Hugelkultur

Hugelkultur is building raised beds with a core of wooden logs or branches; the logs rot down over several years, both providing nutrients and creating airspace in the beds, such that the soil needs neither fertilising nor tilling. As the wood rots it also becomes spongy, and creates a slow-release reserve of water at the heart of the bed.

References: hugelkultur: the ultimate raised garden beds, The Art and Science of Making a Hugelkultur Bed.

Abe visits Yasukuni

And so another Japanese premier visits Yasukuni and, as predicatable as rollers breaking on a beach, the sound of infuriated Chinese and Koreans denouncing it as unacceptable and the Chinese in particular, to emphasise their commitment to a peaceful world, threatening unspecified repercussions.

Two good comments on ZeroHedge. One simply points out that China complains mightily when anyone else interferes in their domestic affairs. The other — well, it's worth quoting in full:

The Chinese leadership failed to mention that the Japanese killed 6-10 million Chinese, yet under Mao the Chinese managed to kill 60-90 million of their own citizens. Interestingly it is the revolutionaries families of the Mao era that are getting filthy rich while most are still suffering.

Hanne Nabintu Herland

Reading a somewhat sensationalist article in The Times of Israel, I come across the name of Hanne Nabintu Herland, who at first reads like she might be simply the usual leftist European-hater, judging from the (admiring) remarks of the author (though in truth, the attitude of Norwegian officials towards Israel, as I've heard it expressed on and off in the news, has often seemed to me to be shall we say rather unfortunate), so I go to her entry in Wikipedia.

A rather different picture is revealed, with surprisingly common-sense positions on a number of topics, including the unintended consequences of creating a welfare culture, the presumably (though one can never be too sure) unintended consequences of feminism, and the poisonous, institutionalised white-hatred of the Norwegian elites (her position on and the latter must be especially painful for those on the receiving end, since she was born and brought up in Africa).

So a good report card overall, but I'm blown away when I read (in the context of her criticism of Norwegian antisemitism, as referred to by the original Times of Israel article) her succinct summary of something that I've believed for a long time, but only ever expressed to instant derision from those hearing it (i.e. my sadly plonk-socialist friends):

Instead of supporting the only real democracy in the Middle East, namely Israel, we blackmail the Israelis in a manner as though we were still in 1939 at the time the socialist Hitler «sieg heil» was shouted in Norway. For the Nazis were Left Wing, and came out of Germany’s Socialist Labour Party, they were not right-wing. The individuals in the Norwegian politically powerful positions that have pushed for these solely negative attitudes for so many years, are responsible for creating a politically-correct hatred towards Israel that has made Norway the most anti-Semitic country in the West.

Yes! She's spotted that the Nazis were left-wing! I don't know why that seems like such an achievement (after all, the clue is in the name!), but whenever I point that out to people the usual look is one of incredulity. To me, it's one of the most amazing triumphs of the left that it has succeeded in painting Nazis as being on the right, when they were clearly a socialist organisation and their methods were simply another version of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Methods that, incidentally, the left continues to employ to this day (Saul Alinsky, anyone?).

Wind power generation mostly useless!

http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2012/02/epn2012432p22.pdf

There's correlation over an area including Denmark, Germany and Great Britain: when it's windy in one of these places it tends to be windy in the others too. The takeaway is that the wind generation plant has to be supplemented by backup generation, and that that backup generation could quite happily do the whole job without the windmills. In other words, it's an expensive farce.

The future comes to town

One of the stocks-in-trade of sci-fi is a sky full of machines, hovering, whirring, darting and generally busying around, taking off and landing and shooting away in all directions. From The Jetsons to Star Wars, you can't do a prosperous sci-fi future without it.

Now it looks as though that future may nearly be here, with the news that Amazon is testing octocopters for delivery purposes. It sounds incredible, I know, and maybe it's just a publicity stunt (current AI probably isn't up to it — will they have operators flying them by joystick over the internet?) but at least it means that people are thinking about it, and that means it may be about to happen.

HTML 5 and namespaces

The decision not to include support for namespaces in HTML 5 can only be described as a disaster, especially in the light of the forthcoming Web Components technology. How are we supposed to distinguish novel tag elements created in different libraries? It's going to be vendor prefixes all over again, a real trip back to the stone age.

A nice Javascript idiom

At least, I think it's cute — type-purists would probably scream in horror. To my mind, it's illustrative in a very small way of the recent explosion in understanding of and familiarity with Javascript's amazing flexibility; it's gone from being despised s a mere web page scripting language to being recognised as a powerful and elegant multi-paradigm language with functional and metaprogramming elements in very short order.

Anyhoo, this is how to write a single function that not only acts as both a member getter and setter, but also allows you to chain setter calls:


radius: function(newRadius) {
if (arguments.length === 0) {
return this.r;
}
this.r = newRadius;
return this;
}


ECB ready to print, Germany ready to scream

An interesting article from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph: ECB ready to print, Germany ready to scream.

