The best Greek journalist

Pasxos Mandravelis is a journalist who has a daily column in "Apogevmatini" daily newspaper. He publishes his columns online soon after their publication, but only in Greek (they deal with domestic affairs most of the time anyways). He offers a classical liberal viewpoint, and in the current political landscape is a rare species in Greece. Very frequently I find myself in complete agreement with his views, which offer a unique, rational and well-thought perspective on domestic issues, among the flood of hysterical, populist and ignorant noise that is modern Greek journalism.

Crash dummies countries

Chinese cars..... better stay away from them, at least for some more years. This SUV displayed the worst result ever in a safety crash test.

I personally drive a Korean car (Hyundai Getz) which has received 4 out of 5 stars in crash safety.

And everyone knows the overall high quality of Japanese cars.

More generally, while Japan and South Korea are world leaders in technology, innovation and product recognition and quality, mainland Chinese products are usually cheap, low quality imitations.

So why is it that these three countries (mainland China, Japan, South Korea) that seem so near (from a European perspective) perform so differently, industrially and technologically?

An obvious reason has to do with their economic systems. While Japan and South Korea have benn capitalist for decades, China has only relatively recently started to unleash its economic potential through liberalization of its economy. So the two former countries have a serious headstart in terms of industry development. To reinforce this point, one can consider the following comparison:

Communist mainland China and capitalist Taiwan are both populated by chinese majorities. Taiwan has 1/60 of the population of mainland China, but almost 1/12 its wealth. The average GDP in Taiwan for 2004 was five times as much as in mainland China, despite the huge leaps that China has done in the last years. The disastrous effects of maoist policies are therefore still very evident in China, whose population has huge untapped potential, as the comparison with Taiwan reveals.

Still, China's late start does not fully explain the huge disparity in product quality. Japanese or South Korean products have never been, even in their infancy, so dreadful as Chinese products, in terms of quality. I think the political climate in each country plays a role here. Japan has been a democracy since WWII, while South Korea was never as totalitarian as China and has been a full-fledged democracy for over a decade. China on the contrary is still a police state. In a police state, there can be no consumer associations, no public outcries over bad company conduct, no mass media hysteria over malfunctioning and potentially life-threatening irons, toys or tosters. Chinese companies, often fully owned by the state, operate with immunity and endager the lives of helpless and voiceless chinese citizens. Therefore, until these companies are sufficiently export-oriented in order to improve their quality procedures, or until China finally becomes democratic, it is wise to be weary of mainland chinese products and stay away from their cars.....

An enlightening system

That was what communism was supposed to be, right?

(Here is the whole amazing picture.)

Open Water

Yesterday we went with my girlfriend to watch the "Open Water" movie at the Ster multiplex cinemas in Patra. Although the film was short and relatively simple since most of it just showed the 2 main characters agonizing in the middle of the ocean, I found it very powerful, mostly because the situation was presented quite realistically.

Google Desktop

Some days ago I installed Google's new feature for Windows 2000/XP that builds an index of the files in your computer and displays possible results whenever you do a google search. It takes some hours after the installation in order to build the index, but the good thing is you can use your computer meanwhile. I have found the tool especially useful, and it actually addresses a desire that I have felt many times, when I wanted to find something I knew I had seen in my PC, and I would like to be able to search it as I search the Internet with Google.

Some people have expressed security fears but this is actually unfounded, since Google Desktop doesn't search anything that wasn't already there.

The IPv6 shepherd story

For almost 10 years now, IPv6 has been the revolution that is just around the corner but never seems to actually materialize. I would say that now is the moment, but this has been said so many times in the past that it reminds me of the story with the shepherd that cried "wolf" and was believed by none when the wolf actually appeared. Well, IPv6 is certainly not a bad development, but it does seem to have been predicted so often that the predictions have been discredited.

For those people who have not heard of IPv6 before, it is the protocol that is destined to replace the currently used IPv4, with its usual IP addresses that look like 150.110.60.8. Our new IPv6 addresses look like this: 2001:648:800:1:204:75ff:feb3:36a0 (yes, they are uglier, but that's why they come in abundance: sixty thousand trillion trillion times more than the total available IPv4 addresses). Why are they so many? Because the 4 billion IPv4 addresses that once seemed infinite some years ago were about to be exhausted. So the IETF that designed it, decided that IPv6 should have more address space than anyone could ever expect to be necessary, just to be sure.

Perhaps predictably, the Internet did not wait for IETF to finalize, test and deploy the new Internet Protocol. It just went ahead finding hacks to solve the immediate problem, and one such solution proved to be quite successful: NAT. Actually, it was so successful that some people even believe that IPv6 will never happen, because despite NAT's shortcomings (and they are many), it has relieved the IP address shortage that was the main factor pushing the Internet towards IPv6.

I am nevertheless confident that it's time has come, and a basic reason is the maturity that surrounds the new Internet Protocol nowadays. IPv6 support is bundled in Windows XP, as has been the case with Linux and *BSD for quite some time. Cisco is also a major promoter of IPv6, as most of its competitor router manufacturing companies. There are all types of applications that work over IPv6, especially in the Linux/BSD world. But most important, NAT is simply not sufficient anymore. With huge countries like China and India progressing towards becoming major economic powers and devices like cell phones becoming essentially small computing gadgets, IP addresses for everyone and everything are necessary. Nothing can provide them as easily and effectively as IPv6.

Preparing for the IPv6 Workshop

Tomorrow I will have a presentation at an IPv6 Workshop (link in Greek) in Athens organized by GRNET (the Greek NREN, responsible for the academic network connecting greek universities).