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So, President Bush is set to announce his new economic “stimulus” plan. The centerpiec e of it is eliminating the tax on dividends. I’ve read any number of articles in the past week that explain clearly why this won’t help. The bottom line is that it’s better for the economy if businesses reinvest their profits in their own businesses rather than paying them out to investors in the form of dividends. From an IT perspective, the number one problem right now is the lack of new projects that would staunch the flow of jobs out of the industry. You just don’t see job listings these days for people to work on new initiatives. Take Microsoft for example. MS has tens of billions of dollars just languishing in the bank. How about some capital spending, guys? I just don’t see how more tax cuts, and especially a tax cut on dividends, are going to help. The Economist commentary is worth reading. ...

One of the great things about the Web is that there are people who sit around mounting thoughtful and intelligent analyses of just about everything. There are brilliant people posting on Yahoo Finance message boards about how corporations should be run. There are people who run amateur sports sites that write incredibly thought provoking and intelligent articles about how to manage professional sports franchises. There are obsessed players of computer games who probably know a heck of a lot more about the way game mechanics play out in real life than even the developers do. And it seems very, very few of the people who stand to benefit from this criticism actually read it. For a long time, this really, really bothered me. It disturbed me greatly that there was all this great feedback out there that was just falling by the wayside. Then, the other day, I realized something that made it all click for me. When I wrote my first book, Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week, I was obsessive about checking its sales rank at Amazon.com, and I was incredibly eager to get my first review from an actual reader. The review I remember was my first bad review (it could have even been my first review overall). I disagreed with the whole thing. I was outraged. I sent an email to the reviewer (it was actually very respectful, I even thanked him for the feedback). More reviews followed, and I read and contemplated every one. I even had a program that tracked my sales rank on a day to day basis and how many reviews had been posted. Gradually, I started looking at the page with the rankings less and less. The script broke and I didn’t fix it. Then I quit looking for reviews of my book altogether. I can’t remember the last time I’ve even entered my own name in the search field at Amazon.com. So, even on the minute scale of my own professional writing career, I have no interest in seeking out feedback on my work. I can only imagine how unlikely it is that people who are executives at big companies or working heads down at game companies seek out criticism of their own work on the Internet, regardless of how valuable it is. Those guys have to deal with the fact that paid journalists criticize them in print before an audience of thousands or millions every day, to say nothing of bloggers and other amateurs on the Internet. It’s no wonder they tune it out. ...

The NY Times has a long article today on the current state of digital rights management measures from Hollywood. Not much new here. Basically, they want to sell you a license to view a movie, or TV show, or listen to a song, rather than selling you your own copy of the media to do with as you please. You already know that companies in the copyright business want to treat you this way, so there’s probably no reason to read it. ...

Meg posted a piece today complaining about the fact that people applying for a tech job seem unwilling to read the instructions for applying before submitting their resumes. I can’t say that this surprises me. In early 2002, when the IT job market was as bad as it has ever been, we had an incredibly hard time finding one truly qualified Java developer. We looked at scads of resumes and there were very few standouts in the bunch. When really good people are out of work for awhile, it has to be an issue with seperating the wheat from the chaff, because for every poor candidate out there looking for a job, there must be 10 or 100 who already have one. As I prepare for an imminent job search, I don’t find this encouraging. ...

Kevin Werbach has noticed that the successful Internet companies are the ones that do one thing and do it well rather than trying to be all things to all people. Needless to say, this has long been a formula for success in non-Internet businesses as well. Here’s his conclusion: The Googles of the world, who found valuable niches and stuck to their knitting, are thriving. Yahoo! and Inktomi find themselves the equivalent of a 1970s conglomerate: The whole is worth less than the parts. It doesn't take a search engine to figure that out. You might also note that this holds true across the IT industry. There are some notable exceptions, but most companies succeed by virtue of mastering one specialty. Even a mammoth like Microsoft makes the lion’s share of its money selling desktop operating systems and productivity applications. All of those side businesses are money losers. ...

Quinn argues that providing Internet connectivity to the developing world enables you to “teach a man to fish” on a larger scale, which is another way of getting at what I was trying to get at in my previous post. At work every day, I use the Internet to provide the answers to problems I’m having. Isn’t it kind of foolish to think that people in much more dire circumstances wouldn’t be able to do the very same thing? We don’t have enough doctors to send one to every single village in the world. Imagine if people in those villages could go online and at least ask qualified medical professionals questions about the medical problems they face. That’s better than nothing, isn’t it? ...