I do so love it when one of my predictions is borne out.

Today's depressing error message

Courtesy of Google Charts:

Error: Type mismatch. Value 269.40 does not match type number in column index 1

The data comes from an original Yahoo data feed, converted from CSV through Yahoo's own yahooapis.com to a JSON feed, and so is in a textual format. But that's not supposed to matter with Javascript -- if it looks like a number, it's supposed to act like a number.

Still, worthwhile perhaps trying explicitly converting numerics to numbers before putting them into the data table that backs the chart, just in case. Possibly somewhere in Google's code something is doing a regex on numerics, and possibly my code to extract from Yahoo's convoluted data feed has missed an extra space or something (not likely!).

Ce chien est méchant...

Entitled Leftists are predictably 'outraged' that the Church has dared to canonise the people whom they themselves were responsible for killing:

Spanish Civil War 'martyrs' beatified

Spanish Civil War 'martyrs' beatified, angering Franco victims

Particularly sickening is the scare-quoting around 'martyrs' at these links.

Apple's 64-bit transition for phones gives new opportunties to Google, MIPS

Apple's 64-bit spec uplift has been quickly picked up by Samsung,
who may have started a race to catch up; 64-bit could become the
next must-have for the mobile phone and tablet markets.

If so, Google stands to profit from a second chance to assert control
over the Android market. Of course, since Android apps run on the
Dalvik virtual machine, there's no need for them to become
64-bit, even if the base Android operating system moves to 64 bits
itself (although Google could always revise the VM specs to do that
if they wanted to, though it's probably overkill for individual apps).

However the move to a 64-bit OS below the GUI application layer gives them
the opportunity, over time, to dump support for the 32-bit version, variants
of which have been forked by Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Alibaba. Google
could simultaneously do a bit of re-architecting, transferring functionality
to the cloud, and introducing branding and copyright restrictions that
effectively negate the open-source licensing of the code corpus itself
(I think they would leave the licensing alone, apart from at most minor
tweaks, as they know they would face a firestorm of criticism from Geekdom
if they didn't).

This would have the satisfying effect of leaving such parasitical companies
to either develop and support their forked operating system on their own (thus
increasing their costs by a small but nevertheless not insignificant amount),
or to come back to the fold of the main distribution and having to cut a deal.

It would also raise the possibility of native code extensions to existing
apps perhaps not working on a 64-bit Android platform, and that must be a
plus for MIPS, the underdog Android processor. If Google attempt to go down
the pNaCl route to solving this one, rather than requiring re-compilation,
then MIPS could see a current barrier to utilisation simply evaporate away.

Bullish for Google and Imagination Technologies then.

Russia detains Greenpeace 'activists', considers piracy charges

An interesting article on the BBC website, Russia accuses Greenpeace crew of 'piracy' in Arctic. The article seems to be more careful than usual, employing neutral-sounding language and mostly just reciting the facts — though this is probably only because sympathetic leftists will already be outraged that the Greenpeace thugs were hindered at all, given the supine response that is usual when they target western or Japanese operations.

It seems that the Russians are going to charge the activists with piracy. Hopefully they will also consider declaring Greenpeace a terrorist organisation and penalizing companies that deal with them (e.g. banks) and individuals that donate to them (e.g. swivel-eyed leftists).

My unfortunate experience with Amazon Marketplace

On 17th July 2013 I bought a 16Gb black iPad 4, via Amazon, from Selling Zone. It was to be a gift for my housebound Aunt and my Uncle, and I bought with confidence having previously bought another one through Amazon (though from a different seller), this time for a cousin of mine. Besides, I was covered by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee: what could possibly go wrong?

At 17:03 that day I received an auto-confirmation email from Amazon, re. my Amazon Marketplace order with Selling Zone Ltd. The only thing that appeared a little odd was that the estimated delivery date (I had chosen Standard Delivery) was a long way away: per the email, from Monday July 29th 2013 up until Tuesday August 6th 2013. I thought nothing of it, but in fact it turned out to be key to what transpired.

At 12:04 on 22nd July I got an email from auto-shipping@amazon.co.uk stating that the order had now been dispatched from Selling Zone. I noted with some dissatisfaction that the estimated delivery date was now Tuesday August 6th 2013, right at the far end of the previous estimate. It seemed even more odd that the delivery date was a full 15 days in the future, given that it had now been dispatched, but I simply berated myself for being so cheap as to choose Standard Delivery, and decided to grin and bear it and learn from my mistake in the future. Unfortunately there was no tracking information associated with the delivery.

