As if meetings weren’t destroying productivity badly enough these days, it’s amazing how basic meeting services can still continue to function so badly. For example, have you ever had a phone conference with more than two participants that wasn’t riddled with a bad connection, echos, interference, feedback noise or some other problem? Has any content sharing or collaboration software ever worked properly for all participants? Or, have you participated a meeting where all the projection equipment worked flawlessly and people never had a problem connecting to a projector?

Apart from the very high-end telepresence systems, the basic services continue to wreak havoc on most meetings. The Calvin & Hobbes comic below captures the feeling perfectly (click to enlarge):

And then we have the meeting etiquette, agenda definition, timeliness, processes and preparedness (or more often the lack of all five) problems on top of the basic technological problems and one can only imagine how many billions of dollars are being wasted in meetings.

100Mbps ought to be enough for everyone

Yes yes, that phrase is likely to come back and bite me. But a more pertinent question is what exactly is the benefit of having a 1Gbps connection (the ones Google is planning on trialing) as opposed to 100Mbps, which is the state-of-the-art consumer broadband connection available in select locations around the planet?

Video? No. HD video? No. 3D HD-video? Still no. In fact, some years ago Cisco estimated that an all-senses, indistinguishable-from-reality virtual reality system would require a bandwidth of around 70-100Mbps – call it the input bandwidth of the brain. With advanced video and other codecs, the requirement is likely to be less than that. So I think it’s a fair question to ask what do consumers need speeds over 100Mbps for? Especially with the rest of the Internet along with TCP limitations usually bogging down the speed much below that for non-P2P applications.

Dumb, dumber, government?

Mention NBN to anyone working in telecom in Australia and you’re bound to get an opinion. (NBN is a government initiative that, with some $40 billion in cash, is to build a nationwide broadband network, delivering 100Mbps to most households.) Nothing in the project, however, seems simple. But there’s one aspect in particular that is nothing short of mind-boggling; the government is taking and threatening to take a number of hostile actions against a single, publicly traded corporation – Telstra (disclaimer: I work for Telstra).

Now, I agree with the need for functional separation of access networks and services parts, part of a bill that is currently being debated and looks likely to fail. But what I have absolutely zero tolerance and understanding of are the threats made by the government that unless Telstra plays nice (again, only Telstra, a single publicly traded entity) and comes to an agreement with NBN Co. on a number of non-trivial things, it will be forced to divest its 50% ownership in a cable company, Foxtel, AND be forbidden from bidding on new 4G radio spectrum. WTF?

I’m all pro-competition and anti-monopoly, but come on! How can it possibly be constitutional for a government to start making laws that are custom-tailored against a single corporation?! That is hardly modern capitalism.

And on a lighter sidenote, how is Telstra identified in these wannabe-laws? By name? If so, Telstra could change its registered name every six months and dodge all the legal mandates ad infinitum ;P

Borrowing the post title from the great Calvin & Hobbes comic, that’s something I’ve been wondering the past day or so. The Economist delved at length on the topic in their end-of-the-year double issue with the theme “Progress and its perils”. It’s a good issue, so pick up a copy or read what you can online if you haven’t yet. While The Economist looked at some big issues, morals and all, I’ll leave those alone for now and focus a minute on some smaller ones where “progress” is actually a four-letter word.

Remember when flying used to be fun?

10 or 15 years ago, flying was a pleasant experience. But now? Now flying is a royal pain with all the added “security” hurdles and restrictions. The latest bombing attempt incident has already – again – caused even further tightened security measures, like the completely braindead approach of demanding passengers sit down for the last hour of the flight. That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb. All this even though everyone should know most of the so-called security procedures are futile. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

The rest, i.e. most of it, is just a nuisance that adds up. In essence, we the passengers have to put up with great inconveniences for the sake of security theater. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with all security theater, but do we have to pick the most annoying, counter-productive, useless, expensive and abusive theater practices? That sucks. Especially when we could do something useful.

Remember when e-commerce was actually convenient?

