These dudes rock

Just watch this video and stop worrying about the youth of today. Well done guys!

Oligopoly

The Ultimate Machine

This is brilliant:


[embedded video]

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the "Ultimate Machine". Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes.

Geeks on trial, mammals that lay eggs, and other strange occurences: The incredible story of Hans Reiser

The Duckbill Platypus is a mammal that lays eggs. It also plays a key role in the defence of Hans Reiser, an iconic programmer and software visionary on trial for murdering his wife.

[Reiser's defence attorney] for the second day likened his client to a duckbill platypus, a strange-looking mammal -- a "genetic mistake" -- that was projected to jurors on a large monitor.

"I just know this is one of the great screw jobs of what happened to Hans Reiser," DuBois said. "It's easy to screw a platypus."

It is a tragic story (detailed in one of the best pieces ever to appear on Wired - well worth dedicating 20 minutes to go through the whole thing) and one of the most followed and discussed across geekland. Here's another interesting excerpt from the proceedings:

[Hans Reiser explained] to jurors that, as nonscientists, they may not understand his social ineptness.

"Scientists communicate by reference to data. I cannot communicate effectively. That's not how scientists talk. We cannot throw out assertions that cannot be supportive without data points," the 44-year-old defendant testified on his 10th day on the stand. "I have a compulsive tendency to say things that I know are true that people don't want to be true. I do this by reference to the data"

The fogscreen

This is friggin amazing. It took me a couple of minutes to convince myself it is not a hoax (if it is, then they have spent a lot of money setting it up). Watch it:



[embedded video]

I can't believe their imagination gets them only as far as billboards.

Youtube has tons more videos, here is the website (one of the main reasons I can't quite get over my suspicions).

Apple's new thing - 'All this hype for something so ridiculous!'

No, not the iphone, but the first ipod to be released back in 2001.

A loyal reader emailed me with this fascinating forum discussion at Mac Rumors right after the ipod was announced. How different things turned out to be...

I can't wait to lay my hands on one of those

Video (must watch),article, website. I really don't understand why the get one give one programme is limited both in number of pieces to be made available and location, but I can wait.

And yes, I think it's an amazing idea and will work wonders in the developing world - and beyond. More on this in an upcoming post.

This, on the other hand, is a gadget I will be getting soon - and fellow owners will find the information in the video very, very useful.

And while we are at it, David Pogue's podcasts at the NYT are simply amazing; unless you hate gadgets and technology with a passion, don't miss it.

Markets in everything, attention edition

Or is this a tax on emailing?

Attent™ [...] tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance. It gives recipients the ability to prioritize messages and a reserve of currency that they can use to signal importance of their messages to others.

More here. I have reservations:

1) Who is responsible for controlling the currency supply (and will internal corporate communications enter a boom and bust cycle?)

2) Can a goods market work without a credit market to enable capital to find its way to its most productive use?

3) Will the reduced informational cost faced by the readers compensate for the increased informational cost faced by the senders?

4) Is the system incentive compatible? Do senders' valuations correspond to those of the readers, even on average?

5) Does this formal system offer much at all? Don't we already have ways to show that a particular piece of information is important? (the word URGENT in the subject title, coupled with a couple of follow-up calls, together with a reputation for not sending useless email does it for me)

On related news, in today’s America there are more World of Warcraft players than farmers.

Mobile phone charger to be standardised

This is good news:

The spaghetti-like nightmare that forms many users' collection of phone chargers, headset connectors and data cables could be set to end after a major mobile industry forum agreed to standardise on one type of connector.

On Monday the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) -- a forum dominated by networks but including manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG -- announced that its members had agreed on micro-USB as the future common connector.

There's not much point abstaining from setting a common standard when there is hardly any prospect of technological innovation in a given area; this development is welcome and long overdue.

Broadband trouble

It's a funny world. I recently commented on a Wired article saying that 'French DSL is like a rude French waiter':

France has more broadband DSL customers than most countries, including the United States. But if you happen to be one of the millions of customers having major problems with your connection, then life can be a living hell. High-tech service in France is like service in a Parisian cafe -- intermittent and snooty.

The problem is that there are at least 10 DSL companies battling for a share of the French market. The companies do a good job of selling services, often bundling phone and TV service with DSL. Unfortunately, the companies make promises to gain subscribers without having the infrastructure in place to make good on them.

A few days later, Paul Krugman wrote this for the NYT- entitling it 'The French Connection':

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there’s little competition in U.S. broadband — if you’re lucky, you have a choice between ... the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as ... Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

If I may add my personal experience, broadband internet provision sucks in the UK too.

The moral of the story? The grass is always greener on the other side; Paul Krugman hates George Bush; and if you are looking for reliable broadband service, your best bet is moving to Mars. Nothing new here, but confirming one's priors is always a satisfying experience.

Bloody passwords

By the end of this week, I have to change my work computer password - for the fourth time this year. And of course I can't choose any old password: amongst other requirements, it has to be between 12 and 16 digits long, contain both letters and numbers, and it can't be the same as any of the last 9 passwords I used.

It's not just my employer that's giving me trouble. I have to remember passwords and pins for dozens of different services and websites, all of which tend to have different sets of rules regarding length, characters that are acceptable, etc. Even though I have four 'generic' passwords, each compliant with a frequently used set of different 'password strength' rules, there are a number of services that stipulate yet more exotic requirements. And even with all the different passwords memorised, I still have to remember which one applies to each particular account.

In the end, password selection rules converge to this:

The password must be impossible to remember and never written down.