Over the next three weeks there followed a long series of phone calls between me and my Aunt. Had the iPad arrived? No, the iPad had not arrived. The only thing she had had in the post that was not a simple letter was a cheap exercise watch, which had arrived on the 18th or 19th; there had been no documentation or covering note to say what it was for or who it was from. We decided that it must be some kind of marketing gimmick and had a little laugh about it -- who would be so daft as to send a cardio watch to two pensioners? We thought no more about it, and it got tucked away in a drawer, but that little package would also prove to be key in what followed.

On the 8th August, two days after the end of the estimated delivery period, I contacted Selling Zone Ltd through Amazon’s web interface, to tell them what had happened. I have received no reply from them to date.

I had been getting more and more worried with every day that passed. Consulting the terms of Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee, I learned that I would have to wait for a full week *after* the end of the original estimated delivery period before I could file a claim. So the earliest date that I could file a claim was the 13th of August, but in the event it was not until two days after that, the 15th, that I claimed, as I had to go to hospital on the 14th to be assessed for heart surgery.

On the 4th September the A-to-z Guarantee claim was denied, with this covering note:

“The seller provided us with ROYAL MAIL tracking XXXXXXXXXXXXX that shows a delivery with signature acceptance. Amazon.co.uk is not able to resolve shipping problems after delivery. We advise you to contact ROYAL MAIL as well as your local authorities if necessary in order to pursue this matter further.”

I went straight to the Royal Mail delivery tracking site at http://www.royalmail.com/track-trace and entered my tracking reference and to my surprise found out that:

“Your item with reference XXXXXXXXXXXXX was delivered from our WARRINGTON Delivery Office on 19/07/13 .”

19th July… THREE DAYS BEFORE I got the email from Amazon to say that the iPad had been dispatched. TEN DAYS BEFORE the start of the estimated delivery period and a full 18 DAYS BEFORE its end! What on earth was going on? We knew that we hadn’t received an iPad. Fully convinced that something was very wrong, we turned our suspicions the Post Office, and started on a round of frustrating and ultimately unrewarding phone calls to them.

In retrospect, the requirement in the Z-to-z Guarantee that we wait a week after the end of the estimated delivery date before we could file a claim proved to be the worst advice possible, because by the time that Amazon had come back to us with the verdict that they were going to wash their hands of the whole affair, the Post Office, whom we contacted next, told us that it was too late to find out what had happened because they didn’t keep records that long.

All that could be done, apparently, was for the *seller* to submit a claim to the Post Office for non-delivery. That claim would be assessed and … something. With heavy heart I once more got onto amazon.co.uk and used the web interface to contact Selling Zone, telling them what they needed to do. As you may be able to guess, I have to date heard nothing from them in response.

Today I got a phone call from my Aunt. My Uncle had been doing a bit of tidying, and had come across the package containing the exercise watch that had appeared in the post on the 19th of July. The merest glimmer of a suspicion popped into my Aunt’s head out of the blue, and she said to him, “Could you just check the delivery tracking reference against the one for the iPad?” The numbers were the same.

I’m sure this has been just an innocent error on the seller’s part. It’s probably just coincidence that everything -- the original delivery estimate, the dispatch note, Amazon’s guarantee requirements -- everything led us to wait and wait and wait before we could get the machinery into motion. Meanwhile that little package mouldered away in a drawer, forgotten, and it was only chance that alerted us to what had happened. I wonder if it has happened to anyone else?


UPDATE
I forgot about this one, but it rather takes the biscuit.

On the 4th September my Aunt received the following communication from Amazon:

"Hello [name], are you looking for something in our Tablets store? If so, you might be interested in these items."

There followed adverts and links for a bunch of iPads from various different sellers on Amazon Marketplace. It seems Amazon's automated systems had noted that hers was the delivery address on my iPad order, had matched this to her own Amazon account address, and concluded that she was ripe for a bit of advertising. Needless to say, she was speechless [actually that's the direct opposite of the truth, as her subsequent phone call to me proved beyond doubt; but I bet she *had* been speechless for a few seconds at least].

In asking for Congress' approval, is Obama actually backing down?

Having seen David Cameron brought to heel by the UK parliament, has the incalculably Machiavellian "big-O" spotted a way to avoid the consequences of his own rhetoric? Until today, Obama was clear that he needed the authorisation neither of the United Nations (which he wasn't going to get) nor even of the U.S. Congress; now he's voluntarily decided to ask Congress for permission.

If the left suddenly drops its clamour for retribution (the right doesn't seem to be all that keen in the first place) during the debate, we'll know it was a put-up job.

Who wants to intervene in Syria?

I heard the oddest thing on the news the other day. I assume it was the BBC, just because of the utter wrongness of it, but I suppose it might have been Sky News also.

Someone was being interviewed, and the interviewer did the usual leftist thing of casually castigating their enemies, referring to right-wing bloggers who were baying for an intervention in Syria. And that's what's odd: as far as I can see, it's the *left* who are all for intervention in Syria; the right seems to have no appetite at all for such adventurism.

