October 21st, 2003
Rojisan’s entry on determinism was very interesting and reminded me something about inventors and innovators.
Inventors are usually brilliant people but they are also very stubborn. I suppose it is the stubbornness that enables them to perserve on despite any criticisms. Unfortunately, it is also this stubbornness proof to be their greatest pitfalls.
When they invents something, they don’t just invent a product…they envision the whole ecosystem, of how their inventions is going to work, how the market is going to use them. So when the market wants their invention for something else, they not only actively ignore it but reject it outright.
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October 21st, 2003
Keith has responded to my entry again. Like him, I think it would be useful to air our differences in public. Whichever side you on, your own choice :-)
“I say that his dns-search piece describes an outcome that is in every way similar to SiteFinder.”
Yes. The goal is the same. The approach isn’t. And the whole argument we have is about the approach, not the goal. And I know the approach matters a lot to John as a technical decision (not political one).
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October 21st, 2003
Keith Teare responsed to my last blog entry so let me do a quick one to reply him. (ps: Yes, Keith is also a friend … great guy but we do disagree sometimes. :-)
First of all, I like to clarify that I think Site Finder is a service which will benefit many end-users. But I disagree with using the DNS wildcard to achieve this. This is why in my last entry I suggested we should explore this further in IETF.
Now, moving on to reply Keith…
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October 20th, 2003
A recap of the events…
A few days ago, CNN reported an interview with Stratton Scalvos, CEO of Verisign on their controvesial Site Finder service and the need to allow Verisign to “innovate the DNS infrastructure”.
Kevin Werbach, former counsel for FCC, promptly dismissed Stratton and argued that innovation should be done above but not on the DNS.
Keith Teare, former CEO of Realnames, who is one of the members whom Verisign “consulted” on SiteFinder argues that innovation should be allowed on both DNS and above DNS citing John Klensin, former chair of IAB and his draft-klensin-dns-search proposal and also IAB comments on wildcard.
This prompted Karl Auerbach, former board member of ICANN, who reiterate the damage Verisign is doing to the Internet infrastructure even though it may not be felt by most users.
Verisign folks actually called me the day before they are forced to suspend their Sitefinder but we never hooked up. But never mind, let me add my views to the discussion, for whatever it is worth.
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October 19th, 2003
Today, I catched up with my blogroll (which I lag very behind due to spending all my free time on the bayesian plugin), and was kind of surprise to see this on ITU Newsblog.
Public IP telephony would create a wide open door for new competitors to walk in and take away all the value that the carriers can bring to voice services. In theory, someone having a phone with an Ethernet socket needs only a high-quality IP service and a server to provide IP address to be able to use the phone to place unlimited calls to any other phone. The internet backbones are already in place and, since voice uses very little bandwidth, the industry would move to flat rate pricing: “All the calls you want to make for only US$9.99 a month!”
Wow, ITU actually got it half right!
What they should do is take this to the next obvious development, that it cost less then US$200 to setup your own VoIP server + handset (and getting cheaper) and soon people will be asking “Why are we even paying US$9.99 a month when we can just do it ourselves?”
I think the concept of the telco or what we called “a voice company” may not even exist in the future.
October 18th, 2003
Jay Allen, the author of MT-blacklist, commented in a discussion at Q Daily News:
While I will agree that many blacklist implementations and models are flawed, I still haven’t heard an valid criticism specifically of MT-Blacklist’s implementation (other than a couple of bugs which will be ironed out in the next version), but would be happy to hear some and adapt the program as necessary to best serve the needs of the community.
I take a quick look at MT-blacklist. The whole logic to determine if a comment or ping is spam or not comes down to this:
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October 15th, 2003
Update: Michah Valine has taken over the maintenance of MT-Bayesian
Update: Please read the problems with MT-Bayesian.
Many people have complained about my “Solution for comments spams” is unfriendly to disabled or those who do not have a graphic browser.
Hearing your feedbacks, I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and pings.
Download it here: mt-bayesian-1.1.tar.gz (Documentation)
[I just installed SimpleComments plugin and modify the templates so it will also display spam but will blockquote them. Check it out. :-]
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October 12th, 2003
I wrote about Outsourcing in Part 1 of Predicting the future a month ago and I thought it is about time I write a sequel. So here is Part 2: “local industry”.
Like Part 1, lets look at industry revolution and how railroad changed the business landscape. Railways bring people closer together and allow goods to travel further. Where you used to do business within 30km, you now do business 300km away with equal ease. Companies faced not only competitions from the same town but from other similar companies other towns.
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October 11th, 2003
Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, warns the danger of outsource:
The U.S. software industry is about to lose jobs and market share to foreign competitors unless the government acts quickly to fight protectionist trade policies and double U.S. productivity, he said.
Actually, I wrote about the trend of outsourcing in Predicting the future a month ago.
I argued that protectionist policy won’t work in our global society anymore. Protectionist policies will only make U.S companies less competitive globally and hence a slow and silent death for the industry.
What U.S software industry should do, really, is to move up the value chain, from programming to design. This is no different from products been prototyped and designed in U.S but manufactured in China or Taiwan.
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