you, the subscriber, pays for all this.
Last but not least, people, please be aware of one thing: what happened to our Blackberrys is a perfect example of How The Cloud Works. Because RIM's worldwide network is an archetypal example of a very large cloud, with as much redudancy and failover built in as they can manage (BES can fall back on BIS, but not the other way around). So, since you have to access it in some way, and since you're accessing it from a device with only a single access point, this is what we refer to as a single point of failure. At some point, even in the most sophisticated version of The Cloud, there is a such a SPOF. Even if it is just the one guy trying to look at two screens at the same time.
For me, too, the adventure began on a PDP-11, one in a London suburb, running ITT Dialcom software, that I leased space on from British Telecom, and began learning UNIX. Within a few years, I lived in Manhattan, did an SVR3 stint at Bell Labs in New Jersey, then gravitated back across the Tappan Zee, to NYNEX Science & Technology. Without Dennis, I'd never have laughed as hard, when I saw a pickup truck with the license plate /dev/car in RTP. Just know that whenever you type a URL into your browser bar, or log into your router, you're touching Dennis' soul.
If you want to know where to get cheap stuff, all you need to do is look at the outlets that don't advertise. Umm, WalMart, Aldi, Trader Joe's, I am not seeing a lot of K-Mart advertising, Safeway, I am specifically looking at TV, cable TV and internet advertising here. It is beginning to look like merchants that do run advertising campaigns don't sell cheap goods.
I guess what I am saying is that the word of mouth stuff, as this recession worsens, works. Safeway sells a $1.99 breakfast sandwich
Speaking of "cheaper", CNN has an article entitled "10 ways mobile gadgets have changed our lives" - and conveniently forgets to define "us". The majority of people do not have smartphones, a.k.a. "handheld computing devices", and therefore can't surf the web or email or chat while they're on the road, or are still relegated to WAP phone
So what has changed? Being reachable isn't anything new, there were pagers back in the 1970s, and long distance walkie-talkies, and radio telephones, too. Yes, they're much more affordable, today, but back when I worked with a Gamma team to report on the coronation of Queen Beatrix - April 30, 1980 - we had all team members on one or the other electronic communicating device, same as we would now. And we increasingly restrict ourselves from using our new tools.
After somebody had a car crash while on a conference call on his mobile phone, we couldn't have work conversations while driving any more. Makes sense. And now adolescents can't use their phones while driving, we can't text in most jurisdictions, or use handheld phones, there are places that jam cellphones - and yet cars are equipped with Bluetooth and touch screens, both of which ought to probably be prohibited.
So I am not so sure the list is correct, or appropriate. I can tell you that thanks to the cellular telephone, I now carry a handheld navigation device, something I find infinitely useful, I maintain my address book and location database in one place (well, two, actually, I have a backup in case my primary goes belly-up). If you take into consideration that most people in Singapore, Hong Kong and Surinam have two cellular numbers, you can assume that, like me, those folks largely have two devices.
And that is what CNN, where the journalists appear to do research by walking around their Atlanta head office, doesn't get. Using one device for all those purposes makes no sense, and can be dangerous. You don't email or answer a call on your navigation device - when I use my Nokia C7 to navigate, I take calls and check mail on my Blackberry. It isn't any different from the PC - we now all have a laptop, but many have a laptop and a desktop, or two laptops, using different devices for different purposes. After all, you bake a pie in your main oven, but the kids will heat frozen fries in the microwave oven, right? It is one of those areas where Facebook got it right - kids want to do all their stuff on Facebook, because they do it on a mobile device. You just can't - conveniently - Youtube, email, text, Facebook, Twitter, game, what have you, on one single device - there aren't enough buttons and screen real estate. So, today, the kids do the laptop-and-iPhone combo, and tomorrow - well, who knows, one thing that is clear is that kids do not use their phones for voice communications - it is all text. If there is voice needed, they do that on a phone, while using their mobile device for something else.
Zuckerbaby is getting older, so he may lose touch with what kids do, and someone else - someone younger - will step in. It is kind of automatic - Facebook is getting complicated to the point that you won't be able to operate it from a smartphone, and the functionality Zuck is adding will slow it down. That'll kill it for kids, who do not have any measure of patience. Besides, not only kids use Facebook from phones, grownups in countries where there isn't a decent data network use Facebook in the same way, for similar reasons - on (mostly) Blackberrys - one stop communicatering. The only reason the kids sometimes still need me is because they cannot always figure out how to get a file from one place to the other. That's where an old fogie like myself comes in handy - I actually know the UNIX that lives underneath web servers, so I can use my web server as a file and database repository and transfer point. Once they have a way around that (Facebook would die, as in, stop working, if it allowed file transfer) I too will be on my way to the Old Fogie Farm. And maybe Zuck, too - nobody on Facebook needs Skype - kids do not use Skype, and we already have Skype, and those who do not have it, want it on their smartphone, not on their Facebook. So maybe Zuck is over the line, too, already...