Now I understand...

Now I understand why Skylon is such a clever idea. From the comments on this slashdot posting about SpaceX's progress in returning a first stage booster to its landing pad under powered flight, I learned that most of the fuel a rocket uses is to get itself moving sideways not upwards (a posting on xkcd, Orbital Speed, makes the situation crystal clear).

If you think about it then, Skylon can spend a lot longer inside the atmosphere, breathing in its oxygen and hydrogen propellant mixture and gaining speed, than if it was simply going straight up, although of course there will become a point (presumably rather less than orbital velocity?) where friction will negate any further gains from staying in-atmosphere.

Judging from Elon Musk's comments on the [lack of] competitiveness of Ariane, ESA might well be advised to spend all its lifter budget on subsidising Reaction Engines instead. :-)

Putting all your eggs in one basket...

... is exactly what 99% of all birds do; and birds that don't, like of course magpies, end up diversifying by putting their eggs in other birds' single, "actively managed" baskets.

[OK, "99%" was a rhetorical device, but some large percentage.]

Perhaps putting all your eggs in one basket is in fact the strategy that works best, as long as you look after that basket?

Is the Economic Crisis an Indictment of Capitalism?

Every time there's a bit of turmoil in the markets, someone at the BBC trots out that question. I veer between being amused that anyone could be so stupid, and annoyed that they could be so lazy. Then again, the PC mindset at the Beeb requires that anyone who works there be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, so it's no wonder that their poor dear little brains are pickled in a marinade of socialist group-think.

As luck would have it, Ludwig von Mises considered that very question on behalf of the worriers of his day [short answer: no] :-

It is almost universally asserted that the severe economic crisis under which the world presently is suffering has provided proof of the impossibility of retaining the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is thought, has failed; and its place must be taken by a better system, which clearly can be none other than socialism.

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested. But it is another question whether the system that has failed was the capitalist system or whether, in fact, it is not anticapitalist policy--interventionism, and national and municipal socialism--that is to blame for the catastrophe.

Hat tip to Shawn R at the Foundations of Economics blog, who concludes:

I was struck by how much of what Mises said about the response of many to the Great Depression applies closely to our current situation. Just like Mises, we must never tire of explaining the fallacies in the thinking of those who think the Great Recession is a clear case of the failure of capitalism. In fact, it is a quintessential example of the failures of interventionism to bring about anything other than economic destruction and relative impoverishment.

Cafe Ferret

Having seen the success of Cafe Luwak -- coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of civets, where the digestive enzymes have removed the bitterness and, reputedly, made it taste like caramel coffee -- I am in search of a cheaper and, well, more British alternative.

Hence, Cafe Ferret. Now the ferret is an obligate carnivore, however I note that the civets who eat the (raw) coffee berries do so because they select the ripest, sweetest ones for their taste and, being unable to actually digest them, pass them through undigested but, of course, enzymatically transformed. Which suggests that civets are obligate carnivores too. Howsoever it may be, I have seen dogs and cats eat greenery when it suits them, so I think that ferrets may be induced to munch on a few berries a day, perhaps three or four, if they are especially deliciously sweet, without harming their little tummies. It's not as if I were planning to force-feed them bags of crisps!

Now, the coffee bushes can be grown in my b ack garden, in a greenhouse if necessary. But where to source the ferrets?...

Android: fragmentation and security - an extraordinary coincidence

We've been reading for years that Android is suffering dreadfully from fragmentation. Barely 2% of phones out there run the latest version of the operating system, while a good 40% and more are more than two major versions old. The problem is that the OS is installed (mostly) by the manufacturers, who then sit back and do nothing, losing interest because they just want to sell new phones, not support old ones, while the telcos may push out a couple of minor revisions, if you are lucky, and then they lost interest too, because they want to sell you a new phone with a new plan.

At the same time, Google faces challenges in maintaining control over the Android platform itself, as other players (Amazon, Alibaba, maybe soon Samsung) are choosing to fork the OS and mould it to their own plans, replacing links to Google's online services with their own.

Now, completely coincidentally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the lack of updates, on the basis that older versions of the operating system have known bugs that are exploitable to gain remote control over consumers' phones; thus the telcos are lacking in their duty of care to the consumer. This, I have to say immediately, is a Really Big Deal, and I guarantee that the telcos will sit up and take notice. Not only do they risk FTC investigations into their business practices, and audits of their security, they have just been put on notice that they may soon be facing class action suits from aggrieved consumers, or at least by the ACLU and others on their behalf. In effect, their operations have just become materially more risky, and that will have to be noted in their statutory filings with the SEC... the consequences just go on, and they are all unpleasant.

