Monthly Archives: September 2007

Another brick in the wall?

Posted on September 25, 2007 by | 6 Comments

Hearing that poor Dealmaker’s site was blocked by the Great Firewall of China put me in mind of a recent dilemma. Of course, I can see why they blocked The Dealmaker. Like a true Maoist, he points out the weaknesses and contradictions of the capitalist system by using gross caricatures of the capitalists themselves, and of course the Chinese are quite keen to move on from that.

Thing is, I worry I have helped the Chinese to block him, or more precisely, block him better in the future. One of my top holdings is this little Canadian outfit called Sandvine, a fantastic stock.  It’s made me 300% already, and there’s at least another 100% left in it if it all works out and the management doesn’t screw up. It’s in something called Deep Packet Inspection (henceforth DPI), and this does exactly what it says on the tin: peers into the little packets of data that make up traffic on the internet, checks they are kosher (viruses, evil spam bots and hopefully those horrible chain letters can all be discarded, but please can we keep the Nigerian scam emails?), and sends the morally upright ones on their merry way to their final destination. It’s a no-brainer: every Cable and DSL provider in the world is going to want this, it enables new levels of network visibility and control. It’s a proven business model (with initial hardware sale, high-margin software module upgrades later on) in an under-penetrated market growing at 100% a year. It is a stock that cries out “buy me, buy me!”; finding stuff like this is why I do what I do. Of course, I have to own it.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Lens grinding, What Would Spinoza Do?

Horrible Yellow English

Posted on September 23, 2007 by | Comments Off

Tom Shanklin and Rocky Elsom contest a high ball

Apologies for the general blogging hiatus around here. Multiple factors are behind this:

  • Travel! Just got back from a terribly exclusive Alpine spa where I poached myself in mineral-thick thermal waters. Staying in for too long led to a peculiar lassitude I had never experienced before. I stuck the kids in the pool for half an hour before we left (they loved it, a huge enormous bath) and they slept the whole drive back, good as gold. Weekend before last was a work offsite. I have been all over the place. Too much time AFK, and Robert Fisk’s tremendous Great War for Civilization is keeping me from my Spinozan course work.
  • New colleague! we hired this guy to provide us with “analytical bandwidth”. I think he will work out but as he is “ramping” (a word we use a lot in tech investing, I wish we didn’t) he is a bit of a time sink; I get home a bit tireder and later than usual. He annoyed the crap out of me the other day by actually knowing more than me about something — what on earth is a Zoran, or a Schottkey? I had to nod sagely and pretend I knew too. So I told him that “Veeblefitzers” were hot right now and he had to find me a veeblefitzer play. Now I feel really bad, I have nightmares about him asking the Goldmans semi analyst for hot veeblefitzer ideas. I think I will tell him monday that there’s a huge veeblefitzer glut and I’m not interested any more.
  • Lack of inspiration! what is there actually to blog about? The subprime teacup tempest seems over, the tech market is er “ramping”, I am up 6% on my short AAPL long RIMM trade, and with a bit of help from Saint Bernanke, the enlightened optimism of the Felix-Baruch axis has stuck one in the eye of the schadenfreude-intoxicated prophets of gloom who want everyone to be poor (worse, if they were right, I’d be poor). Net net, all is right with my world, which is not a state conducive to stimulating blogging. Outside Fisk which I am 2/3rds through I haven’t read anything interesting in ages.
  • Rugby! Actually, forget all the stuff I wrote just now, while all true it fades into insignificance in relation to the fact the World Cup is on. A few minutes ago the Australians were taking apart the poor Fijians, who got a few good tries in nevertheless. My 4-year-old daughter made the mistake of asking me who the Australians were so I told her — see the title of this post. The word “English” in our Welsh-Greek household is not a term of endearment, by the way. As I told her of the genocide of the Australian aboriginals and their replacement by the criminal classes of C18th England, I had the briefest of qualms about what I was filling her innocent mind with until I remembered that it was all true, and that I wasn’t even exaggerating (I might have left some stuff out). Right now I am watching the terrifying All Blacks suck the marrow out of the Scots, after having treated them to a particularly fearsome version of the Haka. The Scots and myself are doubly confused by some bright spark’s decision to dress both teams in what seems to be the same grey-blue kit. Probably the stench of fear coming from the Scots allows the New Zealanders to know who to tackle.

Anway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. If anyone can think of anything interesting I should write about, post it in the comments.

