Manduka

Compund Interest

2017-07-04T12:07:00.002-07:00

Professor in Sylvie and Bruno:

'Only the tailor, sir, with your little bill,' said a meek voice outside the door.

'Ah, weIl, 1 can soon settle his business,' the Professor said to the children,
'ifyou'Il just wait aminute. How much is it, this year, my man?' The tailor had come in while he
was speaking. 'WeIl, it's been a-doubling so many years, you see,' the tailor replied,
a little gruffiy, 'and 1 think I'd like the money now. It's two thousand
pound, it is!' 'Oh, that's nothing !' the Professor carelessly remarked, feeling in his
pocket, as if he always carried at least that amount about with him.

'But wouldn't you like to wait JUST! another year and make it four thousand? Just think how rich you'd bel Why, you might be a king, if you liked!' 'I don't know as I'd care about being a king,' the man said thoughtfuIly.

'But it dew sound a powerful sight 0' money! WeIl, 1 think I'11 wait-' 'Of course you will!' said the Professor. 'There's good sense in you, I see. Good-day to you, my man!'

'Will you ever have to pay him that four thousand pounds?' Sylvie asked as the door closed on the departing creditor.

'Never, my child!' the Professor replied emphaticaIly.

'He'll go on doubling it till he dies. You see, it's always worth while waiting another
year to get twice as much money!'

Story of the Day

2014-07-28T09:39:00.001-07:00

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young [boy]. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:
Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

*Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference!*

Sheepification of Pakistan

2014-07-21T20:29:00.001-07:00

When we were small, there was a month and it used to be called Ramzan. It was Ramzan on television, it was Ramzan in the newspaper with the sehr-o-iftar timings and while nobody had a cell phone or Facebook to wish anyone, it would have been Ramzan Mubarik nonetheless. Sometimes if one was being quite linguistically adventurous it would be Ramazan, but nobody seemed to mind.
And then, insidiously, The Arabs crept up on us. It wasn’t like the return of Muhammad Bin Qasim, but somehow Ramzan became Ramadan. Nobody knew exactly how it happened, but almost overnight our crisp z’uad sound became a lisping Arab burr, and we—a nation of language speakers with no apparent consonant pronunciation difficulties—were flung into the downward spiral of an affectation obsession. Now it was cool to sound Arab, and soon enough it began to be increasingly desirable to look it. Cue Al Huda, cue our streets being lined with gangly palm trees that do nothing, either in terms of beauty or shade, cue the availability of the most bling Islamic cover-up gear you’ll see this side of Dubai.
Still, as a nation we were still fairly open-minded about this, so we fasted year after year and didn’t really pay attention to the semantics of it. We were busy trying to live our lives and be regular Pakistanis, but The Arabs kept making inroads onto our cultural minds. One year ‘khuda-hafiz’, that old and comfortable way of saying goodbye and Godspeed, became ‘Allah hafiz’ with the dubious reason of having to specify which deity to whose protection one was recommending you. Because here in multi-religious, multi-cultural and secular Pakistan there was actual leeway where one would wonder who exactly Khuda is, and perhaps not want to be entrusted to a pagan god. Some people resisted, and continue to resist Allah hafiz and keep saying khuda-hafiz with the logic and hope that whatever His name, He will still protect and love them. Also if it was good enough for one’s grandfather and great-grandfather, it was just fine for them too.
Allah-hafiz then progressed, as the average virus does, and soon many misguided drivers were seen on roads with license plates that read ‘Al Bakistan’. The only language problem we used to face as Urdu speaking people was the difficulties of saying ray and rray properly, and the difference between a gol qaaf and danday wala kaaf. Suddenly our proud and inherent ability to say ‘pay’ was expected to evaporate, and the land of the Pak became the land of the Bak. Allah (or Khuda) alone knows what Bak means. Maybe a variant of buk-buk, or maybe the sound a sheep makes as it blindly follows its herd on the way to the qasai. By this time evidently the people who sport these number plates have been so thoroughly infected by The Saudi Virus they didn’t even notice the Bakistan, probably because their keffiyeh got into their eyes while they were busy searching for cans of imported Bebsi and singing a camel herding song.
The last straw—a camel-less one still, thankfully—was this year’s Ramzan, bringing with it suhoor. As a friend quipped, who is this suhoor and where did she come from? Suhoor is trying to boot our beloved sehri out the window to join the words and lifestyles that have already been inched out, and really enough is enough. This is Pakistan, formerly of the Indian Subcontinent. This is still the place where people knew Farsi and had read the Baburnama in the original. This the land of kings and warriors, a civilization as old as the Indus. Where does Saudi Arabia, that land of the crazed Bedouins so uncivilized and jangli that they needed the best of our Prophets to come save them, get off on telling us how to be Muslims? Saudi Arabia, the place where the royal family is as debauched and louche as they come, the country that treats you like a criminal when you’re a pilgrim, the place where random strangers scream and slap your hands down for wanting to say a Fatiha at your beloved Prophet’s grave. This is the country that is razing the landmarks of Muslim history and building toilets in their stead. How dare they come and tell us how to worship? It is the greatest pity of our time that the people to whom we entrust our government are the biggest panderers to the Saudi agenda, so we have little control over the palm trees and whatever authority it is that lets Al-Bakistan license plates even exist. But we can, as a people, take our culture back.
Historically we have enjoyed a cultured, ethnically and religiously diverse past. We speak a whole spectrum of beautiful languages, but Arabic is not one of them. Like many other Muslim countries, that doesn’t make us any less Muslim, and the beauty of religion is that there is no one way to practice it as long as one’s intention is good and knowledge of the basic ways and means is intact. Least important is the semantics of it all—waking up to have sehri or sehr or sargi (in Punjabi) is all the same; the long and short of it is that you are awake and eating because you’re fasting, and will be for the next twelve to twenty hours. Calling it suhoor won’t earn you any brownie points with God, but it will make you sound pretentious. Lacking a centrally defining Pakistani culture doesn’t mean that we have to go looking to others for one. The Quran and Sunnat (see, a T, not an H) exist to guide us, and Allah is there to be prayed to for all other concerns and queries. The rest is dross; no need to be sheep.

The writer is a feminist based in Lahore.

m.malikhussain@gmail.com

Technology and English Language

2013-12-23T10:11:00.001-08:00

I love english in its ability to adapt. Looking at some fun additions in the last 20 years and see how much of the new additions to the OED to be driven by technology:

Attention Deficit Disorder
Birthers
Blog
Civil Union
Cougar
Disemvowled
Friend with benefits
Gadar
Googled
Helicopter parents
Infotainment
Lifosuction
McMansion
Nascar dad
Obamacare
Person of interest
Playdate
Podcast
Ringtone
Snail mail
Soccer Mom
Staycation
Swift boated
Text (verb form)
Truthiness
Tweet
Viral Video
Wiki

Decoding India's Telangana conundrum By Mayurika Chakravorty

2013-08-19T22:22:00.002-07:00

This week, India's ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition decided to create Telangana - a new state that will be formed out of the existing state of Andhra Pradesh. National and social media have been abuzz with the issue, keeping the country "informed" of parliamentary developments through minute-by-minute live feeds.

The media frenzy reached a crescendo with the announcement by the central government (led by the Congress party) had endorsed the formation of the state. But why such commotion? The last time new states (three) were carved out of larger states in 2000, there was not such a hue and cry.

To many the issue is really about Hyderabad - the city that since the information technology boom of the 1990s has been a thriving economic center. It recent years it has also been the haven of a real estate mafia who rode on the wings of that boom and an unholy nexus between caste and regional politics.

Also palpable in the tirade of the people unhappy with the formation of Telangana is a sense of injustice as they claim that the success of Hyderabad was somehow the joint work of the people from both Telangana and coastal Andhra regions, and hence both should have a piece of the cake (or jewel!). Such views can only be understood as a rather short-sighted and historically challenged perspective on the issue.

A shared 'jewel'?

First, not many people outside the region know that Hyderabad's success is not a modern phenomenon - it did not start with the 1990s IT boom.

Ruled by the Qutubshahis and then the Nizam, it was one of the most developed cities in medieval times, with enviable urban infrastructure unparalleled anywhere else in the country. It retained its autonomy throughout British rule (the history of the complex negotiations between the Nizam, his knighted deputee Sir Salar Jung and the Imperial crown is in itself an engaging topic), and after independence the Telangana region with Hyderabad as its capital remained one of the richest revenue-generating zones in southern India.

Following independence, the Indian government annexed the Telangana region, then known as Hyderabad state, and the first democratic elections were held in 1952 with Burugula Ramakrishna Rao (Congress Party) becoming its first elected chief minister.

It needs to be noted that the coastal Andhra and Rayalseema regions were not a part of this state and were in fact a part of the newly formed Andhra state carved out of the Madras Presidency. Andhra state was formed in 1953 with Kurnool as its capital. So when, why, and how did these two separate regions - Andhra and Telangana (or Hyderabad state) come together? The answers to these questions are the key to understanding the formation (or rather re-formation) of Telangana state today.

An unholy matrimony

Telangana (Hyderabad state) and Andhra states were merged on November 1, 1956, with this merger termed by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru as a "matrimonial alliance having provisions for divorce" - and there have been petitions for divorce right from the day the alliance was formed, culminating in yesterday's declaration of a "separation".

The State Reorganization Report of 1955, on the basis of which this merger was effected, stated the following:

The existing Andhra State has faced a financial problem of some magnitude ever since it was created and in comparison with Telangana the existing Andhra State has a low per capita revenue. Telangana, on the other hand, is much less likely to be faced with financial embarrassment.

The report also strongly notes the dissent of the people of Telangana region and their unwillingness to form the larger Andhra Pradesh (it is called Vishalandhra in the report). It states "Telangana claims to be progressive and from an administrative point of view, unification, it is contended, is not likely to confer any benefits on this area."

It further voices the anxieties of the Telangana people:

One of the principal causes of opposition of Vishalandhra also seems to be the apprehension felt by the educationally backward people of Telangana that they may be swamped and exploited by the more advanced people of the coastal areas. In the Telangana districts outside the city of Hyderabad, education is woefully backward. The result is that a lower qualification than in Andhra is accepted for public services. The real fear of the people of Telangana is that if they join Andhra they will be unequally placed in relation to the people of Andhra and in this partnership the major partner will derive all the advantages immediately, while Telangana itself may be converted into a colony by the enterprising coastal Andhra. (para 377)

While the report points out the "obvious advantages" - mainly economic concerns as well as control of the river basins - of the merger, it stops short of actually recommending it and instead says:

After taking all these factors into consideration we have come to the conclusions that it will be in the interests of Andhra as well as Telangana, if for the present, the Telangana area is to constitute into a separate State, which may be known as the Hyderabad State with provision for its unification with Andhra after the general elections likely to be held in or about 1961 if by a two-thirds majority the legislature of the residency Hyderabad State expresses itself in favor of such unification. (para 386)

It ends with a hope that the people of Telangana may be eventually persuaded to agree on the merger, while also recognizing the need to respect their wishes if they do not:

Andhra and Telangana have common interests and we hope these interests will tend to bring the people closer to each other. If, however, our hopes for the development of the environment and conditions congenial to the unification of the two areas do not materialize and if public sentiment in Telangana crystallizes itself against the unification of the two states, Telangana will have to continue as a separate unit. (para 388)

However, eventually, the central government, with its visions of large-scale industrialization in the region including the unified Krishna and Godavery river projects - as well the cost-effectiveness of a shared administration - took the decision in favor of the merger.

To allay the anxieties of the people of Telangana, it was decided that there would be certain provisions or "safeguards" for the people of Telangana and a gentleman's agreement was drafted to this effect. Among other things, it assured reservation for the local people (of Telangana) in government jobs as well as certain domicile conditions besides safeguarding the interests of Muslims and Urdu in public sphere.

However, there were strong suspicions about these so-called safeguards even then and the Congress PCC Chief J V Narasing Rao stated that "constitutionally speaking, these safeguards had no meaning".

Significantly the chief minister of Hyderabad state, Burugula Ramakrishna Rao, too was against the merger of Hyderabad state and the Andhra state. He wrote in a letter to the president of the Indian National Congress: "If Telangana is compulsorily merged with Andhra there will be considerable bitterness in Telangana with no adequate advantage on the other side."

He also expressed apprehension about the relative lack of modern education in Telangana:

Educationally Telangana is very backward as compared to Andhra. They are particularly backward in the study of English for which there are either no facilities or very poor facilities. They are, therefore, afraid that in the matter of service in a bigger province, they will be at a terrific disadvantage. While there are thousands of graduates and MA's in Andhra, there are not even a few hundreds in Hyderabad. No guarantees can level up this great deficiency. Services, therefore, are afraid of an adverse effect of the merger.

Pertinently, Rao also pointed out that in spite of the common Telugu language (thus challenging the linguistic justification of reorganization of states) there were irreconcilable cultural and social differences between the people of the two regions:

Telanganites feel that apart from being Telugus they have built up their own way of life during the last 175 years. This way of life is in many respects different from the way of life of the Telugus in Andhra. The merger, they fear, will destroy this way of life. That is why they are worried.

Besides Telugu, Urdu too was an integral part of the social, cultural and political sphere in the Telangana region and he points out that:

Quite a large number of Telanganites are Urdu-knowing and Urdu-speaking people. For more than a hundred years Urdu has had its place in the life of the people. The administration is carried on in Urdu, records are maintained in Urdu, courts conduct their proceedings in Urdu, lawyers and other professionals carry on their work in Urdu. They are, naturally afraid that the merger would take away the importance of Urdu in their life. They do not like this prospect.

It is indeed significant because the influence of Urdu in the language of the Telanagana region is so prominent that in the thriving film industry in present day Hyderabad dominated by coastal Andhra tycoons, the Urdu-laden Telugu is often ridiculed on screen in the dialogue of comedians.

Instead of the harmony hoped for by the State Reorganization Committee Report, Rao's letter reveals a dissonance that has unfortunately survived until today. He wrote:

Although the language is common, there are instances that there is no love lost between the Telugus in both the states. The classical example of this mutual dislike can be found in the attitude of Andhra officers during the Razakar agitation and immediately after the accession of Hyderabad [the annexation of Hyderabad state, code named Operation Polo]. While, they say, the Marathi, Kannads and other officers were comparatively kind to the people of Hyderabad, Andhra officers were particularly harsh and unrelenting. There are bad memories left. These memories are so fresh in the minds of the Telanganites that they do not want to be at the mercy of their brethren in Andhra.

Chief minister Burugula Ramakrishna Rao, in spite of opposing the merger, however conceded to the decision taken by the Congress High Command and did not oppose the merger of Andhra and Telangana. Is it not a classic happenstance that the same Andhra and Telangana are being separated now through another difficult decision of the Congress High Command in spite of the misgivings of present Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy?

Thus, as predicted by several leaders of the time, the alliance of Andhra and Telangana remained a union marked by distrust and aggression and as the coastal Andhra influx over the years inundated and overpowered the social, cultural and political fabric of Telangana, there were periodic pro-Telangana agitation in favor of separating.

The most damaging in terms of casualties was perhaps the 1969 movement, when more than 300 people died for the Telangana cause; and the most recent one, which most of us know of, was in 2009, spearheaded by the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS). Although it was TRS that was at the forefront of the latest movement, it is noteworthy that the final decision to de-merge Andhra and Telangana was taken by the Congress Party, which in the first place, several decades ago, had played the matchmaker to this unholy matrimony.

What now?

While the separation of Andhra and Telangana may make more sense in the light of the history of the region, it is questionable if historical retribution was the sole impetus behind the demerger initiated by Congress.

People have pointed out political exigencies with the elections coming up and the Congress Party not otherwise faring too well in the southern state. This might provide a boost to the prospects of the ailing party at least in the Telangana region.

Congress leaders from the other regions (coastal Andhra and Rayalseema), many of them with real estate and other lucrative business interests in Hyderabad, have strongly lobbied against a separate Telangana. They will no doubt continue to lobby for keeping the state united or at least keep the shared status of Hyderabad for longer (now it is proposed to be a shared capital for the next 10 years).

It is also significant in this context that while the educated, rich and upper-caste voices from Seema Andhra regions have expressed their dissent against the separation of Telanagana, there are supporters of Telangana in the region from among the Dalits and other marginal communities, one example being the scholar activist Kati Padma Rao from Guntur (coastal Andhra).

The Telanganaites, meanwhile, will strive to point out the centrality of the historical, cultural and geopolitical significance of Hyderabad city to their movement. For the ordinary people of Hyderabad city though - including the multitudes of young professionals from other states in India - life will go on as usual, probably even with the hope of better prospects if the absurdly inflated real-estate prices crash in the near future, as predicted by the pundits.

When I was a tadpole and you were a fish

2013-07-25T22:41:00.001-07:00

When I was a tadpole and you were a fish 
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide,
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip,
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
Mindless we lived and mindless we loved,
And mindless at last we died,
And deep in a rift of the caradoc drift,
We slumbered side by side,
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death,
And crept into light again.
We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand,
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees,
Or trailed through the mud and sand,
Croaking and blind with our three clawed feet,
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark ,
To hint at a life to come.
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more,
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mould,
Of a Neocomian shore,
The aeons came and the aeons fled,
And the sleep that wrapped us fast,
Was riven away with a newer day,
And the night of death was past.
When light and swift through the jungle trees,
We swung on our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms,
In the hush of the moonless nights,
And Oh! what beautiful years were these,
When our hearts clung each to each,
When life was filled, and our senses thrilled,
In the first faint dawn of speech.
Thus life by life and love by love,
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death,
We followed the chain of change,
Till there came a time in the law of life,
When over the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and the soul awoke,
In a strange dim dream of God.
God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds,
And furnished them wings to fly,
He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves,
Where the crook-boned men made war,
And the ox-wain creaks o'er the buried caves,
Where the mummied mammoths are.
Then as we linger at luncheon here,
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when I,
Was a tadpole and you were a fish. 
Langdon Smith, 1895

Eidograph

2013-04-28T12:04:00.001-07:00

A Pantograph is quite a nice contraption to scale :-)

Quite a Commencement Speech

2013-04-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

If you find yourself in such a place, I would ask you to consider a rule I learned as a physician: First, do no harm.