My guess is that as the telcos wake up to the magnitude of their exposure here, they will rush todo two things. First, they will absolutely require from the handset manufacturers that they ship the latest version of the OS on new phones. Second, they will address the problem of updates. Here, the most desirable solution would be to make it somebody else's problem: try to enforce a requirement to keep the OS up-to-date on the handset suppliers. This may or may not stick, and certainly is likely to be limited in scope, perhaps to the consumer's contract term (where the phone sold via a contract) - arguably, if the consumer supplies their own phone, updating it is the consumer's problem. If it doesn't stick however, the telcos will have to manage the updates themselves, and the consequence of that will be a rush, nay a stampede, to make sure that the handsets are easily updateable from Google's stock updates. In other words, it will be the kiss of death for supplier's custom skinning of the OS.

The effect on forked versions such as Amazon's Kindle will arguably be less, since those firms are currently bearing the support burden themselves anyway, but at least those suppliers will be on notice that their versions of Android will need to be as secure as Google's. Otherwise they may be exposed to legal risk.

At a single stroke, the ACLU has gone a long way to solving the problems that Google is experiencing from zombie versions, excessive manufacturer skinning and shell replacements, and even, to a degree, forking. What an amazing coincidence!

The Greek seamens' strike

The sheer amount of damage that the Greeks seem to be able and willing to do to themselves continues to stagger me. The latest is a 24-hour strike amongst seamen protesting anti-austerity measures. This is bound to act as a wake-up call to anybody who is considering buying property on a Greek island (if indeed there are any such people left), and should the exercise be repeated for a more extended period, life on Greek islands — a vital part of their tourist industry — will come to a shuddering halt. Remember, most people in Europe have just three days' food in their cupboards.

The point of Facebook Home

I'm thinking that the real point of Facebook Home — the app that replaces the Android shell with a Facebook-specific one, including rolling photos from your Facebook friends' picture albums on its lock screen — is not just to keep people engaging with Facebook, but to up their Facebook time figures even when they are not interacting with it.

After all, if Facebook pages and web-app endpoints are constantly being queried in the background, even when people are phoning, texting or playing games, then Zuckerberg's viewing figures are going to look absolutely wonderful.

Investing - reading the boards

Today is a day for trawling through news, looking at risers and fallers, and reading the boards (the forums) at places like iii, in the hope of throwing up new leads. The latter activity is proving rather depressing: so many boards where a long, gentle decline in the share price is accompanied by posts saying things like "holding for the moment - surely this can't go on!", followed by a single, agonised post saying "What just happened?", as the unfortunate investors are relieved of 99% of their invested capital on one unforgiving day.

So I'm going to think a little longer about Blinkx. Even if the results are going to be as good as expected, the recent, rumour-driven rise in the share price (supposedly google are looking at them, ho-hum) has probably taken most of the value out of that already. And long term, the share price does seem to still be on its declining trajectory.

The same with AZ Electronic Materials. Yes, the recent drop was probably overdone, but the smart money picked it up on Tuesday at about 240p. That said, their conference call was very reassuring: the slowdown in colloidal silicon sales was caused mostly by two of their customers learning how to squirt less of the stuff over their chip wafers while polishing them, and less by competition, and those two customers were only coming down from using *more* than everybody else, so that practice is not going to spread; opto-electronics was good, and they have firm promises of restocking from their customers in the IC business in the second half. That sounds like a potential purchase, but I might wait a few days and think about it a bit more.

Meanwhile, the Real Portfolio is powering ahead. Genel (which I bought on March 5th as a place-holder while I was waiting for GKP to stop falling and clear up its court case) has had a stream of good news since then and has risen 14%. Cairn is up nicely, even Imagination is up again after its recent decline. Finally, Wolfson, the perpetual puppy that I fall for time and again, only to be disappointed, has at last come good in a big way by being appointed a primary partner for Samsung, supplying audio hubs to their Galaxy range. That's good not just for the business itself, which has led to a nice 8% bounce in the share price, but because it will doubtless encourage other phone and tablet manufacturers to look at using them — Samsung being very much the firm to copy nowadays.

Worldwide PC sales tumble

Says a new BBC article, quoting an IDC report [PC sales fell 14% globally in the first three months 2013, the biggest fall ever].

This is further evidence for my belief that 2013 will mark the first of the "crisis years" for Microsoft, when its income will fall substantially relative to Google and Apple, with Intel also starting to feel the chill.

Google Reader

The thing I like most about Google Reader is that it doesn't clutter itself up with useless pictures or fancy styling. After that, the thing I like next most is that it doesn't incorporate useless social information, such as what people I barely know think is interesting, or what they think about the things that I think are interesting. As a result, it is constantly open on my desktop, often with many tabs (I go along the newsfeeds, opening tabs when I find interesting stgories, then I read them one after another in a batch).

