Google's action to limit speed trap avoidance used in France declaring Google a monopoly

July 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

NYTimes posts on France's declaration of Google a monopoly.

Google Ruled a Monopoly in France
July 2, 2010, 3:53 AM

From Floyd Norris in his latest High and Low Finance column:

It is fun to run a monopoly. But in the long run, it can be a lot less enjoyable to own one.

Why?

Companies change as they grow larger and more profitable. Bureaucracy and success slow innovation. Will this new product hurt an old one? If so, should we delay, or price it very high? Old monopolists find themselves outrun by newer companies with no stake in the old ways.

What did Google do?

In a preliminary ruling, the Authorité de la Concurrence said that Google's Adwords system, which prompts ads to appear alongside search results, lacked transparency and "resulted in discriminatory treatment."

The ruling followed a complaint by Navx, a French company that provides data on the location of road traffic speed cameras and petrol prices, as well as other services and content for GPS devices. Navx said its ads were removed without warning from AdWords in 2009, and accused Google of anti-competitive practices.

Google said the reason for the disappearance of the Navx ads was a change of policy in 2008, when it decided no longer to promote services helping people to avoid speed cameras and fines.

The issue being debated is whether Google has the rights to limit a French companies business model.

"The competition authority is saying that Google has a dominant position," said Ron Soffer, Navx's lawyer. "When you have that position you can't just do what you want."

Google is confident it is in the right.

A final decision is expected in September, and a Google spokesman said the company remained "confident of a positive outcome."

But this is politics and gov'ts around the the world are looking for ways to regulate Google.

IBM was one of the first high tech companies to have monopoly problems.

However, IBM's dominant market share in the mid-1960s led to antitrust inquiries by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on January 17, 1969. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business. The case dragged out for 13 years, turning into a resource-sapping war of attrition. In 1982, the Justice Department finally concluded that the case was “without merit” and dropped it, But having to operate under the pall of antitrust litigation significantly impacted IBM's business decisions and operations during all of the 1970s and a good portion of the 1980s.

Microsoft monopoly history is well known.

Google is next.

Employers have problem finding skilled workers

July 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Finding data center staff is one of the top jobs of data center executives and part of the reason they are out at the data center conferences. NYTimes has an article about the skill worker mismatch in manufacturing.

Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Students at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland are training for manufacturing jobs. More Photos »

By MOTOKO RICH

BEDFORD, Ohio — Factory owners have been adding jobs slowly but steadily since the beginning of the year, giving a lift to the fragile economic recovery. And because they laid off so many workers — more than two million since the end of 2007 — manufacturers now have a vast pool of people to choose from.

Yet some of these employers complain that they cannot fill their openings.

The job shortage is for the type of workers in data centers.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

Makers of innovative products like advanced medical devices and wind turbines are among those growing quickly and looking to hire, and they too need higher skills.

Given the labor shortage in data centers, I am curious how many people are coming from other industries.

Employers say they are looking for aptitude as much as specific skills. “We are trying to find people with the right mindset and intelligence,” said Mr. Murphy.

Ben Venue has recruited about half its new factory hires from outside the pool of former manufacturing workers. Zachary Flyer, a 32-year-old Army veteran, had been laid off from a law firm filing room when he applied at the drug maker last summer.

He spent four months this year learning how to operate a 400-square-foot freeze dryer that helps preserve vials of medicine. Monitoring vacuum pressure and temperatures on a color-coded computer screen with flashing numbers, Mr. Flyer said last month that he preferred his new work to the law firm, where he had spent seven years.

The vast majority of you outsource your data center maintenance and operations.

How do you manage your Service Level Agreements (SLA) for your data center maintenance?

Part 1 - Italy Trip 2010, going with the flow

July 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Many of my friends and coworkers want to know how my vacation was. Logistics were great, Food and Wine were awesome. Had great time to reflect and think.

It took us 24 hours to get from our home in Seattle to our hotel in Rome. So, it was a trek. We used mileage points, so our choices weren't ideal and we ended up flying SEA - SFO - LHR - FCO. There were some flight delays, but our layovers were long enough that it didn't affect the overall time. Slowing down, going with the flow is something I've learned with travel

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao-Tzu

No matter how much structure we create in our lives, no matter how many good habits we build, there will always be things that we cannot control — and if we let them, these things can be a huge source of anger, frustration and stress.

The simple solution: learn to go with the flow.

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.”- Thich Nhat Hanh

Air travel can be extremely frustrating if you don't go with the flow.

My trip to Italy was a 50th Bday present and we went to the city of Montefollonico where we attended a cooking/travel destination www.tuscanwomencook.com

Montefollonico is the orange pin marker between Florence and Rome.

Here is town on Bing maps.

Montefollonico is a town of 600 off the the beaten path. The town has escaped the notoriety of towns like Cortona where the author for "Under the Tuscan Sun" lived.

