Month: February 2004

manufactured constraints?

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: Calling Bunny Huang. Bunny Huang to the white courtesy iPod.:

Here’s fun. This article argues that the iPod is based on a chip capable, by default, of playing Windows Media files – but Apple have disabled the feature. Other players built on the same chip could also, if not fiddled with, play AAC files. Hence and therefore, the whole iTunes Music Store .v. Everyone Else what-format-will-you-buy thing is contrived.

The followup comments with the article are worth a read: not everyone believes in the overwhelming superiority of WMA (the best comment was the one referring to it as a “lawyer’s format.”)

what I read: publishing my aggregator’s contents

I have never liked the idea of blogrolls: they seemed too much like logrolling, ie, dropping names or linking to folks without reading them. Much better to extract the sites you read from your aggregator for two reasons: 1. it’s accurate, 2, it’s automatic, or as close as possible to it.

To that end, I found the very useful MTOutliner plugin and after working with its inventor, we got it working. Some impedance mismatch on carriage returns and linefeeds, of all things.

You can see it all in the bottom of the left sidebar.

I also added some more explicit references to the feeds (the links go to the home page of the site and to the feed). Those RSS 2.0 buttons aren’t buttons at all: they’re CSS-styled text, so they’re indexable by crawlers/robots and they’re easily changed.

I just wrap them in a span tag:

<span class="xmlbtn">RSS 2.0</span>

with this style applied.
.xmlbtn {
   border:1px solid;
   border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
   padding:0 3px;
   font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
   color:#FFF;
   background:#F60;
   text-decoration:none;
   margin:0;
   text-align: right;
}

monoculture, again

Ed Felten discusses the monoculture meme:

Freedom to Tinker: Monoculture: Third, it may be possible to have the advantages of compatibility, without the risks of monoculture, thereby allowing users to work together while suffering a lower monoculture penalty. Precisely how to do this is a matter of ongoing research.

I read that as a call for open standards. In the course of making the various protocols work everywhere, with development taking place in the open, security risks would be minimized and interoperability would be maximized.

We missed an opportunity to make this happen when Netscape failed to make Windows nothing more than “a collection of slightly buggy device drivers[1]”. Perhaps “web services” will get us there this time.

fn1. This article also notes the decline of the Windows-Intel desktop . . . . oops.

a race from the bottom

Through the Looking Glass:

It is difficult to read this and believe that exchange rates are not seriously out of whack.
[ . . . ]

The other point? Americans often wonder if the Indians feel the pain and worry of Americans losing their jobs to cheaper workers elsewhere. They do. They’re deeply worried about low-priced competition from the Phillipines.

So what happens when there’s no place left to send the work to?

If I’m reading this right, the nations/regions reaping the benefits are former colonies (India, the Phillipines, in this example) who are leveraging the educational and other infrastructure benefits they inherited. And why not? But what happens when the industrialists run out of cheap labor pools?

location, location, location

TeledyN: GeOrkut:

Possibly proof positive that the members of Orkut may be social-networks a priori of joining the online adjunct, a nifty geographic display of Orkut member locations showing the clustered majority are clearly close enough to go bowling.

[screenshot of the linked graphic below the fold in case it goes away].

Yup, the death of distance has been somewhat exaggerated.

I guess there is some overlap with the outsourcing/offshoring discussions I keep stumbling across. Where it’s relevant to me is that Seattle didn’t have the critical mass to sustain a high-tech economy as San Francisco or New York seems to have had, Portland even less so. So when the cash infusions stopped coming, businesses were shuttered and people faced the options of staying in the same geographic location and finding other work or voting with their feet (or a U-Haul trailer) and moving to where the work is. Perhaps the circus will come back to town someday.
Continue reading “location, location, location”

Outsourcing/offshoring: it’s everywhere

Crooked Timber: Outsourcing; welcome to the world

‘Multinational corporations are faithless and fickle and will move on to the next source of low-cost labour as quick as you can say ‘globalisation’.’ [ . . . ] Other countries have lived for years with the risk that that the big IT firm they attracted to their spanking new industrial park (having won a bidding war against Glasgow, Lodz and Bratislava) will up sticks before even paying their negotiated rate of lower corporation tax. Entire national economies are structured according to the roll of the dice, or the simple luck to be in the right place at the right time and have a relatively cheap, eager, English-speaking workforce. But every European finance minister is looking over her shoulder for the next upstart country with a pocket full of structural funds and a crazy dream to be the next tiger economy. That’s just life.

Interesting read, with a lot of comments (very high comment to post ratio at CT).

So what are the “safe” (ie, only as portable as *you* want to be) careers?