Double Blind

I’m trying to get rid of some old computer equipment. Instead of using Ebay, I’ve been using the Vancouver Craigslist. I had some partial success with getting rid of my Pentium 2 400MHz system for $50 earlier (the guy mainly wanted it for the Asus P2B-D motherboard) and I thought Craigslist was the greatest thing.

So I’m now trying to get rid of a working Sony laptop. It’s a mobile Pentium 2 300MHz without batteries, but with a large 14.1″ display and everything about it still works fine. I usually do some price research on Ebay before selling old stuff and determined that CAD$75 is a slightly below fair value for the notebook considering that I saw some things go for about US$80 (plus shipping) when I listed the notebook. I actually got four responses a couple weeks ago (one infamous “I will take it ASAP, call my cell at 604-xxx-xxxx and I can take it tonight”), but they all turned into flakes. I also got a couple “nigerian” type scams of people on travel wanting to buy the laptop for their sons/daughters/etc., but of course I just trashed those emails.

The application for these old systems is that you can load up Office 97 and take the thing with you on travel without having to worry about it getting stolen. It still loads up as quickly as a modern machine with Windows XP and faster than Windows Vista! You can also use a PCMCIA wireless card and get internet connectivity through this route or finding an old ethernet PCMCIA extension isn’t too difficult either. If you got a RAM upgrade you can also load Windows XP on the thing.

The point here is that I’ve had the thing on the market for a couple weeks and don’t really want to waste my time anymore – if anybody reading this weblog wants it for $50, its yours. I’ll even throw in an old Microsoft Mouse and some other minor accessories. Contact me if you’re interested.

Update, September 24: The market has spoken by not speaking, so I’ve put this on Craigslist for $50… we’ll see if anybody bites. I could probably get $60 for it or so but I just want to get rid of the thing.

I got 47 out of 60 questions correct (78%) on this relatively difficult civics quiz. It involves knowing a bit about American history, government and political thought, plus international affairs and the market economy.

A typical Harvard, Cornell or Yale student would get around 65% on this quiz.

There should be a Canadianized version of this examination. The reason why this sort of examination is important is that it tells you how much cultural cohesion there is – 250 years ago the ideals of people voting were a rather alien concept and the justification for going to war against Great Britain to form a “better union” gets lost when you don’t remember the history behind these decisions.

Likewise, Canada has its moment of colourful history (albeit not nearly as exciting as American history) that made the country it is today.

I remember there was a time I called USB the “Universal Serial Bust” simply because when it was introduced in 1995, it took about three years before anything was released with it and the software was available to use it. Windows NT 4 (an operating system I used until a year after Windows XP’s release) never had USB support and it took Windows 98 before USB really got adopted. Correspondingly the 1.1 specification was much more robust than the initial 1.0 release and this helped propel USB.

USB 2.0 came out in 2000 which increased the transfer speeds from 12 Mbit/s to 480 Mbit/s and made things such as external hard drives quite usable. It virtually replaced the feature-set of the competing standard, IE1394 (Firewire), although Firewire is slightly faster (800 Mbit/s).

Now a proposed USB 3.0 specification will increase the speed of USB to 4.8 Gbit/s which is amazingly fast. At that speed you can empty the contents of a DVD-R in about 7 seconds. The main bottleneck in a computer is the interface to the hard drive, which is 3.0 Gbit/s for a serial ATA connection. In reality, you won’t be able to get close to this transfer speed due to other constraints on the data bus of the computer system.

The only major weakness of USB is that the cable length is limited to 5 meters. This is still better than the “old school” printer cables (does anybody remember Centronics?) which were limited to 12 feet (3.6 meters).

While ethernet (the fastest standard is 10 gigabit) is still faster than USB, we’re getting to the point where the two are indistinguishable. This brings up some interesting potential applications of the faster speeds (think about real-time display systems by USB).

The USB 3.0 specification will be released in 2008 and one would likely see it implemented in hardware (e.g. consumer laptops) by 2009.

This topic is well known, but I thought this video was perfect at describing why I generally don’t bother reading the comments under Youtube videos. Anything that could be said has been said in this video!

Just a word of warning for those at work: the language is crude so you might wish to lower the volume a bit.

He has comments on the state of the US economy here.