“Progress” is also creating problems in another walk of life: credit cards. Even though we all agree they should be more secure (I should know, my card details were compromised two weeks ago), the layers of added security are becoming a painful thing for the user. The Visa/Mastercard 3D-Secure protocol in particular is annoying as hell and has caused many a transaction to fail. It has, in fact, worsened the user experience so much that I have reduced my card usage because of that. Why? Because 3DS adds numerous steps to the payment process, the verifying bank’s systems often don’t work or the transaction just mysteriously fails. Who cares if it’s more secure if it doesn’t work?!

Remember when the Internet was actually global?

Back in the 1990′s the Internet was a rather nice place to hang out in. Of course we didn’t have all the cool services we have now, but the signal-to-noise ratio was vastly better than it is now. IRC was used for intelligent and/or interesting conversations. Usenet was actually useful. And so on.

Now, ironically enough, electronic national barriers seem to be popping up everywhere. You would think the region codes in DVDs were the last geographically limited media thing we’d see, but no. Try watching YouTube videos from anywhere but the United States and you’ll soon enough hit the “We’re sorry, … is not currently available in your country“-message. Ditto for Hulu. And for crying out loud, even the Daily Show’s official site bans visitors from Down Under. What’s more, if an item in Amazon is sold by another merchant, chances are they don’t ship abroad. What kind of globalization is that?

Of course there are ways to get around some of this stuff – like having a VPN tunnel to the USA or buying a redirecting service with a US address – but the point is one shouldn’t have to do that.

The really big picture

All that is, of course, peanuts compared to situations where real progress actually would’ve been needed. Back on the larger scale of things, economically the past 10 years have taken most of the developed world nowhere.

And don’t even get me started on the political ineptitude of dealing with climate change; the worst part is that it is only a political problem as technically and economically dealing with climate change is perfectly feasible, relatively simple and even relatively cheap. Just reminds me of the quote:

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”

Hence, globally, 2010′s better be better than the “naughties” or whatever you want to call this decade.

In the spirit of improving things – or at least not making them any worse – I shall now do the most economical and environmentally responsible thing I can imagine: hit the local beach. It just so happens it’s also one of the most fun things to do.

Lucky coincidence.

Can somebody please explain to me why the Australian media has such an affinity – an obsession, really – to playing with words? There seems to be an editorial requirement that articles need to appear witty or have some clever (or not) wordplay in the headline. Some examples from this week:

• Desal plant figures don’t hold water.
• A surgeon who draws bad blood
• Sun shines on solar plane’s flight
• A corner in Brighton you can bank on (A property leased by a bank auctioned for loads of money)
• So you think you can prance (A Ferrari review)
• Fear and loathing in Aspen
• Qantas acquisition fails to fly

Ha ha. Seriously, why? Sure some are funny and some even clever, but by no means all. Many are downright forced.

Why pay less when you can pay more?

Perhaps the ad agencies also need to spend more time proofreading the ads instead of coming up with clever quips.

Apple needs a better App Store

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of weeks now and am loving the device. It’s great. I’ll save the device comments to another post, but I have some issues with the App Store. As extolled as it is, it’s just not very usable as the number of available applications has passed 100,000. Specifically:
• The fact that all apps aren’t available globally sucks. It’s downright evil having applications limited geographically; reminds me of the DVD region code debacle – Australia at least had the sense to put a stop to that (by mandating that all DVD players sold here must be region-free), so what’s with Apple getting away with doing essentially the same thing?
• The App Store user interface is bad; for one, it doesn’t scale well to the iTunes window. Did someone forget to tell Apple that having a window that needs scrolling both sideways and up-down is lame?
• It’s unclear what the categorization is based on what; who decides what goes into “New and noteworthy”? Are they new, noteworthy or both? With 10,000 new app submissions every week, just having “new” apps area doesn’t help much.
• What are the Top charts based on? Downloads? Ratings? I want a way to clearly find the top-rated applications and I want them categorized; most apps are games and I want to browse the catalog without being bombarded by entertainment apps.
• Why can’t I sort the lists by rating? Why can’t I see Amazon-style “People who bought this, also bought ..” recommendations?

The App Store has been a runaway success by any measuring stick, but I foresee some serious scalability and usability problems as the apps keep on piling. Even currently the best method for application discovery is using external Internet sites that classify, review and list the best apps; then you just search & download what you need from the App Store.

