Issues & Opinions

It just occurred to me what using my now-several-months-old laptop reminds me of.

It’s a reasonably beefed-out Thinkpad, with plenty of memory, and (ahem) it came preloaded with Microsoft Vista. I stifled my instinct to reload it on day one, thinking that the naysayers on Vista were simply disgruntled… well, disgruntled “whatever-you-have-to-be-disgruntled-about to be overly harsh about Vista.” Wrong-o, to my chagrin.

The performance of my machine honestly reminds me of the days of Windows 3.1, with (in terms of sheer performance relative to reasonably expectations) Windows 3.1 coming out the clear winner.

Windows Vista is an unspeakably bad operating system implementation, and compares so unfavorably to each of the last three generations of Microsoft desktop operating systems that I cannot think of any non-profane way to describe it. Yet, here I am trying to avoid potty-mouthing my own blog. So it’s a conundrum.

It will take me days of effort to reload my machine and reliably assure myself that I got everything restored, but my disgust with the worthless alleged advances of Vista has finally overcome my desire to avoid computer busywork. I’m reverting to XP, knowing that the speed I gain in doing so should recoup me the time lost in reversion. I project a payback of two weeks or less. Yes, Vista is that badly done.

I repeat - I’m no Microsoft basher, and I’ve been a satisfied user of their desktop operating systems for 20+ years. But Vista has no upside to cancel out its hideous performance downside, and is an abortion best avoided.

Addendum - 3/3/2008: I’m presently half-way done replacing Vista with XP Pro. My disdain for it is such that I look forward to never using Vista again. Luckily for me, my disdain hasn’t reached critical levels, as it has for some people.

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From today’s Independent, a story about a study funded by the mobile phone companies:

Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study.

The research, sponsored by the mobile phone companies themselves, shows that using the handsets before bed causes people to take longer to reach the deeper stages of sleep and to spend less time in them, interfering with the body’s ability to repair damage suffered during the day.

…

Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium and funded by the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, representing the main handset companies, it has caused serious concern among top sleep experts, one of whom said that there was now “more than sufficient evidence” to show that the radiation “affects deep sleep”.

(ellipsis mine)

The report refers to a “massive study” of 1,656 Belgian teenagers, the results of which are claimed to complement the lab studies done by MIT et al. Those MIT studies noted a significant effect (with “significant” left undefined in the article) on the level of tiredness found in study participants the day after exposure to RF in the 884MHz range.

The embarrassed Mobile Manufacturers Forum played down the results, insisting – at apparent variance with this published conclusion – that its “results were inconclusive” and that “the researchers did not claim that exposure caused sleep disturbance”.

The MMF should be embarrassed, for two reasons. First, it’s silly to assume that RF emissions have no effect on their surroundings, and it’s not unreasonable to try to quantify these effects, good, bad, or indifferent. More importantly, if you’re going to downplay the results of the study you’ve funded as “inconclusive”, you ought to at least not do so by simply & directly contradicting the stated result of the study. While holding no opinion on the degree to which sleep can be disrupted, I’m sympathetic to their conundrum, but there are far more credible ways to spin a study’s results than just to reflexively deny its conclusion.

In particular, the definition of “very tired”, judged in isolation from other influences on sleep, seems subjective to the point of absurdity, particularly in a study of only 70-odd people. I’m sure they considered this, of course, but it would be nice to read how they’d attempted to adjust for the effect.

It’s an interesting article either way, made more so by the omission (if not in the study, in the article itself) of any control group who’d simply used a wired phone during the same periods of the day. The lab tests, with RF but sans actual phone use, go some (undefined) way toward finding causality, but while studying the overall effect of late night phone use, it seems ludicrous to ignore the fact of actual conversation.

Because, at least in this case, the medium, all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, is not the message.

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Today’s WSJ, in the Business Technology section, juxtaposes two pieces on the hypergrowth of digital information, discussing its reasons, its effects, and some responses to the growth.

The first piece is a straightforward and informative mini-whitepaper, entitled “Cutting Files Down to Size“. It mentions the efforts of Chevron and Credit Suisse to control their information, primarily through implementation of new tools, new methods, and new employee work habits. There’s something about an information base that’s presently 1.2 petabytes in size, potentially growing by 57% per year, that can focus the minds of management. Add to that the million email messages per day that the 59,000 employee Chevron claims to process, and you’re talking some serious data. So much data, perhaps, that’s it’s not even possible to glean the information from it. A veritable flood.

