Technology Movement

I read somewhere(?) that the Technology Movement always follow the Sun (from East to West).

• More than 2000 years ago, the Chinese invented paper, compass, gunpowder and printing.
• 2000 years ago the Egyptians built the pyramids.
• 600 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci in Italy did his stuffs... too many to write down.
• 400 years ago, an apple hit Newton in England.
• In the last 200 years, various people in US studied electricity, invented plane, phone, transistor and eventually the Internet.

China -> Egypt -> Italy -> England -> US. The Technology Movement always follow the Sun (East to West). There are more countries in between but I think I made my point. The question now is, not 'if' but 'when' will the Technology Movement jump the Pacific Ocean to Asia? Are we on the verge of the jump because the time span of each Technology Movement is getting shorter and its already been in the US for 200 years.

Is the economic boom in China the prelude to the Technology Movement of Asia? How are countries like Australia, India or my home country Bangladesh going to fare? With the shorter time span trend, I think the Technology Movement will be in Asia for less then 100 years. So if we want to ride it, we need to get ready and get ready right NOW.

Followup: How does the dark age affect the Technology Movement? That is another post.

Seth's Sheepwalking

Seth Godin wrote an interesting article about Sheepwalking. Personally I call it Grinding. Sheepwalking is when you only do what you are told to. Examples are:

The TSA 'screener' who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A 'customer service' rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it's not working--she does it because her boss told her to.

I call them Grinders. People who punch in at 9, punch out at 5 and wait for the paycheck. They grumble when you ask them to do something out of their job description. Basically, just grinding it out.

At Uni, whenever I discussed technology with my fellow engineering classmates, it saddened me to see them as Grinders. I had spent many a night in the lab to get something working while my team mates went home at 6pm.

Google was a company that defied it all. But lately, all the good people are leaving after cashing out their stock options and they are being replaced by Grinders.

Overhaul the TCP/IP Stack

Today, a friend of mine stated one way to make lots of money is to build a smaller TCP/IP stack. The current stack size is 16K. A smaller stack will enable faster transfer due to more data per packet, faster packet composition/processing and less bandwidth. Companies such as Microsoft, Sun, Cisco would definitely pay a lot of money for the stack.

A way to do that is to move the stack to hardware. To quote the movie Antitrust:

The answer's in the box.

However, I take a different view. The Internet was built in 70's as part of the DARPA project. Technology has advanced so much since then that we need a complete overhaul of the stack. A new, better beginning. You cannot build space-ships out of automobile technology.

Fishing

Last night I went fishing in Shorncliff with my friends. None of us knew how to cast the net, so we improvised. We caught a fish by surprise. Surprise because we thought the net didn't spread when we cast it. So pulled on the net and up came a little fish (3 inch). No idea what fish it was.

The day ended when we accidentally let go of the net completely when we cast it.

Oh well. Headed home after throwing the fish back in the water.

Tech Bust Due Soon

The news article Rampant M&A activity may signal peak of global business cycle puts forward a nice justification that the next bust is near. Current M&A activity ($3.6 trillion) has already exceeded the activity ($3.4 trillion) of the previous tech bust.

I, for one cannot understand YouTube's valuation of $1.65 billion or Skype's valuation of over $3 billion. Just numbers of customers cannot justify those valuation. Right now all of them are supported by ads. What will happen to them at the next bust when advertising money dries up. However, its all part of evolution. We need the next bubble bust to kill off the weak, so that the strong can rise from the ashes.

It takes a long time for a big company to die: so long that it's non-obvious that most of them are in fact dying, or at best treading water. We're a hit-driven industry. A few big successes can make it seem like everyone's doing well. But most of them have only had one hit. Go visit most tech companies, and all you'll find is a fussy henhouse parading around an aging goose that laid one or two golden eggs. All their innovation happened in the first act, and now they're focused on "managing for success." But that kind of managing is just staving off insolvency until a real innovator takes their business away. Any tech company overly focused on (or dependent on) its management is probably a good candidate for short-selling.

Graduation

Finaly had my graduation ceremony today. What can I say…

What I remember most are the:
1. professors (especially the most bizarre ones)
2. staying up late working on assignments
3. craming for exams the night before
4. writing a year long research paper in three weeks

Now I am officially an engineer. =)

Snippet://java/internet connectivity

The following code checks if internet can be accessed. Note, this is not a ping. The Java Socket class isn't capable of such low level function. However, since JDK5, Java java.net.InetAddress.isReachable(int) can be used to check if a server is reachable or not.

isReachable() will use ICMP ECHO REQUESTs if the privilege can be obtained, otherwise it will try to establish a TCP connection on port 7 (Echo) of the destination host. But most Internet sites have disabled the service or blocked the requests (except some university such as web.mit.edu).

public static boolean checkinternet(String url) {
try {
InetAddress address = InetAddress.getByName(url);
System.out.println("Name: " + address.getHostName());
System.out.println("Addr: " + address.getHostAddress());
System.out.println("Reach: " + address.isReachable(1000));
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
System.err.println("Unable to lookup " + url);
} catch (IOException e) {
System.err.println("Unable to reach " + url);
}
}