Needing a 3rd party for basic app discovery is a clear sign of some trouble.

Anyhow, here are also some random thoughts of the day that I thought are good to write up about:

Ready for another recession? And gas prices of 2 euros per liter?

There is an important topic that has been sorely missing from mainstream media; once we get out of this recession and oil demand rises, so will the prices since supply cannot – and never again will – keep up. However, most of the world cannot afford prices of $150 or $200 per barrel, so the increasing energy costs will drag the world economy into another recession. And so it will continue until alternative energy supplies will be scaled up to make some meaningful impact; let’s say 20 years minimum.

As a consumer in Finland, this means gas prices (and the prices of everything else, too, for that matter) will rise soon enough. They may even hit 2 euros per liter or even higher, whereas in many other parts of the world the relative impact will be even greater “thanks” to our tax structure. Now would be a good time to start tracking and comparing prices at the pump with crude prices as the general feeling is that companies always hike prices when crude prices go up but “never” lower them. Might make for an interesting graph in a few years’ time.

Elsewhere, this and related topics have been covered nicely lately. I recommend at least:
• The Oil Drum: The trouble with energy
• Resource Insights: Which matters most? The size of the tap or the tank?
• Peak Oil News: Peak Oil Crisis: stifling a rebound

Swine flu making its rounds

So it seems swine flu is quickly becoming established pretty much everywhere. Even here in the remote Northern parts of the world, there has been the first confirmed “local” infection. The good news, of course, is that the strain is proving to be a very mild one indeed – reportedly even milder than “normal” influenza, which is great. But the worry remains that it might mutate into something significantly worse while it’s making its rounds.. so perhaps it’d be better to catch it now and be done with it? Maybe a swine flu infection now would offer immunity even against the potential new mutations? Or not.

Another thing I wondered was whether there have ever been studies on whether people using public transport get more (or less) influenza infections than people driving private cars? It might seem that people on a bus are in a greater risk, but they might also have better resistance to bugs in general due to broad exposure of all kinds of viruses. Anyone know of any studies to this regard?

I think stores should be allowed to stay open anytime they wish to; hence, I welcome the May-August period when stores in Finland can be open on Sundays. Last Sunday I went to our local grocery store to pick up some fresh bread – or so I thought. Here’s what they had on offer on Sunday evening:



Perhaps I didn’t want bread after all.. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

Hmm, wonder what that is… Let’s call it scrambled eggs!

We were in Kuopio last week for a friend’s wedding which was a lot of fun. During our visit, we stayed at the Cumulus Hotel. Without going into unnecessary details – I do NOT recommend the hotel. One thing that we, prior to witnessing the actual fact, thought was positive was that the breakfast was included in the price. Now, hotel breakfasts can often be judged by their eggs – in better places they will make you a perfect omelette just the way you want it. In good places they will at least have decent scrambled eggs and crisp bacon.

In other places they have this:



On the left are the scrambled eggs from Day 1. On the right is the same scrambled eggs dish on Day 2. I didn’t dare look into it on Day 3.. I don’t know about you, but I doubt one can classify pieces of rubbery eggs floating in water or a huge block of cooked eggs as scrambled eggs. Eww!

Luckily it was possible to find good food in Kuopio – more about that in a later post.

So why don’t we put one like, I dunno, everywhere?

Another snippet of Kuopio. It is a common complaint that there are not enough trash cans in the downtown area of any given city. The Kuopio market square, however, hardly suffers from this problem:



That just might be a bit of an overkill, don’t you think?

One reliable indicator when a technology or service has gone mainstream is when it’s being advertised on bus stop billboards. This Elisa ad from this week in particular shows not one or two but three things that have recently gone mainstream: Facebook, minilaptops/netbooks and mobile broadband. In particular it’s interesting to note that netbooks (the cheap small laptops) have gone mainstream so soon – while they have also been blamed for destroying business models, for many consumers they’re the best thing sliced bread. I’ve yet to jump aboard myself, pondering the usefulness of one of these versus the smartphone which has so far proven to be sufficient for my mobile needs.