6 days of living at a small country town pace, a 15 room Hotel La Chiusa, a daily routine of 2 hours of cooking, 2 hour lunches, 2 hour of site seeing, then a 3 hour dinner, and less than 15 minutes a day of wifi (thanks to thick stone walls you need to be next to the antenna), it was a nice break.

I had some great business discussions with Bill Sutherland, the owner of Tuscan Women Cook as well. Our discussions fit well to ask why you are doing what you are. Bill picked up from Texas selling his commercial real estate business to live in Tuscany and run a cooking business.

Note all you iPhone users, I did have my iPhone, but I never connected it to the cellphone network. Why?

International data roaming can get expensive quickly.

For example, opening an email with a 5 megapixel picture in it, or downloading a 3-minute video on YouTube, each takes about 2 MB of data. The cost would be almost $40, based on pay-per-use international data rates of $0.0195/KB.

What can you do to minimize your international data charges?

Turn Data Roaming "OFF": By default, the setting for international data roaming will be in the "OFF" position.
To turn data roaming "ON/OFF", tap on Settings>General>Network>Data Roaming

– Turning "OFF" data roaming blocks email, browsing, visual voicemail and downloads, but it will not block text or picture/video messages.

– When abroad, international roaming rates apply when you send text or picture/video messages.

– To access audible voicemail when data roaming is “OFF”, tap on Phone>Voicemail. International roaming voice rates apply.

Utilize Wi-Fi instead of 3G/GPRS/EDGE: Wi-Fi is available in many international airports, hotels and restaurants to browse the Web or check email.

There were plenty of people on the trip who had their phones on and were checking e-mail. We'll see if they are ready for the AT&T bill. Getting a bill of over $1000 is not unheard of.

We used Skype on a PC connected to wifi worked great to talk to our kids. And they had a blast calling from their iPod Touch with a headset. I would use gmail's SMS feature to send a text to our babysitters and they would tell the kids Dad was online and they could call.

I did figure out a bunch of things related to data centers when I was on trip, but here is a little background before I start down the path of things figured out. Just because I was disconnected, relaxing, eating and drinking, doesn't mean my brain stopped thinking. :-)

Some GreenM3 Statistics from my 12 day blogging break

June 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

Taking a 12 day break I wanted to get a an idea what happens to GreenM3's blog traffic.

Here is feeds and readership of posts. The blue line is the # of posts being read.

This was expected as I wasn't writing, so reading should trail off.

But, a lot of traffic comes from search engines like Google. Here is TypePad's dashboard traffic. The last week and a half drop in traffic doesn't jump out.

And Google Analytics provides more numbers.

Overall, it was I expected the RSS readerships monitored by Feedburner dropped significantly as i wasn't posting, but Google Search continued to drive traffic.

iPhone 4 Antenna problems, world of analog in a digital space

June 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

I last wrote a blog post on June 17, 2010, and I have tons of ideas to discuss, but sometimes it is easier to get back into writing by starting on an esoteric subject.

iPhone 4 antenna problems.

Here is a post on Apple hiring 3 antenna engineers.

Three Apple job postings for iPhone / iPad antenna engineers to "Define and implement antenna system architecture to optimize the radiation performance for wireless portable devices." All three were posted on June 23rd, the same day that we started seeing widespread reporting of the left-handed reception issues. Coincidence?

and media is starting to cover Apple's discussion of known iPhone Antenna problems.

Leaked Docs Show Apple Knows About iPhone 4’s Flaws [REPORT]

According to documents leaked to Boy Genius Report today, AppleCare representatives are being given a strong company line to deliver to unhappy iPhone 4 owners who complain about reception issues.

Employees are told to say that the device’s reception performance “is the best we have ever shipped” and that itscritical antenna flaws are “a fact of life in the wireless world.” They are told not to perform service on iPhones with these problems and instead to give customers a PR-driven recitative instead.

In a nutshell, Apple knows the phone has problems but will insist that users are simply “holding it wrong.”

How can this happen?

Simple. Being an engineer at Apple working on analog technologies is not sexy.

When I worked at Apple (1985 - 1992), part of time I worked with a team where analog was a big part of the job - Macintosh II and Mac Portable - Power supplies and CRT Monitors. Some of these people had worked on the Apple II, original Mac and Lisa, and analog technologies were known as a must have skill to support the processing of bits. Thinking about signal waveforms, shielding, testing, trade-offs, and FCC Part 15 class B and A certification was part of every product development.

In a world of digital, few think of analog engineers. It is part of the communication problems between IT and the data center. Data Center people have analog experts. IT people can't see digital to analog issues.

But, there are a bunch of Apple people now learning about analog and antenna issues.

Can Apple make analog sexy? No, but they've helped increase the visibility that analog engineers are a critical part of a digital system.