26 Dec 2008
0 CommentsPlaying the Lottery after the Meltdown
Fold or raise? Full house or three of a kind? Eager to jump start an economy that has seen almost unprecedented meltdown, governments around the world are racing to place gargantuan bets with taxpayer and treasury money. Only time will separate the profound from the boondoggle among these bets. Meanwhile, poised on the dawn of a new year, I’ll present my analysis and opinion, recognizing that the complexity of the current situation dictates that no one has the real answer.
Last year’s credit crunch and the ensuing illiquidity has generated a financial crisis whose effect that might have, only a few months ago, seemed totally inconceivable:
- massive government ownership of banks (HBOS, Northern Rock) and insurance companies (AIG)
- bankruptcies of some pillars of the financial system (Lehman Brothers)
- a North American auto industry (GM, Ford, Chrysler) that stared down death, and even with bailouts, may not survive in any recognizable form
- an estimated $30 trillion of value wiped out of global stock markets in a matter of months, according to Alan Greenspan
- not to mention a US recession that has already lasted a surprising one year, with almost no country globally, including hitherto unstoppable China, seeming able to escape severe slowdown.
Closer to home, in 2009, the Canadian province of Ontario, will for the first time have a slower GDP growth than the country as a whole and, in essence, become a have not province. As a country, Canada has a historical reputation of being:
“hewers of wood and drawers of water”
One could easily add to that old dictum:
“hackers of rock, drillers of oil and bashers of metal”
While Canada thrived on a commodity based economy, Ontario’s strategic proximity to Detroit, made the automotive industry king and made Ontarians as rich as almost any region in the world as a result. Over the last 20 years, as the economy started to transition toward knowledge intensive industries and away from basic manufacturing, Ontario did make some strategic investments in Advanced Manufacturing, involving information technologies such as robotics, automation and MRP increased basic efficiencies.
However, with the unstoppable rush of manufacturing activity to the Pearl River delta in Asia, that strategy is no longer enough.
A few months ago, I wrote a series on Public Policy for the Digital Age, which I wrote in the vain hope of stimulating some real discussion during a particularly unexciting Canadian election campaign. At that time, Canadian politicians seemed to ignore what the general public already knew “It’s the economy stupid”. Now, almost no one believes that something should but done, but the question is what?
Many believe that the making real things are the only real“jobs, and that all other jobs are just glorified hamburger flipping. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the pervasiveness of information technology, in all aspects of our economy, as an example:
- the average car is really a complicated computer network, or even cloud, or hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of networked computers with unprecedented software. And the trend to IT in automobiles continues to accelerate into areas such as traffic optimization and safety.
- for even the most sophisticated manufacturers of smartphones, such as RIM, Nokia or Apple, software complexity now signficantly outguns RF Engineering and manufacturing of the devices. The smartphone is essentially a complicated software and services ecosystem which happens to have some hardware to run on.
- green technologies, such as green energy, increasingly harness complicated IT-based systems, to innovations in nanotechnology and industrial design.
- healthcare and life sciences for an aging economy, is just starting to be transformed by software, web and mobile based delivery mechanisms, driven both by concerns about escalating costs but also increasingly demanding consumers.
There is no question that, even if all the actual metal-bashing manufacturing were to migrate offshore, the real value adds during the coming decades will be in such knowledge intensive industries.
It is in this context, and with best practice economic theory suggesting that, in times of recession, strategic economic stimulus is critical to drive recovery, governments have no real choice but to act. And, the global price tag of such economic stimulus will entail trillions of dollars of spending.
Therefore, while government investments in:
- infrastructure, like highways and bridges
- an auto industry that has stubbornly refused to invest in future technologies
are inevitable, governments must save some “powder” to invest in our economic future. The old adage of investing in buggy whips at the dawn of the age of the automobile couldn’t be more true (not to mention ironic) today. The fact that governments don’t generally do a great job in picking winners and losers only magnifies the problem.
My message to our public policy makers here in Ontario, and probably most other OECD countries as well, is simple:
- find a way to channel some of the economic stimulus into sectors that will be the future of the country,
- resist the urge to make discrete investment decisions, instead finding ways to leverageor top up existing investment decisions made in the private sector, and lastly
- measure the results so future generations can benefit from our economic experiments.
As taxpayers, it’s our money politicians are spending, topped up by money created by turning the printing presses at the Bank of Canada. Therefore, it is only reasonable that we need to be heard in determining how it should be spent.
Jonathan @ Victoria/Mile 0
Jonathan sincerely appreciates all of the enthusiasm and support that he received along the way, especially from those individuals and families who deal with Autism every day, yet who found time in their otherwise heavily committed schedules to host local events, come out and meet him, and support him. Likewise, Jonathan is heartened by the many people from all walks of life, who, although they do not have direct connection to ASD, lent their efforts to the run and showed their concern and support for their fellow Canadians.
Ray Simonson
31 Dec 2008
0 CommentsWho Invented the Dot in Filenames?
Who invented the dot (“.”) that precedes the file type extension, as in document.doc or metal.mp3? As we near the end of what has emerged as a most interesting year, we all could use the diversion of examining the history of something so simple and pervasive, that we all take for granted.
A note from my friend Brad Templeton reminded me that being in the right place at the right time can be profound. In fact, as strange as it sounds, Brad Templeton may well have invented the dot in “.com“, as he discusses here. As he says:
This led me to ask myself, who orginated the ubiquitous dot that separates the extension, denoting file type, from the base file name. A much older concept, clearly the use of dot as an internet name separator was influenced, perhaps subconciously, from the longstanding filenaming convention.
The Windows filenames of today are direct descendents of MS-DOS which lacked tree-structured directories and restricted filenames to an 8.3 format, consisting of a maximum of 8 characters of base filename followed by up to 3 characters of an extension connoting the type of data stored in the file. MS-DOS, in turn, directly inherited this convention from CP/M, and indirectly from the UNIX family of operating systems.
I have directly worked with all of the above systems since their early days, but to go back further, I must rely on the oral history I was hearing at the time. CP/M was directly inspired by the Digital Equipment Corporation family of operating systems such as DOS-11 and RSX-11. The dot convention may well have been inherited via TOPS-10 for the DEC PDP-10 line of computers. Can anyone please confirm or deny this? At the very least, the 3 letter limitation of extension length, still common today, came from those systems which stored the extension in a 16-bit word in a format known as RAD50.
However, filename extensions separated by a dot were also a feature of Multics, which dates back to 1964.
Thus it is unclear to me whether Multics or DEC operating systems were the true originator of this concept, or whether there is an even older, perhaps common, ancestor. Can an alert reader, possibly a computing pioneer, help enlighten us on this important question.
Happy New Year to all. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2009.