Besides, life is not that short. Life is well and long enough for you to come to regret any activity or habit

involving an exchange of long-term risk for short-term benefit. This is what many if not most Americans

did during the refinancing and consumption boom of the last decade, and it was what our government did

in egging on the boom. This is also the gospel of drunk drivers and cheating spouses.

Of course, when you encounter the opposite—the short-term risk exchanged for long-term benefit—

consider hitting that button again and again and again.

Past may be prologue, but this is not true for the individual. The individual can think different

The Latticework of Mental Models

2013-04-08T10:47:00.002-07:00

Psychology (misjudgments)

Biases emanating from the Availability Heuristic:
1. Ease of Recall
2. Retrievability

Biases emanating from the Representativeness Heuristic
3. Bias from insensitivity to base rates
4. Bias from insensitivity to sample size
5. Misconceptions of chance
6. Regression to the mean
7. Bias from conjunction fallacy

Biases emanating from the Confirmation Heuristic
8. Confirmation bias
9. Bias from anchoring
10. Conjunctive and disjunctive-events bias
11. Bias from over-confidence
12. Hindsight Bias

Others
13. Bias from incentives and reinforcement
14. Bias from self-interest — self deception and denial to reduce pain or increase pleasure; regret avoidance.
15. Bias from association
16. Bias from liking/loving
17. Bias from disliking/hating
18. Commitment and Consistency Bias
19. Bias from excessive fairness
20. Bias from envy and jealousy
21. Reciprocation bias
22. Over-influence from authority
23. Tendency to super-react to deprival; strong reacting when something we have or almost have is (or threatens to be) taken away. Loss aversion?
24. Bias from contrast
25. Bias from stress-influence (introduction | posts)
26. Bias from emotional arousal
27. Bias from physical or psychological pain
28. Bias from mis-reading people; character
29. Attribution Error; underestimating situation factors (including roles) when explaining reasons; one to one versus one to many relationships
30. Bias from the status quo
31. Do something tendency
32. Do nothing tendency
33. Over-influence from precision/models
34. Simplicity Bias
35. Uncertainty avoidance
36. Ideological bias
37. Not invented here bias — thinking that our own ideas are the best ones
38. Bias from over-weighting the short-term
39. Tendency to avoid extremes
40. Tendency to solve problems using only the field we know best / favored ideas. (Man with a hammer.)
41. Bias from social proof
42. Over-influence from framing effects
43. Lollapalooza

Other Mental Models:
- Asymmetric Information
- Occam’s Razor
- Deduction and Induction
- Basic Decision Making Process
- Scientific Method
- Process versus Outcome
- And then what?
- The Agency Problem
- 7 Deadly Sins
- Network Effect
- Gresham’s Law
- The Red Queen Effect

Business
- Ability to raise prices
- Scale
- Distribution
- Cost
- Brand
- Improving returns
- Porters 5 forces
- Decision trees
- Diminishing Returns

Investing
- Mr. Market
- Margin of Safety
- Circle of competence

Ecology
- Complex adaptive systems
- Systems Thinking

Economics
- Utility
- Diminishing Utility
- Supply and Demand
- Scarcity
- Opportunity Cost
- Marginal Cost
- Comparative Advantage
- Trade-offs
- Price Discrimination
- Positive and Negative Externalities
- Sunk Costs
- Moral Hazard
- Game Theory
- Prisoners’ Dilemma
- Tragedy of the Commons
- Bottlenecks
- Time value of Money

Engineering
- Feedback loops
- Redundancy
- Tight coupling
- Breakpoints

Mathematics
- Bayes Theorem
- Power Law
- Law of large numbers
- Compounding
- Permutations
- Combinations
- Variability
- Trend
- Inversion

Statistics
- Outliers and self fulfilling prophecy
- Correlation versus Causation
- Mean, Median, Mode
- Distribution

Chemistry
- Thermodynamics
- Kinetics
- Autocatalytic reactions

Physics
- Newton’s Laws
- Momentum
- Quantum Mechanics
- Critical Mass
- Equilibrium

Biology
- Evolution

What I tell my Daughter when she cries

2013-04-06T23:13:00.003-07:00

Hold on, to me as we go
As we roll down this unfamiliar road
And although this wave (wave) is stringing us along
Just know you're not alone
Cause I'm gonna make this place your home

Settle down, it'll all be clear
Don't pay no mind to the demons
They fill you with fear
The trouble it might drag you down
If you get lost, you can always be found

Just know you're not alone
Cause I'm gonna make this place your home

DFW on Certainty

2013-04-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the “moral clarity” of the immature.

The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help.

That's about as clearly as I can put it ... That last one's of especial value, I think. As exquisite verbal art, yes, but also as a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one's own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.

This is probably the sincerest, most biased account of “best” your decider can give: these pieces are models — not templates, but models — of ways I wish I could think and live in what seems to me this world.

— David Foster Wallace

One of Many Munger's Life Lessons

2013-03-02T12:09:00.003-08:00

I think most lives work best when you simply react intelligently to the opportunities and difficulties you encounter, and just take the results as they fall.

Some people think that by master planning, you will solve everything, but what I find is that the master plan gets a life of its own, and people believe it because they previously decided on that then, and they make all kinds of mistakes.

Carlyle was a very smart man, and one of his favorite sayings was " “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.”

Leadership 101: Yair Lapid at Kiryat Ono

2013-02-10T18:47:00.000-08:00

You won.

There was a competition in Israel for Israeli-ness that lasted over a century, since the second wave of immigration, and in the end you won.

We lost and you won.

For decades it was a Mexican standoff, where each one waits for the other guy to give in,about which Avi Ravitsky, a religious man, wrote: “The status quo was based on the false assumption” which was accepted by both sides, “that the opposition camp was doomed to dwindle away “and perhaps even disappear.”

I know that’s what the Haredim thought about the secular, that they’re doomed to extinction. But that’s what we thought about you, too, that you’re a sort of living museum, like the Ramat Gan Zoo. There’s a place where they have a rare species, almost extinct, that has to be protected so we can take our grandkids there and show them and tell them: “You see, kids? That’s how Jews used to look.”

Let me remind you, when Ben Gurion agreed to exempt yeshiva students from military service the original number was 700. That was supposed to be the entire yeshiva population, 700, and today in the Mir Yeshiva alone there are over 3,500 men.

By the way, the idea that Jews once looked this way is a fallacy. It comes from the fact that the secular Jews bought the story that the Haredim represent a Judaism that had existed for thousands of years, but in historical terms the Haredi movement is relatively new. It can be traced back to the 18th century when the Hatam Sofer established the principle that “the Torah forbids the new.” But the real breakthrough of the Haredi movement came in the 19th century when the rabbis were frightened when a new concept penetrated the Jewish world, the concept of secularism. Secular Jews came in two forms, one was the enlightenment movement and the other was the Zionist movement, and against these two movements arose a counter-movement of religious Jews. This counter-movement created you, the Haredim.

I know this isn’t what they taught you so I suggest that you don’t believe me, check it out for yourselves. Look at history honestly and you’ll find that the real story is that not only is secularism a response to Haredi-ism, but Haredi-ism is a response to secularism.

And from the very first, these two movements were in constant conflict until they reached the point of confrontation, and you won that confrontation.

You won, not only in terms of numbers, but also in the Haredi presence in politics and the settlement movement and as a consumer force and in the streets and the culture and the educational system, you won in all these places. And looking at you here, having heard the statistics, I expect you to win in the job market as well.

Because it turns out there’s no way to build Israeli-ness without you.

No matter how hard we tried, Israeli-ness can’t exist without Judaism and Judaism can’t exist without Haredi-ism, so you win.

There are two reasons for your victory: The first reason is demographic, of course. When the State of Israel was founded the founders had a certain vision, a clear perception of what it should be like. It should be a socialist, secular, European state. That was the mainstream vision, and it held out for 50 years, but different tribes gradually formed around the mainstream.

The Haredi-Ashkenazi tribe and the Haredi-Sephardi tribe and the national-religious tribe and the Beitar tribe, and in the ’50s tribes came here from North Africa that turned into the tribes of the periphery, and in the early ’90s the Russian tribe came here and then the Ethiopian tribe, and each tribe had its needs and demanded something from the mainstream.

Some of them had religious needs, like your tribe, the Haredi tribe, and others had political needs like the national-religious tribe, which instituted the settlement effort after 1967, or there were economic needs such as those of the tribes of the periphery or the Russian and Ethiopian tribes. Each tribe wanted something and each ate away at the mainstream and the tribes gradually infiltrated all the traditional mainstream axes of power, at first in the IDF, then in academia, then in business.

And when the mainstream of Israeli-ness tried to defend itself, because every group instinctually defends its own interests, the other said: Look, you oppressed us, you denied us our rights, and we won’t accept that. And they were right, because the mainstream really did oppress them and denied them their rights and they really shouldn’t have had to tolerate that.

And something else happened besides, the mainstream was no longer the majority. By the late ’70s there were more Sephardim in Israel than Ashkenazim, and since the ’80s there are many more people who consider themselves traditional or religious than secular. And Jerusalem is a much bigger city than Tel Aviv, and since 1977 the capitalist right wing has been in power most of the time, 34 out of 40 years, and a survey from 1994 showed that 56 percent of the public believes that the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai.

It became clear that the balance between the tribes and the mainstream has been upset. The mainstream is no longer the majority. Neither numerically, nor economically, nor politically, nor ideologically.
Then, in the late ’90s, significantly late, something predictable happened: the mainstream got fed up. The mainstream looked to the left and the right and said to itself: I’m sick of everyone demanding things of me, if they want me to lead the country, let them lead it themselves, because I have a new solution: from now on, I’m a tribe too.
And the mainstream turned into a tribe.
For our purposes, and this is very topical, you can call it “the middle-class tribe.”

It said to itself: I don’t need the government in order to do business, I can get married in Cyprus in a civil ceremony, and I have to defend democracy because the other tribes, instinctively, are either non-democratic or less democratic, and I’m sick of the fact that a boy in Bnei Brak and a boy in Um El-Fahm whom I’ve never met are funded by my taxes, and I certainly don’t need to be told that I oppressed them.
If I’m so oppressive, let them get along without me. I’ll do what everyone else does. I’ll look out for Number One. I’ll take care of myself and my people. And that’s how things have stood in recent years.
Instead of a state with one mainstream surrounded by tribes, we’ve become a country of nothing but tribes.

And there’s just one small problem with that: The country won’t survive like this. Not only Israel but no country in the world can survive without a common center, without a broad base on which every can agree.
And that leads me to the second reason why we lost and you won: the spiritual reason. When the Zionist fathers came to Israel they said they wanted to build a melting pot for the Jews, and they truly looked for a broad base of agreement between the different sectors. They ignored the fact that the Jewish people already had such a base. Because the Jewish people had a Father. They wanted to build a secular, socialist melting pot and ignored the fact that the Jews had an ancient Father who had maintained and protected them for 2,000 years, and this ancient Father of course is the God of Israel.

I want to emphasize that I’m not talking about faith, because faith is something else, I’m talking about the question: What is the societal and cultural foundation of the Israeli ethos?

The founding fathers tried to skip from the Bible straight to modern times. They wanted to establish a Biblical ethos, not a Talmudic one. Because the Bible took place here. Because King Saul went to find his donkeys on Highway 443. Open a map and you’ll see where he looked. They planned to base the bond between the Israeli people and the Land of Israel on the Bible because almost all of them were yeshiva scholars who took off their kippot and to them, the Talmudic tradition belonged to the exile, to the home they had decided to leave.

So in order to establish this Biblical ethos they decided to skip over the Mishnah and the Midrash and the Talmud and the Golden Age of Spain and the Ramhal and the Hatam Sofer, as well as Bashevis Singer and Shalom Aleichem and Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. And instead of a multi-dimensional, multi-sectoral vision that could include all the different types of Jews, they created an ethos that suited secular Ashkenazi socialists and they wanted all the other tribes to submit to this ethos. This wasn’t done out of malice or stupidity, it was… secular thinking. The founding fathers’ way of thinking was: If God hasn’t brought the Jews to Israel in 2,000 years, it’s time to let someone else try, it’s time to create a new myth. And when the Holocaust came they saw it as proof that you can’t rely on the God of the Jews because he’s an unreliable father, we can only rely on ourselves.

So we tried to rely only on ourselves, but our attempt failed. If failed because it caused everyone who wasn’t secular, Ashkenazi and socialist to withdraw even more into his tribe, especially when he realized that the vision he was being offered had no room for what was most precious to him – his God. And it failed even more because the founding fathers’ explanation was… unsatisfactory. It didn’t justify our being here. Because if we take our ancient Father out of the picture, what are we doing here? Why would a secular person choose to live in the worst neighborhood in the world, among a billion Muslems who hate him, in this heat, if he doesn’t believe in an external power that makes it worth living here. We realized that this was a problem in 1967, just after the Six-Day War.

Because although the war was run by secular people, the reaction to the war was utterly religious. Following the conquest of regions of our historical homeland… You’re too young to remember this,
but there was a tremendous outburst of religious sentiment that led to the founding of the settlement movement, but even more so, it led to a sense of the miraculous. It was felt by widespread sectors of the nation, a feeling that was lost in the Holocaust: that there’s someone watching over us, that there’s a reason we’re here that we may not understand, that may not oblige us to keep all 613 commandments, but we have to admit that it isn’t arbitrary.

And once we admitted that life isn’t arbitrary, we lost. So we lost and you won. It’s a fresh victory, just a few years old, but it’s already here. And the initial significance of this victory is that we, the secular Jews, have to admit that our vision, the vision of a state that we run without you and in which you’re only guests, was a failure. Because we can’t run the Israeli economy without you as partners,
and it’s no coincidence that the “cottage cheese revolution” was started by a Haredi from Bnei Brak.

And we can’t decide where Israeli education is going if you won’t be our partners, and we can’t decide where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going and we can’t decide what the democratic nature of the country will be, or the relationship between the citizen and the Supreme Court, if you aren’t partners.

If an Ethiopian child in Netivot is hungry, it’s your responsibility as much as mine. And you can’t say: I only give to Haredi charities. If missiles are being fired at Ashkelon or Kiryat Shemona, it’s your responsibility as much as mine. You can’t just send ambulances, you’re responsible as a sector, you’re responsible as part of the State of Israel. And if another huge fire breaks out on Mt. Carmel
I want to know what you plan to do about it, because it’s your responsibility as much as mine.

You won, and that means the time has past when you could stand on the sidelines and say: “You have to consider my needs.” You’re the winners, which means I can say to you: You have to consider my needs, too. You’re responsible for me, too, isn’t not only me who’s responsible for you. It’s not only me who has to find a way to make your life possible in this country, you also have to find a way
to make my life possible in this country.

Because victory has its costs. Losing has no cost. Losing is always its own cost. But victory has its cost because it imposes responsibility. You’re responsible because you’re no longer a tribe or a museum or a zoo, you’re the State of Israel just like me and you influence the Israeli way of life just as much as me, so you have to ask yourselves the question: What responsibility does this impose on you? You’re the lords of the land. What does this oblige you to do? Can you still tell yourselves that only secular Jews should join the army because it’s not your business? Can you still tell yourselves that the only poor people you care about are poor Haredim, and you don’t care if secular poor people die of starvation? Can you still look at the problems that concern Israel, first and foremost the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as secular people’s problems? Can you allow yourselves to remain silent when a group of Haredi extremists tries to force the State to endanger human lives and move the Emergency Ward at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon?

Because taking responsibility means you can’t automatically support Haredim just because they’re Haredim. You’ll be just as supportive of doctors who save lives there every day because you’ll be just as Israeli as them, and that makes you responsible for their children because you have to help their children where your parents wouldn’t help them.

I’m not casting aspersions, heaven forbid, on your parents, I’m sure they were good parents and they loved you and tried to give you the skills that children need who belong to a privileged minority living among an indifferent or hostile majority. Your parents taught you to protect yourselves and your friends and relatives and your lifestyle.

One of the classic Haredi claims against core studies is that they’re not necessary because Talmud study sharpens the mind and Haredi students can easily make up for them later. This claim has two parts, one true and one untrue. The true part is that Talmud study sharpens the mind. We’re talking about thousands of years of wisdom, and whoever studies it becomes both a better person and better trained intellectually.

And the very untrue part is that if you don’t teach children math and English they have no trouble making up for it. They do, because the human mind simply takes in languages and sciences
much more easily at an early age. A few months ago there was a big conference at the Technion on employment in the Haredi sector. Shimon Weiss spoke, he’s the principal of the Jerusalem College of Technology, the oldest academic institution for training Haredim, and Shimon Weiss revealed the incredible statistic that more than 50 percent of Haredi men who are accepted to the college prep program in the technological fields drop out before they graduate. More than half. Among Haredi women who do study math and English the dropout rate is between 5 and 7 percent.

