Eclectic Views

    
An article by UC Berkeley economics professor Hal Varian discusses an
industry based on intellectual property but without patent or copyright
protection.  The fashion business relies on trademark law to guard its logos
and brand names, but rivals freely copy from one another with impunity and
the whole operation appears to thrive on it. (Before 1941 a group called the
Fashion Originators' Guild did in fact prohibit copying of designs, but the
practice was held by the Supreme Court to violate antitrust laws and has not
been revived.)  Pr. Varian quotes a research paper as ascribing success to
two factors that also apply to a degree to some of today's high-tech
businesses: "induced obsolescence" and "anchoring".  The first term reflects
the well-known fact that most people - excluding dowdy economists - replace
clothes with new fashions before the old garments have worn out.  And the
second one says that to select this year's hot new trend, a sort of minimum
critical mass is needed that means multiple brands carrying skinny leg jeans
or baby doll dresses.  If only (for example) Levi's or Donna Karan offered
some new style, they wouldn't be able to generate enough buzz on their own;
but if other designers flatter it with imitations, the momentum builds to
make it a must-have.  The theory doesn't translate perfectly to say routers,
but for consumer items like cell phones it may suggest manufacturers could
benefit from a less protective approach.
  

    

   Blackberry Outage Cause Determined

Research In Motion, maker of the wireless e-mail device used by 8 million
customers around the world (about 45% of the smart-phone market per the
BBC), says the failure of its North American service for several hours on
Tuesday and Wednesday was due to "an insufficiently tested software upgrade"
for a "new, non-critical system routine designed to increase the system's e-
mail holding space". Coupled with the failure of RIM's backup systems to
"fully perform to its expectations", the outage caused several million users
in the US and Canada to briefly have a life.  The company, whose profits
rose tenfold in the quarter ending March 3rd, is not expected to be affected
financially by the disruption.
  

    

   The Return Of The Mainframe?

The days of One CPU To Rule Them All have seemed pretty much over since the
rise of cooperative PC computing and Beowulf clusters (powerhouse Google is
reported to use three million "cheap" microprocessors across its empire).
But a modest revival of the dinosaurs may be underway with announcements
from Sun and IBM of large expensive new video servers.  IBM's offering is a
video-game server which incorporates a mainframe system and many "Cell"
chips of the type presently constituting the heart of the Sony PlayStation
3.  It is said to be "capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of
computer users to interact in a three-dimensional simulated on-screen
world", adding "an unparalleled level of realism".  Warriors of Armonk
perhaps, or COBOL The Barbarian.  The Sun system, designed by prodigal
company founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, is intended for use by telephone and
cable companies; it can deliver 320 billion bits per second from its two-
trillion-byte memory banks, and "can hold up to 24 terabytes of data" or
"9,400 hours of digital video content". The units can also be linked to beef
up those puny stats, of course.  The benefits of this brave new Leviathan?
"It makes it possible for carriers to insert individualized advertisements
into digital streams of video going into homes."
  

    

   Patent Based on Combining Existing Ideas Invalidated

The US Supreme Court rarely overrules the Court Of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit in patent cases, but it just did so unanimously over a system found
to have combined existing inventions in a novel but "obvious" way. The
details of the "most important patent ruling in years", relating to an
electronic sensor to determine the position of a vehicle's gas pedal, are
less important - unless you're in the electronic-gas-pedal-sensor business -
than the precedent which could allow patent examiners to turn down
applications, and judges to dismiss infringement cases without a jury. It
will probably lead to "thousands of cases" requesting patents to be re-
examined in light of the new rule. Up to now, someone challenging a patent
based on earlier inventions (as many are) had the burden of showing why the
combination was obvious, such as published articles that mentioned it, and a
jury was needed to decide the issue.
  

    

   The Perils Of Open-Source Success

Usually the answer to the question "What if my open-source project takes
off?" is "You should live so long"; but today's paper says a Firefox
contract with Google to make their search engine the default home page for
the free Web browser has "in the last two years ... brought in more than
$100 million". You should get so rich. But it does pose a dilemma for the
project and its distributor the Mozilla Foundation. Per the story, "some
1000-2000 people have contributed code to Firefox, ... an estimated 10,000
people act as testers, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word"
including 10,000 who each contributed $5 for an ad in 2004. The article also
notes the browser "has about 15% of the market, [Microsoft's] Internet
Explorer more than 78% and Apple's Safari a little less than 5%". According
to the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation Mitchell Baker, "the best we can
figure, 75-100 million people are using Firefox. Those people did not get it
in a box. That is 75 million decisions around the world to put this piece of
software on someone's machine." Doing good and doing well; what's not to
like?  Un-open lack of transparency, for one thing: "Google insists on the
secrecy of its arrangement and agreements" according to Mozilla board member
Mitch Kapoor. (Google declined to comment, thus sort of confirming it.)
Another is whether any of the contributors deserve a little recompense.
Mozilla has been "quietly assisting contributors who are hampered by poor
equipment" says Ms. Baker, and the foundation is considering support for
"community purposes", though no consensus has yet emerged on a definition.
  