Of course, all three go hand in hand. A netbook is utterly useless without the ‘net, requiring mobile broadband. Luckily flat-rate plans with reasonable usage limits are becoming more and more available. And then you need something to while on the Internet, and what could be a better example of this than the runaway success of Facebook?

When doing the right thing twice means doing the wrong thing

When the leftmost sliding door is broken, it’s only natural to instruct people to use the door on the right. And when the door on the right breaks, the correct course of action is to tell people to use the door on the left.

Unless it’s already broken, that is. If it is and you do that, you end up with an endless loop. Luckily it’s very easy to spot such simple, straightforward errors in logic on the spot, right?

Right?

*sigh*

Don’t companies know anything about their customers? With customer relationship management, targeted & personalized advertisement etc increasingly important, I fail to understand how some basic stuff can be missing.

Like, for example, two months after ordering Helsingin Sanomat, why do they send me – me personally, named envelope and all – an ad and an offer to order Helsingin Sanomat? Uhh, hello, Earth calling the Customer Database?

Or why does Elisa send me an ad for faster broadband speeds when they know well I already have their fastest line?

Not only are they wasting money doing this, they’re giving off an amateurish image. It’s kinda like they don’t even know I’m their customer – except when it’s time to send the bill, of course. (Okay to be fair, they do deliver the service also – paper comes in every day, and bits go in and out.)

Payson enables online fraud

I’ve been fighting a payment to a Swedish merchant for non-delivery of goods, and learned the hard way that payment processors come in more than one variety. To make a long story short, I bought stuff from the merchant who used Payson as their credit card processor. I didn’t think too much (i.e. enough) about it, and made the payment. Never got the goods despite inquiries, so I called my credit card company. Alas, they cannot do anything as their customer (Payson) has transferred the money exactly as they should. It’s the merchant that sucked.

But no luck with Payson either – they also think they did everything right. While theoretically that is true, I consider Payson acting as an intermediary to be an enabler for online fraud, happily processing fraudulent payments. So what makes this loophole possible? Payson doesn’t store the credit card number as a part of their user account so VISA regulations don’t apply.

Idiots. I’ll know better next time. PayPal, the most popular intermediary, is better in this regard as the card is part of the account and normal regulations apply.

So avoid Payson. And any merchant that deals with them.

Would we be better off looking beyond the quarters?

Recession is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. With every newspaper touting every single decline as “huge”, companies are hitting the panic button everywhere. But just how bad have things gotten? Take retail in the US, where talk has been of a major collapse. Figures of double-digit sales declines from last year do indeed seem dramatic. But we can also take another view into the situation. Here’s a quote from today’s NY Times:


According to the Commerce Department, retail sales for 2008 fell 0.1 percent from 2007 [..] Much of December’s drop in retail sales came from falling gasoline prices, which have tumbled to a nationwide average of $1.79 a gallon from their peaks of $4.11 in July

0.1%? Oh yes, a fully valid reason to panic, is it not? Is it just me or does that suddenly not seem so dramatic at all? Seriously, are we forgetting that prices of lots of things went up absurdly in the past 24 months? Spiraling costs were considered bad news then. And now that they’re returning to more reasonable levels, that’s also bad news?

This has got to be one of the coolest things I’ve learned recently. According to a recent Nature article (see e.g. the ABC story here or last week’s Economist):

One of the more unusual things you can do with a roll of adhesive tape is to take an X-ray photograph of your finger.
[..]
Peeling take from a reel results in a phenomenon called triboluminescence. The breaking of intermolecular bonds that hold the layers of tape together releases energy in the form of light. As the tape peels, the sticky acrylic adhesive, on the back of the tape, becomes positively charged, while the polyethylene roll becomes negatively charged, according to this hypothesis.

How extraordinarily weird.

Speak UP!

What is it with Finns and their sparing of words? I know I’ve brought this up before, but it just never seizes to amaze me how people here consider the following completely normal:
• Elbowing your way through crowds in a bus, a grocery story, department store etc without saying a word. Not a single word.
• Whizzing 1cm past you from behind on a bike without ringing the bell or yelling “on your right!”
• If a bus goes past your stop despite having pressed the stop-button, what do most people do? Nothing, that’s what. Rarely does anyone speak up and ask the driver to, like, stop when he’s supposed to. No, people just continue to ride to the next stop or wherever, resigned to their fate.