When Weiss was asked why they drop out he said: “They’re basic things. Simple math and fractions and basic spelling in English.” You’re familiar with this. I realize you want your children to study Torah too,
who am I to argue? But just in case they don’t grow up to be great rabbis, give them a chance. 6 hours a week. 4 hours a week. Something. After all, you want to give your children the skills of winners.
They should know not only math and English but also what financial planning is and what law is, a propos this department, so they’ll know what their rights and obligations are, and they should understand technology because they live in a technological world which will be much more technological when they grow up.

And they should know something else, they should know their neighbors across the street, they should know us.

I’ll give you an example that I always use when talking about Haredi-secular relations in Israel, which is the Yom Kippur Law. Israel has the hametz Law, but still, all over Israel people eat hametz on Passover and buy and sell leaven on Passover. And Israel has the Pork Law, but still, all over Israel people eat pork and buy and sell pork. And the only law that they keep scrupulously is the Yom Kippur Law.

On Yom Kippur, not one secular Jew in Israel drives out of his driveway. And not one secular Jew in Israel would even dream of eating in public on Yom Kippur. Do you know why secular Jews keep the Yom Kippur Law so stringently? Because there is no such law. The Yom Kippur Law was never passed in Israel. It doesn’t exist. All that happened was that it’s clear to us that it’s important to our religious and Haredi neighbors that we don’t drive or have barbecues on Yom Kippur. And we’re glad to keep it because they asked us to, because it’s a neighborly act of mutual respect and it’s part of our responsibility towards you to do our best to enable you to live your lives in your way and based on your beliefs.

Yom Kippur is an example of how someone who doesn’t only care about his own tribe acts, someone who sees himself as part of a broader society, as part of a nation. It obliges you to act with the kind of generosity and courtesy that oppressed minorities may not be able to afford, but you can afford.

I don’t want you to be shocked by the fact that you won. Victory has tremendous advantages, this campus is a good example of that, because thanks to this victory the next generation of Haredim, or at least many of them, won’t suffer from the kind of poverty that is intolerable in a modern society.

And thanks to this victory you can speak to us about public space in Israel which will eventually break down the Haredi ghettos. I realize you don’t want your kids to play with my kids in the public playground, and I try very hard not to take offense. But there’s no reason why we can’t find a way to live next door to each other without my having to fear that you’ll proselytize my kids and without your having to fear that I’ll corrupt your kids. Because winners can always afford to fear less. Thanks to your victory you’ll never feel like guests or foreigners in this country which is just as much yours as mine,
and thanks to your victory you’ll never feel threatened again.

And maybe then it won’t be the extremists in your society who set the tone in issues such as modesty or Kashrut or women’s rights. Because if we secular Jews aren’t so threatening any more, your lives don’t have to be such a reaction against secularity and you can ask yourselves questions that you couldn’t ask before. About the general culture and poverty and how extremists rule every aspect of your lives.
Just as wherever you Haredim don’t threaten us we can respect you. We can honor Yom Kippur and circumcise our sons, which isn’t a law either, yet secular parents circumcise their sons.

And we can hold midnight study sessions on Shavuot with thousands of secular participants dressed in white who come to study Talmud and Judaism. By the same token, now that we don’t threaten you,
you can take your future in your hands and decide what your relationship to us will be. This victory enables you to be first class citizens, not second class citizens, but you’ll find that first class citizens
work quite a lot for their country. First class citizens take responsibility for its security, for the welfare of its people, for equality, for its international relations, and more than anything else they’re responsible for enabling people who are very different from them, just as I’m different from you, to live side by side with them.

Thank you very much.

Digital Cash and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron

2013-01-24T14:26:00.002-08:00

By Steve Jurvetson

Many of us will soon be working in the information services or technology industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual property law. As the law struggles to find coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual property (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies may provide a better solution — from the perspective of reducing litigation, exploiting the inherent benefits of an information-based business model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.

Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can provide a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving traditional notions of intellectual property that protect specific instantiations of an idea rather than the idea itself. For example, it seems reasonable that Intuit should be able to protect against the widespread duplication of their Quicken software (the expression of an idea), but they should not be able to patent the underlying idea of single-entry bookkeeping. There are strong economic incentives for digital cash to develop and for those techniques to be adapted for IP protection — to create a protected container or expression of an idea. The rapid march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, information technology itself may provide a more coherent solution.

Information Wants To Be Free

Currently, IP law is enigmatic because it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In developing the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that ideas should freely transverse the globe, and that ideas were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The issues surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being more of an information-based economy.

The use of e-mail and local TV footage helps disseminate information around the globe and can be a force for democracy — as seen in the TV footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and TV from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev used a video camera to show what was happening after he was kidnapped. What appears to be an inherent force for democracy runs into problems when it becomes the subject of property.

As higher-level programming languages become more like natural languages, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish the idea from the code. Language precedes thought, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our ideas. Restricting software will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.

An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and free exchange of ideas. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no idea is detached from others. This begs the question, is intellectual property an oxymoron?

Intellectual Property Law is a Patch

John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression... Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”

From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new importance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an idea, and not the idea itself. The physical expression is like a container for an idea. But with the emerging information superhighway, the “container” is becoming more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Whether it’s e-mail today, or the future goods of the Information Age, the “expressions” of ideas will be voltage conditions darting around the net, very much like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not very different that the fleeting image on the retina.

The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to images to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane where IP law has always found definition and precedent. Patents cannot be granted for abstract ideas or algorithms, yet courts have recently upheld the patentability of software as long as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical result. Copyright law is even more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 requires that works be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression cannot be copyrighted. E-mail is not currently copyrightable because it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In recent rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied elements of Lotus 123’s look and feel, yet Apple lost a similar case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is difficult to reconcile under the total concept and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus cases.” Given the inconsistencies and economic significance of these issues, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.

Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software ... and should be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents proper profit streams and “prevents good software from being written.” Now we have Windows.

But seriously, if we continue to believe that the value of information is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of information, which in many cases increases in value with distribution. Small, fast moving companies (like Netscape and Id) protect their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.

The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of software. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Office to overturn the patent. In 1992, Software Advertising Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial advertisements with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio commercial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code commonly used in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the widely used GIF file format for images.

The Patent Office has issued well over 12,000 software patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to pay $120MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the software patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every decision you make while writing a program into a legal risk,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a large program like crossing a minefield. Each step has a small chance of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The very notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the fast moving software industry seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.

IP law faces the additional wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Where has an Internet crime taken place? In the country or state in which the computer server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual property laws as the U.S. Even within the U.S., the law can be tough to enforce; for example, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no knowledge of the activity since it occurs in the flood of bits transferring between its subscribers

The tension seen in making digital copies revolves around the issue of property. But unlike the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is less a clear ethical issue of theft, and more an abstract notion that you are undermining the business model of an artist or software developer. The distinction between ethics and laws often revolves around their enforceability. Before copy machines, it was hard to make a book, and so it was obvious and visible if someone was copying your work. In the digital age, copying is lightning fast and difficult to detect. Given ethical ambiguity, convenience, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.

Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering

We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices before. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of personal hard drives have some pirated software on them.

Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy seems to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from major publications and WSJ columns appear and circulate widely on the Internet. Computer Pictures magazine replicated a complete article on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.

Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art form, from 2 Live Crew to Negativland to local bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content; “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his work. He delivered it and it stood on its own. In the interactive world, artists will also be the suppliers of information and collage material, which people can either accept as is, or manipulate to create their own art. It’s part of the shift from skill-based work to decision-making and editing work.”

But many traditionalists resist the change. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is impossible to distinguish the original from a copy; according to a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “The art world is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia; the music industry first insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they made, and then they settled for an embedded code that limited the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.

For a healthier reaction, look at the phenomenally successful business models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a business on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But once you want support from Netscape, or the higher levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with strong demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software products are especially susceptible to increasing returns with scale, as are networking products and most of the information technology industries.

Yet, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of business application software totaled $7.45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software units in Korea were counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a world that sees the issue very differently.

Clearly there are strong economic incentives to protect intellectual property, and reasonable arguments can be made for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the relatively rapid developments of another technology, digital cash and cryptography.

Digital Cash and the IP Lock

Digital cash is in some ways an extreme example of digital “property” -- since it cannot be copied, it is possessed by one entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the techniques for protecting against pilferage and piracy work in the domain of cash, then they can be used to “protect” other properties by being embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-protect an “original” work of digital art, digital cash techniques be used as the “container” to protect intellectual property in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by those who stand to gain from the current system. Such as Bill Gates.

Several companies are developing technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, several High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter TV and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital cash are anonymity and efficient small-transaction Internet commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal information. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Internet commerce, cash is more efficient and easier to use than a credit card for small transactions.

“A lot of people will spend nickels on the Internet,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current cash for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can spend freely on the Internet. A competitor based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web page with numerous articles on electronic money and fully functional demo of their technology. You can get some free cash from them and spend it at some of their allied vendors.

Digital cash is a compelling technology. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will change the global economy.” Handling and fraud costs for the paper money system are growing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It costs money handlers in the U.S. alone approximately $60 billion a year to move the stuff... Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play.”

The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to protect against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy issue, the techniques used have been mathematically proven to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is being used or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are powerful digital cryptography techniques which have recently been spread in the commercial domain (RSA Data Security is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the High Tech Club on January 19).

To protect against piracy requires some extra work. As soon as I have a digital $5 bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Many companies have busted their picks trying to copy protect files from hackers. It will never work.). The difference is that I can only spend the $5 bill once. The copy is worthless. This is possible because every bill has a unique encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my particular $5 bill is still unspent. Once I spend it, it cannot be spent again. As with many electronic transactions today, the safety of the system depends on the integrity of a centralized computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”

One of the most important limitations of the digital cash techniques is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least three parties — a buyer, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to protect intellectual property, would require networked computers and “live” files that have to dial up and check in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, including voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.

When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual property protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a $5 bill could be used for any number of things, from medical records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be used with a registry of proper image owners, and could be used to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.

Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail questions with the reply “You are on the right track in thinking that crypto can preserve IP. I know of several attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital cash may provide a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual property.

The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software copy protection. They won’t work on an isolated computer. This certainly would slow its adoption for mobile computers since the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, soon most computers will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, instead of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.

The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with current slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For example, if someone forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may have to have their computer do the repository check before they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow enough today, but in the near future, these techniques of verifying IP permissions and paying appropriate royalties in digital cash could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking computer (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System 8). The digital cash schemes are consistent with other trends in software distribution and development — specifically software rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.

The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its current usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the people who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other software applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a market economy, under lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament over software piracy may now be addressed 20 years later.

InterOffice Memo

2012-11-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

To:     List
From:   Nathan P. Myhrvold
Date:   September 8, 1993
Subject:        Road Kill on the Information Highway

Technological changes often have enormous consequences.   Microsoft has been the beneficiary of this effect for the last 17 years, and a variety of other companies in the computer industry have either had their day in the sun, or have fallen past the crest of the wave and have suffered as a result.   Although the shifting fortunes of companies within the computer industry are naturally quite important to those of us who are participants, the effect on the world at large has actually been rather modest.   The confluence of wide area digital communications and ever cheaper computing is going to be a lot more traumatic and far ranging than PCs have been. This memo is about some of those changes and how they will effect a number of industries.

Many of the ideas described here spring from numerous conversations with people at Microsoft and elsewhere. I'd thank everybody individually, but alas since my life isn't yet on line its hard to enumerate them all. I would like to thank Cindy Wilson for confirming a number of facts for me and providing terrific library support.

A Computer On Every Desk

Personal computers have become incredibly useful tools - whether for individuals or organizations. The world writes with PCs - whether composing a simple letter, writing a novel, laying out Time magazine or drafting the blueprints for new building.   We make decisions with personal computers - analyzing an investment or creating a budget and asking "what if?". These are all very valuable tasks, but it is also important to keep some perspective on the scope of the changes. Word processing has replaced the typewriter - but outside of the typewriter business one could ask "so what?".   Spreadsheets, one of the strongest applications categories have replaced the columnar pad and the adding machine.   The spreadsheet implementation of a columnar pad is a lot more convenient and has broadened the user base to some people who weren't big columnar pad users, but this is the basic functionality. I remember seeing those funny pads with all the columns in the back of stationary stores years ago. I recently checked, and found that they, along with all those delightfully bizarre forms of K+E graph paper, are still carried in a good stationary store (albeit at reduced volumes).   Despite the enormity of the personal computer "revolution" within the parochial confines of the computer industry, it really hasn't been that much of a revolution in society as a whole. How radical can a revolution be if its rallying cry (at least implicitly) is "Death To Columnar Pads!" ?

Another way to see this is to look at our own mission statement - A computer in every home and on every desk. This was a highly unconventional vision in the context of water cooled mainframes humming in the machine room, but it's really rather modest in the larger context of society as a whole. In actual practice, the mission that we and the rest of the industry have actually delivered is somewhat shorter than way we normally phrase it, it's really - A computer on every desk. We have been pretty good about getting computers onto desks whether they are in the office, or in the den at home, but desks are still our primary strength.   We've done a bit better in some areas than others. Laptops (like the Omnibook I'm using right now on United 871 to JFK) have allowed people to take their desk activities with them. This is balanced by the fact that there are many real desks, such as those in the school classroom, that haven't been populated with computers.

The metaphor of the desk top which inspired researchers at Xerox PARC has largely been realized - personal computers and the software they run are primarily dedicated to service the activities that people do at a desk. Most of the product development done at Microsoft is focused on making incremental improvements to this basic mission, or in integrating the last remaining desk top activities. Our Microsoft AtWork campaign will unify PCs with the telephone, FAX and copier, closing on the last big gaps.   However challenging (and profitable) this may be, we must not forget that our industry has grown up in a rather restricted environment. It is if we lived in a world where the only furniture was a desk, and columnar pads were on every bestseller list.

The Importance of Being Exponential

I was recently interviewed by a guy doing an article to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Playboy magazine. He wanted to know what computing would be like 40 years hence, in the year 2033.   This kind of extrapolation is clearly fraught with difficulty, but that doesn't mean that we can't try our best. In the last 20 years the overall improvement in the price/performance ratio of computing has been about a factor of one million. There is every reason to believe that this will continue for the next 20 years; in fact, the technological road map appears reasonably clear. This will yield another factor of one million by 2013. It is hard to predict what technology will be promising then, but I'm optimistic enough to believe that the trend will continue.

Laboratories are already operating "ballistic" transistors which have switching times on the order of a femtosecond. That is 10-15 of a second, or about 10 million times faster than the transistors in this year's fastest microprocessor. The trick is simple enough in principle - reduce the size of the semiconductor component and the current flow so that the electrons don't bump into each other or the semiconductor atoms.   In addition to being much faster, this dramatically reduces power drain and heat dissipation. The next stage is more of the same - people are currently experimenting with the "single electron transistor", in which a single bit is represented by a lone electron. This is not only very fast, it is also the ultimate in low power computing!

This raises a couple of other amusing points. Every advance in speed makes computers physically smaller. Switching speed in semiconductors is directly related to their size, and at another scale, the delay or latency caused by time for a signal to travel from one part of the computer to the next is limited by transit time at the speed of light. At the speed contemplated above this is extremely significant. If you have a computer with a femtosecond cycle time, then it takes about 1 million CPU cycles for a signal to travel one foot.   As a point of comparison, a hot processor of 1993 with a 100 MHz clock rate (10 nanosecond cycle time) will would have a similar relative wait time in terms of clock cycles if it was sending a signal about 1860 miles. The latency associated with going across the country today will be occur in moving across your desk in the future.   The amazingly fast computers of 2033 will of necessity be amazingly small because you can't build them any other way. They are also likely to be very cheap because most any method for manufacturing things this small is to replicate them like crazy and make many at the same time.

Optical computing offers an interesting and orthogonal set of tricks and techniques. Note that in the cases I am describing here the invention that must be done is primarily engineering rather than scientific in nature. The basic phenomena exist in the lab today, so mother nature has, in effect, already signed off on the designs. The remaining steps are just to learn how to manufacture these devices in quantity, integrate them at a large scale and bring them to market. People are pretty good at doing this sort of thing, so I think that there is as much reason to believe that breakthroughs will accelerate the pace of development as there is to doubt that the trend will continue.

Assuming that the price/performance trend in computing does continue, the computers of 20 years from now will be a million times faster, and 40 years hence a trillion times faster than the fastest computers available today. In order to put this into perspective, a factor of one million reduces a year of computing time to just 30 seconds. A factor of a trillion takes one million years into the same 30 seconds. Attempting to extrapolate what we could do with a CPU year of 1993 level computing is hard, and a million CPU years is nearly impossible to imagine.

Note that this is only the estimate for a single CPU and the standard serial "von Neuman" architecture.   Multiprocessors will become increasingly common, and give us a huge range of performance above and beyond this. The figures above were meant to be a comparison at fixed cost - say for a typical desktop computer. There will always be specialized problem areas in science, engineering and elsewhere that will justify machines that are 1000 times to 10,000 times more expensive than a desktop user of today can afford.   The supercomputer of 2033 could easily be 4 quadrillion times faster than a computer of 1993 - which means that it could do in 30 seconds what the fastest PCs of today could accomplish in 4 billion years - the age of the earth.

Storage capacity is also increasing at an exponential rate. There are a whole host of interesting storage technologies on the horizon.   Current hard disk technology will continue to drop in price - earlier this year we priced hard disks at about $1 per megabyte. This fall a new series of disks will come in at about 30 cents per meg, and I believe that this trend will continue for a while.   We have talked to people at disk companies who are planning to make gigabyte capacity drives down to the 1.8 inch form factor, and then surface mount hundreds of them to cards, as if they were chip modules, to increase the density.   The total bandwidth will be very high because the disks will be configured as an array. Various forms of optical storage will also appear to challenge this standard magnetic based technology.   The most exotic of these is holographic memories which appear to be able to store up to 1012 bytes - a terabyte - per cubic centimeter. This isn't even close to the theoretical limit, which is far higher.

