"Here Comes Another Bubble"
Remember, you skeptics live outside Silicon Valley, even an old warhorse like Oracle is humming along,posting a 35% increase in net income. From the Richter Scales:
Read more...Category Archives: Technology and innovation
Internet Brown-Outs in Two Years?
It’s not as scary as having bridges fall down, but just as we have been neglecting our physical infrastructure, so to have we apparently been neglecting our technology infrastructure, in this case, the Internet backbone. The downstream providers are gearing up for, nay encourging, greater consumers use of bandwidth-intensive services like streaming video, without sufficient […]
Read more...Fed’s Gary Stern Makes Lame Arguments Against Increased Credit Market Regulation
Perhaps I am attributing too much importance to a single speech, but the Minneapolis Fed President Gary Stern’s “Credit Market Developments: Lessons for Central Banking,” reveals a lot of what is wrong about the way policymakers are thinking about our credit crisis. And if Stern’s position is widely held within the Fed, we are in […]
Read more..."As Big a Shock as the Russians Launching Sputnik"
The Chinese have demonstrated, convincingly, that their military technology is superior to America’s, via having a cloaked sub slip, undetected, within striking distance of a US aircraft carrier during war games. This has to rate as one of the most important news stories of the year, yet it has been reported (in English, anyhow) only […]
Read more...Conventional Wisdom Watch (Financial Innovation Edition)
Even though I have said some unkind things about the Economist, once you get outside the world of politics, it is a very good guide to leading edge conventional wisdom. What do I mean by “leading edge conventional wisdom?” It is the sort of thinking dispensed by well regarded think tanks and private sector experts […]
Read more...Making Copper 200x Faster
Australia’s News.com.au reports that a local Melbourne PhD student has developed an algorithm that will increase the data throughput speeds on good old fashioned copper wires 200 fold. John Papandriopoulos claims that his approach can produce Internet speeds up to 250 Mbps. By contrast the top speed offered by Verizon’s fiber optic service FIOS is […]
Read more...Former Fraudster Frank Abagnale: "Technology Breeds Crime"
I’ve debated for a couple of days about posting this item, but since it was still nagging at me, I figured it was sufficiently interesting to be worthy of your attention. By way of background, Frank Abagnale of book and later movie “Catch Me if You Can” fame, can lay claim to having been one […]
Read more...Microsoft Accepts the Rule of Law (EU Antitrust Edition)
I’m pretty amazed at the tone and some of the content of the report on Bloomberg about the fact that Microsoft decided not to appeal the decision of Europe’s second highest court and worked out a settlement. Not only does Bloomberg seem not to appreciate that even Microsoft is subject to the rule of law, […]
Read more...The Economist Gets It Wrong on Japanese Outsourcing
I must confess I don’t read the Economist as much as I used to. I suppose one factor was my belated recognition of how much to the right it had moved (it was evident to UK readers in the 1990s, but not being a close follower of British politics, I didn’t recognize it until the […]
Read more...20 Years of PCs, and What Do We Have to Show for It?
We appear to have made stunning gains in the world of desktop computing. Screamingly fast chips. Huge amounts of RAM and gigantic hard disks. And those big, gorgeous flat screens. If you are playing games, watching (and storing) movies, or editing photos, all that horsepower is essential. And websites have gotten all kinds of busy […]
Read more...Google Advertising Model Under Threat?
A Bloomberg story reports that specialized online ad agencies such as Quigo are successfully gaining share at the some of the very biggest (and therefore most profitable) advertisers. Quigo allows advertisers to specify what sites their ads run on. Quigo also allows publisher to use their own sales force rather than Google’s. Other ad agencies […]
Read more...IBM Seeks to Patent Checking a Box
Well, at least it’s checking a box via a GUI (graphical user interface). You can’t make this stuff up. From the US Patent and Trademark Office: Mode switching for ad hoc checkbox selection AbstractControlling checkbox status by selecting and deselecting checkboxes in a GUI according to a mode of operation, the GUI having displayed upon […]
Read more...IBM Seeking Patent for Outsourcing
You cannot make this stuff up….From the US Patent and Trademark Office: Outsourcing of services Abstract A method for identifying human-resource work content to outsource offshore of an organization. The method is provided on a computer readable medium and includes the steps of identifying at least one task being performed by an organization; associating each […]
Read more...Apple Asks for a Class Action Lawsuit
Is the iPhone the beginning of the end of Apple’s days as a company who can do no wrong? In retrospect, the change of the name of the company from “Apple Computer” to “Apple” may have been the tip-off. It made official the Cupertino company’s shift in orientation from being a personal computer company to […]
Read more...What is Wrong With Vonage’s Attorneys?
For those of us who have been following the Vonage saga (full disclosure: I’m an early and generally happy customer, and even used their service in Australia, which allowed people to call my 212 number and reach me in Sydney), the trial results are baffling. By way of background, Vonage is the largest commercial provider […]
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