Robotics and the Next Generation

Went to the 2004 First Robotics Regional Competition in Silicon Valley, held at San Jose State University. And it was awesome to see all these kids running their "bots" through the paces. Got some great footage, even though Los Gatos High School's robot broke midway through competition.

Seeing the excitement, the fun, and the high-tech hijinks reminded me of the days when we were putting together workstations on-the-fly in a Berkeley workstation spin-out called Symmetric Computer Systems. I haven't seen this kind of serious fun for a long time in the computer biz.

Maybe we should all be building bots...

Your paper is silly, smells, and is ugly, ugly...

Jonathan M. Smith has an interesting idea on how to avoid blackballing in tech paper reviews.

For those not clued in (or fortunate enough to have avoided academic paper submission follies), in order to have an academic paper accepted, one must submit to double-blind review by anonymous experts in the field to evaluate whether a paper is interesting and appropriate to the conference venue without being dazzled (or tainted) by knowledge of who actually wrote it.

While in theory this approach seems quite reasonable, in practice one tends to find that papers which push the envelope, contain ideas not within the accepted compact, or even radically new treatise often meet with less-than, shall we say, open-minded and even-handed analysis? And since it's pretty easy to guess who's paper it is anyways, or even find out using a google search on the keywords, which everyone does anyway to figure out if "someone else wrote something like this before, so I can use their results in my analysis", the "double" in double-blind doesn't really work.

So Mr. Miller has proposed (at SIGCOMM in the OO session) a simple process: 1)That all reviews be public, and 2) signed by the reviewer. According to Mr. Miller, "That way history gets to see who was right - and who was wrong."

Sounds good to me - I'm willing to take on the judgement of history in my work, since that's only rational. Any other takers?

Fun Friday - Apple's Amazing Product Cycle

"An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy..."

This is how a very humorous take on Apple's very odd product roadmap begins. The photos make it complete.

Momma, Don't Let Your Kids Grow Up to Be Programmers

Well, with all the Olympics fun, forgot to mention that the CS major percentage has dropped again a few weeks back. At the same time, 25% of 18-34 age group now watch videos on the web. Very big growth, don't you think?

Of course, who will keep this momentum going? Don't we need creative young people to keep up with innovation? I know that people often like to think everything that we need has been invented, but this convenient mindset can be misleading.

In 1904, physics was considered a very sedate and settled field. Then Einstein published a series of papers in 1905 on special and general relativity, and also set into motion the new fields of quantum mechanics and modern statistical mechanics. Modern physics was born.

The international physics community has set aside 2005 as the World Year of Physics as a tribute to Einstein's centennial. Of course, I follow these things since I have a physics degree myself. But maybe everyone else should take a minute and think about how in a matter of a year the world can change forever.

When the Press Gets Ugly

Hurrah for John Crumpacker's article in the SF Chronicle today on the "ugly press" at the Olympics. It's nice to see good people in the press take others in the press to task when they act badly, and tell them to act like journalists - not badmouths.

My family watched the opening ceremonies broadcast last Friday, and we were very annoyed at the rude comments about countries marching in the Olympics by the so-called press commentators. They displayed a willful ignorance about world history. When they had to read some piece of information gathered for them about a particular country, the male commentator would say it with a smirk and a laugh, as if it was a joke. It was just plain annoying.

When the Greek contingent did their inspirational speech, both commentators acted offended that Greeks would speak Greek! No matter that in another age any educated American would have studied Greek and understood. No matter the emotion and prayers for peace. No matter the kind words reaching through history. And, finally, no matter there was a translation for those too ill-educated to understand. That wasn't enough.

Most Americans do not act as if the entire world should revolve around them like a spoiled selfish child. Yet it seems the only ones who get the attention of the cameras are the smirky jerky minority. Is it any wonder we are resented? Is it so hard to select people who simply act politely and courteously? As you noticed, boorishness (a Dutch word, hmmm) is the order of the day for Americans in public - it's almost an affectation or habit. I'm amazed they don't all carry clubs and hunt dinosaurs to complete the image. :-)

It used to be "America First". Now it's "America's Jerks". And the rest of us pay the penalty for their bad behavior. It is time they were brought to book.

But of course, a jerk never sees anything wrong with his behavior - it's always somebody else's fault.

Credibility and the Web - What is Video's Influence?

Well, I was discussing David Danielson of Stanford University and his upcoming talk on "web credibility" with the VP Marketing / Branding of a client company. Basically, web credibility has to do with how information is arranged on a site to make it "trusted" to the customer - something both good security and marketing people know implicitly. So what did a hot-shot marketing guy say about an academic's work on this topic? Plenty.

He noted that those studies on credibility did not properly address Internet video commercials and rapid turnover branded video, yet they're finding a dramatic change in the last two years with their 18-34 age demographic in view / use of video for the buying decision.

I actually run the datacenter that monitors the high-level metadata that is incorporated in our client's videos (plus, I did a little marketing myself in the old days), and we're in a novel area, so what he's saying doesn't surprise me. However, it seems to me I'm seeing the same credibility so to speak of customers displayed - not on the basis on web / site design, but on the basis of the actual video as compared to TV commercials - and the better produced, tighter focus, the better the customer likes it.