Rather randomly going back to having backup devices, I just realized why I do that. Funny, all this time. You see, all the time I worked at NYNEX Science & Technology every platform I worked on had to be high availability and redundant. The service level mandated by Federal and State governments simply made that necessary. Everything had to be high availability, and 9-1-1 had to be no-fault. High availability, meaning you can lose the calls in progress, when a fault occurs, but the next call in has to be completed, and you must not lose more than 50% of your center capacity.. And then you talk to people on bulletin boards, and friends and acquaintances, and they lose information because they don't copy their information, and they do not have a backup device. It is like that for most of you, right? Your iPhone breaks, you lose your phone book and your email and half your pictures?
More about this... in my next installment.
I am assuming you have seen the deceptive lifestyle ads that have been plaguing the news media for a while now - saw another one at CNN today, shown here. I am just surprised that CNN and others are OK with these "ad services" - this one was particularly stupid, as they appear to have found men and women models with the same gianormous cup sizes. I can't help but think CNN and others should be able to make money from real advertisers, instead of these scam artists. Whenever the Fed takes down another Penis Enlargement
Steve Jobs and Apple Computer really enticed me back into the computer industry, after I left IBM around 1973. I'd had enough of mainframe computing, IBM and other things American weren't exactly popular in The Netherlands, and the world of media, press and theatre, always important in Amsterdam, soon sucked me in. When the Apple ][ was introduced, in 1977, a friend managed to cut an agreement with Cupertino to get representation of the computer in the Benelux, and after writing some advertising copy for the nascent company I became its engineering director. Then, I ended up managing director ad-interim, when my friend mistakenly was carted off to a French jail, when French customs didn't like his convoy - a convoy in which the 16th Karma-Pa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, was traveling.
They did let my friend out of jail, but soon Apple began to realize the gold mine it was sitting on, the personal computer era had begun, and started up its own subsidiaries in most Western countries, cutting out the middle man. By that time, I had made my move across the little pond, and was living in England, we're in 1979 at this point.
I am not meaning to do yet another Jobs obituary, but it would seem to me Steve Jobs' career was sort of hacked into two: the invention of the original personal computer, which, from a commercial point of view, was certainly largely an Apple product, until IBM ran the Macintosh off the rails. This was and episode I saw up close on Wall Street, at the First Boston Corporation, where the Mac, by 1988, was relegated to "desktop publishing" on account of its lack of protected memory, while the latest brokerage workstation, with windows (yes, Windows) giving a simultaneous view of the stock markets of New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago was running on an IBM PC-AT with Windows 286. Bill had eclipsed Steve.
For Steve Jobs to come back with an avalanche of consumer electronics that ended up financing a completely new generation of Apple computers, running Unix and X-Windows, can only be called a stroke of genius, and that he certainly was. Pity he died young-ish, but, I suppose, he had a good innings, and he most certainly leaves a huge legacy, as he flies with the angels.
In my quest to answer interview questions, I've finally written up some of the stuff I have done, over the years, in a more coherent manner than before. A Microsoft executive mentioned it, the other day, I am multi-disciplinary, and my various skillsets aren't that easy to combine, for an HR person or hiring manager. Especially here in the United States, where often a manager will shy away from an applicant they can't follow, often because they're afraid the person will go off at a tangent, or has too many interests to stay focused. I wouldn't apply for a job I couldn't work up an interest in, but that isn't something you can make people believe. Similarly, loyalty is hard to prove, although you would think that is what references are for. Then again, you wouldn't come up with a reference who would badmouth you, so it is complicated.
I've written a few cover letters for various skillsets, and what I would like is for those of you who have critiqued my resume before to take a look, when you have time and feel like it, and let me know what you think. I put them, for your convenience, in one webpage document with three sections, here.
Anybody, really, you can use this link to comment if you don't have my email address or can't use LinkedIn. And should you, reading my cover letters, experience a desperate urge to have me come and work for you, don't hesitate... *grin*. Especially if you need a technologist who understands how to fit your new "thing" into the old guy's "widget", I can do you.
(Cool, huh, that Kindle Fire
That in itself is intimidating enough, but for him to spend this much time on me is gratifying and scary at the same time. Having said that, this is one of the companies that is forever looking for talent - a couple of weeks ago, they posted 1,083 local jobs at their careers site, in one day. That is a hell of a lot, I do not recall ever seeing any employer do that (but I don't see them all, to be honest). So - as one does after an interview, another resume revamp, and I am writing additional documentation about some of my expertise - we Europeans aren't that good at blowing our own trumpet, I am very much of the "read between the lines" generation, and that is something that does not work here in the United States. My career, after all, has more than a few "firsts"...
