Category Archives: Asides

Greedy little China

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You could not make this stuff up. According to today’s New York Times, Dubya is planning to lecture the Chinese president on the need to curb his (i.e. China’s) thirst for oil! Yes, that’s right — the US is going to hector the Chinese for guzzling too much oil.

WASHINGTON, April 18 — The competition for access to oil is emerging high on the agenda for President Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House this week. President Bush has called China’s growing demand for oil one reason for rising prices, and has warned Beijing against trying to “lock up” global supplies.

With crude oil selling for more than $70 a barrel and American motorists paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, American officials say the subject cannot be avoided at Thursday’s meeting in the Oval Office, as it was sidestepped when Mr. Bush visited Beijing last fall.

China’s appetite for oil also affects its stance on Iran, where a growing confrontation with the United States over nuclear programs has already unsettled oil markets. China has invested heavily in Iran, and as a permanent member of the Security Council, its position on the question of sanctions is crucial.

Even as Mr. Hu arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, Chinese and American negotiators were debating a proposal for the two presidents to announce a joint study of both nations’ energy needs as a way to ward off conflict in coming decades, when China’s rapidly expanding need for imported energy to sustain its growth may collide with the needs of the United States, Europe and Japan.

In 2004 China used some 6.5 million barrels of oil a day and overtook Japan as the world’s second largest user of petroleum products. The largest, the United States, consumes about 20 million barrels a day…

I’m not known for my admiration of the repressive Chinese regime, but in this case I trust that Hu tells George where to stuff his demands.

A different London

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Serendipity. I stumbled on this lovely essay by Ian Jack while looking for something else. Sample:

Perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life happened in June 1970, when I walked across Hampstead Heath from an interview with Harold Evans, which closed with his saying that I’d got a job on his newspaper. It was sunny, warm enough for the Sunday Times editor to wear nothing more than a dressing gown (he’d told me to be early, but he was in bed when I got there) as he conducted the conversation over his breakfast orange juice at a table in his back garden.

His house was a Tudorbethan villa on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate. I remember he said, in the context of where I could afford to live, that a house like his would cost about £20,000, but that flats could be had for £5,000 or £6,000. My salary as a sub-editor would be £3,000. All these amounts seemed large.

I walked across the Heath to the tube at Hampstead in a daze of excitement. The sun sparkled on the ponds, couples walked dogs or kissed each other on the grass, the dome of St Paul’s shivered far away in the haze, a kite bobbed up on the horizon….

StopBadware.org

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An interesting new initiative by the Berkman Centre, Oxford’s Internet Institute and Lenovo. In an interview with MIT Tech Review, Johathan Zittrain described the motivation for the initiative thus:

Machines clogged with “malware” — the catchall term for code that infiltrates PCs to steal data, send out spam, or produce pop-up messages — are already costing billions annually and testing everyone’s tolerance.

And a single destructive virus could prompt harsh regulations and cause millions of people to seek safe, closed networks.

To help fight back, Zittrain and fellow academics have just launched a new antimalware effort (www.stopbadware.org) funded by Google, Sun Microsystems, and Lenovo (the Chinese firm that acquired IBM’s PC division).

The importance of sex

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No — not what you think. It’s the headline on a fascinating Economist editorial on the importance of women in the workforce. Here’s a sample:

EVEN today in the modern, developed world, surveys show that parents still prefer to have a boy rather than a girl. One longstanding reason why boys have been seen as a greater blessing has been that they are expected to become better economic providers for their parents’ old age. Yet it is time for parents to think again. Girls may now be a better investment.

Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents’ nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do…

The Chinese approach to intellectual property

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

It’s taken Research In Motion years to bring its BlackBerry service to the Chinese market. It filed its first application to do business in China back in 1999 and since then has registered at least nine trademarks for the device and accompanying service. And now, just a few weeks before the company is to finally open for business in what’s expected to become one of the world’s biggest markets for wireless communications, China Unicom — the country’s state-controlled wireless network — has rolled out a rival service called … wait for it … RedBerry.

“China Unicom’s RedBerry brand not only incorporates people’s familiarity with the BlackBerry brand name, but it also fully embodies the symbolic meanings of China Unicom’s new red logo,” the company said in an announcement that no doubt had RIM CEO Jim Balsillie seeing red himself. A brazen move and one that’s got to be causing angst over at RIM. RedBerry is virtually identical to RIM’s service, albeit quite a bit cheaper. The standard e-mail account at RedBerry costs less than a dollar a month, plus a few cents for each e-mail sent. A typical BlackBerry account in Hong Kong costs up to $64 per month. Clearly, this is an ugly situation for RIM and one that’s almost certain to grow uglier still. “From RIM’s point of view, this is rather disturbing,” a Canadian business consultant in Beijing told The Globe and Mail. “It’s obviously a copycat name. It’s a fairly clever example of brand piracy.”

Clever? Blatant, more like. I’ve long thought that the key determinant of whether China becomes a real global player in the technology business (as distinct from just being a low cost assembly location) is whether its government decides to get serious about enforcing patents and respecting IP. Despite the Economist‘s recent story suggesting that there might be changes afoot, the RedBerry case implies that state-sanctioned piracy rules ok.

But wait — the plot thickens…

Reuters reports that:

China’s computer manufacturers must install operating software before their goods leave the factory gates, the latest effort to address the thorny issue of piracy before President Hu Jintao visits the United States.

The order was given in a notice issued jointly by the Ministry of Information Industry, the State Copyright Bureau and the Ministry of Commerce on March 31 and released to reporters on Monday.

Chinese counterfeiting is a major irritant in U.S.-China trade and American software firms have said they want to see progress on the issue at the 2006 meeting of the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade in Washington on Tuesday.

“Computers manufactured within the country’s borders should have pre-installed authorised operating software systems when they leave the factory,” the notice said.

Wang Ziqiang, director of the copyright management department at the State Copyright Bureau, said the notice was not about reacting to foreign criticism.

“This is not because of foreign pressure,” he told reporters. “This is about the country’s economic development.”

Search users ‘stop at page three’

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Well, whaddya know — most search users ‘stop at page three’…

Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results, says a US study.

At most, people will go through three pages of results before giving up, found the survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect.

One wonders how much it cost to unearth this banal truth?

Still running Windows? Read on…

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From Sci-Tech Today…

Two weeks after a third-party vendor issued a temporary patch to fix a critical security vulnerability in the Internet Explorer Web browser, Microsoft has released a whopper of a monthly patch that includes a fix for the Internet Explorer flaw. The megapatch also includes fixes for nine other flaws, of varying severity, found in Outlook Express, FrontPage, and SharePoint.

In the Security Bulletin announcing the fixes, the software giant acknowledged that eight of the 10 flaws could allow a hacker to take complete control of a computer running unpatched software. To do so, the attacker would have to set up a Web site with malicious code and inveigle the unsuspecting user to visit the site.

The good part, said Rob Ayoub, a Frost & Sullivan analyst, is that these vulnerabilities finally were fixed. He also said that this monthly round of patches is surprising in that the updates apply to so many computer users. Some 90 percent of computer users run Microsoft Windows and the Internet Explorer browser…