Here are a few economic insights, and some advice - even though I doubt many IT types are reading this blog:

1. In cases where I am the only one at risk from my own bad password habits, let it be. I can probably understand the rationale behind asking for a 'strong' password when the implications of any security breach will affect other users, but why on earth do you care if someone cracks the password to my personal email account?

2. Stipulating exact rules is suboptimal - it limits the character combinations an intruder would have to try out, and it rules out a number of passwords the user may be able to easily remember. Just ask for passwords that meet a minimum 'strength' standard (e.g. use an algorithm that gives 1 point for each character used, 10 point for using both letters and numbers, 10 points for using caps, etc, and don't allow passwords that score less than 15 points)

3. There are stuff other than remembering passwords I would like to expend my limited brainpower on. As a result, if you push me too hard, I'll cheat: for example, I may write the password down, or choose the easiest password compatible with the rules. There is a point beyond which 'password strength' requirements lead to less security, not more.

4. If you are the boss: Your IT security guys have incentives that are incompatible with those of your employees and your organisation. They don't give a toss about productivity; all they care about is that there are no security breaches, and that when these do occur they can be blamed on a poor soul that 'didn't take security seriously' and wrote her password down. Try to find ways to align their incentives to yours, and for heaven's sake don't give them a free reign over IT security policy - they are the experts, but they don't have your best interests in mind.

This still leaves me with the problem of picking a new password. I was thinking of 'Rumpelstiltskin', but it turns out the miller's daughter was stupid: my computer says it's 'too easy'.

French DSL is like a rude French waiter. Why?

Over at Wired, a non-economist writes:

France has more broadband DSL customers than most countries, including the United States. But if you happen to be one of the millions of customers having major problems with your connection, then life can be a living hell. High-tech service in France is like service in a Parisian cafe -- intermittent and snooty.

The problem is that there are at least 10 DSL companies battling for a share of the French market. The companies do a good job of selling services, often bundling phone and TV service with DSL. Unfortunately, the companies make promises to gain subscribers without having the infrastructure in place to make good on them.

Despite often appalling DSL service in France, there has been no severe public backlash.

In a country where government controls keep most critical services -- like medical care -- reliable and affordable, people are used to taking their complaints through the proper channels.

The author of this piece implies that competition is the problem and government intervention the solution. But what's really going on? What's the market failure here and what, if anything, can the government do to fix it? I'll be posting my answer soon - in the meantime, comments are open and I'm looking forward to reading your suggestions.

Stop Censorship - Free the Net

I am appalled - and it's not just China:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a stury of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries showed evidence of content filtering.

I think there is a way round this problem, and it should only take a few lines of html and a little bit of public pressure. If you are as pissed off as I am with censorship, please read on:

We develop a 'widget' - a few lines of code anyone can attach to their website - that appears as a small button on the host webpage. When, say, a Chinese user clicks on it, she gets access to a 'mini-browser' from where she can navigate the net - but with a twist. Instead of surfing directly, her actions provide information to the host website instead, which then updates itself to include the information the user has been looking for. It will be slower than browsing directly, and it is perhaps best if the cached information is restricted to text to reduce pressure on the host server. But a user operating behind a firewall can get access to information that is banned, all the while never allowing the censorship software to realise which websites she is accessing.

Here is an example. The Coca Cola website can be freely accessed in China. BBC news cannot. So now, the Coca Cola website has an additional button that when clicked opens up a different page with pseudo-web browser functionality. The Chinese user can type http://news.bbc.co.uk and the Coca Cola server scans the text and links from the BBC website and makes it part of the Coke website pseudo-browser page. At no step in this process is the firewall aware the user is getting information from a banned website, as all the time she is tuned in the allowed Coke website.

Now, while the spiders cannot see what happens within the Coke website, they can definitely spot that a webpage has the widget. And here's where public pressure comes in: A company or organisation that refuses to include it on their webpage is clearly standing for censorship. That way, every website host, company or organisation has to take sides: either for or against free speech. As soon as a few prominent backers emerge, trying to remain on the side of the censors will become increasintly unprofitable. And China will have to accept all the information on the net - or live with none of it.

Anyone who thinks this could work and would like to be involved, step forward - and please pass this on.

A new market is born

Coming to you soon, real soon. And it will mean that the computer I'll be writing this blog on two years from now will turn out to be much cheaper than its cost of production.

What is it that gets me so excited? Stories like this:

More than 250,000 PS3 owners have enrolled their console in the Folding@HoME project which uses it to study the shapes proteins assume.

And, even more, stories like this:

Sun Microsystems has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge computing power to rent it by the hour.

Sun Grid costs users $1 for an hour's worth of processing and storage power on systems maintained by Sun.

So-called grid computing is the latest buzz phrase in a company which believes that computer capacity is as important a commodity as hardware and software. Sun likened grid computing to the development of electricity.

The company will have to persuade data centre managers to adopt a new model but it said it already had interest from customers in the oil, gas and financial services industries.

Today, most companies that rely on computing power face high costs associated with IT maintainance, building up excess processing capacity to deal with peak times (which may be few and far between) and storing all this power in what is expensive real estate.

For such a company, the ability to rent processing power on demand is an amazing boon. But despite Sun's rhetoric, the comparative advantage lies elsewhere: home computers.

Just realise that the average home machine operates only a few hours a day, and even fewer at full capacity. Home users already meet the fixed costs of maintainance and real estate. How long till some clever silicon valley entrepreneur adapts the (already available) software and develops a viable business model?