Justin is considerably more negative on the status of the US economy than I am. Although the amount of damage being done in the subprime market is considerable, it will be contained to certain financial institutions. The majors will lick their wounds and move onto the next big thing (which will likely be private equity markets of companies with less than 299 shareholders so they can skirt reporting requirements).

As for currency considerations, although I have been pathetically wrong with my prediction that the US-Canada exchange rate will stabilize at around the 0.85 mark, I don’t think the US dollar will weaken relative to the Canadian dollar for too much longer. Like it or not, but both countries are joined at the hip with Canada needing the US much more for its exports. As a result of this connection, the Canadian dollar will not be making a runaway break from the US dollar.

Finally, inflation should be contained in the short term. As interest rates were dropped to nearly nothing by Greenspan a few years ago, this only created inflation in the housing market. We see the result of that excess being bled today in a liquidation of mortgage liabilities. It should be interesting to see where this liquidity excess will end up, but I will preempt this speculation by just saying it will end up where it always does – in the stock market.

I have been filling out for the past couple years the budget consultation. Despite the fact that I think my voice gets drowned out by the thousands of special interest groups out there, I spend some time to think about it and fill out my thoughts in a futile attempt. The only result seems to be that my name gets added to an appendix of brave people that choose to submit thoughts.

This year the provincial government seems to be obsessing about the environment. The first three (of five) questions were this:

What budget choices would you make to help reduce B.C.’s greenhouse gases by at least 33 percent below current levels by 2020?

The Province currently provides tax incentives to encourage the purchase of hybrid vehicles, the production of wind power and the use of bio-fuel. What tax changes would you make to encourage environmentally responsible choices?

What tax changes would you make to discourage British Columbians from activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions?

They give you a small package to read (which is apparently mailed out to every house in BC), so my first suggestion would be to let interested parties download it instead of wasting enough paper to keep the forest industry afloat.

The government seems very obsessed about meeting the 33% greenhouse gas target. You can see BC’s greenhouse gas trend changes here and also the historical 1990-2004 breakdown by source here and a more specific breakdown of 2004 here.

The low lying fruit is in the “Solid waste disposal on land” category. You can (at moderate expense) cap landfills and capture greenhouse gases (which is mainly methane). Assuming you can capture 100% of that (which is an impossibility) you’re still left with about 16,300 tons left from 2004 levels to eliminate. This isn’t happening without turning the entire gasoline fleet of cars into emissionless vehicles.

So my honest answers (which I didn’t submit) would be to make the province into a hell-hole, forcing enough people to leave the province through discouraging and punitive environmental policies. When you have about a million people leaving the province, you’ll get your desired reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, I’m not sarcastic about this point – even if you give everybody a hybrid vehicle to drive in replacement of their own vehicle, you’re still only eliminating about 3400 tons of CO2. You can’t get rid of or reduce the heavy diesel category (these are the big-rig trucks) since there isn’t enough rail infrastructure to take bulk cargo inside every nook and cranny of the lower mainland.

The one obvious “paradigm shift” that nobody really is considering is commuting – if you encouraged telecommuting, you would prevent a lot of vehicle emissions. It would be very interesting to know what percentage of vehicle mileage is used strictly for work commuting purposes.

The last ripe target for greenhouse gas emissions is to get rid of the oil and gas industry – assuming you managed to get rid of the entire industry, that means emissions go down a whopping 12000 tons.

So if the government was truly serious about this, they’d start levying punitive taxes and other such measures that would make the previous NDP administration look like a pro-business government.

If you lived anywhere in the Peace River area you’d be dead set against this and would start petitioning to secede from British Columbia and join Alberta. Culturally speaking, the Peace River area is closer to Alberta. As the population centre of the province lies mainly in a small box in the southwestern corner of the province, the people in that sector wouldn’t feel it nearly as much as the resource industries of the north. So if the government was serious about getting greenhouse emissions down, they will have one decision to make – completely gut the oil and gas industry. The cost to the province will be $1.3 billion a year in royalty revenues, a good chunk of personal/corporate income taxes (guess about $400 million), and a lot of credibility. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.

Today was an interesting day in Canadian politics. Three ridings, all in Quebec, had a by-election. The ridings were Outremont, Roberval–Lac-Saint-Jean, and Saint-Hyacinthe–Bagot.

