The Blog of Harald

A new book by Stan Liebowitz, called “Re-Thinking the Network Economy“, has some interesting insights. This
Economist.com article discusses one, namely that the principle of “first to market” was completely bogus.

The “network effect” describes the condition that a product’s value increases with the popularity of the product to consumers. The typical example is the telephone; one is useless, and the more people have a telephone, the more useful one is.

First to market is the principle that, because of network effects, the first person to produce a product in a given space wins. Superior late-comers cannot gain market share, because “using what everyone else is using” is more important than a superior product.

In refuting this, Mr Liebowitz emphasises the distinction between two kinds of lock-in. The question of compatibility is central to both. One kind of lock-in arises simply because switching to a new product involves a cost beyond the purchase price: costs of learning how to use it, for instance, or the difficulty of using it alongside products you already own. Mr Liebowitz calls this self-incompatibility, or weak lock-in. But there is also strong lock-in. This arises if a new product is incompatible with the choices of other consumers – and if, because of network effects, this external incompatibility reduces the value of the product.

Liebowitz claims (and I agree) that real strong lock-in is nonexistant. Consumers are capricious beasts, and are perfectly willing to adopt a superior product even in the face of incompatability; witness the ongoing success of the Macintosh platform.

Long before the Internet, consumers had plenty of experience adopting better technologies despite network-effect obstacles: cars (you need petrol stations), telephones, fax machines and, most recently, generation upon rapidly succeeding generation of network-dependent consumer-electronics devices. If a new product offers a clear margin of improvement over a competing one, consumers not only want to take it up themselves, they expect others to do the same. In this way, even where network effects apply, a sufficient margin of improvement achieves the necessary co-ordination among consumers.

I’ve always believed that the “first to market” principle was false; it’s nice that someone agrees with me.

Apparently the Toronto Transit System is getting flak from commuters. Seems that whenever someone is late for work, they blame it on a TTC delay. The TTC wants to reassure us that the transit system is running just fine…

Today I hear on the radio that (paraphrased): using data up to the end of August, the Bloor Danforth line is running on schedule 95% of the time, and the Yonge University Spadina line is running on time 90% of the time.

What is wrong with this statement, I wonder?

• This means that the Yonge line is running off schedule 10% of the time. That’s about 15 minutes per *day*. Problems are more likely during the two rush hours, when the system is already at capacity and all of the older, more troublesome trains are operating. 90% uptime sucks, in my experience.
• The data used in the commentary aren’t relevant. The data runs up to the end of August. Since then, a significant number of working commuters have returned from vacation, and the school year has started, adding a large number of students to the transit system.
• This simple statistic also doesn’t measure other information. The Yonge line is over capacity during morning rush hour. If standing at Yonge & Bloor, for example, one must often wait for several trains to pass until one with space for passengers arrives. At a minute between trains, this can add up to a personal delay even when the system is “on time”.

PR people make me laugh, or cry. I’m never quite sure which.

In celebration of banned books week (September 21 – 28 2002), The American Library Association is encouraging a “Read-Out” – a continuous book reading of books banned and challenged.

They also have the usual lists: The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books and a list of frequently challenged classics.

People are crazy.

Since I enabled IPv6 on www.cfrq.net, I’ve received no IPv6 traffic other than my own, and a couple of curious onlookers from the IPv6 webbug’s log site.

I’ve been having lots of trouble with zebra; several bugs in OSPF6D and RIPNGD continue to plague me, so I can’t keep dynamic routes up-to-date. Static routing is too much work, especially with my laptop which changes networks at least twice per day.

IPv6 on Windows 2000 works ok, but often when I apply an IE service pack, it updates wininet.dll, removing the IPv6 support in the browser. I can re-run the IPv6 installer to put it back, but I wonder what bug fixes I’m stomping on as a result.

PHP for Apache 2 is still experimental, due to the new Apache threading model.

I could have tolerated all of this as a natural side effect of running an experimental network, but the last straw is that the w2k ipv6 and VMware 3.1 are having a feud, causing a BSOD on my computer.

I’m tired of fighting with, and babysitting, IPv6. It’s about to die an ugly death on my network, and good riddance.

[via Anders Jacobsen] New Scientist reports:

A US record company has issued reviewers with portable CD players that are glued shut to prevent two new albums from being pirated online before their official releases.