- I had my first internet account in London in 1980,
- my first laptop with built-in modem from Miami,FL, in 1984,
- in 1985 turned up my very own MCI Mail Link between MCI and British Telecom Gold, where I leased service, working with the Vint Cerf, who, as it turned out, worked from an office in Rye, New York, only a few miles from where I would, in 1990, join the NYNEX research lab in White Plains, New York,
- a former colleague at the First Boston Corp. reminded me I was the first person he ever saw with a mobile phone, in Manhattan in 1987, and
- my first website, in The Netherlands, in 1994;
- I turned up (myself) the first ever speech recognition in the public telephone system in New York in 1997, in the Bronx, New York, and
- had my first internet domain in 1999.
- In 2000, Verizon took the first call through its new Long Distance subsidiary, a company I was brought down from New York to help build in Arlington, VA, it was the first time a regulated "landline" phone company designed and built a deregulated carrier company with Federal approval.
NYNEX' nationwide expansion, 9/11 and Federal Stuff kind of got in the way of "new things" for a while, but I went and got into research off my own bat after my Verizon management buyout. Mostly, I have been working on cellular internet implementations overseas - in the United States, there is little incentive for this, as DSL, FIOS and cable internet have taken over our world. Curiously, in Western Europe, arguably more advanced than the United States in terms of its installed fiber base, cellular internet enjoys a higher uptake than it does here, possibly caused by the (regulated) interoperability of competing networks there.
- I found an HSDPA mobile telephone with full GPS based navigation in the Philippines in 2007, that wasn't something you could get in the United States. It did (and does) 3.5G; then in Singapore and Hong Kong, now virtually everywhere outside of North America. Tethered, too. Interestingly, HSDPA, what is called 3.5G "over there", has been available in many overseas places since 2006, and when the terminology "4G" is used in the United States, most of the time they're talking about 3.5G. The use of "4G" obfuscates the fact we're aeons behind Europe and Asia.
- I tested RIM's T-Mobile Blackberry 9700 on NTT Docomo's 3.5G Tokyo network, in 2008, until then not a network any Western mobile telephone could use,
- I got myself a Fory multistandard mobile telephone with touch screen and worldwide TV reception in 2008, in Beijing, where they still play with technology - and went back
- in 2010, when I got my first ZTE 3G wireless internet dongle on TD-SCDMA, using China Mobile's home grown Chinese high speed wireless standard - interesting because the Chinese government, nominally still owner of all telecommunications in the People's Republic, is trying to implement a high speed cellular standard that does not involve paying royalties to Qualcomm or Americans, or using their technologies.
- Equally in 2010, I put a member of my family on mobile internet in Indonesia, enabling them to keep up with the home front in Europe using Skype, a Chinese Dell laptop, and a 3.5G dongle. Special, because it has not been long since Indonesia was a telecommunications third world country. Today, in the middle of metropolitan Jakarta, you can Skype with video on their wireless XL network - I am not a little proud I am one of the team that started that company, and began the GSM network build, a bunch of New Yorkers competing with networks set up for the Indonesians by the Dutch PTT and German Deutsche Telekom. With no small thanks to our expertise, drive, and Indonesian future vision, today, Indonesia has the highest growth rate in the world in mobile internet. Teens to pensioners in Indonesia Facebook on millions and millions of Blackberrys...
All told, I am seeing my job hunt result in serious interviews, hopefully resultant to my "new and improved" resume - FWIW, you can find that here. But I am finding out I really have not put together a coherent story of my technical professional fortes - mobile telephony, 24/7 operations, risk management, disaster recovery, and high availability systems. Especially in the latter, I have experience like nobody's business.
Friend M., has a colleague who is a former auto mechanic, who saved my backside by replacing the A/C compressor
I can't prove it, but I think the overhating problems and the noises were all caused by the compressor failing progressively, nothing to do with the radiator at all. The dealership, meanwhile, wanted another $1,100 to replace the compressor, but thankfully mechanic M. said he could do it for much less, and I set about finding the replacement compressor on the internet.
That was not the easiest thing in the world. I went to a web merchant I had used before, autopartswarehouse.com in California, and promptly got "done over". The compressor they sent me, allegedly the right model for my Durango, was not, and the refrigerant I ordered, according to the website "in stock", was suddenly on backorder - after they had charged me. Well, yes, they said, that happens because orders come in from multiple places, so the systems don't always get the latest update. This, of course, is bullshit - your inventory can only be in one system, so once the last item has been purchased, other systems can't put that order in, an order system can only pull one inventory number at a time. For that not to work means that they don't have their web system set up properly, and they hope you'll sit there and wait. I did not, and asked for my money back, which they did speedily, to their credit.
I found the correct compressor with acpartshouse.com, in Texas, and these folks provided much more detail in terms of not only getting the right part for my car, but making sure I had a compatible model number, something the other outfit didn't even ask for. It was a little (about $30) more expensive, and they charged shipping, which the Autopartswarehouse had not, but I now have a rebuilt, perfectly fitting, perfectly working, A/C compressor in the Durango.