Outremont was widely regarded as a battle between the NDP candidate and the Liberal candidate. Traditionally the riding has been a Liberal stronghold, but today the NDP took the seat with a whopping 47.5% of the vote. There was 37.6% voter turnout which is enough to send a serious message that in a general election that the Liberals would be in for a battle. I remember on Pinnacle that the NDP were the underdog going into the election (they were around +160 which is a 38% chance to win) and so the market was wrong. The Bloc got crushed, but they didn’t seriously campaign in the riding.

Roberval–Lac-Saint-Jean was predicted to be won by the Conservatives and that they did. No surprise here. It is notable, however, that the Conservatives managed to increase their vote count by 20%, with the winning candidate receiving 59% of the vote on over 40% voter turnout.

Finally, in Saint-Hyacinthe–Bagot, the Bloc Quebecois kept its seat, albeit with a slimmer margin of victory (about 5% compared to 30% of the general election). Still, the surge in Conservative support has to worry the Bloc.

The clear winners of this by-election were the NDP for winning their first seat in Quebec in eons, and the Conservatives, for being able to drastically increase their popular support in non-Montreal Quebec. The losers were the Bloc and the Liberals.

This will drastically change the next election dynamics. It is clear that the Bloc Quebecois has no chance of retaining its 49 MP’s if an election were called today – they would likely win about 30 seats. The Conservatives would be able to claim most of these seats which would bring them closer to a majority, but they are still nowhere close to getting the magic 155.

My guess for the moment is that the Bloc will support anything coming through the next session of Parliament. They would be stupid to vote anything down. The Liberals and NDP will continue opposing everything since that is their official role, but also that they know the only location in Quebec that they are in contention is Montreal so they have nothing to lose at this point.

A lot of people are considering this election into a leadership confidence vote. If this is the case, Jack Layton received another couple years of life, while Stephane Dion had better start making moves before he gets ousted. Gilles Duceppe is also stuck between a rock and a hard place and I can’t critically figure out how he can get himself out of this situation – the Conservatives have just snookered him into a hole and he can’t dig himself out. There would need to be a new federal government corruption scandal of massive proportions before the separatists could receive a wave of public momentum again.

There are also by-elections due for British Columbia (Vancouver-Quadra), and two seats in Ontario and one seat in Saskatchewan.

It appears this minority government might last even longer than the Spring 2008 budget, which would be unprecedented.

Finally, the Ontario provincial election is going to be a fairly good proxy for the federal scene. I think the Liberals will end up with a slim majority government, but time will ultimately tell with this one. I don’t think John Tory has what it takes to pull out a victory, despite having the most appropriate name for his political party.

Today, the Canada Post website is down and they have interim status messages more or less saying that it will be down for most of the evening until they have restored the site.

I never realized how important their site was until I tried to find a different location to look up a postal code for a Canadian address. There isn’t any. The closest I could find was some place selling a CD with the postal code lookup tables.

This is also a good reason why backup plans should be practised every half year or so to make sure that when a site does go down that you are able to restore the site with short notice. I’m guessing nobody tried to do a blanket restoration of Canada Post’s site until now.

MediaDefender is a company that tries to saturate the torrent space with fake and corrupted media. It hasn’t been too successful, but it tries to make a business and has obvious allies. As you might guess, it has a ton of enemies.

A hacker managed to compromise a good chunk of their email database. The torrent can be easily found over the internet and is about 130 megabytes compressed. I looked through it and realized that just like the AOL search word leak, it was a gold mine of information.

For one thing, I know how much their 14 developers earned, their social security numbers, and their birthdates. While the salary information is not too bad a breach (other than being a curiosity), the social security number leak combined with the birthdate leak is clearly the worst case scenario for these individuals as it will open them up to many forms of identity theft. The US rely on social security numbers much more than us Canadians rely on the social insurance number.

This form of security compromise is an absolute worst case scenario and people that decide to open up their own company in a line of hostility should realize that security is a paramount concern. MediaDefender didn’t pay attention until it was too late.

At a minimum, if you are going to send an email spreadsheet of critical information concerning your employees, encrypt the thing. Anything that is archived by an email server that is remotely accessible is potentially open to compromise and assuming that such information is safe is foolhardy.

I’ve removed my Facebook account. The service had no longer provided much value since it was descending into the Myspace morass which tends to plague these types of services. There are some other reasons why I did it, concerning privacy.