Author: admin

We must laugh for humanity, lest we cry

“I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show. An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator. Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much more than cowering in a corner, praying that some of our neighbors will go to hell…”

– Blogger David Brin, on self-righteous creationists

“See, the way it works is we dangle the carrot, then when a file-sharer reaches for it, we wiggle the stick so they know what we’re packing, We ask them, ‘Are you sure you want to do that? Didn’t you see the stick?’ And if they insist on going for the carrot, we beat them to death with the stick, you know, just until we can see a little brain through the skull. That’s why you need the stick and the carrot both. It’s really hard to kill someone with a carrot.”

– MPAA spokesman Dan Glickman, on his “holistic approach” at dealing with movie piracy.

“We are dancing the tango. When you are dancing the tango and your toe is stepped on, hurting your toe, you complain. If it is stepped on harder, you complain again. There’s a whole game, but we are prepared to continue dancing the tango.”

– Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jesus Perez being glib about the 2004 US election results

An academic look at innovation law

I had the pleasure of attending a Bell University Labs lecture entitled, “Intellectual Property, Innovation and Efficiency in Information Economies” hosted by the Professor William Melody. Melody is, among other things, a former FCC member in the late 1960s and a visiting law professor at the University of Toronto. The seminar was specifically hosted by the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy. And yes, I’ve been slacking, this lecture was on October 20th.

He started off by telling the audience that eventually, the only economy left will be the “e-economy”, driven by market liberalization and intellectual property laws. Regulation has not always lagged behind technology; the introduction of deregulation policies has been the driving force behind many of the market’s innovations. Several decisive laws put in place since the US Reform Act in the 1960s has, in addition to breaking up AT&T, have broken down barriers to entry and unbundled services. The result was that the layers of infrastructure, hardware, protocol, software, and content has been peeled apart, stimulated competition at each layer.

Today, regulation has been brought back to table, as the various information technologies begin to converge. Monopolies, such as the ILECs, IBM, Microsoft and others have manifested themselves. Meanwhile, intellectual property rights have become more restrictive than ever. Meanwhile, the ITU and WSIS have been slow to turn any matching policies into actual rules to abide by. Melody urges a reassessment of current laws and policies to address these issues.

While Melody does not have a technical background (he didn’t distinguish between infrastructured-based VoIP solutions with VoIP Internet applications). Intellectual property issues were not discussed in detail either. However, this lecture provided an interesting insight from a law academia point of view.

Games of the day

Panda Bounce Game It’s like Breakout. Click the panda to start the game. Use the mouse to move the trampoline so the panda can jump and catch fruit. Possibly the only time you will see pandas, squirrels and ninjas in an alliance against Vitamin C.

BBC’s Death in Rome Game You are a detective in ancient Rome, probing a citizen’s death. Luminol and DNA testing is still two thousand years away, so you’ll have to rely on clues at the death scene and interrogations of witnesses and historical experts.

In the PlayStation2: Burnout 3. IGN called this the best racing game ever, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I have the agree it’s a delight to play. What other racing game you know will reward you for driving badly? The controls and premise are simple: outrun your opponents by running them off the road. If Gran Turismo was the Ph.D of driving games, Burnout 3 would be Hooked on Phonics.

Searching for research

Re$earch Infosource’s annual list of Top 100 Canadian Corporate R&D Spenders is out, and here’s the shortlist for fiscal 2003:

  1. Nortel Networks ($2.8 billion)
  2. Bell Canada ($1 billion)
  3. Magna International ($630 million)
  4. Pratt and Whitney ($423 million)
  5. ATI Technologies ($328 million)

Nortel is the champ for the third year in a row, and most of the others have been in the top ten. The unusual guy in the lineup is Bell Canada, who in FY2000 was ranked 95 on the same list. They’ve rocketed up the list since then, and now no other telecommunications company comes close: Telus sits at #41 with $47 million, and Rogers Wireless is #82 with only $20 million on research. Are they more adverse to research and development, or are they having a hard time tracking it?

The Toronto Star remarked that Canadian R&D seems to be down 1.5% overall, although some of it can be explained away by lab outsourcing. Regardless, if you’re not competing on innovative features then you have to be content in competing with price, which tends to be not as much fun.

Laming up

The NYT asks the near-rhetorical question, “Does the patent system need an overhaul?” Professors Josh Lerner and Adam B. Jaffe seem to think so, and have written a book about it called “Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It”.

“We see people set out to do reforms with one thing in mind, but that have quite an unintended effect…The easier it became to get patents, the more people wanted to apply for them, and that led to a situation where examiners grappled with more patents to review, which led to them being pressed to do quicker reviews and a degradation in quality of patents issued.”

Lerner and Jaffe accuses the clique-like patent bar for encouraging a “patent system that is complicated, and one that involves protracted, costly litigation.”

Their tricks for the fix? Scrutinize and apply more resources to patent applications in relation to their order of importance, encourage information contribution by third parties via incentives, and trial patent lawsuits before judges, not potentially technically-illiterate juries.

