A successful businessman: richness does not automatically bring happiness

Most books written by and about successful businesspeople and business gurus deal with the “How” part of the success equation.

Jacob Burak’s Hebrew language “Do Chimpanzees Dream of Retirement” (© 2007 by Jacob Burak and published by Kinneret, Zmora-Beitan, Dvir – Publishing House Ltd.) starts with a short autobiography, and then courageously dives into the “Why” part of the subject matter.

Jacob Burak is an Israeli businessman, who was one of the founders of the Evergreen Venture Partners, an Israeli venture capital investment house.

After exploring the relationship between richness and happiness, Burak discusses the “result test” and the value of cautious risk taking.

Another section of the book deals with the motivations of successful entrepreneurs. This subject is covered also by the English language article “How would you want to be eulogised?” written by the same author.

The second half of the book deals with the various traps and pitfalls, which cause wise people to make unwise decisions. One of the subjects dealt with is the economic value of trust, about which Burak also lectured in the TechIA Forum (lecture summary in English).

A combined book review and author interview can be found in “How to make money – or at least be happy”.

The refreshing, no-bullshit point of view of Burak’s book reminded me of Freakonomics.

Blogs vs. Newspapers

One important difference among blogs and newspapers (paper or Web sites) is the fact that no one expects bloggers to verify their sources, or to be objective (unless the blog claims otherwise). On the other hand, newspapers are supposed to be authoritative. This means that newspaper journalists should be verify their sources, get a response from people being covered in news items, etc.

Five Unpublicized Anecdotes (in Hebrew) has accounts of five instances, in which journalists and/or newspapers violated ethics or professionalism. The anecdotes can be summarized as follows:

  1. One journalist steals a news item from a colleague, without giving due credit.
  2. A journalist publicized embarrassing personal information about a politician among the politician’s network of friends, rather than publicize it. The information in question was the politician’s very explicit cellphone talk with his mistress.
  3. An embargo agreement between a police investigator and a journalist, not to publicize anything about a certain sensitive investigation before it ends, was not honored by the journalist’s newspaper due to changes in personnel.
  4. A journalist was careful and refused to publicize unconfirmed rumor, and was eventually fired as a result of this refusal.
  5. Another journalist publicized a fabricated news item, which had no basis in fact.

Won’t it be great if bloggers could volunteer to monitor the news items publicized by newspapers, and keep the newspapers and their journalists honest?

Bloggers could catch textual duplications between different newspapers (anecdote 1), and call out newspapers for publicizing false information (anecdotes 4,5).

At present, the only mechanism for keeping newspapers honest is the threat of libel lawsuits. This does not work for keeping out fabricated news items, which damage no one’s reputation. False but non-defamatory news items about people do not lead to libel lawsuits either. People also sometimes let libelous information pass by, knowing that their personal acquaintances know better.

How to implement such a newspapers’ monitoring network?

One approach would be to observe the mechanisms being developed by the Wikipedia for ensuring the correctness of the information in its articles, as well as academic research about trust and reputation networks. Then try to adapt them to set up a network of newspaper monitoring bloggers.

16th Linux Day

Today, 16 years ago, Linus Torvalds released version 0.0.1 of the Linux kernel.

This is an occasion to reminisce how I began to use Linux, and how I subsequently switched to 100% Linux usage at home.

I started using Linux about 13 years ago. For me, the killer application was Brian Marick’s GCT – a C Coverage Tool. At the time I worked as freelancer in the area of medical software testing, and needed a way to assess code coverage of my tests.

After the failure of an attempt to port GCT over to the world of 16-bit computing in MS-DOS, I found out about Linux. I soon found Harvey Stein, who had Linux (the Linux-IL mailing list, whose Patron Saint was Harvey Stein, started operating at about the same time – and this is no coincidence!). Mr. Stein let me come to his office and copy from him about 40 5.25″ diskettes of the Slackware distribution.

I copied the diskettes and installed Linux in an empty partition in my 5MB AT386 PC. Soon afterwards, I got GCT working!