Uniformly, I have found that the people who like Google Reader are the high-intelligence, interesting and vocal types. Pity Google was unable to to see that from its usage figures. Yes, Google, there are not very many intelligent people in the world. But they ALL liked Reader, and now you have pissed them off. I hope Microsoft take this opportunity to bring something out to replace it! "Bing Reader," anybody? ("Bing!, and it's read!" — perhaps not.)

Cypriot Banks — a run or a steady walk away?

So Cyprus is introducing capital controls. Predictable, in the wake of depositor losses and threatened losses.

However, in the age of the internet, of much more limited effect than it used to be. Time was, when ordinary people had no option for their banking needs than the banks in their local high street, or at best, in the centre of their city. A bank run meant that people flocked to their bank, took money out, hid it under the mattress and then, when things had settled down, promptly put it back in the same bank. Assuming, of course, that it still functioned.

Now people can transfer money over the internet. At best, they may transfer money to branches of foreign banks operating in Cyprus: that will kill the Cypriot banks without necessarily being catastrophic for their banking system and their balance of payments. At worst, they will send money abroad, as soon as they are allowed to, and in whatever small amounts they are allowed to, using automated payments to make sure they never miss an opportunity.

---

The article quotes a studend, one Thomas, as saying "They've just got rid of all our dreams." I think you're going to have to pay for your own dreams from now on, Thomas.

Incidentally, the article says that although they are now in for a decade of stagnation and falling living standards, at least the Cypriots have avoided the "catastrophe" of an exit from the Eurozone. Catastrophe? For whom? The one thing that the Cypriots don't need right now is to be inside the Eurozone. It will carry on making their goods uncompetitive and encouraging them to spend money they haven't got. You really couldn't make this up. The real exercise in masochism today is not some alleged "austerity" but a pointless, almost religious, dedication to the nonsense of Eurozone membership!

Also, I wouldn't like to be a German gas consumer next winter. Supplies from Russia are going to be, shall we say, unreliable.

The "Dijsselbloem Principle" has to be right

The net effect of the 'Dijsselbloem Principle' will be to make raising debt more expensive for Eurozone banks, which will, over time, limit their ability to take on new risk, and therefore act to shrink their importance relative to the economy as a whole. With European banks being way much less well capitalised than American ones, this is surely the right way to go.

A Cautionary Tale

A poor shepherd, known for his prudent ways, saved every penny he could all his life long. In 1895, near the end of his days and never having married, he hid the money in a box in one of the fields he'd so often wandered while tending his flock. Rumour of his hoard passed into local legend as Old Mister Brown's Folly, and many was the local lad who tried to find it, though none ever did.

Until one day in 2013 when a man from Birmingham parked his car in the local Borough Council's car park nearby, and ran like a lunatic around the fields waving a metal detector. What luck! The detector went off with a beep, and the man dug up a rotten wooden box with a rusty iron handle and hinges. Trembling, the man broke open the box. Inside it were some large, white pieces of paper with strange, curly writing on them!

"Crumbs," he thought, "what's this?"

What it was, was twenty old Five Pound notes, from 1895 or thereabouts. One hundred pounds, at that time a veritable fortune for an 'umble working man.

But the man from Birmingham scowled. He'd heard of Old Mister Brown's Folly, and he'd been expecting a good deal more than this. Why the metal detector alone had cost more than that (he'd bought it specially for the job)! With a truly dreadful imprecation he grabbed the money and dashed the box to pieces on the stony hillside. Then he got into his car and drove dangerously fast to the nearest bank. A hundred pounds was better than nothing, he reasoned, and he could probably sell the metal detector as unused on eBay.

Unfortunately, when he got to the bank, the clerk said, "I'm sorry, Sir," (and he made a kind of pantomime dame voice when he said "Sir," to let the other tellers know that he was going to have a bit of fun with this geezer), "but this is not legal tender. It's quite worthless I'm afraid!" (and here his voice sounded all dramatic for a moment). And then, being curious, and noticing that it was nearly closing time, he added, "Where ever did you get it?"

So the man from Birmingham told him the whole story, to much muttering from the people in the queue behind him, who could see that they were clearly not going to get their money out before the bank closed, but who nevertheless were determined to stay and make pointed and quite audible comments behind his back. Some of them had even heard of the legend of the Folly, and were intrigued that it had at last been found.

As closing time arrived, the bank clerk, who had been keeping his eye on his watch, interjected, "What a shame, Sir, that Old Mister Brown didn't bury the money in the form of gold Sovereigns, which I note from my computer" — and he clicked some keys very quickly on his actually-just-a-terminal — "would now be worth..." and here he stopped, just like the judges on X-Factor, and made them wait a little bit longer, "... three hundred and sixty pounds each! Why, that's thirty-six thousand pounds, Sir! What a Shame".