These forms of secondary storage will face some interesting competition - semiconductor RAM has increased in density (and decreased in cost) by 4X every 18 months for the last twenty years. The various technologies discussed above for CPUs will also effect mass storage - RAM based on single electron transistors will be very dense. Various random factors (such as the recent explosion at a Japanese epoxy plant) can perturb the pricing, but in the long run I expect these pricing curves to be maintained.   This is far faster than the price of mechanical mass storage is dropping, and suggests that by the year 2000, RAM will cost about $1-$2 per gigabyte.

I expect that the typical desktop PC around the turn of the century will be over 100 gigabytes - whether RAM or a mixture of RAM and some other sort of mass storage., and a typical LAN server here at Microsoft will have a few terabytes. To put this in perspective, the American Airlines SABRE reservation system is a little over 2 terabytes, so it would fit on only 20 PCs worth of storage.   If you bought that capacity today with PC industry components the cost would be just under $700,000 , a tiny fraction of what it cost to built SABRE out of 112 IBM 3390 disk drives.   By the year 2000, I expect that amount of disk space to cost a few thousand dollars. In fact, it might cost even less because video on demand systems used to replace Blockbuster and other video rental stores will dramatically increase the market for storage and should dramatically drive the price learning curve.

The computational load used by SABRE is even less of a problem than the storage requirement. The existing reservation system uses processors (IBM 3090 architecture) rated at 423 million instructions per second. This is equivalent to four MIPS R4400s, or six to eight Pentiums.   Another way to look at this is the traffic load. The peak ever recorded on SABRE was 3595 transactions per second. A dual processor MIPS R4400 machine over in the NT group recently benchmarked at about 300 transactions per second1 with NT and SQL Server, so you'd need a dozen of these machines to do the whole thing. The reason for the factor of six difference between this and the raw number of compute cycles is that SABRE uses specialized transaction processing operating system (IBM Transaction Processing Facility) rather than a general purpose system like NT and SQL Server which is far less efficient (but more flexible) than TPF.

In fact, with a new generation of transaction and database software based on direct use of 64 bit addressing and massive RAM memory, a single microprocessor such as the MIPS T5, Intel P7 or next generation Alpha or PowerPC should be able to the entire SABRE load.   Although SABRE represents one of the most challenging real time data processing tasks of 1993, hardware technology will pass it by in the next couple years. There is still a major task in creating the software which will enable this, but my assumption is that we and/or others will recognize this opportunity and rise this to challenge.

One way to consume these resources is to switch to ever richer data types. We have seen how the move to GUI consumed many more CPU cycles, RAM and disk space than character mode, so it is relatively safe to suggest that more of the same will occur with rich multimedia data types. Audio is already within our grasp, because it is fairly low bandwidth. Film and video represent a major step upwards. A feature film compressed with MPEG or similar technology will be about 4 gigabytes. Advances in compression will probably take this down to about 600 megabytes and increase the quality but this is still a major step up from text. If we compare the size of a novel or movie script to the film itself, we'll see roughly a factor of 1000 increase.

A factor of 1000 is quite a bit by normal standards, and much of the work that the PC industry will be doing in the next several years is gearing up to this challenge. It is quite clear that video and other multimedia data types will become as commonplace as text is today.   This will cause major shifts in usage and will have all sorts of other consequences, some of which are treated elsewhere in this memo. Nevertheless, this isn't a very full answer to the question of what we'll do with all of those computing cycles.

Remember that a factor of 1000 improvement takes only ten years, so at best the transition to video will only be a temporary pause in the onslaught of computing. Other media types won't really help much because there is a more fundamental limitation, which may be somewhat surprising - human sensory organs aren't all that complex!

Audio and video are already well understood, but we can make some estimates for the other senses. Taste and smell are actually variations of the same sense (you can't "taste" many things when your nose is plugged) which maps a set chemical sensors in the nose and mouth to a signal.   Clinical tests similar to the "Pepsi Challenge" show that the taste/smell resolution is not very complex - at least in humans.   The sometimes hilarious vocabulary used by oenophiles to describe the taste of a wine is another example. Without understanding the output device it is hard to say in detail, but I doubt that the combined bandwidth would be more than audio.

Touch is more interesting. Apart from our fingertips, lips and a few other regions, our sense of touch is actually not very good. The basic unit of visual displays is the pixel, short for picture element, and in a similar vein we can talk about the touch element or "touchel". Even parts of our anatomy which we think of as being quite sensitive often have poor spatial resolution and thus require few touchels to achieve the full effect. Poke yourself with various shapes of the same basic size and you'll find that most places you can't tell the difference - sensitivity as we normally think of is actually about resolution in amplitude, which effects the number of bits per touchel rather than their density. Even the highest resolution parts of your body don't need more than 100 touchels per linear inch, and the total surface area which requires that much is pretty small.   An estimate of the total touchel bandwidth is probably something like one million touchels with 8 bits of amplitude per touchel, updated between 30 and 100 times a second. The total bandwidth is therefore equal to, or possibly a bit less than, that for video.

There are clearly some major engineering problems to be solved before we all have touchel based body suits and taste output devices in our mouths. Better yet we could have a direct connection to our nervous system so we can "jack in" to our PCs in the manner that William Gibson and others have described in cyberpunk science fiction. Since this is primarily a biological and mechanical engineering problem it is not subject to the same exponential technology rules which govern computing. There are reasons to be optimistic, but it is not clear to me whether we'll have the full range of human senses as output devices in twenty years, or even in forty. Regardless of the I/O issues, it is clear that computing resources will not be the bottleneck in solving this ultimate human interface problem. In fact, the estimates above suggest that the total bandwidth that can be absorbed by a human is only a modest constant factor larger than video, and thus will only take a few more years for the price/performance curve to surmount it.

Given the amazing growth of computing, there are always a foolish few who contend that we will run out of demand, so we'll never need more powerful machines. The counterexample is that there are many simple problems which would require more computing than a 1993, or even a 2033, level supercomputer could do between now and the recollapse or heat death of our the universe2. Computer scientists classify problems of this sort as "NP hard", and there are many examples.   In actual practice some NP hard problems can be efficiently approximated, but many cannot, and this will lead to a never ending stream of problems for computers of the future, no matter how fast.

Here is the simplest example of why NP hard problems are hard. Consider trying to enumerate all possible combinations or orderings of N unique objects (characters or whatever).   The number of combinations is N factorial, usually written as N!. 3! is only six, so I can list all of the combinations here 123, 132, 213, 231, 312, 321.   10! is about 3 million, which is relatively small, but 59! is about 1080 and 100! is just under 10157. These are really big numbers! For reference sake, cosmologists usually estimate that there are about 1080 elementary particles (protons, neutrons etc.), and about 10160 photons in the entire universe, so even with extreme cleverness about how we stored the resulting list, we'd need to use all of the matter and most of the energy in the universe just to write down 59!, much less 100. As output problems go, touchel suits seem mundane by comparison!   This particular example isn't very interesting, but there are plenty of NP hard problems, such as the traveling salesman problem and many others which are just as easy to state and just as hard to solve.

Many open problems in computing - including some classified as "artificial intelligence" fall into a grey area - they are likely to be NP hard in principle, but there may efficient approximations which allow us to get arbitrarily good results with bounded computing resources. Other problems, such as simulation, recognition based input (speech, handwriting...), virtual reality and most scientific programs are clearly not NP hard so they will fall to computing.

The key issue behind this point is that computing is on a very fast exponential growth curve. Anything which isn't exponential in growth, or which is exponential but with a slower growth rate, will quickly and inexorably be overwhelmed. NP hard problems are an example that can easily scale beyond any computer.   Mainframe and minicomputers did have exponential growth, but at a slower rate than microprocessors so they succumbed.   Human interface only scales up to the point where our nervous system is saturated, which as discussed above will be reached within the next decade or so.

The SABRE airline reservation system mentioned above is one which doesn't scale. The size of SABRE depends on the number of travelers, flights, travel agents and how fast they type. None of these factors is growing anywhere near as fast as computing itself. Even a constant factor of 1000 by using video, or of perhaps 10,000 to have a full virtual reality (thus obviating the flight altogether!) does not matter because any constant factor is rapidly absorbed by exponential growth.

This is a fundamental lesson for us. It is extraordinarily difficult for people to really grasp the power of exponential growth. No experience in our every day life prepares us for it. The numbers become so astronomically large3 so quickly, as the projections above show, that it easy to either dismiss them outright, or mentally glaze over and become numb to their meaning.   It is incredibly easy to fool oneself into thinking that you do understand it, but usually this just means that you've mentally done a linear extrapolation from the recent past. This works for a little while, but then rapidly becomes out of date.

The trick for the next decade of the computing industry will hinge on being very smart about recognizing which things scale with or faster than computing and what things do not. This will not be obvious in the early stages, but that is where the value lies so this is the challenge to which we must rise. The "MIPS to the moon" vision speech is very easy to make - the hard part is to really believe it. Fortunately, much of the competition will be a bunch of entrenched linear extrapolators that won't know what hit them.

At its essence, this is the secret of Microsoft and the personal computer industry.   Despite the incredible advances that had occurred in mainframes and minicomputers, the people involved - many of them quite brilliant - could not grasp the fact that the advances would continue and that this would stretch their business models to the breaking point. If the mainframe folks had stopped to make the exponential extrapolation - and acted upon it - then it naturally follows that microprocessor based systems would deliver computing to the masses, that they would ultimately surpass mainframes and minis, that hardware should be decoupled from software because the driving forces are different, and finally that software would be a central locus of value.

The last point is quite interesting. If you are in the hardware business you must be very agile indeed to keep your footing.   The implementation technologies change so fast that you are always at an incredible risk of becoming obsolete. It is very hard to change a manufacturing business fast enough because of the large investment in tooling up for what will soon become yesterday's technology.   The only hardware companies that have ever made significant money are those that managed to create an asset - the hardware architecture - which was above the fray of individual implementations and thus could enjoy a longer life span. Software is able to do the same trick in an even better fashion. Like a hardware architecture it lives for a long time - more than a dozen years so far for MS DOS - but the tooling cost is far lower. The software business is still quite tricky but it is fundamentally better suited to long term growth in an exponential market than hardware is.

The growth curve of Microsoft is unprecidented in the annals of business, and seems quite miraculous until you realize that what we have done is ride the exponential growth curve of computer price/performance.   That is the true driving force behind our success. As long as computing hardware increases its price performance there is a proportionate opportunity for software to harness that power to do things for end users.   This occurs because the machines get cheaper, user interface techniques like GUI allow us to make computing more appealing to a wider audience, raw power enables new application categories, old customers can upgrade and get substantially better features... All of these factors combine to increase the opportunity for software. I made a chart a couple of years ago plotting the number of lines of code in several of our products over time. These also followed an exponential curve with approximately the same growth rate.

Our feat, and believe me I do not mean to belittle it, has been to ride this wave of technology and maintain or increase our relative position.   The correct way to measure this position, and thus our market share, is as a fraction of worldwide CPU cycles consumed by our products. (As an aside, the evolution of the information highway will cause this market share metric to evolve as well. Rather than measuring the fraction of the worlds computing cycles executed by our software, we will have to look at share of both CPU cycles as well as total data transmitted.)

Maintaining CPU cycle share is very hard to do, because the right mix of products and technology to do this at various points in time changes a lot.   Companies that have point products or which only extrapolate linearly will fail. So far, we have often been the beneficiary because we have been able to reinvent the company at each point along the line.

The bad news about this is that we will have to continue to do so, and at a rate which continues to increase.   It will impossible for us to maintain our historical growth curves unless we maintain our CPU cycle share and that means that we must do two things: continue to bring new technology to our existing products, and at the same time create new product lines to track the emergence of computing in new mass markets.

One aspect of the price/performance trend discussed above is that a PC class machine will get amazingly powerful, but an equal consequence is that extremely cheap consumer computing devices will emerge with the same or higher computing power than today's PCs, but with far higher volume.   The bulk of the worlds' computing cycles come near the low end, high volume part of the market. Any software company that wants to maintain its relative share of total CPU cycles must have products that are relevant to the high volume segment of the market. If you don't, then you are vulnerable to a software company that does establishes a position there and then rides the technology curve up to the mainstream.   This is what the PC industry did to mainframes and minicomputers, and if we in the PC industry are not careful this fate will befall us as well.

The basic dynamics of this situation comes from the relative lifetimes of software and hardware. An operating system architecture can easily last 15 to 20 years or possibly even more, as MS DOS and UNIX both demonstrate. Over that period of time the computing hardware that the OS runs on will increase in price/performance by a factor of 30,000 to a million, taking the combined platform into new realms and application areas. If each segment of the computing industry scaled at the same rate, then the relative standings would be safe, but this isn't the way it usually works. Technology trends will favor some segments over others. Microprocessors beat out discrete components, and more recently RISC based microprocessors have been increasing their price/performance at a faster rate than their CISC based rivals. Business trends also matter - a high volume platform will have more ISVs, and probably a more competitive hardware market.

Microsoft started out as the Basic company - well, as it so happens we still are the leading supplier of Basic, but that is hardly the way to characterize us at this point.   Growth, profitability and the focus of the company have historically shifted from one area to another, and this will continue past our current product lines. The day will come when people will say "hey, didn't Microsoft used be the company that made office software?" and the answer will be "yes, and as a matter of fact they still do, but that isn't what they're known for these days".

Your Life On Line

Consider spoken conversation.   Although we may quote each other when we say something memorable, that is the exception rather than the rule.   People tend to treat speech as an ephemeral medium - if we want to count on being able to revisit it in the future we go to special effort to take notes or record it.   In the near future we will have the capability to record and index it all.

It's pretty easy to compress human voice down to about 4800 bits/second today, and this will almost certainly improve to 2400 bits/second in the near future, which works out to about 1 megabyte per hour.   The DAT drive that I use for backing up my hard disk stores 5 gigabytes on a single tape which works out to 5000 hours.   If you assume 8 hours of sleep a day, there are 5824 hours you're awake per year.   Of course there is no reason to record the periods of silence, only periods where you are speaking or somebody is speaking to you.   Thus my single DAT tape can probably hold many years worth of audio.    It's actually an older unit - the next generation of digital VCRs coming out in 1994 will hold 100 gigabytes per tape, which means that a single piece of media with a cost of about $10 should be able to hold all of the conversations an individual has for their entire lifetime.

Video takes considerably more room than audio. If you assume that this sort of archival video can be a bit lower quality than standard VHS, it will take about 1.5 megabits per second with off the shelf compression methods. This means that recording video onto digital would cost about eight cents per hour using digital video tape, or a couple hundred dollars per year. Note that this is a 1994 cost - within a few years it will be far cheaper.

Location is another important attribute. This can be obtained with a small GPS receiver, or a variety of other small wireless devices.   Recording the precise location (within a couple of feet) and the precise time of every movement a person or vehicle makes is far smaller amount of storage than voice.   While we are at it, we could record temperature (ambient as well as body temperature), barometric pressure, blood pressure and a variety of other data about you or your surroundings.

Those of us who work with computer will also create files, receive email and so forth.   A really fast typist can do about 100 words per minute with a 5 character word length, or about 30K bytes per hour. Lossless compression can typically reduce this to about a third, so this is about 100 times smaller than voice.   Mouse motions and application commands are tiny on top of this, so we certainly have the capability to spool all keystrokes, commands and files that an individual creates over their lifetime at a fraction of the cost of voice.

The result is that it is easily possible to create general digital recorders which will spool audio, video and other data very cheaply. Cryptographic techniques can be used to time stamp or location stamp these records with digital signatures so that they cannot be forged or tampered with. The entire input and output of an individual's life can be spooled and recorded onto digital media. From there it is a small matter to index it for retrieval based upon time, location and content (via off line speech recognition).

The first application of this will come in the various individual systems. Given the increase in storage on PCs, why not record every version of every file?   High speed networks and new software will make this quite cheap. Typing and other input mechanisms don't scale with the growth of computing, so why not spool every keystroke and mouse move.   The notion of losing work should go away, because it is trivial to record everything that a user does. Caller ID telephones have started to do this with a list of every caller (answered or not) - why not record the content as well?

The Rodney King case showed the power of video tape in recording a situation. How long will it be before every police car, or individual policeman, is equipped with a digital video camera, with non forgeable time and location stamps?   Commercial airliners have long had a "black box" or flight recorder, but why not extend this for buses, cars - even for individual people?   In some cases this would be limited to time, location, speed and in others it would record full video and audio.

In fact, while we are at it, a unit like that is cheap enough to be deployed even more widely.   Banks and some stores have cameras which can record in the event of a crime, but given the low cost why not have them nearly everywhere? Every city street light represents an investment by the community toward public safety, yet these lights are far more expensive to install and operate than a digital video black box will be in a few years. I could easily imagine such automatic recorders positioned in literally millions of places; connected to storage and analysis facilities by the information highway.

A couple more years of price/performance improvement and we could carry a device like that with us. The digital storage capacity would be enough to record every thing we say and do - for our entire lives.   Such a device could carry your entire life on it - the ultimate diary and autobiography.

