Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Microsoft Longhorn

    Microsoft Longhorn – As you may have seen over the past few days parts of the American media seem to think that the launch of Microsoft’s new operating system is turning into a bigger disaster than the war against terror. They’re wrong for two reasons:

    – The war against terror is majorly messed up because of poor leadership which has betrayed the countless men and women who have been serving their countries selflessly

    – Even in the unlikely event of Microsoft going bankrupt in the morning and the business and associated ‘intellectual’ properties disappearing into a puff of smoke (I sooo wish it were true), there are numerous viable alternatives from pirate Windows software (nice price, shame about the code), GNU/Linux, various flavours of Unix (Solaris, Openware, Mac OS X, netBSD, FreeBSD etc)

    Let’s put Microsoft Longhorn into perspective:

    – Whine number one – its late, duh show me an IT project that isn’t late, or over budget. Ever heard the one about the sales man who walks into a client, promises them the earth and then gives the programming team three weeks to build it and is then surprised when it doesn’t deliver. Microsoft is bigger than everyone else so does things like this on a bigger scale.

    – Whine number two – it won’t do what you promise, you’ve cut out all the good bits. Ok, I’m going to let you into an IT industry dirty secret, marketing people lie. They believe what they tell you when they have told you it, but they lie. I know they lie, because I’ve taken their lies and written them in an easy to understand format for journalists to write about. Journalists propagate those lies because they provide content that readers pretend to glance over whilst really checking out the job adverts and feeling aggrieved at the money they are paid. The content is a trojan horse to get those job adverts into their workplace because there are too many more interesting things to do in their own time. Everyone benefits from the ecosystem

    – Whine number three – its an omen of doom, Trey (William Gates III to those of us who know him well) has taken his eye off the ball and Monkey Boy Balmer has royally fcuked up, this would not have happened with Bill in charge. This one needs to be broken down into sections.

    First of all, Steve Balmer has done a good job fighting against the rabid autistic children that make up most of his employees, bringing it successfully through a shedload of antitrust lawsuits and helping put a more sympathetic government in the White House.

    Remember, Bill Gates’ video testimony helped with the finding of fact against the company in the first place and condemned Microsoft in the court of public opinion.

    Secondly, when Gates was in the hot seat the company made some shocking errors:

    • Microsoft Bob – don’t know about it? That’s because it bombed
    • The Road Ahead (first edition) – ghost writers had to tear this apart and rewrite it replacing up to 30 per cent of the content, Gates had dismissed the Internet and missed the boat. They spent hundreds of millions before they caught back up
    • Cairo – during the development of Windows’95, Microsoft spent a lot of money developing some wicked cool technologies that improved searching for data on a computer amongst other things. Cairo was designed to unify the DOS and NT based products on one state-of-the-art platform (this unification happened much later with Windows XP). Along the way a lot of cool stuff got culled, the market got an inferior product which sold despite being launched with a Rolling Stones live performance of ‘Start me up’. Windows’95 went on to be a technological wasteland and an unprecendented commerical success. Cairo still makes Microsoft Longhorn look good

    Thirdly it takes more than Microsoft Longhorn, a few penguins and unruly autistic children to take down the house of Microsoft. Why? Because thousands of IT people want to follow each other like lemmings rather than looking at alternatives that may provide their business with competitive advantage? The real compelling reason why Microsoft should not be scared of Microsoft Longhorn – politico-economics. Below is a quote taken from the I, Cringely column of August 14, 2003:

    Why aren’t Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations? Whatever the gigahertz numbers say, Macintoshes are comparable in performance to Windows or Linux machines. Whatever the conventional wisdom or the Microsoft marketing message, Macs aren’t dramatically more expensive to buy and on a Total Cost of Ownership basis they are probably cheaper. Nobody would argue that Macs are harder to use. Clearly, they are easier to use, especially on a network. So what’s the problem? Why do Macs seem to exist only in media outfits? Apple is clearly wondering the same thing because the company recently surveyed owners of their xServe 1U boxes asking what Apple could do to make them more attractive? For those who own xServes, they are darned attractive — small, powerful, energy-efficient, easy to configure and manage, and offering dramatic savings for applications like streaming. Yet, Apple appears to be having a terrible time selling the things.

    I used to think it came down to nerd ego. Macs were easy to use, so they didn’t get the respect of nerds who measured their testosterone levels by how fluently they could navigate a command line interface. Now, I think differently. Now, I think Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staff. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren’t you putting your job in danger? Exactly.

    Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department’s job.

    Now another question: Why are Linux computers gaining in popularity with large organizations while Macs, which are based after all on BSD Unix, aren’t? While there is certainly a lot to be said for Linux in competition with various flavors of Windows (Linux is faster, more memory-efficient, more secure, has more sources of supply, supports many more simultaneous users per box in a server environment, and is clearly cheaper to buy), the advantage over Macintosh computers is less clear.

    Again, it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase it’s efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged.

    I am not claiming that every organization should throw out its PCs and replace them with Macs, but the numbers are pretty clear, and the fact that more Macs don’t make it into server racks has to be based on something, and I think that something is CIO self-interest.

    Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that.

    I didn’t come up with this very smart idea, it came from a reader. That same reader made the point that every part of an organization ought to be concerned with improving the bottom line, which is to say with being more productive. Yet IT typically doesn’t work that way.

    All you aspiring ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch’s out there, you have an ideal target to squeeze for efficiency get liquidating staff and taking technological change out of the hands of the IT director (better still fire his ass and buy the mortgage on his property for peanuts). Before you ask, outsourcing just ships the problem out of the country but not out of your life.

  • Who is Gary Winnick (and why I am writing about him?)

    You may not know Gary Winnick, but at one time the fund manager who looked after your pension probably knew his name.

    For over two decades, Gary Winnick worked at the sharp practice end of capitalism. In the 1980s he worked with Michael Milken Drexel Burnham Lambert (Drexel) selling junk bonds. These were used to finance some of the most savage slash-and-burn management takeovers in modern history.

    Here’s a simplest version of it

    The ability of a company to get credit to grow depends on a number of factors including market sentiment towards the company, its industry sector and its credit rating. Junk status when a company is viewed to have fallen below investment grade material by a credit ratings agency such as Standard & Poor or Moodys.

    A bond is piece of paper that can be bought and sold like a company share, however it is really an IOU, a company sold the bonds to raise money and promised to pay a set amount of interest on that money and repay it at a set time in the future. They are used by companies and governments to borrow money (you may have heard of them mentioned as gilts or t-bonds, in the UK premium bonds are a government loan but with the interest divided out via a lottery selected by a computer called ERNIE), government bonds are commonly used in a portfolio as a low risk strategy or to hedge against interest rate declines.

    From a practical point of view junk status means that credit becomes more expensive, the company is considered to be a higher risk loan. Consequently, companies seeking credit and having junk status generally had a low share price and relied more on the bond markets to provide their capital requirements. Investors generally seek a higher return for higher risks so bonds from junk status companies (junk bonds) are also known by the more benign name of high-yield debt.

    Anyway, somewhere along the line some bright spark (possibly Milken himself) realised that just because a company had junk status, it did not mean that it would disappear overnight. Many large household names and solid industrial performers had junk status, because they were steady but unspectacular performers. This meant that there were bargains to be had. Investments providing high returns because of an unfair high risk status. Junk bonds became the new HOTNESS.

    The outcomes

    – There was blood in the water and Milken was eventually prosecuted for massive corporate fraud, after Ivan Boesky ratted him out rather than take the full rap on a number of insider trading charges

    – Many companies were gutted by modern-day robber barons who borrowed money to buy companies, and then paid back the debt through the placement of junk bonds and asset stripped the company. Books that outline this include Barbarians At The Gates

    – Savings and Loans scandal – S&L are kind of equivalent to mutual building societies in the UK and Ireland. During the 1980’s, they were deregulated and their money poured into the stock market. This deregulation fuelled a feeding frenzy causing many S&L collapses due to fraud and speculation. Since there were regulations still on what S&l’s could invest in, merchant banks put together complex financial instruments (derivatives – so called because they are derived from something else, like orange juice and pork belly futures in the film Trading Places) that would allow them to get into the ‘high-yield debt’. Initially the idea of these derivatives was to bind just enough government investments like T-bonds (treasury bonds) into the deal so that credit ratings agencies like Standard &Poor would not rate the derivative as a junk status investment. These instruments (known as derivatives) were very arcane and complex making it virtually impossible to understand their true investment value or how they would be impacted by changes in the market. Think of the childrens story The Emperors New Clothes. If you would like to know more read Liars Poker by ex-derivatives trader Michael Lewis. The S&L mess was bailed out by the Fed.

    Global Crossing

    Gary Winnick parted company with Michael Milken before Drexel flamed out and set up an unspectacular investment company called Pacific Capital. In the mid 1990s, Winnick saw the telecoms gold rush and founded Global Crossing.

    The telecoms goldrush came about due to a number of factors:

    – Deregulation allowing competition in the telecommunications sector

    – The rise of the Internet created an increased demand for new networks

    – Sustained economic growth in the developed world and a collapse in some emerging markets and Japan meant that there was too much money chasing too little investment opportunities. Gary Winnick raised and destroyed some 20 billion USD. Much of which would have come from pension fund managers in the US and Europe, or was invested into similar companies like Worldcom or RSL Communications (RSL COM).