There. I said it. Slashdot is worthless. OK, I’ll admit that the headlines are useful, but the comments certainly are not. The sad thing about Slashdot is that there are still people posting useful and interesting comments, and they’re utterly and completely lost among the utter crap that floods the site. Generally I make do by simply ignoring the comments section on Slashdot entirely, but after reading the comments on the Jhai PC yesterday, I realized that the comments section is not just worthless but actually a malign force. The thing that amazed me most was that almost all of the comments on the Jhai PC were critical. The thing that amazed me least was that most of the critical comments were obviously written by people who didn’t even bother to click through on the link, and were criticizing things that weren’t even true. The criticism generally centered on the fact that instead of giving PCs to the Laotians, the Jhai PC folks should be working on giving them food, or schools, or some other basic staple of life. First of all, never mind the fact that the commentors are simply rock throwers who most likely aren’t doing crap for people in Laos or any other country. Rather than trying to make a difference in anyone else’s life, they sit on their asses all day carping on Slashdot about things other people are doing. Even if the Jhai PC is not the most brilliant idea in the world, it’s something, which beats the hell out of nothing. If you don’t admire the project or aren’t interested, then don’t donate any money. It really is that amazingly simple. The Jhai PC folks aren’t asking to raise your taxes, or asking for a government grant, or saying that their idea is the end all and be all of anything. The proposition here is to provide pedal-powered PCs that might provide some benefit to some people in Laos. It’s an experiment, and people are donating their own time and money to make it a reality. What do the losers on Slashdot do? Tear it down. Pathetic. The first time I ever visited Slashdot, it was to read the article arguing that Netscape should release the source code to Navigator. Back then, this was a pretty revolutionary idea, because the movement that everybody refers to as open source was nascent at that time (in spite of its already lengthy history). Certainly Slashdot wasn’t the only place where people were talking about open sourcing Navigator, but the article was a big, big deal at the time. It embodied a particular vision. Now, if you want to read visionary stuff, Slashdot isn’t the place to look. You’re better off hitting technical blogs. The Jhai PC is a visionary idea. Will it improve the quality of life for the people served by the product? Maybe, maybe not. It sure seems to me that enabling people to communicate with friends and relatives across the world for the first time would be a nice benefit for the people in those villages. Allowing them to negotiate business transactions with people a few villages away without walking there to do it might be nice as well. Nicer than having a meal to eat? Probably not, but I doubt that the people who posted on Slashdot have a better sense of the needs of Laotians than the people in the Jhai Foundation working on the project. And the thing about it is, if this proof of concept works, then who knows what it could lead to? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get real first person reporting from areas of war and strife thanks to these computers? The idea of an internet connected PC that can operate almost completely off the grid holds great promise, and someone has to get it out there to see where it leads. This is that project. People who actually did even a modicum of research know that the main part of the Jhai project isn’t computers, it’s coffee exports. The Jhai Foundation is building a nascent export economy by selling coffee grown in Laos. Apparently the coffee is very good. What if the coffee farmers in Laos use the Jhai PC to further improve the scale of their agriculture by communicating amongst themselves and learning more about coffee cultivation via the Web, thus making it possible to raise the standard of living significantly in rural Laos in general? Maybe that’s a crazy idea. But maybe it will work. It takes this project to find out. We know we can help out people in developing nations by providing better food, education, medical care, and other basic staples of existence. Those of us working in IT can help provide these necessities of life by donating our money to causes that provide them. The question projects like this can help to answer, though, is how we can use the intellectual products of our work to make life better for some of the least fortunate people in the world. Maybe this is one of the ways. If not, we can try something else. It depresses me that the readers at Slashdot (at least the ones who bothered to comment) have a hard time seeing that. ...

Peeve Farm has done some work to analyze the packets produced by Internet Explorer when it requests Web pages. I had heard that IE pretty much ignored the TCP/IP spec, but I didn’t realize the depth of the deprativy. Basically, IE and IIS abuse the TCP/IP spec to make things better for their users, at the cost of screwing everyone else. Sounds like Microsoft to me.

Today Declan McCullagh writes about an interesting (if absurd) legal quandry he faces thanks to the DMCA.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an item about the hackers who are creating rugged, bicycle powered PCs that are going to enable remote villages in Laos to connect to the Internet. The man behind the project (called the Jhai PC), Lee Felsenstein, needs $25,000 in donations to deploy the PCs to five villages sooner rather than later. Here’s a description of how the system works from Danny O’Brien’s piece: Felsenstein got to work. He's built the solution. It's a bicycle-powered, ruggedised luggable, with a localised version of Linux and constructed from cheapo commodity parts. It's got an aerial, too: it uses WiFi to connect to a central Internet hub in the market town. Using it, villages that currently have no electricity, telephone or decent roads can monitor the prices of crops, negotiate group purchases with other villages, and make business deals without spending days away from the farm. And with email and built-in VoIP, the families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora - the relatives who left the war-torn zone to earn money in the capital and beyond. Please do yourself and the world a favor and donate. (This story has been Slashdotted. $25,000 is needed – maybe they’ll wind up with $250,000.) ...