Autopartswarehouse capped it all off by charging me a 10% "restocking fee", even though they had sent me the wrong model compressor. This was exacerbated by huge delays in their customer service. They use a call- and service centre that I assume is in the Philippines, and that works well, but is scaled so you end up spending an hour on hold before getting to an agent. Again to their credit, the center works well, excellent English, no communications problems, but between not being able to get hold of them swiftly, and them not returning calls via their message system, I was not able to get them to ship me the right model compressor. I pointed this out to them, and they did refund my "restocking fee". From my perspective, though, if they don't have their parts and inventory systems set up right, and you can't get to them on the phone in less than 15 minutes, I will not buy from them again. When something in my car is broken I need the right part, providing that is not rocket science.
Here is a bit of video, showing the A/C compressor cycling, as it should. By the way, the A/C in your car comes on when you start your car, even if you have it switched off, as it removes moisture from your ventilation system and windshield while the engine and car warm up. This isn't something you can bypass, as a clever but elderly neighbour insisted was possible on his Honda. It isn't.
If there were an "endless" market for mobile telephones, I expect there would not be the kind of lawsuits we see occurring between Apple and Samsung today. The idea of pushing each other's products off the market is somewhat self defeating, I would suggest - you compete by making a better product, not by spending your clients' hard earned dollar$ in courts - every lawsuit either reduces your profits, or increases your prices. And when I see one of my nieces jumping up and down for joy after replacing her iPhone with a Galaxy "Samsung Galaxy S II Zwart", the Samsung being both cheaper and better than the iPhone, according to her, it would seem to me Apple needs to be careful. I've said that before - Samsung
Add to this Verizon Wireless' sudden insistence that Samsung should not be impeded in handset sales by Apple, and I really have to wonder whether Apple knows what it is doing. Perhaps it is not sufficiently aware that Verizon Wireless is 50% owned by Vodafone, the largest wireless carrier on earth, which has a vested interest in an "uninterruptible" relationship with Samsung. This is not about my not liking Apple as a company - you really can't say much in the negative about an American company that delivers shareholder value the way Apple does - but about my amazement at Apple's actions, which could, in the long run, cost it dearly. You generally don't pick on those six times your size, unless you really have ammunition. I guess we'll see..
In an article in the Dutch Volkskrant, its "science editor" Maarten Keulemans (whose scientific credentials nor CV nor bio are posted anywhere for the great unwashed public to find) states that "eating meat in excess is bad for the environment and for public health". I am quoting Mr. Keulemans because his comment is a perfect example of pseudo-science, none of this is in any way proven. Eating anything in excess, and that would certainly include meat, isn't healthy, that is well documented.
Meat is not in any way an exception here, and the reason that eating meat in excess is "bad for the environment" is simply that large parts of "the environment", like Mr. Keulemans' home country of The Netherlands, are terribly overpopulated. It is the regionally concentrated production of pigs, cows, chickens and other meat producers, rather than doing this in a distributed fashion, that causes damage to the environment, not the over-eating. And that concentration is a consequence of price competition, of having to mass produce, something that could be remedied by distributing production, we have the refrigeration and other preservation technologies to facilitate long distance transport. The pollution, if you will, is caused by stacking people on top of each other, not by those people eating more than they should.
For as long as we insist on living in cities of six- or ten million inhabitants and more, we're going to have environmental problems caused by overpopulation
Perhaps Mr. Keulemans wants to think a bit less "Dutch politically correct", and a bit more scientific. Yes, The Netherlands is most certainly very overcrowded, something almost nobody ever talks about. Because, you see, The Netherlands is an RWC - a Rich Western Country, one that can afford to stack its citizens and remove their poop in an environmentally responsible fashion. But some 350,000 people are born every day (just 500 of which, or 0.14%, are born in The Netherlands), and those 350,000 cause a lot more damage to the environment than do those eating trop steak frites. Most of those 350,000, actually, cannot afford steak frites. They can't even afford frites... or, indeed, environmentally responsible cooking fuel. Stand on a street corner in Bangalore, India, as I did taking the picture to the right, and you get the message: pollution caused by overproducing cows for fancy meat dishes may be A problem, but it is not THE problem. Go to India or China (just take a walk through the humongous new Beijing South Railway Station
The other day I mentioned Cebu to friends, the town in the Philippines, as an ideal vacation destination, by comparison with Bali or Hawaii or that place on the left coast of India - it is cheaper, just as sunny, the people (this is a personal assessment) are even nicer, they're not after your money 24/7. As important: Mactan
Anyway, I loved the Philippines, and had I known in 2007 what I know now, I'd have pulled all of my money out of my brokerage account, and moved to Mactan. Of course, you never do things when you can - it is hard, some say impossible, to predict the future. The Philippines is a very nice place, is all I can say, and they officially speak English there. Officially, I said... 'nuff said. The Shutterfly slide show to the right shows you the various facets of Mactan, and I apologize for there being 193 slides, but I don't know what you're interested in, and that is all I took there, minus the duplicates and the out-of-focus stuff. So - enjoy. Or ignore, as you please.