Seriously. One would be forgiven to think that most Finns are mute altogether. But unfortunately what it really is is bad manners and disrespect.

The most-broken law in the country

For some years now, it’s been illegal in Finland to speak to a cellphone when driving if you’re not using a hands-free kit. However, there is nothing anywhere to make you think this would be forbidden. If you take a look at the traffic, you’ll soon notice that 10-20% of the drivers are breaking this particular law at any given point in time.

This includes everybody from the hockey-moms to the busy businessmen and road “professionals” like taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers etc. There is conclusive evidence that speaking on the phone while driving is dangerous, though I’m not sure there is evidence that hands-free systems help significantly. In any case, it’s blatant disregard for the law. Kind of like red lights, which don’t seem to mean a thing – or at most, means “hit the accelerator” – for some drivers in Helsinki.

All airlines that I’m aware of have been operating fully non-smoking flights for as long as I can remember. And to my knowledge, even when some weirdos allowed smoking, it was forbidden in the toilets. So why on earth are brand new planes still equipped with an ashtray in the toilets? That’s mind-boggling. I mean it even weighs more than just a door so you’d think they’d get removed in the name of fuel economy

Seats for midgets

A word of warning: avoid economy class in Cathay Pacific’s new Airbus A330s if you’re tall. I’m 6’2″ and the seat on the right is designed for people classified as midgets from my point of view. The problem lies in the unadjustable, molded-to-shape seat back, pictured on the right, lower part of the photo. Unfortunately, with my height, the seat ends way too soon and the molded upper part jabs me somewhere around my shoulder blades. The head rest becomes an awkward neck rest and the whole contraption is uncomfortable as hell. Worst I’ve ever experienced. It took four pillows and two blankets to cover it sufficiently to just survive.

Does Finland have to be 100% more expensive?

While in New Zealand earlier this month, I ate at Subway a couple of times when in a hurry. The following points struck me as somewhat unfair:
• The prices, as numbers, were more or less the same as in Finland. The problem: 1 Euro = approximately 2.08 New Zealand dollars, meaning it was >50% cheaper in NZ.
• When you order a meal, you get two cookies instead of one like in Finland.
• Soft drinks come with free, unlimited refills, unlike the different sizes you have to pay for varying amounts over here.

*hmph* Is it only our God-forsaken location way up here near the North Pole that gives us such ridiculous prices? Or could it involve some lack of competition also?

Here on the right we have a gate at our campus at work. Looks pretty secure, no? It’s certainly a solid piece of work, fully capable of stopping the average thief or vandal.

Unless, of course, that vandal has the sense to look an inch left of the gate, where there is open road – see below.



(Okay, in all fairness – they are in the process of dismantling the whole gate/fence thing and this is just an in-between step..)

In case of a heart attack, please run that way

While in reality this is probably a good health care service to have around, I still found this sign at a mall in Monaco quite funny.

If this is how the country is run when times are good..

.. what will happen when times are not so good, as will soon happen? Finland has been experiencing good – in some sense even unprecedented and certainly above EU average – economic growth for the past years. Would this be a logical time to try to invest in the future of the country?

One would like to think so, but apparently the government doesn’t quite agree. For one, we all know mental health care is in a pretty shoddy shape. Outpatient treatment has come to mean abandonment. And we all know what happens to mental patients when they’re abandoned, don’t we? Do they magically heal themselves. No they don’t. The regular health care is struggling with worsening labor shortage.

Meanwhile, child care is also another area that’s not being run well – group sizes are ridiculously big and day care is hard to find with long waiting lists. Many other important sectors are also running short of money.

One has to wonder whether it makes sense to invest in overpriced infrastructure projects and on pampering the willingly unemployed while skimping on preventive care in good times? Big infrastructure investments for one would be so much better done in times of an economic slowdown when they’d be cheaper and provide some jobs as well as economic stimulus. I’m pretty sure this will be contrasted by similarly dumb counter-moves when times are bad.