And all the people in the queue cheered, to think how much money the man had missed out on.

QE: global asset bubbles

A rather complacent article on the BBC website, What is driving the global stock market rally?, illustrates some of the circular thinking common on this subject. The basic thesis is that QE is driving stock markets up, because the QE asset purchases are driving down the return on "safe" government bonds. [Ha! remember when they used to call the short term government bond rate the "risk-free" rate?]

Althought he article goes on to find additional reasons for the stock market rise, it's its consideration of QE that I find most alarming, so I'll just make some notes on it here.

Firstly, the author asks how long QE can go on for:

Will this money supply continue?

Well, maybe not forever, but in the medium term, yes.

The reason it will continue is, appartnly, becuase governments will want it to: the BoE, the Fed and the BoJ all want to stimulate their econimies, and the QE will continue until they are popping. No thought of unintended consequences. Indeed it's difficult to see what's intended and what isn't. The initial impetus behind QE was said to be, when it was being considered, that it would spur banks to lend to firms, thus stimulating the economy. This famously hasn't happened, so I guess we are now supposed to think that the intention is to persuade people to spend by reintroducing a feel-good factor from rising asset prices, by creating bubbles in the stock market and eventually the real estate market too. God help us, we know how the last one ended.

The only thing I can see here is froth. Simultaneous QE in every continent, leading to simultaneous stock market and housing bubbles. When these burst, it will be like nothing we have ever seen: the world's first truly global bubbles, and several of them at the same time, likely accompanied or swiftly followed, by runaway inflation.

Funny washing machine advert

Quite the funniest advert I've seen all year.

Is Microsoft heading for a market share collapse in 2013?

In a previous post I argued that stick PCs ("Android Mini PCs" to give them their full name) could provide effective replacements for many of the functions of the average home desktop PC, and that we might see this becoming a trend in 2013. Then read that tablets have accounted for much of the lassitude in Windows 8 sales in 2012 — instead of replacing their old desktop PC with a new one, people are choosing to buy a new tablet instead. Now I hear that Acer's Chromebook [a notebook running Google's web-oriented Chrome OS], which was only introduced in late 2012, now accounts for nearly ten percent of its U.S. shipments.

Price, it seems, is key: Acer's C7 can be got for 180 to 190 quid, perfectly serviceable tablets for about the same price, and stick PCs for as little as forty or fifty quid. And while their absolute level of performance may be inferior to a desktop PC or an expensive Windows laptop, for the purposes that they are bought for, they will do just fine.

Windows seems to be under attack from all sides, its market growth opportunities — the sales that once would have been indisputably and rightfully its own — snatched away by cheaper alternatives. And all those alternatives are running OSes — Android and Chrome OS — provided, under Open Source licences, by Google.

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Apparently Michael Dell wants to take his eponymous company private. The idea, supposedly, is that Dell will no longer try to compete in the home PC market, nor even in the business desktop market, but will concentrate on the server room, and on consultancy and integration. Apparently Microsoft is interested in investing trwo or three billion dollars out of the twenty two or so billion that would be needed for him to do this. I wonder if Microsoft is also planning a retreat from the consumer market into Fortress Enterprise?

The truth is that there has been enormous growth in consumer computing in the past few years, at least in terms of the number of devices sold. Since those devices tend to be lower power and somewhat lower performance than desktops, spending has not gone up quite so much, buit it's still climbed very respectably of course, just look at Apple. The problem is that none of that money has gone Microsoft's way. Now, inevitably, the power of those replacement devices has grown, and they are serious contenders for complete desktop replacements. Microsoft's once-mighty empire is revealed as but an island in a far larger sea. And the sea level is rising...

The coming Android super-swarm

Stick computers spell doom for Intel, Microsoft and the PC.

In 2013 Android, which has moved steadily from mobile phones to tablets and set top boxes, seems poised to enter a “swarming” phase where dozens of manufacturers will release hundreds of devices, creating new markets and swamping (even destroying) established ones as it does.

To see what I mean, just: search Google for “Android Mini PC” and take a look at a few of the products that are available. These devices, which I'm calling “stick PCs” for short since they all have a USB-stick form factor, mostly run a current or near-current version of Android, but on some of them you can install Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, ported by enthusiasts.

To take one brand as an example, the Rikomagic MK802 series has been used as a home media center, a smart displays for commercial events, for home gaming on the TV, for internet browsing (not just websites, Twitter and Facebook, but also enough oomph for YouTube and Google Docs). Enterprising users hook up USB cameras and run Skype — yes, the whole family sitting comfortably in front of the TV, chatting on camera to relatives on the far side of the world.