Back to last Tuesday's blog entry, then, and Search Engine Optimization
Although I am doing better in terms of the interest my skillset is garnering in the job search, I am not getting the feeling I am close to a job. That's not necessarily "the way it is", stuff does happen, and it is eminently possible one or the other employer will be on the phone, one of these days. While searching in the Washington, D.C., area, the vast majority of jobs I qualified for were "U.S. citizen" or "Cleared"
Part of my problem is that I have a huuuuge and very diverse (nice word for incongruous) skillset, and that routinely confuses hiring managers. I've been (successfully) employed as a journalist, editor, photographer, film producer, systems engineer, project manager, customs specifyer, and systems developer and -tester. I have a creative and a technical streak, and I write my own HTML and maintain my own website and do my own server administration. Since 1994. That means I am actually engaged in Search Engine Optimization, as well, as I follow my server statistics, and tweak my site and links and headers and know how to drive traffic to my site. As in, I have some seventeen years experience futzing (to use the technical term) with the world wide web.
Have I sold that skill? Not really. In Verizon, I was in charge of some of our web presence, but it was a sideline, and it meant I managed the folks that "did the internet", and understood what they were talking about. At the same time, I managed the underlying "actual" internet we used. The problem, then, is that you can't put all that, in between all the other crap, in a few words in your resume. Even though I can teach (from what I see, out there, just surfing) a few people how to "do" the web. What they do, out there, is often dismal, but it looks good when they access it from their own network, and the managers often have never done any web programming, and don't have skills beyond Facebook. They often don't have the comparison basis, either - 50,000 hits in a month looks great, but only because they do not know how many hits they could have. And then the ratio between hits and results (whatever those are) is rarely calculated. I'd rather have 500 orders out of 10,000 hits than 600 orders out of 100,000, but the problem is that results are often gauged in traffic, not in sales or orders or contacts, not in ratios, and not in understanding why - "please stay on the line to answer the survey". Look, moron, if you don't know what's wrong with your customer service there isn't a survey in the world that will tell you. Ask Gordon Ramsay
The primary tool, when building a "web presence", you see, is time. The secondary tool? Abhor change. Search engines get to know you because you are always there, and you always "look" the same. If your links change every week, if this week you use Flash, and next week you don't, you screw yourself up. My resume is visible because of a very simple reason: the URL is aartsen.net/resume. Inside that directory, there are other pointers for the search engines, but the primary is that when a search engine crawls my site, it sees a domain name, and then it sees a few directories. And it will then understand that the directory "resume" contains the resume. And the directory "curriculumvitae" does too, for the Europeans, Asians and Africans. Tomorrow, still there. Next month, still there. Next decade (and this is really really important!!) it will still be there. Never mind the new idiot who wants to use WotsitFoosion - it has to be there, always there, what you are after is all the searchers you can get,, not "ooooooooooh pretty". If it does not solve a problem you have, if the developer shows you screens, but not your bottom line dollar$, don't install it. The internet is old already, it is not the latest greatest newest any more, even if it is for you - I had my first real internet account in 1980, my first wired laptop in 1984, and it worked the same today's does, the screens just got a bit bigger. It is not about visitors, it is about those looking for you, or your stuff. If you do fancy stuff, it will take longer, and the next "manager" will change the structure, because (s)he has a better solution, and guess what? You lose your place. Simple as that. KISS really works!
But, enough of that, all I am saying is that the American recruitment process is such that everybody gets compartmentalized, something we did not use to do. The only reason we speak of "out-of-the-box thinking" is that everybody and their grandfather thinks in the box, which is one reason why we do not innovate. The other reason we don't innovate is that we've cut margins to the point there isn't any money for research and development - way back when, we spent millions of dollars we had inventing stuff that, for the most part, never went anywhere. While we were doing that, back in the '80s and '90s, there were tons of developments that came as "byproducts" of all this innovation, those did go out and make money for us, all over the world. I used speech dialing as an example, the other day, cost a fortune to develop, and nobody uses it, but the sidelines were a new way of analog-to-digital conversion, and a new way of moving data quickly from network to memory chip to permanent storage. Analphabetic people in Third World countries probably would love speech dialing, but where their $23 cellphone costs the equivalent of a quarter's salary, and their monthly cellphone subscription costs $3.21, there isn't the money for them to have a tool they could really use. Even though we invented and built the tool, we can roll it out there, it is paid for, and this is real dogooder stuff for people who can neither read nor write. You could even pop stuff on their screen as it is recognized, help them learn to read. Just sayin', you've got to be inventive, and out-of-the-box may mean you do things everybody else thinks are useless and/or a complete waste. After all, when you teach people to read they will buy books and newspapers and make more money and buy computers so they can send emails and things, right? It may take a while, but won't they? A big problem in Africa, after all, is that farmers can't read text messages about their crops...