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Posted in Lens grinding, Uncategorized

I resent my lack of candour

Posted on September 16, 2007 by | Comments Off

Bento, I think this article (via Barry Ritholz) concerns a very Spinozist project. Radical Honesty is the idea that we should simply stop all the pointless little lies that pervade our every day life and which in the end preclude actual communication of real, useful information. We would feel free to say, yes, your arse does look fat in that, or (and in my office this would be relevant), excuse me, but your breath smells like shit so can you please eat a polo mint or talk to me from farther away? In both cases we would be helping the other party either avoid wearing something that does not suit them or alert them to something that other people will have no doubt noticed and which could help them better build functioning personal relationships or even unblock that promotion which their ability might otherwise merit. Continue reading →

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Posted in Philosophising, What Would Spinoza Do?

Baby and Bathwater?

Posted on September 16, 2007 by | Comments Off

An ostensibly interesting attack on the “New Atheists” here, Bento (via Andrew Sullivan, and scroll down a long way, past the Parrot, to get to the good stuff), but from a self-avowed atheist; what do you think?

Me, I am not sure how this differs significantly from the utilitarian defence of organised religion, namely that it provides a bonding agent to society, a sense of morality, which helps us all function together as teams. The writer makes much of the apparent fact that religious people really really do give more to charity, even secular charities, than the secular generally do. To which the New Atheist would of course reply, bollocks, and point out the argument from utility completely ignores the issue of the veracity of the belief itself, whether it is a good thing for everyone to think things which are not in fact true but rather stark staring bonkers, and once you allow that to be a good thing in the first place you let have a slippery slope to belief in all sorts of nasty things, and a population of cowed simpletons.

Of course, our own dear Spinoza — uncomfortably for you perhaps — would be on the side of the author, ie that it is a good thing for the masses to have their opiate, so long as we Men of Reason know better. What am I to think?

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Posted in Philosophising, What Would Spinoza Do?

iShort iPhone

Posted on September 11, 2007 by | 7 Comments

[scoble+at+apple+store.jpg] 

I am sure, despite never having seen an iPhone, that it is a fine piece of kit, Bento. But I do so very strongly dislike Apple as a company. They sell high quality hardware it is true, but so overpriced; you pay a premium to be unable to use 90% of the world’s software without running some other complex program to do so. I hate the cutsie-coo operating system and the self satisfied “pop” when you close a window. I find the advertising unbelievably irritating, with its “Think Different” slogan, which when you think about it is a pean to its lack of market share; if they had managed to sell more Macs than PCs would they be telling us to “Carry on Thinking the Same” to make us buy more Macs? More than that, I pity the ponytailed, smug, pseudo-individualist, and above all gullible Apple fanboys, who all believe they are part of some greater social movement representing god knows what but who are in fact the victims of some corporate succubus which cares not a jot for them except how much more they can milk them. And the fanboy’s anger at the Wintel axis ignores the fact that the only thing which kept the company afloat during the dark times was Microsoft’s charity; that and the need to pretend that Windows was not in fact a monopoly.

No, Apple is the antithesis of what a Spinozist technology company should look like: closed, not open systems; overly pleased with itself and arrogant; and its advertising and brand values appeal to the grossest of the Passions: envy, pride, confusion and fear. In their defence, the flip side of their arrogance is a certain appealing audacity. The company from time to time (but not as often as we think) creates attractive and innovative products. But net net they have to go in the Stupid Cartesian bucket.

Anyway, I submit Apple may well have peaked, and it is all downhill from here. I am worried about the company and the stock, and think it might be time to call er, time on the fanboy stuff at least. Continue reading →

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Posted in Lens grinding, Stupid Cartesians

Pope: Lack of evidence of God is a test

Posted on September 1, 2007 by | Comments Off

Baruch, sometimes the credulous make mocking them rather too easy. You may have read a few weeks ago that God never did get in touch with Mother Theresa, as revealed in her letters to confidants. Now the pope tells us why:

Pope says Mother Teresa felt “God’s silence”

LORETO, Italy (Reuters) – Pope Benedict said on Saturday that even the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta “suffered from the silence of God” despite her immense charity and faith. [...]

It is significant that the Pope mentioned Mother Teresa’s torment about God’s silence as not being unusual because there was some speculation that the letters could hurt the procedure to make her a saint. [...]

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe. (my italics)

That, I posit, is a brilliant variation on the creationists’ explanation for why there are fossils in the ground: So that believers can understand the situation of people who base their beliefs on the evidence around them.

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Posted in Stupid Cartesians