The primary solutions discussed are conceptually simple:

• Get people to pay attention to the amount by which they’re increasing the deluge
• Put systems in place to eliminate redundancy, such as using Microsoft’s well-reviewed SharePoint server, ensuring that even the worst PowerPoint slide decks are only stored once
• Admitting, and getting data creators to admit, that not all information is equally valuable

All excellent steps, though both expensive and difficult to implement. Totally aside from the grotesque knock-on effects of continually increasing technology infrastructure to store all new information, the real benefit from such efforts is to remove potential sources of background noise; the unimportant, the duplicative, and the no-longer-operative. “Data” is both easy and not intrinsically valuable - it’s “information” that’s both difficult and valuable, and too much data can obscure the information. Best of luck to the contestants in slaying their particular dragons.

The companion piece, on the same page, in Lee Gomes’ “Talking Tech” column was the more intriguing of the two. Entitled “Computers Should Be Taught To Let Certain Memories Go“, it contained an interview with Harvard KSG professor Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, and was among the more thought-provoking pieces in the entire day’s paper.

Mr. Mayer-Schoenberger’s thesis is this:

Human beings … weren’t designed to remember everything we ever learned, and sometimes are better off when we forget. Computers, he adds, should as a result be taught to let some memories go.
…
We are biologically hard-wired to selectively remember. But in moving into a digital age, we are now surrounding ourselves with tools that have inversed (sic) that.
…

How does this make life different?

In the predigital age, we might have called someone who knew a person we were interested in learning about, got them to tell us about the person. And we would get a quick picture — but not a complete and comprehensive picture of each and every piece of communication or behavior that the person did over the past 20 years. I think we have lost something by moving from that sort of short encapsulation toward a complete picture that provides us with all the details, the sort that over time, we as a society, and as human beings, tend to forget.

But what’s the problem with that?

Things that happened 10 or 15 years ago might have happened to a different person. Therefore, we should put less weight on what we did 15 years ago than we would do now. In the past, our brains did this automatically for us by forgetting it. But we haven’t been able to develop another evolutionary method, another method by which we can weigh things that happened further in the past differently from those that happened more recently.

(ellipses mine)

Interesting theory, and one that makes some rational sense. I can’t speak for anyone but myself on the subject, but I’m surely not the same person today as I was 15 years ago, and would want any judgment of me weighted more on the current me than the one from decades ago.

The (mild) shocker in the piece, however, was this, his prescription for a solution:

My proposal is that we have a law that mandates that software coders build into software a better ability for people to let their digital tools forget, if they so wish. Right now, both Windows as well as Mac OS have a huge amount of meta data that they keep track of for each file that we use: “Date Created,” “Owner,” and so on. So I suggest that we add another type of meta data: “Expiration Date.”

Conceptually, he has a point - that would be at least a potential solution to the problem he’s laid out. Why the rush to what I can guarantee would be massively ineffectual legal efforts, I wondered? For starters, I presumed it’s because he’s an associate professor with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, whose faculty, perhaps by definition, thinks more abstractly and less rationally than, say, Harvard Business School’s must. Then I visited his faculty page at KSG:

…He advises businesses, governments, and international organizations on regulatory and policy issues. He holds a bunch of law degrees, including one from Harvard, and an MS (Econ) from the London School of Economics.

That explains it. Ignoring any questions about how many law degrees one can effectively use, the “bunch” he holds appear to have been enough to outweigh any pragmatism learnt at LSE.

Addendum - 5/14/2007 Having read Dr. Mayer-Schönberger’s paper, Beyond Copyright: Managing Information Rights with DRM, it’s clear that his definition of the problem and the solutions that can mitigate it don’t translate well into a “20 questions” format.

Digital rights management is, as the title indicates, at the heart of his thinking, and for anyone who puckers at the thought of DRM, his paper provides an excellent antidote to reflexive rejection of the concept.

I thank the professor for pointing me to the paper, and am better informed for having read it.

