Category: Four pillars

Butler, Ribstein and Sarbanes-Oxley

[Now how on earth did I move from Technorati rankings to Sarbanes-Oxley in one Saturday step? Easy when you know how. File Not Found to SOx via 404….]

The latest Economist, in an article entitled The Trial of Sarbanes-Oxley, reminded me of this document. It’s written by an economist and a law professor and well worth a read for those who are interested in such esoteric things. But then I’m told Einstein never wore SOx……

One paragraph in the Economist article stood out to me.

“Much of the blame for this should be pinned on accounting firms, which, despite being seen by the public as big offenders in the Enron and WorldCom scandals, have emerged as the big beneficiaries from SOX. According to Joe Grundfest, a former SEC commissioner, the audit industry has several incentives to “push Section 404 compliance to a point of socially inefficient hyper-vigilance”. To avoid further damage to their reputations, and to minimise the risk that they will be sued over accounting irregularities, audit firms are adopting the most prudent possible interpretations of the Section 404 rules — rules that are vague and open to argument. And, as Mr Grundfest points out, the “more onerous the requirements of Section 404, the more money the audit profession can earn” by selling its services.

Again, for those who are interested, please read Michael Power’s pamphlet The Risk Management of Everything, where he pretty much predicts the SOx debacle in style. Note to myself: must arrange to have lunch with Prof Power again soon.[An aside: I bought the pamphlet after reading a synopsis of his PD Leake lecture in 2004. Then, the only way to get the document was via Demos. Now Demos itself points you to Amazon, with no difference in price or conditions. Interesting]

“Incumbent to watch”

I was re-reading The Next Net 25 on Business 2.0 at a more leisurely pace than the first time around, you can find the whole article here.

In the article, all Gaul is divided into five parts:

  • Social media
  • Mashup and filters
  • The new phone
  • The webtop
  • Under the hood

An interesting list, one that I want to look at more carefully in the context of Four Pillars.

Against each of those classifications, they name five companies to watch. Interesting as well.

Also against each classification, they named “incumbent to watch”. Here’s the list of ITWs (I know, I just couldn’t resist the TLA -) )

  • Social media: Yahoo
  • Mashup and filters: Google
  • The new phone: Skype
  • The webtop: Microsoft
  • Under the hood: Amazon

 

There’s something obsolete-making about being called the “Incumbent to Watch”. It feels a lot like being called The Establishment during the 60s.

 

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I can’t help hearing Terry saying “I coulda been a contender“. The question is, who’s Charlie?

And thank you BBC for the photo.

 

Stepping into my personal Wayback Machine: or, 1984 Revisited

I’ve been reading the Summer 1984 issue of the Whole Earth Software Review. Some unbelievable quotes, makes me feel truly humble. Read them and see for yourself.

From Richard Dalton’s editorial titled “Enabling Computers”

  • ” A very liberating environment where you bump into electronically-linked communities of people you didn’t know were out there. Where your physical limits or disabilities don’t count. And an indicator of how revolutionary the whole computer thing may turn out to be”.

From an article called Telecommunications by Art Kleiner:

  • …Mike Greenly writes articles about the computer industry on The Source, a nationwide dial-up network. “The difference between me and a print journalist is (1) my coverage is immediate (readers had info on Steve Jobs’s launch of Macintosh just minutes after he’d finished speaking) and (2) readers can interact with me. They tell me what they’d like me to report on, and we swap information.”
  • …People play games, order products, use large-computer systems, retrieve public-domain (free) software, spin mutual fantasy stories, seek romance and stock quotations, and track their bank statements through computer networks.

Art Kleiner writing on The Personal Effects of Networking:

  • Some people move on to addiction: signing on a dozen times a day………[…..]…. Fortunately, addiction is usually short-lived. You get overwhelmed by overload and cut back, learning to filter out material. You don’t have to lose appreciation for the physical world; you can become more sensual elsewhere to compensate for the hours spent online. You can use the telephone more sparingly, scheduling calls and exchanging agendas for them in advance.

Robert Cowan on Virtual Business:

  • I believe we will soon see the emergence of “electronic store-front firms” wheren potential users will look through a computer network’s directory for service providers and contract with the most appropriate one. That provider might be located on a farm in Washington or in the heart of New York City. Geography is becoming less important as our focus shifts to […..] .. human intelligence and creativity.

Charles Spezzano (a diehard IBM PC man seeing his first Macintosh) on Breaking The Chains That Bind:

  • My real conversion to Mac, however, wasn’t spurred by anything the salesman showed me during the demonstration. I realised it on the way home. Mac has sex appeal, like an Italian sports car: it’s compact, stylish, soft and quick looking. Even without knowing exactly what I’d do with it, I’d like to have Mac sitting on a table in my living room…..[…]If I could get near it, that is. My wife and daughters would love this machine. They respect the PC, but no one loves anything made by IBM. I think that may even be an official psychiatric perversion.