The first Kernel version, which I installed, was 1.0.8. Soon after installation, I upgraded to Kernel version 1.1.13.

The old AT386 PC is still operational, and is bootable into either MS-DOS or Linux (Kernel version 1.2.13).

Additional links:

One day I acquired a new PC, but used MS-Windows 95 on it. I used the old AT386 for E-mail and surfing, and the new PC – for software development. At the time I developed software, rather than testing it. Few upgrades later, I installed RedHat 5.1 on the new PC, and it became dual-boot.

Subsequent years saw me switch to RedHat 7.2, 8.0, and then to Debian. I also had MS-Windows 2000 (in another hard disk).

One day, the PC’s motherboard died and I was forced to upgrade to a new one, with clock frequency beyond 1GHz. The MS-Windows 95 ceased to operate, and MS-Windows 2000 was problematic. Linux booted on the new motherboard without having to make any modifications or installations whatsoever. This was when I abandoned MS-Windows altogether and switched to Linux fulltime.

Over the years, I did not need to rebuild my PC’s Linux hard disk due to malware. I did rebuild it due to switching to new versions of RedHat and then Debian. As a proof, I present the fact that my ICQ number is still 8-digit long.

Warning to drivers in countries which persecute sex customers

If you live in a country like Sweden or USA, in which people who buy sex from prostitutes can be persecuted, then do not be a good samaritan if you see a woman in apparent distress on road:

Good Samaritan Sex Offender
Chicago Man Sues after Prostitution Arrest

A Proven Free Software Business Model

Companies like MySQL, RedHat and Zend (trademarks belong to their owners) make a lot of money from Free Software. This indicates that they have a Free Software business model, which really works. This is interesting, because when people discuss Free Software business models, usually there is a lot of handwaving. There are assertions, which are left unsubstantiated. However, the above companies found a business model, which really works. This business model goes as follows.

  1. If you are hobbyist and make no money from our software, then our software is free for you.
  2. If you make little money from our software, then our software is free for you, too.
  3. If you make a lot of money from our software, then you pay for using our software.

The above model works, when it works, due to the following reasoning.

  1. If you do not make money from our software, then you do not have the money to pay us anyway. If we demand money from you, you just stop using our software and switch to another hobby, in which our software is not needed. We prefer that you use our software, even if we get no money from you, due to the same reason Microsoft tolerated software piracy as a means for conquering a market for their software. We want you to find more uses for our software. We want you to debug it. We want you to contribute improvements to our software. On the other hand, you cannot make more money by having our software optimized for your environment, so you do not need support from us.
  2. If you make little money from using our software, then we would like to have a cut from your profits, as well. However, we cannot justify the costs involved in collecting from you. For this, we need to sign contracts, install licensing infrastructure, enforce licenses, incur badwill, and even support you if our licensing mechanism causes you problems. Therefore we would not collect money from you. However, we win from your using our software due to the same reasons as we would win from people who make no profit from using our software. There is also the chance that one day you will become a big business; or even come to make our software a critical part of your business infrastructure. Then the following applies.
  3. If you make a lot of money from using our software, then you have an interest in having the software work all the time. You want any bugs to be fixed promptly. You want support in optimizing the software. You can afford to pay us a lot of money, because the software makes and saves you much more money when it works and when it works with you in a smooth way. Therefore you would sign a support contract with us. Since big money is on stake, we can afford the transaction costs involved with collecting the money. If your optimizations and customizations are your trade secret, we license our software to you using a proprietary license.

A consequence from the above thinking is that not every software package can take advantage of this business model. For this, the software package must have the following attributes:

  • Be useful for both private individuals, small businesses and big businesses.
  • Be “tinkerable” i.e. facilitate development of enhancements and add-ons by individuals with bright ideas.
  • Be such that optimizations and adaptations to meet special needs would yield significant profits or savings in the right place.
  • Be critical to the functioning of some of the big businesses, which use it.

Typically, such software is dual-licensed, usually under the GPL and a proprietary license.

Blogging About Disabilities

I write in this blog not only about crazy ideas, but also about accessibility and deafness.

