i-con

Given the state of my mobile phone I thought I would venture in to town and look at the new i-phones. Very nice they are too. But I have a bit of an issue taking a contract of 18 months (or 24 which was the other option) for a phone that delicate. No problem, you can get extended warranty for the second year at 59 pounds. Seems a bit steep. Or you can buy Vodafone insurance at 12.99 per month.

My understanding of insurance is that you pay an amount of money to hedge the risk of losing or breaking the phone (or car or house). But on a contract of 2 years that's 311 pounds in total. About the costs of buying a new phone (and in 2 years about the cost of buying 2 phones I expect).

They must think the risk of having to replace your phone is certainty and you will basically buy a new phone if you take the insurance.

Well worth it.

Pay

The times has an interesting article today about an electrician who works for a council earning 124,000 pounds in pay and bonuses. Although the small print says that this was made up of overtime, stand by allowances and back dated pay (conveniently they do not state how much was back dated pay). Shocking? Not really. What is worrying about this article is the comparison yet again to the pay of ministers, the PM and MPs. "By contrast, a minister of state such as Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, earns 106,136 pounds per year.

What is it about the comparison to what minister's earn? This electrician has clearly worked hard, probably well qualified and has only claimed money legitimately due to him (let's not talk about MP expenses). Why is there this belief that ministers and the PM should be the most highly paid people in the country. Even if not in comparison to the private sector, there is nearly always this view that nobody in the public sector should be paid more than the PM. The PM runs the country? Probably but not in reality. They are under serious pressure and constant scrutiny but they are politicians. While the day rate may not be fantastic one has to consider the 'package'. The directorships, consultancy that follow office, the after dinner circuit, the books, the interviews etc etc. I bet when the electrician is not being offered chairmanship of ICI, paid stacks of cash as a non-exec on numerous boards or has a pension that will allow him to lead as comfortable life as the PM will have.

It takes no qualifications to be a minister or an MP. Just an interest and dedication to run the country. You do not do it for the money and the benefits are far more wide reaching than immediate enrichment. The majority of MPs cannot be sacked in between elections and even if you are a poor performer, if you are in a safe seat you will not lose your job.

So lets please stop comparing everyone's pay to ministers. If the market rate for an electrician is 124,000 per year (given what I have paid for electricians and skilled tradesmen this does not seem massive if one considers it to be about 70-80 pounds per hour) then Ms Jowell has a choice, she can stay as minister for the Olympics or leave, train as an electrician and earn more money. But let's not create an artificial ceiling based upon politicians. The market is open and working relatively well. Supply and demand dictates the wages. Interfere with that at your peril.

Books, there must be another way

The internet has been a revolution in the media world and one which has caused numerous problems for the publishers of media. The internet is a brilliant opportunity to sell digital media. A golden opportunity for publishers. No more printing or making physical cds and dvds etc. Costs fall, profits grow. But it is a well understood double edged sword. The easier it is to distribute to your customers, the easier it is for them to distribute to their friends. Nobody has cracked this yet, especially for music it seems for a number of reasons.

1) Any attempt to encrypt files will be defeated. By definition a file that is encrypted is decryptable and so unless you don't want anybody to decrypt it then this just won't work.
2) Restrict the format. Make it so that only your player (hardware and software) will run the music. Proprietary formats never work because somebody inevitable creates a converter or a good chunk of your customer base cannot read the files (so won't buy the music).
3) Charge enough to cover the copying. I.e. put the price of music up so that the losses due to the copying are already taken into account. This makes the legitimate customer base pay for the crime rather than the publisher. This is not an attractive model.

Its a tough nut to crack. Books are about to go the same way. How does the publisher protect the rights for ebooks? Its a similar problem and one that will have no more success than the music industry.

What is needed is a change in thinking. The issue can be boiled down to how does an author (music or books) get paid for the work in an electronic world when the connection between the physical (paper, vinyl, cd etc) and the content is broken.

It is worth looking at the role of the publisher at this stage. I suspect that the reason we have publishers is that before electronic media came along, the costs of making and distributing content (music or books) was quite high and beyond the purse of the average writer or singer (band). This led to a selection process where a judgment is made by the publishers on whether to invest the money or not.

This seems a superfluous process now. Let the audience do the selecting. I am already, when I want to listen to music, or want to read a book capable of selecting from millions of titles. I have no major issue finding a book I can enjoy or that is useful (and I do not believe that argument that this is because publishers have already thinned out the bad). I have seen lots of terrible books all with publishers who have 'selected' them. Existence does not equate to quality today.

We are already seeing various self publishing sites for music and will start to see the same for books. This can only be a step forward.

The question remains then on how to get people to pay for the content they appreciate. One way of achieving this is to make the content so cheap balanced with mechanisms to make catching of fraud high with big penalties.

Crime will follow where something that has value can be sold. The criminals will simply balance the money they make with the likelihood of being caught and the penalty when they have been caught. Make the value of the item so small that the crime does not pay. But how will this help the authors. Simple, you sell more. As costs of books go up I am more discerning about what I buy.

I go onto Amazon looking for books on a particular philosophical topic. Normally there are lots of books, some good, some bad but it is hard to tell. If the book is available second hand for a pound or two I would take the chance and purchase it. If the book is 10 pounds then I would want to read it first to see if it was useful. We are prepared to take a lot more risks and lower our standards if the consequence of a bad choice is low.

So the model has to be to move the cost of music down to 10p a track and books down below the 1 pound mark. Books that sell for 10 or more may panic over the losses but I suspect that people would buy far more books than they normally would do if the costs were low.

