markjeee.com

4. miserlou: I'm a person who makes my living by porting and writing free software

and then selling it for a profit. Unfortunately, I have to use

proprietary, corporate controlled markets (Android Market, iPhone App

Store, etc) to do this. How do you feel about digital software markets

as a financial support structure for Free software?

RMS: I don't think of them under the rubric of finance, because what

preoccupies me is the restrictions they impose. For instance, Apple's

terms for the iGroan/iBad app store have the effect that any

executable received through the app store cannot be free software.

There are free software source licenses that permit you to distribute

an executable through Apple's app store, but that executable won't

itself be free.

As far as I know, there is no such problem with Android Market.

If you want to release a version for the iGroan and iBad, I suggest

that you stop dealing with iTunes. Instead, distribute it youself and

invite people to jailbreak in order to install it.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.

In the Dutch healthcare system care providers pay their own ICT investments (and make their own software choices). A late 2009 report by M&I Partners calculated that Dutch care providers in 2008 spent about €1.7 billion on healthcare IT.

Specific figures on EHR expenditure by the government were not given, but are estimated to have been at about €100m in 2008.

The total amount of €1.8 billion is quite high as compared to the health IT spend of the English National Health Service, which in 2008/2009 spent approximately €2 billion.

The figures suggest that The Netherlands (with a population almost exactly one third of England) spends about 2.5 times as much per capita on healthcare IT.

Interview A couple of months ago, a book appeared in Finland which has become a minor sensation. In the book, a former senior Nokia executive gives his diagnosis of the company, and prescribes some radical and surprising solutions. Up until now, the book has not been covered at all in the English language. This is the first review of the proposals outlined in Uusi Nokia (New Nokia - the manuscript) and draws on three hours of interviews with its author, Juhani Risku.

July 2010

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean."

The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.

In China, eight of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees

Retirement.  What a dumb idea.  In 1889, Bismarck invented it to give German laborer’s hope that there was a carrot at the end of the stick.

"Apple's attempt to draw RIM into Apple's self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple's claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM's customers don't need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple."

- Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie

Disclosure: I am an anything kind of mobile user but an iPhone user. I will soon buy an iPhone just to get a feel of all these mud slinging back and forth.