So, perhaps one of the ways in which the United States can be a development leader again is for us to start spending money on inventions again - but then we will have to wean the consumer off off "cheap". Today, the Chinese have the money, and they are spending it on inventing new and improved products, because they know what we buy, and they know what we might want to have tomorrow, and they have the know-how, the factories and the resources, human as well as monetarily. What we have to do now is take the decision whether we will give them more money, or spend it on ourselves, and start thinking the way "they" do. We've got to do something - sitting here bickering about tea and coffee parties will only bankrupt us even more. What the Chinese do today is the reverse of what Obama is doing - they're not creating jobs, they're creating innovation, without a requirement for an immediate return - you can do that when you have the Communist Party looking over your shoulder, rather than the Wall Street Party. Their bullet trains are not designed to run at a profit, they facilitate a framework that (hopefully) will.
The pictures? The Subway poster, top right, made me wonder how far in terms of low prices Subway thinks it can go. There isn't any way you can make a profit on a $2.99 sandwich (actually, if you're ordering the deal with someone else, you get two halves of a 12 inch sub, and pay only $2.50...), so, clearly, Subway is trying to "draw crowd". What they are competing against is the supermarkets - breakfast sandwiches at Safeway for $1.99, and this Vietnamese lovely, spicy, sandwich (I'd almost forgotten the French were Vietnam's colonial masters, so the Vietnamese sandwich is made with a proper French baguette
(I wrote this as a review posting - see my Amazon reviews here, and am posting it here so I can tell Amazon where to get off if they try to claim any rights to my writings).
I love this thing, the Nokia C7, which T-Mobile calls the Nokia Astound
There are two reasons why I "bought" this phone. First of all, I needed a backup for the Nokia 6110 Navigator I bought in the Philippines in 2007, long before any carrier in the United States thought of selling phones with GPS capability. Back in June, 2011, I was getting ready to drive 3,000 miles, clear across the country, and I wanted to make sure that I had a backup should my main GPS phone fail mid-trip (it didn't). Secondly, T-Mobile offered me this touch screen smartphone for free with a 2 year extension of the contract on one of my lines, and that, combined with the above motivation, clinched the deal for me.
You see, back in the same 2007, when I bought the Navigator, Nokia bought the Navteq mapping company - it is, today, called Nokia Maps. Navteq was the oldest, largest, and arguably most advanced purveyor of navigation tools - I visited them many years ago, when we (NYNEX Corp.) were contemplating offering navigation services (we decided against it, eventually). Drove a Hertz car outfitted with their navigation device, which promptly couldn't find the Marriott Hotel in San Jose I was staying at. I mean, I could kinda see it from the car, but the device couldn't get me to the entrance, it insisted the hotel was in the middle of a local park. So Nokia now has one of the largest mapping databases in the known universe, competing with Google (which rolls its own) and Dutch navigation devices manufacturer TomTom, which bought the other "biggie" in mapping, Dutch Teleatlas.
So if you buy a Nokia phone, it comes with a fully featured navigation application-with-everything, Nokia switched from Swiss provider Route66 to the existing Navteq algorithms, databases and software when it bought that company, and integrated them with its Symbian handset operating system. There are many other flavours of navigation, in many other mobile phones, but Nokia arguably has by far the most advanced, and the most experience in building "Navigators". In the C7, that shows.
I love this thing, but I do not know I'd have spent $500 on it (I do, on some, I do). And before you say "iPhone", never had one of those, either. I firmly believe that you can't do everything you do on a PC or laptop on something the size of a pocket calculator, and the C7 (and presumably the iPhone) only confirms that for me. Between the touch screen and the, count 'em, six buttons along the rim, and three keys, I am always touching something I shouldn't, and the handset goes off doing things I didn't mean for it to do. You can certainly get used to "ginger operations", but by (admittedly) comparison with my non touch screen Blackberry it is more of a pain to operate.
Having said that, it can do more, and comes with much more stuff preloaded that I happen to use and like on my PC. There's the aforementioned navigation, there's Skype (which I have not been able to get to work other than in very choppy speech mode), there's UMA, a.k.a. WiFi calling (more about that at the end of this piece, that's T-Mobile USA specific), and then there are PC Suite and Ovi Suite, which synchronize the C7 not only with Microsoft Outlook, but with Lotus Notes, the standard mail and database tool for many corporate and civil service types. The BBC News, a Facebook webapp, Slacker, Twitter, all come preloaded. Especially Facebook pleases me, I am allergic to the Facebook app you can load and install on your phone, as that continually reports all sorts of stuff back to Facebook. I don't mind them having that data, but only if I have pre-approved that and if they pay me for it - after all, Facebook uses that information to make money. Or tries to. There is a lot more, I just wanted to give you a flavour.
In short, backed by the unparallelled mobile phone expertise Nokia has - Nokia was only the second manufacturer that introduced a handheld mobile telephone, back in 1988, and has always built its phones soup-to-nuts, from the operating system to the circuit boards - the C7 is very usable, advanced, full of magic (an 8 megapixel camera, although 8 megapixels in a phone isn't the same thing as 8 megapixels in a Nikon), and the price is right.