What evidence do I have for this? Only personal unfortunately. Anecdotally when I was younger I was into music (records at the time). I could buy a new album for 10-15 pounds or so at the time or I could go to my second hand music store where I could buy records for 50p or 1 pound each. I had a huge music collection as instead of just buying my favorite band that had just been on TV I would buy a far wider range of bands. Some I liked and some I did not. But my music horizons were widened.

Google itself has done a great thing in digitizing a stack of books. But given the issues they have faced which is that they have upset a lot of publishers and authors over IPR issues they have locked up the content and face the same problem as the authors themselves. They have to protect the value invested in digitization and so strangely you can only view the books online. Which is no good at all to anyone.

It has to be the only viable model. Take away the value of the goods, you take away the crime.

Personal responsibilty vs person responsible

Snow always brings out the best and the worst in people. What I noted this year was that the level of whingers is on the up. Blame the authorities (whoever they are) find out who is responsible for not clearing the roads, for not gritting, for now cleaning the pavements for not salting the shopping center and have have them thrown in jail! Schools are closed, people cannot drive to work, shops are not being refilled! How will people survive without their tinned salmon now the shops have run out!

Its enough to make your blood boil. Where is the personal responsibility? Outsourced. We now expect our routines (whatever it is we do) to carry on regardless of what nature throws at us. We buy houses next to big rivers, enjoy the beauty of the scenery year after year and then blame the authority when a flood ruins your 2 billion pound per sq millimeter original wood flooring. We build houses on volcanoes, skyscrapers and wood shack houses in earthquake zones. We live in a world where we are no longer prepared to take personal responsibility for what we do, or more importantly, what is done to us.

Snow comes every year almost. If not for weeks, at least somewhere in the uk will have light dusting. Its winter, it snows. Pipes freeze, electricity cables fail, heating oil cannot get through, roads don't get cleared. But how many of the whingers have studded tires at home? I would bet none. How may have alternative fuel heaters on standby. I would be none.

Its time people started taking personal responsibility. If the pavement is not cleared, pick up a shovel and clear a bit. Buy some salt and salt your pavement.

We have outsourced our personal responsibility. If the community pulled together and helped clear the roads of snow then the roads would be cleared and pavements would be passable (Or just buy decent boots). But we have the local council to do that for us. What else do we pay them for? Rubbish. Just because we have the authority to do (or fail to do) things does not give us the right, when things go wrong to do nothing.

But the award for staggering stupidity goes to the guy on TV today. They were talking about the announcement by the water authorities not to walk on ice. Then they switch to this guy who had just walked out onto the ice to the middle of the lake and back. They asked him what he thought of the advice. He said they were just out to spoil the fun and that he had waled out to the middle and back and did not go through.

Well that's OK then.

Beware of golf balls

I was somewhat amused by a signpost I saw today as I walked along a river next to a golf course. It said "Beware of golf balls". I assume they do not mean standing on one.

A golf ball (which is about the same size as a golf ball) travels at up to 180mph after initial hit and around 72mph on its way down after reaching its peak height.

Just how on earth do they expect us to beware!

AI EI O

Old McITGuy had a server farm AI, EI, O (that's artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Integration and Oracle).

Ok, that was awful and no I am not drunk (yet). I was reading a good book on AI though on the possibility of intelligent computers. I have covered a bit of this in the Turing Test before in this blog. The book made quite a good point and one which I agree with.

The book was drawing the parallel between artificial flight and artificial intelligence. Basically early designs for flight were taken from birds which meant early flying machines were based on men with wings attached or machines that flapped. Neither worked for what are now well understood reasons (weight and volume blah blah blah). The point they make is that we compare AI to human intelligence and only in terms of a general interaction when it comes to the Turing test. I.e. the idea that if you cannot tell whether you are talking (typing into a terminal) to a computer or another human responding on the terminal then the computer would pass as intelligent.

The AI guys in the book say that it is the wrong target. Humans do some things very well and other things very badly. You can imagine the new IBM launch of its new super computer that could pass as human intelligence. Congratulations, you have now got a $1 billion dollar machine that cannot do long division in its head. But it can walk to the shops, get there and wonder what it came in for.

They have a point, so the focus is on improving the best bits about Human intelligence. No bird can fly at 45,000 feet for 10 hours. Inventing a bird like machine would have be genius but ultimately useless unless you need to land in trees and crap on people's heads.

But it struck me that the whole AI thing is doomed to failure for one main reason. I have always believed that we cannot define intelligence and therefore could never measure it. The book did not state that but the example they gave showed the issue. IBM's Deep Blue (I think that was its name) beat the Chess Grand Master but many critics state it was just a machine and was not intelligent. BUT, if my dog were to beat the Chess Grand Master, he would be considered an intelligent dog, no question.

The point is that we automatically have a 'yer but' filter. It does not matter what a machine does, it is a machine and it could do everything a human can do and do it a million times better and faster and people would still claim it not to be intelligent but just a machine. In other words many people find it hard to attach the label intelligent to anything artificial.

Until we get over that hurdle, we may never finish the race.

New Year, New Beginnings

Happy New Year.

This year is going to be better than last year. Last year was hard going in just about every respect for me and so I have made a resolution to try and slow life down a bit and go for quality and not quantity.

It made me think of one of my favorite poems. Its by W. H. Davies (1871, 1940). Its called Leisure.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.


I think the poem says it all really.