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Not for the first time, the technology world has a do-or-die patent judgment hanging over its head - “Judge grants partial stay in Vonage patent case”

The last such major drama was a bit more than a year ago, in the case of NTP v. Research in Motion (RIM), related to the Blackberry remote messaging service and its infringement of patents held by a patent licensing firm. In that instance, much of RIM’s effort before ultimately reaching settlement was dedicated to contesting the patents. During late 2005 and early 2006, there were many stories of successful challenges to NTPs patents, as reported here, here, and here, as well as myriad other places.

In that last linked story, one of the two primary crutches on which the losers of patent infringement cases regularly lean was described like so:

More bad news for we-don’t-actually-make-anything NTP in their long legal dispute with RIM — the US patent office just made a “first office action” rejecting the validity of the last of eight NTP patents they were reviewing, five of which were at the heart of the RIM patent infringement suit.

Another of the crutches is the all-too-common complaint that the Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides patents far too willingly, either for inventions that are obvious or trivial and thus not patentable or already widely known in the public domain prior to the patent filing. Disclosure of presumptively patentable inventions prior to first filing with the USPTO makes them ineligible for protection, in many cases, and certainly, disclosure by someone other than the patent applicant is strong indication that the invention fails the to surmount the hurdles regarding triviality and uniqueness.

Notwithstanding successful defense of patents widely considered invalid, like Amazon’s patent for “one-click” technology in internet commerce, dissenters regularly continue the argument, both generally (as with DNA patents in the comment linked to the ledt) and related to specific patents like Amazon’s.

In the case of NTP v. RIM, RIM had hoped to obtain reversals on all NTP-owned patents it had been judged guilty of violating. RIM ran out of time, and had to pay the piper, even though every single patent at the heart of the case had, by crunch time, been provisionally revoked. This was clearly an unfortunate, and arguably an unfair, result for RIM stockholders.

In the current case, Vonage was granted the temporary right to continue using the patents at issue, but not to use them in providing services to new customers. Vonage, predictably, was disappointed by this:

Roger Warin, a lawyer for Vonage, said the partial stay amounted to “cutting off oxygen and a bullet to the head” of the company.

And, given stronger finances, it seems possible that Vonage, like RIM before it, might attempt a blocking or delaying tactic while attempting to have the patents overturned.

But Vonage (they of the “shaky finances“, both before and after their IPO) isn’t RIM (they who, even if they perhaps shouldn’t have needed to pay NTP, weren’t mortally damaged by the battle). And Verizon isn’t NTP. It’s bigger, of course, but the technology underlying the patents at issue wasn’t purchased, to my knowledge, but was instead actually invented by Verizon. Even under the arguably silly (silly because patents, like other property, can be bought and sold) stance that NTP didn’t really deserve the patent protection it used to win the case, Verizon is a whole different breed of cat, possessor of many patents, quite familiar with the process of acquiring and protecting them, and to which such an argument doesn’t apply. Any attempts to invalidate its patents seem likely to be a hard battle, with at best an uncertain outcome for the challenger.

While “a bullet to the head” and “cutting off oxygen” seems less likely to guarantee instant death than a bullet to the lungs and cutting off its head would be, Vonage, as Mr. Warin said, is in deep trouble as a result of the only-partial stay of the patent infringement judgment. Inability to acquire new customers will be their death knell, given a business model that’s predicated, still, on market share growth instead of financial results.

Breathy claims, made during the initial trial, that they had alternative technology that could be used instead ring hollow for me, and were interesting for public- and customer-relations, but are not operative in a real world where new customers must coexist with old, and where implementing any sort of new technology, especially for a customer base far larger than the company’s service quality seems to merit, would be like performing open heart surgery in the bed of a pickup truck going 90 mph on a rough road.

Good riddance to a company that’s often treated its customers rather cavalierly? Perhaps not. But as a happy-to-be-ex-customer, I think it’s more likely than not.

Addendum - The more things change, the less they stay the same:
(5:47 PM ET Apr 6, 2007)
“Vonage receives stay, can continue signing up new customers“.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Vonage Holdings Corp. said late Friday it has received a stay from a federal court in Washington, D.C., allowing it to continue to sign up new customers. Earlier Friday a judge the same court issued a ruling barring Vonage from signing up new customers, because Vonage in March had been found to infringe on patents owned by Verizon Communications Inc.