    
That's a story I'd missed.  Wow.  Thanks for the great recap.
  

    

   We Had To Destroy Ourselves In Order To Save Us

Cell phone service provider Amp'd Mobile has filed for bankruptcy, as a mark
of success. "We are taking this step as a necessary and responsible action
to sustain and strengthen our momentum in the marketplace", they assert. The
company is described in the news article as "aiming at a market of young
professionals, emphasizing music, video, entertainment, and high-speed
mobile access". For cell phones. It says service will not be interrupted by
the Chapter 11 process, whose goal is "revamping the business and finding
new financing". From lenders who aren't troubled by how their predecessors
were treated.
  

    

   Into The Wild Green Yonder

An article in today's NY Times describes the US Air Force's efforts to wean
itself from petroleum products. Not a small undertaking: "The Air Force
burned 3.2 billion gallons of aviation fuel in 2005, or 52.5 percent of all
fossil fuel used by the government, federal statistics show." An official
says the goal is "a 50-50 mix by 2010". Fifty percent what, though?  That
seems to be the problem, since corn products lack the energy density
required; current leading candidates are coal and natural gas.  Liquefied,
of course; the spectacle of shoveling coal into the boilers of a fighter
jet, or giant supersonic gasbags, is not to be expected (though intriguing).
These choices are not without their own problems: coal and gas are no more
renewable than oil and "produce even more carbon dioxide than petroleum
fuels".  Eventually the Air force hopes (I am not making this up) to use
"sea algae" as a "promising long-run source of clean fuel".
  

    
I expect the Navy will have something to say about the Air force
usurping its sea algae.
  

    
Maybe the Navy can reciprocate by using smog to power their subs.
  

    

   A Certain Fragility

Unnamed "French government defense experts" have advised against the use of
Blackberry handheld communicators by officials to avoid eavesdropping by US
intelligence agencies.  Since the messages travel via servers in America and
Britain, the French are concerned the NSA and other groups could retrieve
and decipher them at will.  Canadian BB maker Research In Motion Ltd.
responds that the messages are encrypted but according to Pierre Lasbordes,
who was tasked by the prime minister to investigate, the company
acknowledged "a certain fragility in the protection of information" which
passes through their system. Perhaps for similar reasons, the US barred
White House aides from using wireless devices at the Group of Eight summit
in Germany last month.
  

    

   You Can Call But You Can't Hide

The Nielsen company, whose statistics on television-viewing choices have
been used by advertisers for decades, is buying Telephia. Its business is
"tracking consumers' phone calling, mobile Web surfing, video viewing and
just about everything else".  Nielsen's new offering titled Mobile Vector
"will begin releasing information next month about cellphone users" to
clients like NBC, who states "any technology that increases measurement
across any platform, including mobile, is of great interest to us."
  

    

   Old Is The New New

According to the BBC at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/6912023.stm
an article in the New Journal of Physics proposes a mechanical computer like
Babbage's Difference Engine, perhaps even like the Antikythera Mechanism,
except with parts measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter). It is
suggested that such devices could avoid the heat buildup problems of today's
ever-denser chips and might be more robust physically for use in cars and
other bouncy environments. Building a small enough oilcan is another matter,
of course.
  

    

   SCO Loses

The NY Times reports today at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/technology/11novell.html

"a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell,
not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix
operating system. In the 102-page ruling the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also
said Novell could force SCO to abandon its claims against IBM, which SCO had
sued. Judge Kimball's decision in favor of Novell could almost entirely
undermine SCO's 2003 lawsuit against IBM."

SCO stock which traded at $19.41 a share after filing suit against IBM in
2003, sank a penny in after-hours trading to $1.55.

Columbia law professor Eben Moglen commented on the result that "It was
argued that this was supposed to suggest riskiness in open source, but it
turns out that the open-source world was rock solid from the beginning."
  