At this stage you may wonder why do this?   Indeed, the notion of never being outside the range of digital recorders operated by Big Brother can sound pretty sinister. It would be very easy to regard this as the ultimate threat to privacy and personal freedom.    At another level it may be pretty stupid. Everybody has, at some point or another, told a lie or done something that in retrospect they aren't proud of - why should we record ourselves and make this obvious? Richard Nixon's decision to record conversations in the White House for future historians clearly backfired and he was hoist on his on petard.

The social, legal and moral implications are quite interesting because our existing traditions are not prepared to cope with the incredible potential to record and analyze information on this scale.   There will be many arguments about how to extend the principles we have today to this new world.   In fact, we have already started to see the first skirmishes in this battle in the FBI proposal to make encryption illegal. Their proposals are chilling to a technologist, but their argument is disarmingly simple. They just want to preserve the abilities that they have today.   Sounds reasonable, right?

Regardless as to whether putting your life on line is good or bad, it is very clear that it will be both feasible and quite cheap. Given this I believe that it will be widely used in at least some circumstances.   Here are some scenarios as to how and why we may find our lives on line in the future.

The first is that there are many contexts in which it would be very useful to have a personal record of what you've done. This is clearly true for computer files, where returning to an old version is already done quite often. Researchers at EuroPARC (the Cambridge branch of Xerox PARC) have created a system that uses wireless electronic badges to record all of the motions of people inside a building, then create a "biography" which says where you were at any point and who you were with talked to (they do not record voice yet).

Unfortunately there are other reasons besides simply utility to the end user. Insurance companies would love to have the black box recorders on your car - both to trace it if stolen (there are several systems, such as Lojack that do this today), and to provide information in accidents.   It isn't hard to imagine having half price car insurance if you have a car with a recorder in it. This can quickly extend to other circumstances.   Medical malpractice insurance might be cheaper (or only available) to doctors who record surgical procedures or even office visits.

Many employers will want to use these recorders as a management tool. Bus and trucking companies have an obvious interest in whether their drivers stay within the law and are on time. The public at large may insist that the police record themselves in the course of their work. This guards against claims of brutality or abuse on one hand, and gathering better evidence on the other. Other circumstances will be more invasive and harder to justify, but it is virtually certain that people will try.

Personal safety will be a big issue as well. There are plenty of situations where you'd rather have Big Brother watching than be left to the mercy of street crime.   David Brin's science fiction novel Earth, suggested that digital video cameras with wireless links to the police would revolutionize police work and the judicial system. In addition to putting them in street lamps, Brin has them toted by senior citizens, because retired baby boomers will make up a large fraction of society.   Since they will also dominate the voting population, the laws of his imagined society are oriented toward widespread use of digital surveillance to protect senior citizens against crime.

One of the biggest reasons will be defensive, using the digital record to protect against litigation and other claims.   People who record are open to the possibility of the recording being used against them, but at the same time will be able to protect themselves against spurious claims.   If you have a business deal with another party, and they have selectively recorded things (not every meeting etc.) then the best defense is to have a more complete recording yourself. One side effect of cheap computing is that it will be possible to forge essentially any kind of photograph, video or audio.   The only such data that will be admissible in court will be those taken with tamper proof hardware that digitally signs it.

If these trends continue it will be gradually become more and more accepted to have these records - both at a corporate and personal level. What today seems like the digital jackboot of Big Brother will one day become the norm. Every year the executive staff at Microsoft have to sign a "boy scout pledge" of business practices which says (in essence) that we see no evil, hear no evil and do no evil.   I'm not trying to make fun of this - it is true that our policy is to be good guys - but it doesn't really change from one year to the next. The ritual of signing this annually small testimony to the societal pressure to redundantly reaffirm our values.   Twenty years hence the pendulum of public opinion may have swung to the point that people say "What do you mean, you don't record everything? Do you have something to hide?".

Gutenberg Reprised

If you grant that the world writes and makes decisions with PCs, what is next? The real answer is long and complex, but three of the key components are to read, communicate and be entertained. An even simpler way to describe this is to say that computing technology will become central to distributing information.

As a rule, distribution has much more pervasive effects than authoring.   Improving life for the author of a document does not materially effect the size or nature of the audience that she can address, but changes in distribution have a dramatic effect. The clearest precedent is the invention of the printing press.   Great works of science and literature - Euclid's geometry, Plato and Horace, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Iliad and Icelandic Sagas, all- existed long before the printing press, so humans clearly were able to conceive them, but they had a very limited customer base. Monks and scribes spent lifetimes copying books by hand, while bards and minstrels memorized and orally repeated tales to spread and preserve them. No matter how cheaply one values their time, it was still a very expensive proposition which was the primary limiting factor in broadening the number of customers. If we could use a time machine to supply all those monks with PCs and Word for Windows, but limited the rate at which they could print to the same level of time and expense, it would make little difference - except perhaps for letting the monks channel their energies toward other fields4.

When Gutenberg did change the economics of distribution, the world changed in a fundamental way. It is estimated that Europe had on the order of ten thousand books just prior to Johan's invention - within fifty years it would have over eight million. Literacy became a key skill. The advent of mass media - through printed handbills - revolutionized politics, religion, science and literature and most other factes of intellectual life.

I believe that we are on the brink of a revolution of similar magnitude. This will be driven by two technologies - computing and digital networking.   We've already discussed the change in computing technology, and that is certainly dramatic, but it is communications which really enables distribution.

The technological factors which will drive communication are very simple. The first is that wide area communication will be digital and will therefore be driven by the same price/performance curve of computing as a whole. Switches and other parts of the new digital communications systems will be computers.   Today this is partially true, but most of the world's telephone system is still analog, and the digital components that are in place are constrained by the old analog architecture (circuit switching etc.). If you made a relative comparison to the computer industry, you'd find that a "state of the art" central office switch of today, like the SS7, is comparable to a mainframe or minicomputer of the 1970s. In fact, the SS7 is built out of a couple of AT&T 3B2 minicomputers!   As the microprocessor revolution sweeps this industry we'll see computer style similar changes in the price/performance of the switches and related equipment.

That covers the cost for the boxes at the ends of the line, but what about the stuff in the middle? Fiber optics driven by semiconductor lasers will be the primary connection in between the switches and terminal equipment. Fortunately, this technology is cheap, powerful and scalable. The basic fiber itself is just drawn glass which is able to channel a beam of light. The magic comes in when you can efficiently modulate the light with a signal, demodulate it on the other end, and then replicate the whole thing on as many strands of fiber as you like.

The result of these two technologies will drive the cost of bandwidth per customer down by enormous factors - in fact by about the same amount as the amazing numbers discussed above for computing. This is the key to changing the economics of distribution, and it is central to the entire notion of the "information highway".   I'll use this general term to mean wide area digital consumer networks. In most cases I'll be talking about high speed networks which can transmit high quality video or other digital data. In the long run (actually not all that long!) all wired communication will be broadband. Nonetheless, we should not forget low to medium speed networks (the existing phone system or ISDN) because many of the essential features of the information highway are already exhibited by these systems and for some data and services they are quite suitable.

The Tyranny of Geography

One of the most general and dramatic aspects of the information highway is to virtualize space and time. Put another way, the highway will break the tyranny of geography - the stranglehold of location, access and transportation that has governed human societies from their inception.

An old maxim in the real estate business is that the three top factors that determine a properties value are location, location and location.   The reason is obvious - physical location and access is an incredibly important thing to a commercial building or home.   It determines how many people come in the door of your business, how far people have to commute, who your neighbors are and a myriad of other attributes.

Similar factors govern much of society.   Transportation systems have been incredibly influential to the development of cities, towns and suburbs. Every major change in transportation has caused enormous changes in our lives, and in the business community at large.   Access to people is the primary differentior between city and suburb. Most of the differences between a street in New York City and one in Redmond can be traced to the traffic flow and access potential- how many people can a business on that street draw its customers from and how far must they travel? How many jobs are within commuting distance of a home on that street?

Any activity which can be transacted over the information highway is freed from these constraints.    Assuming that the network is there, a person in Redmond or Manhattan or nearly anywhere else will have equal access to goods and services presented on the network.   Geography doesn't matter any more - if you are on the net you in a virtual world which is not bound by these conventions or constraints.

The implications are enormous - so much so that it is hard to overstate them without sounding silly. Any information based business or activity will cease to be geographically bound, which means that the local operators of these activities will die. Nationwide services which are based on the information highway will dominate them every time.

This will occur in various stages over the next couple of decades. The first examples will be pure information businesses, which can simply transfer digital data directly over the network.   Software (and therefore Egghead and others) will certainly go this way, as will the local video rental store.   The next step up is information used to purchase or deal with physical products - mail order and retailing. This will have a huge effect on local retailing, although it will not eliminate it.

Much of the focus on information business is placed on mass market retail information, but there is another category that is ultimately even more important - wholesale point to point information - in other words, the work product of most people employed in offices. Telecommunting will allow these people to go to work over the information highway rather than the physical one, and thus be bound only by its constraints.   There is still a speed limit on the information highway - but it's 186,000 miles per second5. Long distance bandwidth will drop in price until there is very little reason for people working "together" to be nearly anywhere on earth which has network access.

Initially this will just effect a fairly small number of people, but over time this could become an enormously important phenomenon. An industrial economy needs to have its workers near their factories, but our increasingly service and information oriented economy can let its people disperse to wherever the information highway can reach them. This will lead to de-urbanization of the developed world.   Most of the folks who work in large office buildings in Manhattan and commute in from Connecticut or Long Island would be a lot better off telecommuting - at least part of the time.   Ultimately, "suburbs" will not be constrained to be near urban areas - any area with decent network access will do.

This will take both time and technology to occur. People's customs do not shift overnight, and we will need to come up with lots of tools and support. Video conferencing applications, clever user interfaces and a variety of other things must come into play before people work via the highway on a wide scale basis. Even though the pace of change may be slow, the total effect will be very large.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of geographical tyranny is found in politics.   My vote is aggregated with those of my neighbors - first to vote for local government, then state offices, the House and Senate and ultimately the President of the United States.   At every level, geography plays a huge role - it determines who I can vote for and whether my vote will be heard amid the din of the others who are aggregated with me.   In fact, political control of the aggregation process - known as "gerrymandering" - is widely used as a mechanism to manipulate the outcome of elections.

The tacit assumption in a geographically based representative democracy is that I have something in common with my neighbors. Since we have this common interest, we should pull together to elect representatives to carry our message - either to the state house or the nation's capital. This may have been relevant years ago, but it is certainly fallacious today. I don't have anything in common with my neighbors on most issues that are important to me.   There are some legitimate things that are truly based on local geography, like whether to widen our street, but on the really important topics I probably have far more in common with a computer industry person in Massachusetts or Silicon Valley than I do with the retired couple that lives next door to me in Bellevue.

This trend has already become moderately important in politics. Causes like environmentalism (e.g. the Green parties in Europe), gender or sex (gay rights, feminism...), moral issues (abortion) and others are strong enough to polarize people and create movements that cross geographical boundaries.   The limiting factor is that it requires a lot of work to form and manage these grass roots organizations and get the word out.

The information highway will greatly accelerate this trend because it enables virtual communities and new forms of communication. It is very expensive for one person to communicate with more than one other person - the telephone network is fundamentally a point to point service, while radio and TV go to the other extreme and force broadcast communication to everybody.   Bulletin boards - initially text and later video and multimedia - are an effective and inexpensive way for groups large and small to engage in multicast communication.   Every interest group will have its bulletin boards (text, video...) its video productions and its ability to conduct polls and plebiscites on the network. The information highway will become a powerful conduit for grass roots political organizations which will eventually exceed the power of the traditional media.

Once the populace is thoroughly ensconced in its BBS forums and interest groups, there is still the problem that aggregation is done in the archaic geographical districts.   As the power of the highway in reaching and influencing people grows, there will be a clamor to redress this situation.   Television changed politics from the cloistered world of the smoke filled room where party officials made all the key decisions to the world of the sound bite and the infomercials, because it is TV that gets out the vote these days rather than ward heelers and party bosses.   New politicians6 and causes will emerge to exploit the information highway's ability to reach and motivate people, and it will become the most leveraged way to get out the vote.

The tension between the old geographically based politics and the new highway based approach will ultimately have to be resolved. One solution might be will be to elect representatives from interest group constituencies rather than districts. The simplest way to do this is to implement Lani Gunier's ill fated proposal to use cumulative voting to empower minority groups7. This was originally intended with ethnic minority groups in mind, but in practice it could reach beyond this. The true minority groups are not those based purely on race or ethnicity but rather on the specific issues and values that smaller groups of like minded people share, regardless of race or creed.   If each American got 535 votes to cast any way they like against a national slate of representatives for Congress there would be a very different set of people in the House, and a very different set of political dynamics.

The next logical step is to make government itself use the ability to communicate and vote on issues.   The information highway can conduct votes at nearly zero cost and with far greater assurance against miscounting or fraud.   Representative democracy is based on the notion that the people cannot feasibly be consulted on every issue, but the information highway fundamentally enables us to do exactly that.

Note that I'm not claiming that any of these changes will be better than the current system (although it is hard to imagine that it could be any worse!)   The point in politics is rarely about objective good versus bad - it is about what is popular.   Ross Perot made "electronic town halls" part of his platform, and it is entirely possible that he or someone else will impose these changes in a top down fashion.   A more likely scenario is that the information highway will become a vehicle for traditional political discourse first, and then slowly change the system itself as people become increasingly frustrated with the tyranny of geography.

Sam Walton On Steroids

WalMart is one of the great success stories in retailing. The basic strategy behind it was very simple - move business away from specialty stores, particularly in small towns, and towards large warehouses which can have lower overhead and therefore lower prices.    It was a great idea for everybody except small town merchants, who have in effect become kindly old Sam's personal road kill.

Dell Computer, Gateway 2000, Circuit City, CompUSA and their ilk have done something roughly similar to old style computer stores, and a good portion of direct sales force activities.   Whether you are a mail order firm or a superstore warehouse is only a small distinction - the key issue is maximizing efficiency in physical distribution.

The interesting things about these trends is that they will both become far stronger as the information highway develops - mail order is made easier, and the warehouse store doesn't have to be open to customers because they can browse it on the highway. The effect on retailing will be very large, as discussed in a section below, but there is another more general point that I think is worth making - many of the most powerful effects of the information highway, especially in the early days, will come by accelerating trends that are already well under way.

The reason for this is pretty obvious - if a trend is already developing and it is compatible with the highway then it will be happen faster.   Human inertia is difficult to overcome and that will be a big barrier to things that are truly novel and require major changes in behavior. A change which is already in the works and has the groundwork underway, or which has already been proven to be an easy adjustment for people, has much less of an inertia barrier than things which are totally new.

This point may seem so obvious that it hardly bears repeating, but it does not appear to be well understood.   Time and time again I run into people who make statements about what will or will not happen on the information highway which are totally ludicrous when you consider that the same logic would contradict things which are already important in society.   The converse is that reasoning by analogy with current trends is one of the most important analytical tools for recognizing road kill in the making.

I Brake For Couch Potatoes

Do people want to interact with their TV sets? Aren't we really a nation of couch potatoes who'd rather vegetate than explore the information highway? How much change to people really want? Is the couch potato going to become road kill?

These are fascinating questions because it is hard to accurately judge the amount of inertia in human behavior patterns. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that people will be unable or unwilling to accept the changes that come with the information highway, materially slowing its growth.

The couch potato versus interactive debate is usually portrayed as a black and white issue - either people vegetate in front of their sets, or they are dynamically interacting hitting a button a minute. This charactature serves the purposes of the various zealots and luddites who pontificate on this topic. Regardless of whether you are for or against interactivity, it is easier to make your case if you assume a polarized either-or situation.

In actual fact, I think that it is far more likely that we'll find a very inhomogeneous distribution of interactively - both demographically and by application or service.   Some people are confirmed couch potatoes today and they may remain that way indefinitely in some modes of operation, but I find it hard to believe that there will be a large number of people who love the status quo so much that they won't take advantage of interactively in at least some way. Even the most sedentary couch potato uses the telephone, pours through classified ads, sends greeting cards, looks things up in the yellow pages, calls in to order take out pizza, purchases things advertised on TV and other activities which will be available as interactive services on the information highway. You'd have to be in an intensive care ward to not be interactive in some aspects of your life.

Those who claim that most people are couch potatoes are usually taking a far too narrow definition of what the information highway is about. Even if movies and TV series - primary fodder for the couch potato - do not become interactive there will still be many other things that are. The real question is not whether we all start blasting away interactively whenever we sit in front of a terminal for the information highway, but rather whether enough services exist to fund the continued deployment of the highway. This doesn't take a great deal of interactivity in the early days.

The couch potato debate is really a very narrow issue about the nature of entertainment - will large numbers of grown people use entertainment formats which are active or passive?   The answer in the short term will depend a lot on the details - will creative people come up with compelling interactive titles and services?   It is hard to predict whether this will be terrific games, or daytime soap operas with interactive plot control or a million other possibilities.   There will be both ample potential and incentive for people to try and come up with these new forms and formats.

In the long term I think that they will succeed in this quest for two reasons. The first is that people will have time to experiment and refine the medium.   The Milton Berle Show is pretty odd by current television standards, and MTV would seem pretty strange if you could take it back in time to early television audiences.   It may take 10 or 20 years before the information highway really hits its stride (television certainly did) as a mechanism for entertainment, but in the grand scheme of things that is a perfectly acceptable solution.

The second reason is a demographic one.   We already know the power of Nintendo and other video games for children. One out of three American homes has one of these devices and their children spend a lot of time with them.   We are raising a generation of people who have grown up with interactivity and love it.   The information highway will be a far smaller change for these people than for those of us who only experienced computing as adults and are already set in our ways.   As the Nintendo generation grows up and enters the economy the information highway will have a powerful set of advocates.