Apparently, Vonage used the “Oooooh! You’re killin’me” defense. So I guess we’ll just see.

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Not that I want to bash on the same topic too hard, but subsequent analysis I’ve seen of the Oracle vs. SAP kerfuffle (below), brings into question my understanding of copyright law, and my analysis of the overall case. Such as this bit, from an article of 3/27/2007 by Michael Hickins, entitled “SAP Could be ‘In a World of Trouble’”:

Analysis: The lawsuit that Oracle filed against its rival in the enterprise software market last week is going to get even worse. When all is said and done, SAP’s conduct, if proved true, could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, untold points of market share and even, perhaps, jail time for some executives.

In the complaint, Oracle said it plans to register thousands of new copyright claims for its software and then “amend its Complaint to add further copyright allegations and causes of action when the registrations for these copyrights” are granted by the United States Copyright Office.

I’m no lawyer, and I don’t know who Michael Hickins is, but I’m guessing that either he’s no lawyer either, or he’s a lawyer similar in skills to the public defender assigned in the movie “My Cousin Vinnie”.

Where do I start? Purple prose like “…hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, untold points of market share and even, perhaps, jail time for some executives” is an easy first step.

Business judgment errors, if they were even errors at all, by a tiny subsidiary of SAP called TomorrowNow, seem unlikely to damage the corporate reputation of SAP to the tune of “untold points of market share”, unless “untold” is a synonym for “zero”.

In order for there to be hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, it would seem required that Oracle present evidence of hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. This seems highly unlikely, and not just because this seems clearly less than some corporate spying skullduggery than SAP’s division simply walking through unlocked doors at Oracle on behalf of Oracle’s former support customers. I don’t know what the controlling law is alleged to be, but treble damages, such as in the case of antitrust, don’t seem applicable, and I have trouble conceiving that TomorrowNow, with several hundred employees engaged in servicing all its customers, not just those who’ve recently moved from Oracle, somehow mulcted hundreds of millions in business.
Read the rest of this story »

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I can’t explain my tendency to rail about small, irksome things that are just part of the landscape, but since it’s a tendency without obvious downside, I also can’t muster the will to stop doing so, either.

Among my pet peeves is the marketing practice of sending email messages highlighting white papers supposed to be of truly crucial importance to me, the reader. I’ve ceased trying to determine why it is that many of the marketers think so highly of the motivational power of their email missives. In trying to answer that question in the past, I used to quickly have a look at their web pages, PDFs, or webcasts, not because the topic lit a fire under me, but solely because I was trying to figure out why they thought it would.

And, of course, by simply taking the time to look at the sometimes-maundering presentations, I made their “lists” of hot prospects, targeted for incessant future follow-up and cultivation. Take one of this evening’s four such entries from my inbox:

A thorough understanding of what’s going on in your IT environment is no longer optional.

Without it, you’re leaving your enterprise vulnerable to security, litigation and vendor-compliance risks. And, because the cost of maintaining IT assets represents such a significant portion of the budget, you could be throwing money away.

So it clearly behooves us all to achieve best practices in software and hardware asset management. This paper offers practical guidance that will put you in the know through best practices in asset management – steps that can help you better manage enterprise risks, save money and more. You simply can’t afford to pass this paper by.

Lucky for me, these days I’m much better at finding enough reason in the email itself to disqualify the whitepaper from ever passing before my eyes. For instance:

A thorough understanding of what’s going on in your IT environment is no longer optional.

Wow. I had no idea that it was ever optional, so that would be a fun fact to suddenly know, if the implied predicate for the assertion were actually true.

And, because the cost of maintaining IT assets represents such a significant portion of the budget, you could be throwing money away.

Irrelevant - without regard to the proportion of budget dedicated to maintaining IT assets, there’s no guarantee I’m not throwing money way. Such as by wasting time reviewing the ten or more whitepaper notifications in my daily inbox contents.

So it clearly behooves us all to achieve best practices in software and hardware asset management.

Almost like standard practice in university calculus classes (and elsewhere), the “hand wave”, a/k/a “and therefore, it follows”. “It clearly” does nothing, let alone behoove me, not least because I am not a member of Genus Equine.

