On the way from Kenmare, last Monday. It was one of those magical days when the rain-rinsed Irish air is so clear that you have the feeling that a layer has been peeled off your eyes.
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Cheep, cheep
Happy Easter from two little twerps patiently awaiting their moment of glory as cake-decorations.
The Chinese attitude to IP
This morning’s Observer column…
The one phrase you hear very little of whenever China’s economic potential is discussed is ‘intellectual property’. This is because China is world champion in every branch of piracy known to man. I don’t think there’s a CD, DVD, computer game or software package that is not illicitly available for a dollar or two in virtually every town in China.
That’s why the top executives of Western technology companies are – to a man or woman – agreed upon one thing: that while they are more than happy to have their products manufactured by Chinese labour in Chinese factories, they will never, ever entrust their intellectual property to any Chinese organisation…
Quote of the day
For the poor, globalization is not an accomplished fact but a condition that remains to be achieved. The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.
John Gray, writing about “The Global Delusion” in The New York Review of Books.
StopBadware.org
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).
Iceland comes first in broadband access
Who’d have thought it? BBC News Online: Iceland comes first in broadband.
According to the [OECD] Iceland has 78,017 broadband subscribers and South Korea 12,190,711.
TOP FIVE BROADBAND OECD COUNTRIES
Iceland: 26.7%
Korea: 25.4%
Netherlands: 25.3%
Denmark: 25%
Switzerland: 23.1%The leading countries in broadband use per capita all had more than 25% of their net users subscribing to such a service. Iceland led the field on 26.7%.
By comparison, the UK was ranked 12th with 15.9%, just behind the US with 16.8%.
The importance of sex
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…
Getting to the bottom of it
It’s leading-edge uselessness time again. Consider this from the Australian Sunday Times: A formula for the perfect female derriere…
FEW women would claim to have the perfect bottom. But for those in need of reassurance that it is within reach, a scientist has come to the rescue by working out a mathematical formula they believe adds up to the perfect posterior.
The magical figures are (S C) x (B F)/T = V. Though the equation looks rather complicated, it is, according to the scientist, simple.
It assesses shape, bounce, firmness and symmetry – all factors that add up to the bottom line.
S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness.
V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.
And let Y= the battiness of the psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan ‘University’ who devised the formula after asking 2000 women across Britain to assess their bottoms using a simple points scale.
The Chinese approach to intellectual property
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’
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?