The Virtual Proletariat

The gaps between rich and poor, whether at an individual level within our society, or at a global level between rich and poor nations have up to this point been based on a broad set of factors, both social and economic. The advent of the information highway poses a new kind of gap - that between those who are "wired" and have access to the highway and those who do not.

The new "haves" who are connected to the highway will, over time, will command an enormously greater range of opportunity than the have nots who aren't on line.   In the early stages there really isn't much of a social issues because the very first systems will be dominated by video on demand and other forms of entertainment which hardly count as a serious difference. As commerce, education and broad scale communication move onto the highway the difference will become quite material to an individuals ability to be part of mainstream society. This isn't something sinister - it is merely a reflection of the fact that the information highway will be an incredibly powerful thing, and directly in proportion to its power it will disenfranchise those who do not have access.

On the other side of the coin is an equally powerful phenomenon - once you are on the highway there is fully egalitarian access to on line resources. All users are created equally - both geographically and socioeconomically. There is no technical or business reason why a person in Beverly Hills or Medina should have different access than somebody in Boise, Bozeman or the South Bronx. Some services may cost more than others, but fundamental access to communications, reference materials and other important aspects of the information highway can be available to essentially anybody.   Virtual equity is far easier to achieve than physical equity, because it is driven by the exponentially exploding capabilities of computing and communication. The information highway will not by itself eliminate the barriers of prejudice or inequity, but in the long it has the potential to be a powerful force in that direction.

Markets Meet Their Makers

The market place is one of the central concepts in both commerce and economics, and occupies a central place in any human civilization. The modern incarnations of the open market place are usually quite specialized, but at essence there is not that much separating the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, Sotheby's, a North African bazaar in Tangiers or the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo where sushi chefs go to buy the day's catch.   In each case buyers and sellers gather in a location, shout and argue about price, and ultimately exchange goods.

The existence of a viable marketplace is an enormous boon to commerce and trade. Without stock markets it would be very difficult for companies to raise capital, and without produce markets it would be impossible for farmers to sell fresh fruit and vegtables. The overhead associated with making sure up front that there was a buyer for each tomato would be an enormous burden.   An open market generally means competitive pricing and a reasonable degree of efficiency - goods move from buyer to seller with a fairly modest "friction" due to the people who operate the market - the "market makers".

In the case of Sotheby's or a similar establishment, this is the auctioneer. In the case of the NYSE, it is a rather bizarre chain of people starting with your stock broker, moving down to traders who have "seats" on the exchange and then finally to a "specialist" who manages the market of one or more specific stocks and matches buyers with sellers.   That is for one side of the transaction - a similar set exists for the other party in the transaction. All of these middlemen take a piece of the action.   Gambling with a bookmaker is actually quite similar - the bookie is the equivalent of the specialist in that he matches bets on both sides of horse race or sporting event, with just enough difference between the two to take a piece of the action, known as the vigorish or "vig".

Despite the tremendous success of markets such as the NYSE in raising capital for corporations, the entire system seems quite quaint when compared to what the information highway can offer.   Why are a lot of humans in the middle taking a vig?   Why do they have to congregate in one physical location in one city? Why is the vig so large?

The information highway will become the ultimate market maker for goods and services - posting a buy or sell order is a far more direct way to mediate a market than any of the existing markets. Distributed databases can post offers, resolve offers into completed transactions, handle authentication and security and handle all aspects of the marketplace.   No humans need be involved except for the buyer and seller.   Specific markets on the highway may still charge a vig, but in general it will be smaller than anything charged today.

There is already substantial precedent for this. NASDAQ already operates as a distributed system, albeit a rather crude one, where various brokers distribute the market making function. A network of institutional investors with PCs and modems forms the basis for the Wunsch Auction System (recently renamed the Arizona Stock Exchange) which bypasses existing security markets for a smaller vig.   As systems like this catch on and use the facilities of the highway to provide better services, the existing market makers will be unable to compete. Some of their services will still be needed - for example advice on which stocks to buy or when to buy them, or expert appraisals of art works, but these will be decoupled from the mechanism of the market.

The really dramatic step comes when brand new markets are created on the highway, so that goods or services which never had the benefit of widespread trading can be efficiently exchanged.    Used cars are auctioned today, but to used car dealers rather than the public.   There is no reason to make this restriction on the highway. Many classified ads attempt to establish an auction for a specific item when they say "best offer" for the price, yet the ability to really attract the best offer is limited.

In other cases, new "trading vehicles" will be created in order to turn a non-tradable item into something which can be bought and sold over the network.   In the 1980s this occurred in a number of financial markets. A portfolio of many home mortgages was bound together, then shares in the aggregated pool were sold as mortgage bonds. This allowed banks and financial institutions to trade home mortgages, but without having to deal with them one a time.   Futures options were created on a variety of synthetic securities - such as interest rate futures, or stock market index futures.   In a very different domain, time share condominiums created a trading vehicle whereby people could purchase a resort home at a different level of granularity - by the week rather than forever. Each time this occurred it generated massive amounts of volume and dramatically changed the businesses involved. The information highway will provide such a strong foundation for creating marketplaces that it motivate the creating of many new trading vehicles.

Within 10 years, the information highway will host the most efficient markets ever created for a wide variety of items, ranging from sophisticated new securities to household commodities.    A wide range of today's market makers and middlemen will be left looking for something else to do.

Species of Road Kill

The remainder of this memo will offer some vignettes on how the highway will effect - or flatten - a number of existing businesses and customs. This analysis has the usual caveats that pertain to any such extrapolation.   I could be very wrong, but it is interesting food for thought nonetheless.

One very important thing to keep in mind is that when I talk about companies or industries becomming "road kill" it doesn't mean that they will go out of business tomorrow. The actual process by which the information highway will displace current businesses will be far more like the start of an ice age rather than an instant calamity. In the long run the changes will be massive, and in retrospect it may seem to have happened overnight, but from this vantage point it will be slow transition.   The only dramatic part is that the window of opportunity for a company getting on another strategy and avoiding extinction may come and go many years before it becomes obvious that they are doomed.

Communications Equipment

The market for communications equipment has been very lucrative for the last couple of decades, but the hardware trends discussed above will make it extremely difficult for this to continue. The hardware components that comprise switches, line cards, terminal equipment and forth will be driven down the price/performance curve by the trends in computing. In fact, the communications equipment industry is in a very similar position to that of the computer industry in 1981 when the IBM PC was introduced. The PC design became a public standard (quite unintentionally on IBM's part) which allowed lots of new entrants to build a machine which was compatible with an industry standards. The ATM standard for packet switching is the equivalent standard for communications equipment.

ATM switches, interface cards and cabling will fuel the growth of lots of start ups as well as new product introductions by major manufacturers. ATM will become the key standard at every level of the industry, replacing the LAN and PBX as well as the WAN and central office.

It is certainly possible that the major suppliers of PBXs and central office equipment could downsize their current projects and simultaneously ramp up agile organizations to make cheap ATM equipment; all the while learning to live on dramatically lower margins. Yes it is possible, but it is an enormously difficult task, and I expect that very few will manage to pull it off. Wang, Unisys, IBM, and DEC didn't manage to do this smoothly, and although one or two of them may rally they have all gone through enormously painful travails in the process.

This covers the hardware, but there is also a strong software component to communications equipment at both the PBX and central office level. During an interview last fall a reporter for the Wall Street Journal pointed out to me that AT&T had almost 10 times the number of software developers that Microsoft does.   Despite this resource inequity I don't believe that the major equipment companies are in any better position to write the software for the new generation of ATM based communications systems than the hordes of IBM mainframe software developers were in writing PC software.

The individuals involved are probably smart and their experience may be useful - but only if they are taken out of the old environment and have their goals and philosophy reset. Many people made the transition from working on big computers to working on small ones, but in my experience no organization ever did.

In fact, software will be the area in which these new communications systems are hardest hit. Today's systems - whether for a PBX or central office, are notoriously hard to modify and are all proprietary - much like minicomputer or mainframe operating systems.   There are few if any third party software developers for them, and direct programming by end users (or their MIS organizations) is impossible. As a result there are few applications and little flexibility.

The trend for the future will be towards third party applications which write to industry standard APIs - just like on PCs. Many of these apps will promote end user programmability and customization - both at simple levels like call forwarding, out of office and related features to advanced systems for use in vertical markets. The TAPI spec is the beginning of this trend because it allows Windows apps to interface to a PBX but many more opportunities exist. I believe that one of the next "killer apps" in the office (and later the home) will be communications control. Today the most that we get to do is set a few speed dial numbers, and record our answering machine or voicemail greeting.   Programming your communications - including voice, video and conference versions of both as well as email and FAX, will become important to both organizations and individuals. As this occurs, the old style PBX and central office switches will be unable to compete.

The software architecture for supporting this new flexible approach to communications is likely to move to software companies rather than be written by hardware vendors. The hardware itself will be priced on the quality of the implementation and many different hardware manufacturers will support the same software. In other words, the situation will be a lot like the PC market.   This is going to kill most of the current set of communications companies, and i expect that within five to ten years most of the important players will be new entrants similar to Compaq, Dell and Gateway, with few if any of the current leaders left as real contenders.

Novell ???

People who make local area network equipment aren't gong to fare much better as a rule than the folks in the communications business. The one saving grace is that most of these people already live (or already suffer) in a very low margin, fast paced market so the effects will not be anywhere near as traumatic.

There is a persistent hope on the part of many people involved with LANs that ATM and fiber networks will basically be a transparent change to their current business. This theory holds that ATM will primarily be used as a high speed version of Ethernet - probably for network backbones and other places where the throughput is required. There is no change needed, they say, because this is just a better version of what we already have.

I believe that this is ridiculous. The argument is tantamount to saying that PCs wouldn't effect the mainframe market because they'd be used as terminal emulators. While it is true that some PCs were used this way, particularly in the early days, the really dramatic and important aspects of the personal computing revolution were about totally new applications which fueled customer demand and opened vistas that were never part of the mainframe world. The same will be true for fast ATM based LANs - they will allow video and voice telephony, communication of rich multimedia documents in real time and seamless integration with high speed wide area networks in ways which current LANs are wholly incapable of providing. In doing so, they will create a new set of users and applications.

The biggest casualty in this transition will be existing network software architectures, because they too are wholly incapable of serving the new world.   There are a couple of fundamental reasons for this - first off, they have no ability to deal with real time, yet this is an essential aspect of delivering video and other multimedia streams.

The second reason is bandwidth - the basic protocols and APIs involved will dramatically limit the network performance to a tiny fraction of the network hardware potential. Remember that these new networks will be faster than the local bus on current PCs! It is no more appropriate to use NETBEUI or the Novell equivalent to access these networks than it would be to use them to access the video display or between the processor and RAM.   The whole role of network protocols shifts because for the most part the protocols must get out of the way and let the data flow directly. This requires a very different architectural approach to networking.

The third and final reason is that for the most part the current LAN software architectures do not address the key problems that will arise in ATM based LANs that are interconnected with ATM based wide area networks - a lot of new functionality will be required. The basic things that people use Netware for today are really pretty boring - file and print service and email.   These needs will continue, and can be hosted on top of an ATM network, but I doubt that they will be the primary driving force. Instead, the key asset will be a new generation of operating system and network software specifically designed for both LAN and WAN use.

This is an asset that we must try to secure for ourselves. Novell is also in a position to move in this direction, but in doing so they don't have any advantage over us because the departure from their current world is so great. With luck, they won't figure this out (we certainly should not tell them!). There is some evidence of that they have at least an inkling because they bought Fluent, a multimedia networking company, and they appear to be sniffing around the cable industry.

Even if they do move in this direction (and they already be) there is every chance that we can beat them because we have a variety of projects (our cable deal, our narrowband platform, AtWork...) that have far more synergy with the radical approach than they do. If we are successful at this, then Netware could become passé, and Novell could wind up as the biggest piece of road kill on the information highway.

Of course, if we allow them to win, then they will have renewed and extended their franchise in a very dramatic manner, and our hopes of unseating them will be just as dead.

Communications Carriers

People who provide communications services face a somewhat similar problem to that of the vendors who supply them with equipment - the dramatic price/performance changes that come with computing equipment.

The direct cost of equipment isn't the only factor in pricing communications as a service - there is a lot of infrastructure cost which depends on things like the cost of having guys with hard hats and a backhoe dig up the street and lay a fiber optics cable. Regulatory issues also change the costs and create barriers to entry that are independent of the technology. Nevertheless, the advent of new technology will cause huge problems for existing carriers, because despite the cost and regulatory barriers, it is still true that any existing communications infrastructure will be at a huge disadvantage compared to a new one based on the latest technology.

The clearest example is the race for the "full service network". Cable TV and phone companies each realize that their current business could be subsumed by the other when equipped with a new digital infrastructure. With approximately equal cost, each of them can create a network which serves both voice and video as well as new advanced services.

Initially these networks will be moderately expensive (although still fungible). Over time, the absolute cost and the price/performance ratio - i.e. the dollars per megabyte per second will plummet. Physical installation costs and regulatory barriers will be roughly constant (or may change somewhat) but ever higher bandwidths will keep the price/performance ratio dropping even after the absolute cost flattens out. As long as customers have a use for the bandwidth this means that new network will enjoy a big advantage over older ones.

This poses an interesting problem for a carrier - do you install systems aggressively, even though they will be far more costly and less capable that what is just around the bend, or do you wait until they are cheap? If do you wait, a competitor may have staked out a strong position before you do and own the market. If you rush in, you find that a later competitor can undercut you with newer, cheaper systems. In the past, government monopolies have allowed people to have a certain amount of faith in investing in network infrastructure, but that is far from certain.

In the long run the increase in price/performance still poses a dilemma - how can you keep finding services which will utilize the bandwidth?   The situation is similar to that discussed above with CPU cycles and storage. The first answer is richer data types, with high quality video being the key example. Notice however that this poses a big problem with respect to existing services - the fundamental cost of a voice call is tiny on a network built for video. The first generation interactive TV networks will carry switched data at 4 megabits/second, or about 1000 times faster than a comparably compressed voice call. The cost of the video must also be lower; about 50 cents an hour at the most in order to allow a movie to be priced competitively with video rental stores.   Voice calls which are tarriffed (for long distance and business calls) are more like $6.00 to $18.00 an hour within the US and far more outside. Future generation systems - both local area and long distance will only widen this gap. An OC-3 ATM network is about 40,000 times faster, and an OC-12 network is 160,000 times faster than voice. As a result, voice costs can't help but trend toward zero as these performance levels become cheaper and cheaper.

Price is not the same as cost of course, but unless regulatory agencies explicitly permit voice to have a different billing structure, all voice calls will be essentially be free.   Given any sort of competition at all, existing levels of service will become a lost leader offered to build share for other services.   The current telephony world does this with residential voice service in the local area which is given away free in order to create terminals which can be used for long distance.   One can easily imagine a situation where all voice services, including long distance, are free if you are willing to sign up to rent a high bandwidth smart video phone.

The long term strategy of every sophisticated communications company that we have talked to is to supplement their fundamental network business with higher level contributions to the overall "food chain".   In the case of cable companies the natural move is into programming.   TCI, as a case in point, has used its position and cash to buy its way into minority investments in a number of programming assets - The Discovery Channel, CNN, Black Entertainment Network, QVC, Carelco (the movie studio that made Terminator 2 and Cliffhanger) and others.   This just covers the current world - they have even more ambitious plans for gaining a piece of the new world created by the information highway. Time Warner is already the world's largest media company and plans to seek synergy with its cable business. The smarter RBOCs have similar ambitions.   All of them are interested in using their role in the network business as a point of leverage to build empires which participate in the businesses enabled by the full service network. Their bet is to become information highway companies in the broadest sense of the term, not just communications carriers.

It would be misleading to characterize this as a retreat or flight from the communications business itself. These companies will make enormous investments in creating the full service broadband network.   This will be a profitable business - at least in the medium term - but a major component of its value will be to put them at the center of the new digital world. Companies that fail to take advantage of the strategic opportunities afforded by this position are likely to be in a very hard spot indeed, caught between the downward spiral of communications cost on one side and diversified highway companies on the other.

Retail Banking & Financial Services

Banking may seem like an unusual industry to pick on, but it illustrates one of the important themes of the information highway.   There are 14,000 banks in the United States which cater to retail customers.   Their business is based on offering a variety of services - savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, loans and so forth.

What is the unique value proposition that these banks offer their customers? The historical answer is geography - most people bank with a firm which has a branch office near their home or commuting path. There are some minor differences in interest rates and other retail banking products which might shift people between two local banks, but hardly anybody is going to find these features sufficiently compelling to make them pick a bank that is 10 miles out of their way as long as their are closer alternatives.

The information highway makes geography obsolete, especially in the case of banking or other financial services which are really just information businesses.   The only physical transaction that needs to be done is receiving cash (which itself will one day go away), but automatic teller machines have became the primary way to deal with this. Automatic teller machine networks (note that this use of "ATM" and "ATM network" is quite different from Asynchronous Transfer Mode discussed above) are already threatening the banks. After all, if I have a card issued by a nationwide ATM network, and direct deposit of my paycheck into my account, why do I need a physical bank at all?

In the long term, the notion of depositing money "in" an account is pretty silly. A single transaction clearing service should be able to contract with both me and my employer so that my salary automatically flows out to fixed expenses (mortgage, utilities), or into various short or long term investment accounts.   Most purchases would be handled with a card (or digital wallet) which was able to combine the features of a credit card ATM card and digital checkbook.