From Learning/Playing by Robert Scarola:

  • The following articles and reviews all discuss products that offer a vision, selection or experience of an alternate reality. Some of these products are at the cutting edge of learning simulations and games in which the computer is an active player. Others are designed to make learning specific skills less painful, or even fun. At the moment, there are very few high-quality learning simulations for adults or for kids. But necessity is the mother of invention and I have no doubt that, even as I write this, somewhere out there in the twilight zone twentieth-century wizards are envisioning new, dynamic grand illusions and translating them into technological realities.

Art Kleiner on piracy:

  • Software piracy just brings already contradictory issues into sharper focus. If information is not free, what are public libraries? And what’s to prevent a public library from lending software?

Alfred Lee on the same subject:

  • In the state I lived in it used to be “unethical” for civil engineering firms to bid against each other for highway and other contracts. Now it is a violation of statute for the engineers to follow their ethics. Most of the software I have ever handled is accompanied by a lot of fine print alleging that by using the program — or by previously having torn open the cellophane wrapper — I have consented to a “licensing agreement”. This stipulates, usually, that I will use the disk on my own computer only and will notify the vendor and relicense my program if I change computers. Yes, an ethical question is being raised when I read that. Those lying sons of bitches and their California lawyers are trying to con me and every other God-fearing patriot out of our rights as Americans — namely, the copyright doctrine of “fair use”.

1984. What more can I say? Thank you everyone who made today possible.

Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be

There’s been a sequence of fascinating comments to my post on Empowering Communities, with Clarence Fisher, Dominic Sayers and Nollind Whachell all chiming in, along with forays into Tribes Learning Communities and Kathy Sierra’s Cognitive Seduction post, coming to a temporary halt at Eve-Online.

A ravelling snowball that I’ve been following with interest, maybe even glee. But.

I think we need to keep in mind the Kurt Vonnegut quote that I used to headline this post.

Children discover things by accident and design and serendipity.

They play role-playing games as if it is second nature.

They congregate into subgroups and reform themselves as if they were born to do that.

Because they were. It is what they were born to do. It is their second nature.

And we have the opportunity to make technology their slaves in this sojourn.

Everything that learners can be provided via technology should be “as well as” rather than “instead of” their real worlds.

They need to have a First Life before they get into Second Life.

[Halley Suitt, thanks for reminding me of that in a post of yours sometime ago]

That is our duty and our joy.

Unauthorised and un-paid-for advertising

I was reading the Guardian this morning and chanced across this article. [How nice it is to be able to reference something in the press without having a zillion passwords and accounts…. thank you, Guardian].

The article refers to tonight’s California bake-off between Esther Dyson of Release 1.0 and PC Forum and Flight School fame,  and Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,  on the question of paid-for mail.

I know and respect Esther; while I don’t know Danny, I have a lot of time for Cory and for the EFF. So I look forward to learning some things I didn’t know tonight, particularly about why paid-for mail could be a good thing, why it could be a bad thing, and why this might create a two-tier internet, which is definitely not a good thing. These are important issues for anyone interested in information.

While on the subject of two-tier internet, you should visit http://pulver.com/savethenet/ when you get the chance. Jeff Pulver has done a brave thing and challenged us all. Take a look and, even better, enter the competition. A truly viral competition.

Which brings me back toThe Esther-Danny bake-off. Reading the article made me think. [Dangerous, I know, but forgive me]. In the same way as I used to consider all viruses to be a special case of software agent, I can’t help thinking of all spam and spim and splog as unauthorised and un-paid-for advertising.

I’m used to the ad-free space of the BBC, as and when I get the time to watch television. Watching ITV or Sky irritates me somewhat as a result, though I still manage to watch The Simpsons every now and then. So when I travel to the US, I can’t abide the television except for news channels. And, to my absolute horror, when I went to India earlier this month, I found that people watched advertising occasionally interspersed with programming.

A tangential aside. Born and raised in Calcutta, I was used to telling people to drive in the potholes and to try and avoid the bits of road that came up every now and then. That’s the way television in India now feels to me.

A tangential tangential aside. Watch this if you’re interested in Indian driving. Incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM

I get irritated with DVDs where I have to sit through advertisements before the main feature.

I get irritated with pop-ups.

I like things like TiVo because I can filter out the garbage.

Even if the garbage pays for the programming that gets to me.

I don’t like garbage.

If I start thinking of spam as advertising, and I start concerning myself with all the forms of advertising that I get irritated with, then I’m prepared to pay to prevent receiving it. More later.