T-Mobile offers, on a number of phones, including the C7, something called WiFi calling, known technically as UMA, which allows a GSM mobile phone to make calls over wireless internet as if it was connected to the regular mobile network. Great if you are in a dead zone, or underground, or in a hotel or office overseas that offers WiFi service (where your T-Mobile phone will behave as though it is in the United States!). UMA used to be offered on some cheap Samsung and Nokia phones, but today it is offered on business style smartphones, including some Android devices and all Blackberrys, as well as a few Nokias. UMA service does not count towards the minutes in your plan, and that, if you have WiFi at home and/or in the office, makes the C7 an ideal home phone replacement, too. The C7 supports, unusually, both T-Mobile's and AT&T Wireless' 3G network frequencies, by the way, and that means that this phone will roam on AT&T's network where T-Mobile does not have service available. I don't know how many handsets have this capability, clearly intended for use after the two companies merge, but it is great to have, between that and the WiFi calling, it gets you service where you previously might not have had any.
The picture? Bellevue, WA, contemporary mall architecture at Crossroads. 8 megapixels, taken with the C7, processed to TIF format using the excellent (free!) XNView, then downsized and compressed to a JPEG. Click on the pic top left to see a larger version, or click here to see the (17 massive megabytes, you have been warned!!!) original.
I have been working on revamping my resume for a while now. Recently, my friend Raymond, who is a technical writer by profession, has reviewed my efforts. What he came up with, amongst others, was that the fonts I use are too small to read comfortably. This has me wondering. You see, way back, when I was working in the NYNEX laboratory in White Plains, NY, I came across similar issues. Mostly, these are caused by two human factors. One is that people do not have appropriate glasses to read screens, more often seen in women than men, and the other that people, as they age, adjust the size of the print they read, rather than their prescription.
I was, at the time, working on PC based operator workstations, and found that we could substantially improve operator response time (fancy words for the duration of a "directory" call) by using larger monitors
As we're on health care anyway, the announcement that IBM will begin work with Wellpoint on using its Watson superdupercomputer
The picture? My friend P. took it, her husband M. and I, sitting outside a restaurant, waiting for our table, Blackberrying (is that a verb?). She is such an accomplished photographer with true vision, I often think she should have made that her profession. Judge for yourself - this was shot "on the spur" using her brand new HTC phone.
This (as I write this) is one of those days when the Dow is up because of conjecture:
Click Yahoo's Carol Bartz fired
Click Bank of America fires heads of Wealth Management and Retail.
A perfect example of how investors pay out on the basis of things that have not happened yet. I don't know that there is room for multiple search engines - Yahoo, Bing, Google. or multiple "portals", as they used to be called. You may have read my piece about standardization in the mobile telephony world, the other day - the same thing may apply in search engines. When is the last time you ran searches in Bing, Yahoo, and Google, to see which one would be best? Since you're searching for something, how would you even know which one was best, other than through one or the other not finding anything, which is unlikely? Google appears to be largest and have the most clout and widest expanse, so that's what I use. You get familiar with the way things work, warts and all. It would be interesting if there were a single "search portal", and all of the search engine providers would contribute results, accuracy would be dependent on how much time you're willing to give the search engines to parse, and they'd get paid on the basis of what you, the consumer, do next. That would be real competition.
Bank of America gives me the impression the place has grown too large, and is becoming hard to manage. I recall something similar happening with Verizon - merger, merger, merger, and then eventually the growth cost too much money, and separately, half of Verizon Wireless became the property of British Vodafone. Today, the stock is well below where it was when Verizon was created out of its predecessor companies, and the company, like many others, was mostly hurt by the technology development that is making both copper wire and fiber optics distribution cabling obsolete. With that, competition has driven down the profits of mobile telephony and mobile data
So help me do some sums here - Facebook
Click ran a $500 million profit over $1.6 billion in revenues
in the first half of 2011, we're told. Then: "..a private offering to overseas investors conducted by Goldman Sachs, at a valuation of roughly $50 billion". So that is investment. That was used to run / build out Facebook? What we really would need to know how much Facebook cost to construct, and how much it costs to build out (rather than to maintain). That it "accounted for nearly one third of all Internet display advertisement impressions in the United States in June, more than the combined total of Yahoo, Microsoft Corp, Google and AOL Inc, according to analytics firm comScore" is nice, but what really matters is what, and how much in $$ terms, those advertisements sell. An ad in Google will often come up directly related to someone's search, an ad in Facebook gives me a Westchester County Golf Club when I live the other side of the country. IOW: who knows? Yes, its growth has been phenomenal, but I do not have a good track record of knowing when to get out - and, in my mind, like AOL, this bubble is going to burst, because we have "windows", so can be using Facebook and Google at the same time...