Down doggie

Telus Mobility tried buying Microcell Communications, aka Fido, for $1.1 million. Now Rogers Wireless is trying to buy Fido for $1.6 million. Fido does not seem to be as good as making much money as it is in running cute canine-themed ads as of late. And while it’s well-loved as the plucky underdog of the Canadian cellular marketplace, love don’t pay the rent.

There has been half-joking speculation that it’s now that other Canadian cellular company Bell Mobility’s turn at courtship. But it appears that Bell feels that the fastest way to Fido’s heart is by plunging straight into its chest.

Bell Mobility has just announced its Fido Conversion Plan: hand in your Fido phone and a recent bill at a Bell World store, switch to Bell Mobility and receive a 700 minute plan with unlimited weekends and weeknights all free for one year. Then they’ll throw in a free Sanyo or Nokia camera phone. Some customers have even received free accessories to boot. You have to sign a 3-year contract and you still must pay the SAF, but that’s still a free $400 phone.

It’s very atypical for Bell to shoot a cannonball across its competitor’s port bow. It’s very atypical for Bell to mention its competitors in advertising, period. But this is a very clever strategy.

Fido’s generous but money-losing plans, such as their $45 CityFido plan that features unlimited local calling, can be seen as an attempt to fatten them up for prospective buyers, such as Telus and Rogers.

Its GSM 1900 network is not worth anything; Rogers already has one itself and Fido’s net barely covers Canada’s capital cities. (It is ironic that Fido phones, which run on the worldwide GSM and SIM card standard, can be freely used in 150 countries but will lose signal the moment you leave the city limits of an Canadian urban area.)

Therefore, Bell Mobility is going after the truly valuable part of Fido – its customers. And as long as it costs less than $1.6 million to outfit Fido’s defectors with free phones and free plans, they’re laughing.

IP World Canada 2004

Bell VoIP nextgeneration.jpgIf anyone ever asks me, “Hey, how was that IP World conference on October 4-6?”, I can ecstatically raise my head and crow, “The food rocked.” And how! The VIP luncheon speech was a canned marketing pitch devoid of information or personal conviction, but I dined on risotto and filet mignon.

The exhibit floor was decent, but lacked major brand names, such as Cisco. Alas fear not, gentle stomachs, as we were provided with sushi, steak sandwiches, and the ne plus ultra in convention cuisine, a 3 foot tall chocolate fondue.

I think that it was appropriate that Cisco Systems was not there in the flesh, but in spirit as the official sponsor of the cappucino stand.

Seriously, for a first outing, IP World Canada did a good job getting some of the big names in IP applications out to present, advise, and exhibit: Bell Canada, Telus, Allstream, Juniper, Primus, Toronto Hydro Telecom, Sprint Canada, and others. I even got to shake the hand of IDC analyst Lawrence Surtees. If you ever get to see him talk about regulatory landscapes in telecommunications, run, don’t walk to the seminar.

One thing the conference lacked were actual enterprise clients, which it was initially geared for. So, the exhibitees consisted of just the usual suspects milling about – salespeople from your competitors and industry investors.

Check out the gallery to see the cool VoIP applications and gear from the show.

Linux will Berry Microsoft!

Clayton Christensen of “disruptive technology” fame had suggested that open source was a disruptive innovation posed to carve up the proprietary software landscape earlier this year, but this is the first time he put his foot down – and his target of scorn was ol’ Microsoft herself.

Repent Microsoft, and bring Linux in ye heart, or suffer the consequences, he told attendees at the Future Forward technology conference. He even suggest they buy up RIM, the Waterloo-based manufacturer of the wireless confectionary known as the Blackberry. That would mean ditching Windows CE and focus on Linux thin clients.

Ideas are good and all, but I suspect there is more than one way to skin a penguin. Microsoft has traditionally acknowledge disruptive tech and have been slowly chipping away at their respective markets, such as smartphones (via Stinger), game consoles (via Xbox), lightweight computing (via TabletPC), PDAs (via PocketPC), enterprise integration (Office System, Windows 2003).

Admittedly, they’re bleeding like crazy doing this, and do not hold dominant positions in any of these burgeoning fields. However, if there’s one thing MS is good at, it’s leaning its enormous weight against its competitors until they become absorbed or squished. Whether they need Linux to be disruptive remains to be seen.

Overdrive

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m just chilling and doing what most people do for fun on Saturday afternoon – debugging a corporate application. Yep, I learned I would be expected to be working on this about 28 hours ago. I’m not to complain, but there are a few bugs here that appear could have been caught by the coder if he/she actually loaded the app up to see if their code actually worked.

Regression testing does love company – everyone else is here, so when in Rome, start debugging.

I haven’t had a chance to update this blog for a while because of an unusually high workload. In the free time I’ve had, I’ve embarked into the seedy underworld known as mutual fund research. I swear, the suits purposely make things complicated to justify their salaries.

I will return.