Epic Records Group has taken the drastic step of sealing CD players shut and gluing headphones onto them to stop digital copies being made from promotional albums. The albums involved are Riot Act by Pearl Jam and Scarlet’s Walk by Tori Amos.

A spokeswoman for Epic told New Scientist: “Obviously we have a problem with piracy and this is one of the ways we’re trying to address it. We’re trying lots of things.”

I find it particularly amusing that after all the hype about the Secure Digital Music Initiative, this is the best security they can come up with. A glued shut CD player is hardly tamper-proof. It would be worthwhile for a genuine pirate to purchase a replacement if she damages or destroys the original while removing the CD. Or one could take the CD player apart and tap into the electronics to get a digital playback of the CD direct from the hardware. Or…

New! It’s BURN RATE: The dot-com card game.

With a simple, fun, and uncannily realistic game system, you and your friends will struggle to keep a dot-com startup afloat as the bad business pours in and the money runs out.

Be the last one in business, and you’ll win the dubious honor of “Best CEO”!

This is scarily familiar; my employer is a member of the 99% club (companies that lost 99% of their value in the dot-com crash), and we’re currently racing to see whether we reach profitability again before our cash runs out.

Thanks to michael newton for the pointer!

Thanks to heavybit.com – michael newton for this one (and for Crash Bonsai):

One of the problems plaguing modern technology is that designers can’t seem to build user interfaces that people understand. Buy a microwave in Canada and try to use the popcorn button; it doesn’t work. Or look at digital watches, VCRs, even cars; the interface sucks. Even worse, they’re all different.

Washington designer Burkey Belser agrees, and has a humorous presentation on the subject. Here’s the quote from michael newton’s blog that caught my eye:

The buttons were marked Chop, Grate, Grind, Stir, Puree, Whip, Mix, Blend, Frappe, Liquefy. Belser found the distinctions absurd.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said recently to a roomful of colleagues, “you turn this thing on and the blades whir around with a singular purpose, slaughtering everything within reach.”

Belser created his own one-word identifier: Vaporize. For the buttons, he created a scale of speed, from In A Second to Now.

See the Washington Post article for more examples.

“The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it.” – John Gilmore

An article in New Scientist shows this phenomenon once again. It describes ‘elgooG‘:

The mirror site, called elgooG, is a parody of the English language version of Google in which all the text on the web pages has been reversed. The text terms used for searches are also entered in reverse. The site, which returns all the same hits as Google, can be accessed from behind China’s “great firewall”.

Apparently, one can read the site fairly easily in a mirror (the letters will be reversed, but humans can easily compensate for that). An unusual way to get around access restrictions, to be sure…

From Spin of the Day:

Sustainable Development: R.I.P.
“Sustainable Development is dead. It’s demise came, ironically, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development,” CorpWatch’s Kenny Bruno writes in his report from the UN meeting in Johannesburg. “It’s not that the phrase wasn’t invoked. It was, ad nauseum. But it was hardly discussed. Instead, sustainable development was deemed to be whatever compromise governments happen to reach on trade, subsidies, investment and aid, and whatever projects corporations see fit to finance. ‘Sustainable Development’ is now officially meaningless.” Source: CorpWatch.org, September 4, 2002

I don’t think it’s as bleak as all this. Several world governments are now fighting back against The Evil Corporate Opressors with internal policy initiatives. Some examples: Peru’s OpenSource debate; Brazil’s take on patent medicines; Zimbabwe’s ban on genetically engineered crops. I think there’s a growing catalogue of individual actions that are supporting sustainable development. It may be 0.5%, but growing.

Still, we have a very long way to go, and the nonsense in Johannesburg certainly didn’t help things. I blame George Dubya; it’s fashionable, after all.

From Spin of the Day:

Monday, July 29, 2002
Making the World Safe for Obesity

PR giant Golin/Harris is bragging about its new “Global Obesity Task Force.” The Task Force doesn’t seek to fight childhood obesity, but to protect the interests and image of the multibillion dollar Obesity Industry. Their press release states: “With consumers becoming increasingly wary of American ‘big business,’ many companies find themselves under scrutiny. … The increase in childhood obesity has special interest and government groups seeking to hold someone responsible. And, corporate America is the likely target. Golin/Harris International has created its Global Obesity Task Force with proprietary tools to help companies under fire in the obesity debate… Wide ranges of industries are vulnerable and need to act to protect their brands, businesses and reputations. Quick service restaurant companies, snack makers, beverage producers, the television and video game industries… ‘When managed appropriately, companies can withstand issues without public confidence and brand trust eroding,’ said Kathy Weber.” G/H clients include McDonald’s and Tyson Foods. Source: Golin/Harris News Release, July 29, 2002