Seriously, the level of competition we are used to in the United States requires vast sums for investment. It occurs to me that what European, and, to some extent, Asian governments have done, limiting competition in the marketplace by tightly regulating products like cellular and cable TV services, very likely gets the same expenditure out of the consumer, with less waste. We have, in the United States, three competing incompatible mobile telephony standards
Jobs? We must stop connecting the economy to jobs reports. This is almost a pre-programmed event - the Department of Labour gives a "bad" job report, and the stock market takes a nose dive. That is ridiculous. There aren't any new major products and services we can export, there is no money with the consumer, so there aren't any new jobs. It has been that way for a while, and I am not seeing anything out there that will change that. Jobs are not related to companies making money, only to the traditional distribution of that money. On top of that, Republicans are stopping Obama from pumping money into the economy, the Fed being the only place money can come from. We can take more taxes from wealthy individuals and corporations, if the money is there, and, as a nation, we need it. That's why we have Gummint. If we're not spending our tax dollars on the "wars", let's spend them in country. You don't want that, that's fine, then you go take some of our assets, like those hundreds of idled jets, to the international Pawn, and make money that way. But stop complaining, stop talking, and go do something. "Worst showing in 11 months" - if you stupidly keep concentrating on the wrong thing, you will trigger the self fulfilling prophecy.
Here is someone I had never heard of who says some very reasonable and clever things... Captivated me by beginning his interview with statements about startups being concentrated on consumers, and that that is generally not where growth is at. Or, as I said many years ago in the lab @ NYNEX: "Who is going to pay for it?". We were looking at voice dialing, had designed a great platform to do that with, got it working, patented the sucker, but I could not see how anybody was going to pay $3.95, or whatever, a month so they could say "Grandma" to their phone. Nobody listened to me, of course, just as well as I had no proof, we rolled it out, it worked beautifully, and it bombed, as nobody wanted to pay for it. For me personally, it was a dud as you tend to only program those folks you call a lot, and you already know their numbers in your fingers. Now, of course, we have displays on our phones and it is a moot point, even if most smartphones have voice recognition. The ones that should have, the regular cellphones we sell cheaply to people in the Third World who can't read or write, don't have voice recognition, which is kind of silly, considering the number of analphabetics out there. I wondered why several of my neighbours in Virginia never called, always stopped by, until I recognized they are analphabetic, dependent on their wives to pay the bills and read the correspondence. Quite amazing, in 21st century America, 60 miles from the nation's capital.
It is interesting though - the consumer products, Foursquare, Groupon, Google+, don't make money, Facebook probably only does because of its sheer size, and the advertising sales are a bubble, nobody knows how much their advertising really sells. They talk about "driving traffic", and pay per click - but I do not believe that all of this money HP spent to do popover ads in the New York Times, when everybody could still read the New York Times, resulted in anything, considering they're selling the farm. I mean, if there is truly very little money to be made in manufacturing consumer PCs, we've really got to a point where we need to wonder why we do things the way we do. If neither IBM nor HP can make money making PCs and laptops, the Chinese will in the end not be able to either. That is simple logic...
To finish up my reporting on Nokia's C7 smartphone (a.k.a. T-Mobile's Nokia Astound)
Not much else to report. The C7 being my first smartphone with a touch screen that supports lots of "apps", I am simply spending time learning how it works, only to find that my favourite phone applications, Skype and GPS (Nokia Maps) both make the handset crash all over the place. Skype is particularly bad in that it locks the screen in blank mode, so you can only recover by pulling the battery. The handset is pretty much virgin, in that I have not futzed with it, so this isn't something that should happen. Additionally, I am unable to sync the calendar with Microsoft Outlook using the Ovi Suite, so am now doing that using Nokia's older PC Suite, which is not supposed to work with the C7, but does, once you have installed and activated Ovi Suite - even using Bluetooth - something a Blackberry only partially supports.
I have to tell you we are dying for standardization in the phone arena. Not having it only leads to millions and millions of discarded handphones in boxes in attics, and in landfills. Since consumers can't afford to buy new phones all the time, the carriers do it for us, cutting into their own profit margins, as well as those of the manufacturers. When you buy a computer, this will normally have a PC AT architecture, a standard QWERTY keyboard, and a Windows visual interface, and that means it really does not matter what you buy, it all works the same. That is to say, provided you do not buy a Linux machine or a Mac, because they may be very different, down to the MIT X Window System
But phones... the reason the iPhone
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On September 11, 2001, at 8am, I was in the air between New York City and Washington, D.C., my regular commute for a number of years, on my way to a doctor's appointment - little did I know I would spend the next eight months working on the recovery of our networks and services, in Manhattan and Arlington. "9/11" became a determining factor in my life - I had offices in Manhattan and Arlington, VA, some of my customers, as well as my dentist, were in the Pentagon, and in the World Trade Center, where I would get my morning coffee and breakfast, when downtown. I make a point, now, of visiting, and communicating with, my friends and relatives as often as I can; and I finally left the cityscape, and now live in the country. I've written up some of my experiences of that day, and its aftermath, here. You can find a list of all killed and missing victims of the 9/11 attacks, some of whom I knew and worked with, at the Washington Post.
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