You simply can’t afford to pass this paper by.

Just watch me, Sparky. Just watch me.

The whitepaper referenced above may contain the secrets of the universe, for all I know. Regardless, I didn’t read it, and won’t be doing so in the future. The email solicitation was lame, it moved me only to the point of ridiculing it in a blog post, and I have enough respect for the sales people at ManageSoft not to send them on a goose chase of calling me or pestering me with further email messages I’d just ignore, as I’m not at all interested in their offerings.

Not that I know the sales people at ManageSoft - I don’t. And it’s possible that the sales people at ManageSoft are those directly responsible for the email message I’ve just finished making fun of, rather than some separate, largely incompetent, marketing department. No matter - enterprise software and services sales is a hard slog, filled with wasted salesperson time, and I think, regardless of their solicitation skills or the quality of their offering, that sales people are human, too; people whose time is as valuable as my own, even when I have no intention of doing business with them.

Perhaps I was just well brought up, but more likely, my recently-found reticence to even respond to solicitations that interest me for no reason other than to find out why they were supposed to is that I’ve tagged along on such sales calls with colleagues before, and I respect the craft, when done right.

I just wish that the sales craftsmen spent a bit more time trying to envision how their solicitations are actually processed by their intended, though sometimes poorly targeted, recipients.

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How else to describe a court battle between the two titans of enterprise software, Oracle and SAP? Heavyweights, both.

On March 22, 2007, Oracle filed suit against SAP alleging corporate theft. Per Oracle:

“This case is about corporate theft on a grand scale, committed by the largest German software company—a conglomerate known as SAP,” the lawsuit says. “From that Web site, SAP has copied and swept thousands of Oracle software products and other proprietary and confidential material onto its own servers.”

My initial reaction to the news was “Whoa. SAP just made a big mistake”. In the fullness of the news cycle, however, further details arrived, via a story in today’s WSJ (subscription req’d) entitled “SAP Unit Denies Oracle’s Claims”:

According to the complaint, TomorrowNow in some cases accessed information using log-in information for Oracle customers with expired support contracts. In other cases, TomorrowNow accessed information beyond what customers were entitled to access, according to the suit.

My reaction after reading this bit of news, in a story focused on SAP’s proclamation of innocence, was that Oracle’s position isn’t quite as iron-clad as it had first appeared to be.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Wired Magazine, in an interesting article today entitled “Is Oracle Using Computer Crime Law to Squelch Competition?” questions how different the case would be had the Oracle customers simply provided written manuals in their possession to the SAP subsidiary. Further, Jennifer Granick, the author of the Wired article, doesn’t pick a likely winner in the case, but seems dismayed at the prospect of Oracle’s succeeding in their suit, but doing so simply because the access was electronic rather than physical.

There’s a larger issue that occurred to me in this matter, however. I’m no Oracle maven, but I remember quite vividly the marketing campaign Oracle ran earlier this decade touting “Unbreakable: Oracle’s Commitment to Security“. Ever since the 2002 debut of that campaign, naysayers have been a dime a dozen. In fact, Oracle itself, by its actions if not its advertising rhetoric, has admitted as much. No less a luminary than Bruce Schneier, founder & CTO of BT Counterpane was quoted thusly:

“When they say their software is unbreakable, they’re lying.”

Ouch. That could have left a mark, directed anywhere other than at Oracle’s marketing department, I’d guess.

But unless Oracle has dispensed with the fiction that they, alone in the technology world, are capable of providing a secure database, application, or portal, it would seem as though they’re begging for further ridicule when complaining that SAP (via its TomorrowNow subsidiary) was able not only to get into Oracle’s systems with expired passwords, but that SAP was also able, as if by magic, to access areas to which those same customer passwords were not authorized.

Friends of mine with cooler heads have pointed out that, if Oracle were attempting to get a customer to sign a new maintenance agreement, they might well have avoided disabling access for those expired accounts. My rejoinder? That still doesn’t explain or excuse the fact that their security over this information must be marginal, at best, if they allowed access to items for which the customers weren’t authorized.

And one logical conclusion a court could, but wouldn’t be forced to, draw, is that Oracle didn’t think highly enough of the supposed “corporate secrets” to even put a lock on the door.

Advantage, SAP?

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