And yesterday, McDonald’s USA Announces Significant Reduction of Trans Fatty Acids With Improved Cooking Oil:

The new oil will reduce French fry TFA levels by 48%, reduce saturated fat by 16% and dramatically increase polyunsaturated fat by 167%. While the total fat content in the fries remains unchanged, health experts agree that reducing TFAs and saturates while increasing polyunsaturates is beneficial to heart health. Notably, McDonald’s French fries already had the lowest TFA and saturated fat levels in the national quick service restaurant (QSR) industry.

Now, as they point out, the total fat content is the same, which means that a single large McDonald’s fries still has 540 calories, about 1/4 of typical daily requirements. And it still has more than a third of the RDA for fat, although new research has suggested that RDA may be misguided.

With this nutrition initiative, McDonald’s becomes the first national QSR company to set a goal of eliminating TFAs in cooking oil.

Probably strictly true, however:

• Wendy’s switched from shortening to oil six years ago, to reduce saturated fat and trans-fatty acids.
• Burger king cut saturated fats by 50% when it switched from an animal/vegetable mix to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in 1990.

Ah, that wonderful ability of PR flacks to mislead with the truth. Be ever on guard against Spin… (Source: a Reuters article at Yahoo)

So the bottom line is this: McDonald’s french fries are still bad for you; they’re still high in fat. Then there was that recent report about fried potatoes containing potential carcinogens. And if new research proves true, the potato part of the fries are even worse than the fat part…

Another enty from PR Watch‘s Spin of the Day:

Tuesday, September 3, 2002
“Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?”
George Hesselberg, columnist with the Wisconsin State Journal, is fed up with all the government and media hype for war on Iraq. He excoriates the ignorance of US citizens as reflected in recent surveys but asks, “What do you expect in a country where … the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens. … Isn’t it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation’s psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary? … We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts? We wait and wait for the media to stop showing deference and start showing some defiance. … Is it a measure of cynicism if we think that this is an attempt to take everyone’s attention away from endemic regulator-ignored corporate criminality? Or to keep people from noticing that a human-rights-stomping religious fanatic may be running the Justice Department?” Source: Wisconsin State Journal, September 3, 2002

In last nights news, I saw Tony Blair arguing that the allies should be supporting the United States in their actions against Iraq. I wonder what it took to buy him off; the UK was against the invasion, weren’t they?

I don’t believe that Iraq has any more weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, or biological) than Canada does. I guess the United States will be invading us next.

Seriously, Iraq has been under severe sanctions, and a microscope, for over a decade. I’d be far more nervous about the goings on in other parts of the world that we aren’t paying attention to. What would the world be like if the Russian Mafia had smallpox?

Quoted from the Spin of the Day at PRWatch:

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World

“The next time an overly friendly blond sidles up in a crowded bar and asks you to order her a brand-name martini, or a cheery tourist couple wonder whether you can take their picture with their sleek new camera-in-a-cell phone, you might want to think twice,” warns Daniel Eisenberg. “There’s a decent chance that these strangers are pitchmen in disguise, paid to oh-so-subtly pique your interest in their product.” Eisenberg examines the growing use of “stealth marketing” — covert product placements. No longer content to place their products on TV shows and movies, marketers are planting shills in bars, restaurants and other places, blurring the line between advertising and real life. Source: Time magazine, September 2, 2002

I find it hard to believe that this could be cost-effective…

I received my DS1921L in the mail on Friday (I ordered it at the beginning of the summer, but oh well).

In a nutshell, this is a device the size of five dimes stacked on top of each other. It has an onboard clock and temperature sensor and enough memory to store up to 2048 temperature samples, with a sampling interval of between 1 and 255 minutes. (I can’t believe something so small can do this :-)

We’ve been having trouble with our vegtables freezing, so I stuck the ibutton in there for a day with one-minute sampling and got an interesting graph. It’s not our imagination, something really is wrong with our fridge.

The manufacturer has basic temperature sensors in both iButton and standard packages. The standard ones are great for putting computer monitored temperature sensors all over the place…