This will be a huge challenge to existing retail banks.   If you take an efficiency perspective is that they should simply close - there is no reason to have human tellers, the "vice president" of the branch and so forth for most transactions.   The successful financial service networks will be nationwide in scope, since you can't be otherwise on the highway, and will be highly competitive as a result.   The last vestige of local banking will be the ATMs, which will continue to proliferate. Everything you can do with an ATM except actual cash delivery will also be possible with your PC, your interactive TV and your digital wallet; all equipped with wired or wireless connections to the highway.

Small local banks are not the only ones who will be put to the test.   The ability of the highway to host efficient markets will change other aspects as well. Most retail financial services exploit the fact that consumers cannot access the same markets they can, giving them an opportunity to make an arbitrage profit or vig. They also use time access to a consumer's money, know as the "float", to profit from it while the consumer doesn't notice - this is in effect a vig of 100% of the interest they get for a short period of time. The whole notion of savings accounts (which typically have a large interest vig) and checking accounts which don't pay interest (and thus are an opportunity for float) are designed to give consumers a raw deal, and force them to cope with the artificial distinctions and incur overdraft penalties etc.

Money market accounts which issue checks and credit cards show that there is already an effort to cut a better deal for the consumer.   The information highway will greatly accelerate this by creating opportunities for far more efficient access to financial markets, eliminating most opportunities for companies to vig the float on their retail customers.

The highway will be the center for financial markets offering of all sorts of new trading vehicles. Even an individual consumer's banking transaction could be traded. A deposit into a savings account is really a case of the consumer making a bid for a specific short term investment with standardized terms. Depositing $100 into the highway would simply put a bid out to buy $100 worth of this trading vehicle or security at maket prices. One could imagine a variety of firms in a never ending on line auction for your business, so that no two deposits were ever serviced by the same firm. This is already the case with buying and selling stock. As long as the transaction cost is low, why not take this approach on a wide variety of different services?

Services that try to float your money will have to compete with those that rebate a portion of the float income back to the consumer.   Aggregation services will exist to bundle small transactions into larger ones which can be directly entered on the open market. Fees will be generated for all of this, but the fundamental fee structure will be based on fairly efficient open competition rather than the closed, inefficient world of today's banking and financial services.

Note that this does not mean that financial services companies will go broke. The basic economics will change dramatically, but the total volume of transactions will go up. The basic opportunity will be very large and some players will make a lot of money in the absolute - although at smaller margins than today.   Despite this, many of the current leaders will not survive this transition.

Wall Street

Retail stock market services will fundamentally go the same direction as retail banking. The notion of trading at a single physical location is a historical anachronism that will not survive the transition to the information highway.   As various equity and capital markets become decentralized, they will also become more efficient and the various market makers in place today will seem more and more like useless parasites.   There is simply no reason for any human stock and bond brokers to be involved in making a market or the process of transferring ownership financial trading.

Once you eliminate the exchange and notion of buying or selling through a broker, most of the other Wall Street jobs that remain will still be in high demand. In fact, the information highway will renaissance in speculation and investment because it will become so easy to create new trading vehicles and markets.   Mutual funds and other aggregated securities will sprout up overnight and huge new markets will be developed.

Analysts will find a zillion new markets and trading vehicles to study and pontificate upon. It would be nice if I could predict that market analysts would actually know what they are doing, and be subject to proof of competence, but alas I doubt this will be the case.   Unless there is a breakthrough in economics, market analysts are likely to remain at a level just beneath chiropractors and new age faith healers in terms of their efficacy.

Print Based Media

One of the groups most concerned about becoming roadkill are the people involved in wide spread analog information distribution - newspapers, magazines and books.   Each of these will suffer a somewhat different fate.

Books are actually the best off of the bunch.   I believe that print based books will continue to be published for the next 50 years, and possibly longer although by the end of this period the volume will be far smaller than today.   Books have a number of things in their favor versus the information highway alternatives which other forms of print media do not have.

Customers pay for books.   This may sound like a silly distinction, but in most other print media advertisers pay for a great deal of the cost.   Advertising revenue is far more fickle than direct consumer demand, and information highway has many features which will be very tempting for advertisers.   Inroads that the highway makes in these areas will hurt other media, as discussed below, but this will leave books unscathed.

Another advantage to a book is that they are long and, with a couple of exceptions, they are not suitable for random access.   People tend to read them all the way through, rather than browsing selectively, or starting in the middle.   This has two consequences for competition with the highway.   The first is that the quality of the display is very important.   You might put up with a computer display to check stock prices, or see the latest news, but choosing to read the next Tom Clancy thriller on line will mean signing up to reading several hundred pages on the computer, PDA or television.   Current display technology is not good enough for people to do this because of limitations in resolution, contrast, weight and power consumption.   Ultimately this will be solved, but it will give books five to ten years longer than other more casually consumed print material will have.

The second advantage to length and uniformity is that most books do not benefit as much from indexing, retrieval and filtering. On line newspapers or magazine articles can be browsed, filtered and indexed on a computer in ways which are far superior to print. This is also true of some kinds of books, particularly reference books such as dictionaries or encyclopedias which will rapidly move to the highway. Novels and most non fiction books do not benefit as much from this technology. It might help you find the book, but once you have found it you will read for a long time before searching again - the ratio of retrieval to reading is low.

Newspapers are in probably the worst situation of any form of print media.   I expect newspapers to be published for very long time, they will not disappear overnight. They will face some huge challenges however. In fact, many newspapers are already experiencing problems because of the long term effects of competition from television.

The biggest problem with newspapers is their reliance on advertising revenue.    The current budget for newspaper advertising is (in adjusted dollars) half what it was in 1950. The obvious reason is that during the same time television has become a far more important venue for national advertisers. This trend will continue because the highway will continue to suck advertising dollars at both the high end and low end of the market - more effective and extensive coverage for national advertisers, and at the same time more cost effective ads for small business.    Newspaper ads from businesses tend to be from local companies, at a scale which cannot be addressed by television.   This will change as the information highway allows local ads to be cheaply created on advanced personal computers and delivered inexpensively on the highway.   As local firms shift their advertising dollars to the highway newspapers will feel the pinch.

The long term decline in business advertisement has already shifted the burden to classified ads, because they were immune to competition from television.   Classifieds are the largest single source of income to most newspapers, comprising between 50% to 80% of revenue. Unfortunately for them, the information highway will have many alternative ways for people to sell small volumes of merchandise, find jobs and other classified ad functions. In some cases, such as used cars, the highway gives a mechanism for people to create an on line auction - not only attracting customers, but also offering better pricing.   More generally, classified ads are inherently a database problem - they aren't about great graphic design, or catching the eye of a casual reader; in fact they are not very user friendly. They exist because enough people are sufficiently motivated to laboriously wade through the fine print in search of the car, home or job that they want.   People that interested would be a lot better off registering a filter query or browsing the highway from their PC, interactive TV, smart phone, or perhaps an interactive kiosk.

A decline in classified revenue and accelerated loss of business advertisement would put newspapers under large financial burdens, even if the core editorial side of business did not have much direct competition from the highway. The inevitable result will be higher prices for the customer - up to five times higher if they are going to foot the bill entirely. This kind of increase will hurt circulation. Fixed costs, like maintaining the editorial staff and foreign bureaus will have be born by a smaller clientele, increasing prices further. The big problem with newspapers isn't the news itself - it the way it is paid for.

This isn't to say that there will be no competition for news however. There will be lot of it on the highway. Today's major newspapers, like the New York Times or Washington Post maintain international bureaus and put a large premium on having better in depth coverage than can fit in a 30 second CNN spot, and they staff accordingly - an editorial staff of about 1000 for the Times alone.   The forest of microphones and video cameras thrust in the face of newsmakers around the world is a testimony to incredible redundancy in the way news is currently gathered - major newspapers, weekly news magazines, TV and radio news all have created redundant news gathering organizations. As the information highway coalesces the various media, this redundancy is likely to decrease substantially.

There will always be a market for both depth and breadth, and the information highway provides an ideal way to distribute news. There will be a number of ways this will happen. One natural direction is to make digital editions of existing newspapers. Initially this will be done with repurposed content taken from the print edition, but in order to really take advantage of the new properties of the highway, subtle but important differences will be necessary. Newspapers must cater to a very broad set of customers, but on the highway that is not necessary. Each user could in principle get a different edition, by turning their specific interests into criteria for selecting articles - both by posting filter queries and by giving the human editorial staff more input.   The queries can include high level interests (skip the sports page for me), down to more specific items such as news on your company, or home town.

Text based news has the advantage that it can be sent to existing PCs, AtWork FAX machines and smart phones and over narrowband wireless links to PDAs. The disadvantage is that the more text oriented a service is, the less well adapted it will be for interactive television. This brings up the other natural direction for news is to do a similarly extend the depth of video news - breaking it into segments which can be queried, filtered and assembled into custom editions in a similar manner to text based newspaper articles. Text and graphics can be also be used as annotations to add depth to what is fundamentally a video based service. It will be interesting to see what mix of text and video, and what mix of existing text and video companies, will eventually win out as the primary form of news on the information highway.

The fate of magazines is somewhere between that of books and newspapers.   The business side is intermediate - they typically get half of their income from advertisers, so losing them would not be a lot of fun, but the nature of the advertisements is usually tied to the special editorial focus of the magazine and thus is less vulnerable.

The editorial side is more interesting. Magazines have a key characteristics which will also be found in special interest group publications on the information highway - tight editorial focus on a particular topic. A subscriber to Skin Diver, Rolling Stone, Communications of the ACM or Food Arts has, in effect, already posted a filter query on a range of interesting topics. Common topics like "cars" have already been subdivided into smaller domains - Road and Track, Hot Rod, 4WD, Hemmings Motor News and at least a dozen other magazines have fine tuned natural boundaries in people's interest into their own editorial niches.

As a result, many on line publications on the information highway will be modeled on magazines to one degree or another. This will not spell instant doom for print magazines, because many of them will be able to leverage their brand name and customer base over to the new medium. Print and on line versions could coexist for a very long time and it wouldn't be surprising if the word "magazine" was coopted by the information highway to apply to the new format and a couple decades hence people will have to explain to their wide eyed grandchildren that, once upon a time, magazines were delivered once a month on paper.

Broadcast Television Networks

Television broadcasters are some of the most likely fodder for roadkill of any of the current media companies.   Some form of broadcast TV will continue on for the next 20 to 30 years, but its pivotal role as the leading form of mass media is already declining due to competition from cable and other factors. Their decline will be long and slow and may take the next two decades, so this isn't an overnight phenomenon, but by the time that they realize it the window of oportunity for changing anything will have long since passed. The role of TV networks in the world will be tremendously effected by the information highway, yet they are doing very little about it - like a dazed rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

As in other areas discussed in this memo, the trend is already well under way. Cable TV relived the pressure on channel space, and thus enabled special purpose television.   Prior to this the opportunity cost of time on one of the three major broadcast networks was so high that the networks were forced to cater to the same set of customers.   It made more economic sense to pander to the lowest common denominator and pull in the most viewers, even if that wound up making the networks quite similar and the shows quite moronic.     Each had a similar line of up shows and none of the stood for a particular set of viewers or values.   Each of them wound up having specific areas where they would happen to create a long term asset which would run for twenty years or more - NBC with the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, CBS with 60 Minutes and ABC to a lesser extent with leadership in ABC Sports. Apart from those few long term successes which were basically unique to them, they had a very comparable crop of cartoons on Saturday morning, soap operas and old movies during the day, network news at around 7PM, sitcoms and dramas in prime time and so forth.   These programs would only last for a few years before going into syndication because they were created and owned by third parties (via the recently repealed "Fin-Syn" regulations).

This situation was possible because they had a triopoly with very limited resources. There are only 21 hours of prime time per week and only three sources of new programs at any one point. Nobody else commanded enough market share to host new programming on a broad scale.   Independent TV stations wound up showing syndicated reruns that was about it. Although the individual companies would have their ups and downs (witness NBC in recent times) being in a three way race meant that you would always win, place or show, and thus would always be in the money to at least some degree.

Critics might complain that there was never anything on TV that they wanted to see, but the job of the networks was to try ensure that, statistically speaking, this proposition was false for the largest possible number of customers.   A major newspaper must do the same thing - attract lots of customers under the constraint that they have only one product and only so many pages to go around. This is not the way that the book business works of course, because there is no artificial constraint on the number of publishers, or the number of books equivalent to the three networks and 21 hours of prime time. There are very few barriers to entry in publishing when compared to network TV. Many books are written and a number become successful, but those are not the same ones that would have been picked up front to succeed.

My favorite example of this is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It has sold 5.5 million copies worldwide and was on the New York Times Bestseller List for months.   If publishers had to pick their "fall line up" the way a TV network does, and made a huge opportunity cost bet on selecting one book versus another, who would have picked a physics book?   This isn't an isolated example, The Bridges of Madison County is the first novel by an English professor. It received essentially no advertising budget and was not expected to sell beyond the initial run.   Word of mouth, particularly through book stores, put it at the head of the bestseller list where it has stayed for ages. Meanwhile many highly vaunted and hyped books fail.

Cable broke this triopoly by allowing many more channels.   This pushed the economics past a critical point where channels were forced to emulate each other; instead they had to differentiate and have a unifying theme. Specialized networks like CNN, ESPN, MTV, Nickelodeon, The Discovery Channel and others have fractured the uniformity of the TV audience.   The information highway will take this step much further because it will break the constraint of a fixed schedule - any show or content can be watched at any time. This furthers the fragmentation of viewership to the point that it looks very much like books or magazines - thousands of potential choices, with little or no opportunity cost in making them available.

In addition, the highway will break the traditional "follow on" effect that comes with fixed channels. It is a well established principle in the TV industry that if people watch one show they are likely to just keep watching into the next one on the same channel. The people who create the schedules try to line up shows to encourage this and "build a strong Thursday night" and use a few hits to prop up a mediocre set of offerings.   Video on demand breaks this cycle - you can watch anything you like at any time.   Personal agents might recommend shows to you in any sequence. The whole notion of a channel simply disappears.

Another troubling issue with the information highway is that it may suck advertising revenue away from the networks.    Advertisers on broadcast TV (networks plus independents, but not cable) currently pay the equivalent of $21 per month per TV household.   That is really a lot of money considering that TV is such an indirect means to achieve a sale. Ads on the information highway will merge with shopping services in that they will give the viewer the ability to order directly, switch to an in depth infomercial or other avenues which are not available in standard broadcast TV. In the next five years this will not constitute a real threat to the networks as a major market for advertising, but in the long run it will have a significant effect.

The TV networks do not know how to respond to this threat.   I have discussed the trend at length with senior network executives and independent TV producers. Some see the threat, and others shrug it off. The fragmentation of the TV audience is viewed as a major disaster, akin to an epidemic.   Some claim that the public won't accept changes from the established model of TV, despite the rather clear evidence from cable TV, video rental, books and magazines that once given a choice people tend to take you up on it. Others admit that it is happening, but don't know what to do about it. As the sit wide eyed and dazed, the wheels are almost upon them.

Hollywood

The motion picture industry has developed a very predictable reaction to technology. In the past 50 years there have been a number of technological innovations - talkies, color films, television, VCRs and cable TV. In each case the initial reaction was the same - the new breakthrough was the work of the devil, an evil force which would destroy the industry. These fears have never proved out, and in fact just the opposite has happened. Each change caused a large expansion of the market for feature films and greatly increased revenues.

This rosy picture may well happen once again. Movies are likely to be popular for at least the next 20 years, and probably far longer. The information highway is a great way to deliver films - in fact a far better one than the current schemes. Hollywood's fortunes will continue to improve as the highway takes a larger share of film distribution.

Movie theater attendance is continuing to drop, to the point that theater revenue is no longer the largest source of revenue for most films. The good thing about theaters for Hollywood is that the price is relatively high, and the margin is good - typically about 50%. Despite this, the current trend is likely to continue and theaters will become a smaller and smaller phenomenon, although they are unlikely to become completely extinct. In fact stage plays are a good model - they are still around despite movies, television and other art forms. Plays no longer hold the same relative position as a medium of mass entertainment, and one day the same thing will be true of movie theaters.   They will be expensive places where people purists, aficinados and those with nostalgia go for a special night out.

Blockbuster and other video rental stores are currently the largest source of revenue in absolute terms. Their business is almost certain to go away as the information highway provides large libraries of films on line. However unfortunate this is for video store owners, it is a boon to Hollywood because the current video rental business is based on selling the tapes to the stores rather than directly participating in the rental income. Video on demand on the highway will be done as a share of revenue which is far more lucritive for the film's owners. The death of the video store will greatly increase the bottom line to Hollywood.

This covers existing movies, but what about the new media? The role of Hollwood in the new business is much more uncertain than the distribution question. It is far from clear what role the major studios will play, if any, since in any direct sense they don't really make the movies - they finance them and arrange distribution deals and perhaps rent them some production facilities. The actual creative work is done by a collection of individuals - actors, directors and employees at small companies like Industrial Light and Magic, which come together for an individual project. Financing and distribution will still have to occur, but they are as likely to be done by integrated highway companies as they are by decendents of today's studios.

As the information highway and the growth in computing price/performance progress, new narrative and entertainment formats will develop. Computer games will increase in production values until you won't be able to tell the difference between the game and a movie - they will be equally realistic. High bandwidth communications over the highway will enable multiple people to come together and share the same experience - real or simulated. Who will create the new media formats and entertainment for the information highway? Many of the creative people will come from the community that currently makes movies, but I suspect that the majority of current Hollywood talent will not make the transition.