Lorelle on WordPress wrote a blog article about people who blog about disabilities. This article repeats the old stuff (known to people with disabilities, but not widely known otherwise) about the percentage of people disabilities in the general population, mentions the relevant legal issues (specific to USA), and links to several relevant and interesting blogs.

The above article also refers the readers to Globe of Blogs – Disabled Blogs for more disabled blog links.

Computerized Elections in Israel

Background Information

The Israeli Ministry of Interior is planning to computerize the process of elections in Israel, using electronic voting machines. They are planning to start by running a pilot in ten settlements during the upcoming Nov. 27, 2007 council elections.
Sources:

This is a Bad Idea

The following reasons are given for the move to computerized elections:

  1. Reduction and even elimination of rigging votes and multiple voting.
  2. Election results availability few minutes after end of elections.
  3. Budgetary savings.
  4. Ability to vote from anywhere without special procedures.

Unfortunately, the first three reasons are either untrue or are insufficient justification for switching to computerized elections.

  1. The worldwide experience with election machines is that they are not secure, not well-designed, violate anonymity of votes, and facilitate rigging of votes even more than paper based ballots.
    Sources:

  2. Election results are not available if the voting machines develop technical problems, as they did in several elections in the world. A more fundamental point is that the integrity of the election process is worth the wait until the next morning. Confronted by the choice between rigged elections with speedy results and clean elections with results available only after 10 hours or so, every sane citizen would choose the second alternative without thinking twice.
  3. Any budgetary savings from using election machines are wiped by bad policies adopted by corrupt politicians, who got elected to office thanks to corrupt elections process. This is one place where one could be penny wise and Pound foolish (or one million wise and ten billion foolish).
  4. The fourth goal of computerized elections can be accomplished by alternative means – for example, by using computers only to verify that a voter did not already vote elsewhere. Paper ballots can still be used for the actual votes.

See also:

It is to be noted that the talkbacks to the news items about the Israeli Ministry of Interior plans demonstrate that Israelis are clueful about the dangers of electronic elections.

What Can be Done About This?

  • Find which voting machines will be used in the pilot and publicize audit results and cracking tips available from other countries where they were already used.
  • Refuse to vote in the voting machines during the pilot.
  • In the pilot, the results from the electronic voting machines will not have official use, so it may not be unlawful to actually crack into them. DISCLAIMER: IANAL. CONSULT WITH YOUR LAWYER BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SUGGESTION.

Abysmal Quality of Breathanalyzers Software

In Israel, if you drive a car and a policeman asks you to submit yourself to test by breathanalyzer to determine whether you are drunk or not, you must submit to test. Otherwise, you will be deemed to have driven under influence.

What if the instrument wrongly determines that you have blood concentration of ethanol above the legal limit?

At least one breathanalyzer used in USA was proven to have criminally unreliable software. For example, “the software takes an airflow measurement at power-up, and presumes this value is the “zero line” or baseline measurement for subsequent calculations. No quality check or reasonableness test is done on this measurement.”

Based upon past experience with car speed measurement radar guns in Israel, I am skeptical whether Israeli courts would accept such information as defense by people wrongly accused of drunk driving.

Software-driven instruments used for medical diagnosis are subjected to stringent quality requirements and strict regulations (see, for example, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Premarket Notification 510(k)) before the manufacturer is allowed to sell the instrument. Currently, no similar legal framework exists for regulating instruments used for law enforcement.

Nude Promotion of Peace

It is now fashionable to promote various worthy causes, like environmental preservation, by posing in the nude. Plans to make a nude photo of both sides in a conflict are under way for the fans of two Scottish football teams, who rioted at 1980 in an Old Firm Game at Hampden*.

So this is the right time to air the outlandish, unrealizable and crazy idea of taking a photo of a group of nude Israelis and Palestinians** – both men and women.

* Background information about the Rangers vs. Celtic conflict:

** Yes, I know about the Arab (including Palestinian) tendency to kill women, who violate “family honor” by “inappropriate sexual behavior”.