    

   E-Books Taxi

They still haven't taken off, despite being the next big thing as long as
"flying cars and video phones" according to a story at
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/06amazon.html

But new offerings from Amazon and Google may get them closer to the runway.
No point in recapping what you can read, except for a Sony executive's


   Quote Of The Day

"Digital readers are not a replacement for a print book; they are a
replacement for a stack of print books."

Or perhaps they will be some day.
  

    

   Brighter And Brighter

A supplier to Philips Electronics says it has designed a chip capable of
powering an LED (light-emitting diode) to produce the luminosity equivalent
to a 75-watt incandescent bulb. The article in today's paper estimates it
may be available in quantity for sale within two years. While it will
undoubtedly be more expensive than a bulb, it should draw much less current
and last longer. Already LEDs are replacing bulbs in cars and traffic
lights, but typically several are used in place of a single bulb.
  

    

That sounds like great news.
  

    

   After The Disk

The demise of rotating magnetic memory (drum or disk) has been anticipated
nearly as long as personal flying devices and videophones. Well, not quite
so long since it depends on fast cheap solid-state memory that retains data
while powered off. But it may be on the horizon: the IBM researcher who
shares credit for discovering the "giant magnetoresistance" technique behind
storage devices used in tiny iPods and vast Google data centers says he's
onto something that could increase memory density by a factor of 100.
According to the article by John Markoff in today's paper, "the iPod that
today can hold 200 hours of video could store every single TV program
broadcast during a week on 120 channels". (One presumes this is simply a
form of comparison, not something a sane person would actually want to do.)
While flash memory is creeping up in capacity and can be read from quickly,
it is said to be "very slow in storing" data which limits its usefulness.
The new "racetrack memory" could replace it as well as disks in handheld
devices, computers, and corporate storage farms. According to an IBM VP,
while the timing of its commercial availability may be years off, "Something
along these lines will be very disruptive. It will not only change the way
we look at storage, but it could change the way we look at processing
information. We're moving into a world that is more data-centric than
computing-centric."
  

    

> not something a sane person would actually want to do

I'd want to do that - sometimes I realize too late that I missed a show.
I guess that makes me insane?
  

    
While not insane, capturing 120 channels round the clock for a week might
raise doubts about an individual's priorities. If you tried to watch them
all, you'd be 119 weeks behind after every week. In a year's time, that
would be about a lifespan and a half, plus time for meals etc.
  

    

Capturing is not watching. That's the point, I can be so busy that I miss
a show until after it's already over. Maybe a fast breaking story on CNN
while I'm at work? Or a movie? Or anything. Perhaps I'm less tied to
reading TV schedules than other people.
  

    
This could be what the IBM VP meant when he called the development
potentially disruptive. It might indeed lead to consumers downloading
everything available for later Tivo-ing, and various other behaviors
unthinkable today. I'm not a big TV watcher, so the unit of measurement
seemed a curious one.
  

    
With any luck, we'll be well along moving away from a broadcast model
towards an on-demand model for the distribution of most entertainment,
by the time such memory devices come along, with the likes of Akamai
(or BitTorrent) mostly replacing broadcast towers and receivers.

Like your content free (advertising supported)?  Pick your own advertising
server to subsidize what you want to see/hear.  Network distribution can
do that, broadcast can't so easily.

I think there will always be a place for some real time broadcast, but
it should increasingly focus on what really differentiates it, viewing 
events as they happen and synchronous attention (the feeling of being one 
of millions that are seeing the same thing at the same time), and leave 
distribution of content not directly related to the present moment to 
other channels.
  

    

   Old Is The New New

According to a story in the paper, Nielsen ratings find that "the number of
Internet users older than 55 is roughly the same as those aged 18 to 34".
Also "there are 78 million boomers - about 3 times the number of teenagers".
This demographic has not escaped the notice of VC investors who have funded
social networking sites like Boomertown, Boomj, Eons, Multiply, Rezoom, and
TeeBeeDee (whose name is evidently to be determined). These sites offer many
of the same features as the more youth-oriented ones: "discussion and dating
forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chat about diet, fitness,
and health care." Users report feeling more comfortable than at Facebook,
Friendster or MySpace discussing their divorces and medical issues with kids
"who don't even know who Aretha is". Investors also like the "stickiness" of
adults, who are considered more loyal: one fund manager said "he had some
concern that sites focusing on younger users could be vulnerable to the
whims and caprice of fashion."
  

    
Interesting!  >story in the paper
Would you be willing to spill the beanz about which paper?