    – Companies pay to get their credit evaluation from the likes of Standard & Poor and Moody

    – Grow and the profits will come became a mantra for bankers, VCs, analysts and business leaders due to cheap capital and as a way of keeping the castle in the sky; making it exceptionally easy to sell in a new business strategy

    The telecoms market came apart because:

    – Too much telecoms capacity was supplied as companies rushed in to profit from the gold rush. Global Crossing and its peers built out network capacity first and thought about getting customers later

    – Technology, competition and excess supply drove down prices to make the industry less profitable

    – Many of the companies had the same disease of corporate corruption and creative accountancy that occurred in the 1980s in S&L and junk bonds; inflating the value of deals, booking sales before the money was in (when is a sale a sale is a question that has been of interest to accountants for years) or fabricating them as inter-carrier deals

    – Accounting techniques were shockingly useless allowing Winnick and Co to distort reality

    – Equity analyst hyped stocks that they privately admitted were dogs

    – High yield debt was being used to finance a low-yield industry

    – Much of the growth was promoted through equipment-vendor financing, which allowed the likes of Lucent, Nortel and Cisco to bill higher than normal growth-figures and artificially inflate share prices. A friend of mine who was a telecoms analyst at a brokerage in the city of London at the time of the bust was afraid that Cisco would get severely damaged because of vendor financing. He outlined an allegation that new IP-based carriers were being set up by people close to the Cisco channel, financed by equipment for equity as part of a glorified Ponzi scheme to inflate the value of Cisco

    In Global Crossing, Winnick managed to extract his own position two weeks before the firms lawyers stopped internal share trading due to the companies terminal financial decline. Winnick is back in court this week and you can read all about it here. Many see Gary Winnick as a criminal, he sees himself as a business visionary. More on telecoms here and finance here.

  • Anoto digital pen

    Anoto are a bunch of mad Swedes who have invented a digital pen. The magic stuff they have came up with is a special spotted paper with unique markings so the pen can tell what kind of document its writing, the colour the ‘ink’, where it is on the page, should the writing be sent as an email. Despite featuring in a major feature article written for Wired magazine the company is doing quite well and coming up with cool stuff.  (Wired built up a reputation amongst superstitious techies after a preponderance of companies profiled in the magazine hit problems. Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen to Anoto). As any bureaucrat would tell you the pen is a lifesaver for meetings. While the   TabletPC makes more sense for mobile applications such as the UPS man.

    Anoto have licenced this technology to a number of people most notably Logitech; the mouse and speaker people.

    Logitech’s io is a neat piece of kit. Unfortunately they haven’t released any Mac drivers for it and won’t be doing so for the forseeable future. What I’d like you to do is help them forsee the future by completing this form requesting Mac drivers. (Re the product and serial number, they have a very handy prompt that tells you how many digits that you need to fake up). More related posts here.

  • GoatCactus and Screen Ghosts

    GoatCactus

    What are GoatCactus and Screen Ghosts? Before you ask we haven’t been hitting the magic mushrooms again. Facetop is a project at the University of North Carolina to ‘screen ghost’ video conference participants on to a computer screen, check here. No more annoying iChat screens. GoatCactus is a piece of software that uses computer math to generate music. The results are quite surreal, check this example out. More related topics here.

    History Repeating

    Thanks and maximum kudos to Ted Dolotta who posted this New York Times Op Ed to the Interesting People email list. The New York Times online piece can be found here (registration required, but well worth it).

    Their George and OursJuly 4, 2004

    By BARBARA EHRENREICH

    When they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The audacity!

    Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.

    George II is accused, for example, of “depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens – Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi – since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.

    It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king’s wars.In contrast, our taxes have been reduced – especially for those who need the money least – and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John

    Richard Green wrote: “He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II.”

    But the parallels are there, and undeniable. “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power,” the declaration said of George III, and today the military is indulgently allowed to investigate its own crimes in Iraq. George III “obstructed the Administration of Justice.” Our George II has sought to evade judicial review by hiding detainees away in Guantanamo, and has steadfastly resisted the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-U.S. citizens to bring charges of human rights violations to U.S. courts.

    The signers further indicted their erstwhile monarch for “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” The administration has been trying its best to establish a modern equivalent to the divine right of kings, with legal memorandums asserting that George II’s “inherent” powers allow him to ignore federal laws prohibiting torture and war crimes.

    Then there is the declaration’s boldest and most sweeping indictment of all, condemning George III for “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of acivilized nation.” Translate “mercenaries” into contract workers and proxy armies (remember the bloodthirsty, misogynist Northern Alliance?), and translate that last long phrase into Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

    But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: “And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

    By signing Jefferson’s text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world’s greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.

    They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty. Thanks to their courage, we do not have to risk death to preserve the liberties they bequeathed us. All we have to do is vote.

    Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

  • Lead the internet

    America historically has been the best position to lead the Internet. It deliberately set up multilateral open bodies that set many of the technology standards. It benefited from this approach and is now home to many of the main companies whose technology underpins and makes use of the Internet.

    That might be changing. A small geeky announcement on ChinaTechNews.com that caught my eye indicated that the balance is shifting. The announcement is significant. Think of it this way, how many extra phone lines could you have if you added an extra digit to the area code of a phone number? Well, imagine that jump but much, much bigger to understand the leap forward that the Chinese are making to lead the Internet with the adoption of IPv9.

    This also marks a profound future social, economic and information shift to the East; especially when considering how the most brutal and naked form of capitalism since the Robber Barons of the 19th century America is reshaping China. Behind this laissez faire capitalism is a regime with a very much ulitarian and mercantilist vision of power. The futures red, the future’s China; get ready for video on demand Shaw Brothers Classics. More related content here.