Android mini PCs — an evolutionary frenzy

The stick PC market is in an evolutionary frenzy. From its first appearance in mid 2012, the MK802 brand has seen five different generations in six months: MK802, MK802+, MK802 II, MK802 III and now MK802 IIIS. No sooner does a feature such as Bluetooth appears in one product than it spreads to all the others. Single core CPUs (Allwinner A10) have given way to dual core CPUs (Rockchip RK3066), and quad core CPUs are on the very near horizon.

Though often marketed as set top box replacements or home media centres, stick PCs are fully-fledged general-purpose computers, with CPU, GPU, RAM and flash memory. Connectivity usually include a couple of USB ports, and HDMI port. wi-fi and often also Bluetooth.

Bolted to a desktop monitor, stick PCs can be controlled with USB mouse and keyboard; plugged into your TV they can be controlled by infrared or Bluetooth keyboards and mice. Some of the later models can be controlled by apps on your Bluetooth-enabled Android mobile phone, a feature I expect to become universal in the next few months.

A typical spec includes a dual-core Cortex-A9 (an ARM7-class processor), ARM Mali or Imagination PowerVR graphics, a gig of RAM and four or eight gig of flash. You’ll note that these are mobile phone specs — last year’s mobile phone specs to be exact — and there’s no doubt that these devices are sourced at small marginal cost. Of course, since stick PCs are generally not mobile but attached to a TV or monitor and fed from a power lead plugged into a mini-USB port, the limiting factor is heat dissipation, and they could easily manage an A15 or even higher CPU and more powerful GPU.

Stick PCs will kill the established PC market, from the bottom up

Now that the first generation of digital TVs are moving out of the living room and into the bedroom, replaced by ever bigger and better sets, why buy your kids a new desktop PC when they can plug a stick PC into the TV in their room? For the price of a decent spec desktop running Windows 8 you can get a stick PC for every member of the family. And no more losing your files on an old, slow hard disk that has to be regularly backed up: services like Google Drive, Flickr and Google Docs provide pretty much everything the home user needs, only more conveniently.

Those who’ve been around computers for a while will recognise that with the stick PC, Sun’s Network Computer idea has finally arrived on the scene, only a decade or so late. At the time, Sun got the details wrong and was unable to build such a machine for less than the cost of a much more highly specced desktop; today, dozens of Chinese manufacturers have already succeed.

Intel, so far almost completely absent from a mobile phone market ruled by Android on ARM, is now suffering due to recession in the traditional Wintel desktop market and the failure of its Ultrabook platform, eclipsed by ARM-powered tablets. Intel’s latest accounts show net income down 15 per cent year on year.

Indeed Intel seems to have seen the writing on the wall as it has just announced that it is leaving the desktop motherboard market. Its own foray towards this market, the Next Unit of Computing, looks timid and a little clunky in comparison. The best prices I could find for a NUC with no RAM in it was about four times the cost of a typical stick PC.

As for Microsoft, while all stick PCs come with media centre software, Microsoft’s entry in that market, Windows Media Centre, is only available as an add-on to Windows 8 Pro — you can’t even get it for the base-level Windows 8 product. At current upgrade prices, soon to be upped at the end of January, that will cost you £24.99 for W8 Pro, while Media Centre is then free for a limited period. And Microsoft’s entry in the low-power, tablet space? The crippled Windows RT.

People in emerging markets, whose first and so far only computer is an Android handset, may not purchase a traditional Windows or Apple PC at all. When and if they do need something more work oriented, they may seek the familiarity of the Android interface on a cheap stick PC, keeping the cost of the base unit right down and repurposing an existing TV. Ironically, Windows 8 with its new mobile-style interface legitimises the Android UI for desk work — surely not what Microsoft intended.

The implcations for Google itself are more nuanced. The writing may be on the wall for Google TV, as that market stands to be completely gobbled up by stick PCs. However Google can take comfort from the fact that every single one of the latest batch of stick PCs seems to incorporate access to the Google Play store — hinting that Google Play may be an invaluable asset for whipping into line the likes of Samsung and the no-name Chinese phone manufacturers who strip out links to other Google web properties and replace them with Alibaba.

Opportunities for others

Ironically, such turmoil could give an opening to the savvy and fleet of foot. Perhaps Imagination Technologies (LON:IMG) could persuade someone to produce a stick with an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC (dual core MIPS CPU plus PowerVR Series5 GPU) instead of the currently-favoured RK3066.

There might also, finally, be opportunities for some of the also-ran Linux-based OSes like Tizen (backed by Intel and Samsung) or Sailfish (all that remains of Nokia’s Meego effort), or Canonical with Unity on Ubuntu. Canonical, who are pitching at mobile phone makers, have had the idea that you will be able to plug your phone into a keyboard/monitor/mouse setup and use it as the heart of a desktop system, with installed software receiving notification that it’s now running on a larger screen, and changing its layour accordingly. You can see that such a system might be even more suited to stick PCs plugged into TVs than is Android.