The most dramatic shift for Hollywood will be the change in production costs and equipment. Over the course of the last 10 years publishing has moved from having an incredibly expensive analog production process - up to thousands of dollars per page - to one where a PC and software are sufficient for both professionals and amateurs alike. The same thing will happen to video editing, post production and special effects, as the growth in computing capabilities continues. The amazing dinosaurs in Jurassic Park will cost 1000 times less in ten years, making this sort of effect available to nearly anyone. A few years after that and effects of this capability will be in children's toys - the ultimate extrapolation of the Etch-a-Sketch.

Personal Computers

I've saved the best for last. Our own industry is also doomed, and will be one of the more significant carcasses by the side of the information highway. The basic tasks that PCs are used for today will continue for a long as it makes sense to predict, so it isn't a question of the category disappearing. The question is one of who will continue to satisfy these needs and how?

As a case in point, consider that the fundamental category needs for mainframes and minicomputers also still exists and will continue to do so for a very long time. Despite this, the companies involved are dying and the entire genre is likely to disappear. The reason is that a new breed of machine - the PC - came along which out flanked them. In the early years PCs were not particularly good at what minis and mainframes did, but they were terrific at a whole new set of problems that the traditional computing infrastructure had basically ignored.

Personal productivity applications drove PCs onto millions of desks and created a very vital industry which grew faster - both in business terms and price/performance - than the mainframe and minicomputer markets.   The power conferred by this growth made PCs the tail which wagged the dog; free to ignore the standards which existed for mainframes and minis and move off on their own.   Over time the exponential growth in computing has finally (after 17 years) given the PC industry the technical ability to beat minis and mainframes in their own domain.   Although the early software platforms for PCs had to be extended to fully realize this potential (Dos to Windows to NT to Cairo), it turned out to be far easier to do this than to make mainframe or minicomputer systems address the new needs and applications.   Even within the heart of minicomputer and mainframe's domain - giant transaction processing applications etc., the old standards will not be used.

I believe that the same thing will happen again with PCs playing the role of mainframes and minis, and the computing platforms of the information highway taking over the role of the challenger.

The technical needs of computers on the information highway, or IHCs are quite different than for PCs. The killer applications for IHCs in the early years will include video on demand, games, video telephony and other distributed computing tasks on the highway. It is hard to classify this as either higher tech or lower tech than the software for PCs, because the two are quite different.   Most IHCs will certainly need to be cheaper than PCs by an order of magnitude and this will inevitably cause them to be less capable in many ways, but some of their requirements are far more advanced.

Another way to say this is that the rich environment of software for PCs is largely irrelevant for IHCs.   Windows, NT, System 7 and Cairo do not solve the really important technical problems required for IHC applications, and it is equally likely that the early generations of IHC software won't be great platforms for PC style apps. This isn't surprising because they are driven by an orthogonal set of requirements.

The IHC world will almost certainly grow faster than PCs, both in business terms and in price/performance.   The PC industry is already reaching saturation from a business perspective. Technically speaking, the industry is mired in hardware standards (Intel and Motorola CISC processors) with growth rates that are flattening out relative to the state of the art - just as the 360/3090 and VAX architectures did.   The Macintosh and Windows computing environments may be able to survive the painful transition to new RISC architectures, but they will lose time and momentum in doing so.

PCs will remain paramount within their domain for many years (we'll still have a computer on every desk) but IHCs will start to penetrate a larger and larger customer base on the strength of its new and unique applications.   The power of having the worlds information - and people - on line at any time is too compelling to resist.   For a long time people will still have a traditional PC to handle traditional PC tasks - in precisely the same way that they have kept their mainframes and minis for the last 17 years.   One day however people will realize that their little IHCs are more powerful and cheaper than PCs - just as we have finally done with mainframes.   There will be a challenge for the IHC software folks to write the new systems and applications software necessary to obviate PCs, just as we had to work pretty hard to come up with NT, but this battle will clearly go to the companies who own the software standards on IHCs. The PC world won't have any more say about how this is done than the companies who created MVS or VMS did about our world. Of course, some of the VMS people were involved, but as discussed above it is very hard for organizations to make the transition.

This may sound like a rather dire prediction, but I think that for the most part it is inevitable. The challenge for Microsoft is to be sufficiently involved with the software for the IHC world that we can be a strong player in that market. If we do this then we will be able to exploit a certain degree of synergy between IHCs and PCs - there are some natural areas where there is benefit in having the two in sync. The point made above is that those benefits are not sufficiently strong that they alone will give us a position in the new world.   We'll live or die on the strength of the technology and role that we carve out for ourselves in the brave new world of the information highway.

What Problems to Solve!

2012-09-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

A former student, who was also once a student of Tomonaga’s, wrote to extend his congratulations. Feynman responded, asking Mr. Mano what he was now doing. The response: “studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.”

Dear Koichi,

I was very happy to hear from you, and that you have such a position in the
Research Laboratories. Unfortunately your letter made me unhappy for you seem
to be truly sad. It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give
you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems. The worthwhile problems are
the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute
something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and
we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take
even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can
really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of
success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a
question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away
from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is
worthwhile.

You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with
problems close to the gods. But at the same time I had another Ph.D. Student
(Albert Hibbs) was on how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over
water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the
problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem
instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is
interesting or pleasant or important to work on (namely those problems you see
you may do something about). I am sorry, excuse me. I hope by this letter to
correct it a little.

I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I
enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed.
For example, experiments on the coefficient of friction on highly polished
surfaces, to try to learn something about how friction worked (failure). Or,
how elastic properties of crystals depends on the forces between the atoms in
them, or how to make electroplated metal stick to plastic objects (like radio
knobs). Or, how neutrons diffuse out of Uranium. Or, the reflection of
electromagnetic waves from films coating glass. The development of shock waves
in explosions. The design of a neutron counter. Why some elements capture
electrons from the L-orbits, but not the K-orbits. General theory of how to
fold paper to make a certain type of child’s toy (called flexagons). The energy
levels in the light nuclei. The theory of turbulence (I have spent several
years on it without success). Plus all the “grander” problems of quantum
theory.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You
will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their
simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me.
Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. now your place
in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of
your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s
ideals are.

Best of luck and happiness.  Sincerely, Richard P. Feynman.

Nostalgia: Erik's Post

2012-09-16T16:34:00.001-07:00

* Tobias C. Rittweiler (2008-09-19 00:37)
> for a long time I've wanted to send an e-mail to express the
> gratitude I feel for the countless usenet postings that you have
> written in your comp.lang.lisp history. Now I finally came around
> doing so:

It’s been quite a while since I posted my last article to c.l.l, but very warm and welcome messages like yours still keep coming in at a rate of about one a week. It amazes me.

> Thank you for the time and energy you spent in writing so many
> sophisticated and thought-provocating articles. I never understood
> where you drew this massive amount of energy and the will to
> continue from, considering the feedback you received back at that
> time.

Even when I was posting at a high rate, I received more mail from those who appreciated what I had posted. I needed that encouragement and knowing that despite the increasing amount of insanity on the newsgroup, lots of people were reading what I wrote with a positive attitude. However, there are some people whose evil ways are truly destructive, and those are the moralists and the punishers who are utterly unable to produce anything good at all, but all the more hell-bent on making others pay for such things as not living up to their expectations, doing what they think is right, etc, and I drew a considerable amount of energy from my life-long desire to rid the planet of moralists and punishers. It may sound contradictory, but I hold that the use of force and violence and the lesser evils of
moralizing and punishment should only be used to prevent any of them, never to seek any other goal: Telling a moralist that moralizing is wrong, punishing those who punish others, using force and violence to stop those who initiate the use of force and violence — you get the picture — is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, this gets the moralizers and punishers all worked up, and they prove that they really are the psychopaths they only appeared to be when someone had the gall to do something against /their/ desires. So even though my general outlook on life went under-appreciated, namely that if you know what other people should have done in the past, you never have any clue what you or anyone else ought to do in the future, and if you are concerned with what you yourself ought to do in the future, you generally leave other people alone to figure out what /they/ ought to do
in the future, too, lots of people picked up on the positive message: Exposing moralists and punishers for what they really are — psychopaths — does a great service to any community who suffers from
their pernicious effects. Of course, if you are a horribly bad person like that, you can only see others as reflections of yourself, and you never understand why anyone would want to moralize against or punish /you/, because part and parcel of being rabidly insane is never being able to see yourself from the outside, and you think insane thoughts like “How /dare/ anyone moralize against or punish /me/, when I‘m the sole moral authority in the whole Universe and everyone, everywhere have a
moral duty to behave the way /I/ tell them!”. Or, in other words, people who partition the world population into “the good” and “the bad” always make the mistake of believing that they fall into the “the good” partition, when they are actually among the very few that are truly evil: No monumental evil act in the history of mankind has been committed by anyone who thought of themselves as “evil” — on the contrary, the worse the (objective) evil, the more the perpetrator was
completely convinced of the goodness of himself and of his “purification”. So when the newsgroup became plagued by the evil kindof moron that has nothing to contributed and no rewards for anyone
doing the right thing, but only harm and punishment for those who do the wrong thing in their eyes, it was time to quit. Had I had even more energy, I could have stayed, but I had ran out of steam fighting false accusations, which is another one of those hallmarks of truly evil people who think nothing of harming the innocent in their crusade against the “evildoers”. It turns out, as any study of history will show, that those accused by moralists and punishers are always innocent. That’s why we need courts, so those who accuse are not the ones to decide on the guilt and the punishment. Stupid people tend not to grasp this fact, and only see courts as means of letting people they “know” are guilty avoid punishment.

> And I particularly mean your non-technical contributions. I read all
> those now already several years ago when I was sixteen if I'm
> remembering correctly. I recall how I was shocked at the tone you
> used, and the aggression you seemed to feel towards people, as I
> grew up in feel-good communities myself. [The postings] made me value
> technical expertise and competence over civil masquerade, and they
> revealed how the latter can sometimes even impair the communication
> for the former.

Civility and politeness are extremely useful tools in communication with people who are more wrong than right, but of very little use with people who are vastly more right than wrong. This counter-intuitive observation comes directly from the fact that we simply do not need civil and polite ways of telling people that they are right about something. So the people who have most to gain from civility and politeness are people who know they are and intend to /stay/ wrong while they force everybody else hold their tongues. That may have been a very good way of building societies before /anyone/ was usually right about anything. It is only in the twentieth century that a sizable fraction of the population had any means to know whether they were in the right or in the wrong to begin with. Before we invented the concept of the real world, everybody lived their entire lives in their own emotional world. After science and technology invented the concept of the real world and of truth as correspondence between thoughts and reality, the internal, private world turned out to be /untrue/ almost
all the time. These days, I keep telling people that you only /really/ grow up and become a human being (as opposed to a mere animal) when you realize that most of what you think and almost all you feel is /wrong/ and every person, however smart or highly esteemed by their peers, is utterly and completely incapable of determining where they are right among all this wrongness on their own. We tend to believe we are mostly right, however, and only notice when the consequences of our actions contradict our best expectations. Now, there are many areas of life where there /is/ no way to sort right from wrong, and it would certainly be impolite to point out an error that was only relative to our own personal values, which is where the impoliteness of moralizing comes in, but modern man enjoys a growing number of areas where we can unequivocally sort right from wrong, and then it is impolite /not/ to point out an error, for that means we let someone believe something that will cause them harm, or at least undesired consequences, later on. This means that in the areas of life where
people are mostly wrong, it is indeed a good thing to be civil andpolite all the time, as one wouldn’t want others constantly to point  out one’s own mistakes, either, but in the many areas where it is
possible to be right, and positively harmful to be wrong, allowing people to hold on to false beliefs in order to protect their feelings
is really, really bad for everyone. The key, therefore, is knowing
which areas can and which still cannot tell right from wrong. It is my
firm position that no areas of science, technology, engineering,
mathematics, and allied disciplines such as medicine, are proper
arenas for politeness and civility. If people are wrong and are
spreading dis- or misinformation in these fields, everybody hurts
because it becomes that much harder to know right from wrog. However,
in areas where no one can really tell, such as ethics, politics, fashion, etc, even though we may have pretty good ideas and
communities who /choose/ a particular set of beliefs, it behooves people to be humble and civil and polite because fighting with people who are
wrong, but believe they are right, yet there are no means to prove that, would be extremely tiresome, as it became on c.l.l when people
who stopped thinking about issues where we /can/ decide right from wrong, started to bother everyone with their /personal/ problems when others disagreed with them.

> In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that you helped me become the
> individuum I am now.

I’m very pleased to hear that, and particularly that you took the time
to write and tell me. I wish you the best of luck for the future!

Best regards, Erik Naggum
--
Member of AAAI AAAS ACM AMS APS ASA ASL IEEE IMS MAA NYAS PSA SIAM USENIX
The United States of America still symbolizes individualism, rationality,
and intellectual achievement to me — even though most Americans disagree.

Excerpts from Kubrick's 1968 Playboy Interview

2012-07-26T17:23:00.001-07:00

Playboy: Thanks to those special effects, 2001 is undoubtedly the most graphic depiction of space flight in the history of films — and yet you have admitted that you yourself refuse to fly, even in a commercial jet liner. Why?

Kubrick: I suppose it comes down to a rather awesome awareness of mortality. Our ability, unlike the other animals, to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; whether we like to admit it or not, in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose. We’re fortunate, in a way, that our body, and the fulfillment of its needs and functions, plays such an imperative role in our lives; this physical shell creates a buffer between us and the mind-paralyzing realization that only a few years of existence separate birth from death. If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should be bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie….But even for those who lack the sensitivity to more than vaguely comprehend their transience and their triviality, this inchoate awareness robs life of meaning and purpose; it’s why ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ why so many of us find our lives as absent of meaning as our deaths.

The world’s religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache; but as clergymen now pronounce the death of God and, to quote Arnold again, ‘the sea of faith’ recedes around the world with a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ man has no crutch left on which to lean—and no hope, however irrational, to give purpose to his existence. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?

Kubrick: The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

England's Greatest Son!

2012-03-21T15:23:00.001-07:00

Cromwell's Rule

2012-03-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

The reference is to Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to the synod of the Church of Scotland on August 5, 1650 saying

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.^[2]

^{So you should always leave room for the impossible to happen just in case :-)}

Three Links

2012-03-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

Text: http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY

Exercise

2012-03-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

Suddenly I realized exercise has a far greater effect than I have imagined. Most significantly on the mind :-) I am going to hit it regularly then. Diet, Exercise and Rest are the three key ingredients I look to optimize in my lifestyle from now on (sounds old but works for me!)

Coming Back from A Precipice

2012-02-25T15:34:00.000-08:00

I have danced long on the edge of a precipice. Its fallen and the magic is gone and its time for me to return back. The word 'radical' has its etymology from latin radix or radicalis which means 'root'. Its going to be a tough long road to be back but it must be done. Rooting for myself :-)

As a process of coming back, I need to document my path for myself as a waypointer rather than anything else and here I am..I write because it is as much therapy for me as reading. Writing is far more compelling than reading though (as a therapy of course).

Humming along..

"Then the piper will lead us to reason. ..
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long. ..
And the forests will echo with laughter. ..
And it makes me wonder"

The Final Lapse

2010-02-08T22:43:00.000-08:00

Just because I like circles, here's a link to my first post.

First off, Thank you all who read my posts. I know of atleast two people on this planet who have done so, come rain or shine (thank you folks!) and my gratefulness extends to all those who subscribed to the rss feeds

I don't see any more point of me writing on this domain. I don't have any anonymity that was offered when I started (My dad reads my posts these days!). I don't have any new ideas to post but rather a bunch of links and I have many other reasons to append which finally boil down to the same result of rapping the door behind me.

Finally,I might have a penchant for writing again but it will be on a different domain as times would have changed and I like to start with a clean slate (if I were to do it again!). This marks the end of a phase!

May be if we are lucky, we'll meet again in the cyber-crossroads. If not, Have a Good Life.

I will definitely miss some of the folks I have interacted via this medium. To miss some people in your future is bad enough but to miss people in your past smacks of misfortune to me.

So Long and Thanks for all the fish.

Go Saints!

2010-02-08T00:16:00.000-08:00

Wahoo! The team I support has won the Super Bowl. Its a fantastic outcome for me. It was on the shores of New Orleans that I dropped my anchor in the Fall of 1999. Superdome was an engineering marvel outside which PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students) sold beer. I can still recollect the scent of the city streets. Beignet with Coffee at Cafe Du Monde replaced my chai with samosas at Galaxy Cafe. Midnight pool and beer. Weekends spent at Razoos on Bourbon. They slowly waft out of the mists of my memory.

More importantly, I was introduced to the NFL there. Our then quarterback was Ricky Williams and I took the game instantly. Slowly, I realized the Saints were like West Indies cricket team where no amount of lead in a game is insurance against loss. Slowly they lost match after match and even the playoffs were a big deal for us.

I supported various other teams in the meanwhile. I moved to DC, so supported the RedSkins there who lost to the Cowboys when I cheered them. Moving to California, I tried to pick between Raiders and 49ers but no avail. I still went back to the saints who couldnt even make the playoffs.

Today, however, I feel great about the team making its debut superbowl into a triumphant success. Psychologically, I think we associate ourselves with the team and this its winning associatively translates into our winning. Deep down, there is a gratification in things that we can wait 10 years and still dreams will come true..

BTW for all this great ads during this superbowl, I loved Google's the best because it was simple,subtle and effective to its purpose.

Go Saints Go! You've all been canonized in the field just ahead of the Lent Season (so you could participate nicely for the Fat Tuesday and have an equally somber Ash Wednesday)