It's different when a marketing exec can directly handle hundreds of turns in days with responses measured in Internet video (as compared to working indirectly one turn in a months-long process through a production house in traditional commercial tuning), so perhaps what I'm seeing is different than TV in the sense that it's easy to follow / lead the mood on a daily basis when you tune / create a commercial that day. But the customers also seem very saavy about Internet movies - it's not like watching TV - shorter, faster, nolinear. But they get the message nonetheless.

I was an analyst before a technologist, so I understood Mr. Marketing's issues and thought them of merit. So I wish those credibility studies like at Stanford would start to examine the comparative of Internet commercials versus traditional TV commercials for credibility which Mr. Marketing thought made the buying decision. But we'll probably only see something on this long after it is done. After all, most academic studies on the Internet nowadays seem more history lessons than cutting-edge work. If you want that, work for an Internet startup.

Fun Friday - Read a Book and Shun the Web

Well, I was chatting with Karl Schoenberger of the Merc about the dismal state of the industry, and he had a great line I just had to pass on: "I am among the 0.35 percent of Americans between 50-54 who are shunning the Internet and re-reading Raymond Chandler novels. No, we don't have a chat room or blog about it either."

Lest people think I never have time to read books, actually I do read books - all the time. Give up random TV sessions - the great time waster - and you'll have plenty of time to use the Internet, read. and even work in media.

I take my kids to the library weekly and we go through about 5 books apiece. I just finished "The Birth of Venus", a 2003 best seller, noticed today they have a new Sharpe's rifles book and a prequel to the Mist of Avalon, along with a new Skolian series book (the author is a Harvard physicist, and I always read books by physicists, esp. women, even though Berkeley physics is better since it's my alma mater).

But that's not all. My husband William has a large collection of classic scifi from the 30's-50's as well, if you're into unique short stories. Look up "A Logic Named Joe" by Leister if you're down on the Internet. Totally predicts the craziness (it's a funny story) and it was writtten in 1946 (appeared in Astounding).

Finally, I also do video commentaries as well. It's quite different to speak an opinion piece than write one. Good exercise for the mind of a writer and a reader.

So, since it's Friday, read a book. You've got the weekend to enjoy it.

CEO Pitches, Bows and Optimism

Well, a few weeks back I got to participate in two events. One was watching Rick Bentley, CEO of Connexxed, do his elevator pitch - not in an office, but in front of a plane at the Palo Alto Airport. The second was attending the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs farewell party to Susan Hailey, their retiring CEO, after a successful tenure.

What was neat is that both events were captured with Valux's video service ("MinutePitch - Your Video Screen on the Web!") simply and easily. Rick's pitch is simply great. There's nothing like watching a second-time CEO take the helm.

It was so easy to take a digital camera and capture Susan's farewell captured in Kick-off to Fall ("Forum for Women Entrepreneurs - Bay Area Chapter").

This cocktail party launched the transition of FWE from Susan Hailey (who's now a VP Marketing at Harrahs) to new CEO Amy Love. Susan came into FWE and built it up from a financial hole to an incredibly successful organization in just two years. The FWE silent auction and dinner (I worked the auction - upbid sponsoring VCs and lawyers books, videos, and like things for the "family" group) last spring was a financial success.

Amy is moving forward (listen to her in the video "Kick-Off to Fall") on the challenge of too-low goal setting by women in organizations. Susan launched a series of CEO and COO meetings for women in large companies to build-in support for women (it seems being an entrepreneur is hard enough these days, and if you're a woman it's almost impossible). I know Amy will fight to keep that hard-won goodwill that Susan built up so tirelessly.

Whether it's a startup in security, or a group of women entrepreneurs networking and having fun, I'm struck by the real sense of optimism that comes through these on-location genuine videos. The strength of Silicon Valley comes through our willingness to try new things.

Fun Friday: Star Trek Trivia Day

Everyone in my family is required to know how to program. That's probably no surprise. But everyone also is required to know Star Trek trivia and become an expert on one or another of the many incarnations of Star Trek so we can have trivia contests in email. My daughter Sarah Jolitz always took the "most creative" award for identifying the quotes. My favorite was her answer to "Why I could love you no more than I could love a new species of bacteria" as "Uhura talking to a twinkie as she was taking a bite".

So, in honor of Star Trek lovers everywhere, here is the lost Trek episode everyone is clamoring to see - The Lost Star Trek Christmas Episode: "A Most Illogical Holiday". I think someone read that book "Spock, Messiah" from many years ago... And have a great weekend.

Fun Friday - accoona matata BSD?

Regarding Saul Hansell's report on the launch of Accoona, with star power brought to bear by Bill Clinton courtesy of a large undisclosed contribution to his library by the Chinese government yesterday - I am puzzled. If Accoona is a variant on "hakuna", and is derived from the phrase "hakuna matata" for "no worries", and if, according to the Swahili English dictionary matata plural of tata means "tangle, mess, difficulty, perplexity", and hakuna means "there is no, there are no", does this mean the official 20 year licensed search engine of the Chinese government used to search out even better web pages than google really means "There is no"?

Hmmm. So if I search accoona.com for "Taiwan independence" will I get back "There is no Taiwan independence"? Subliminal Internet messages, indeed.

Ever notice what's been going on with OS X? First it was Mac, then it was Mach (yes, that's why Avi Tevanian moved there from NEXT), and now it's BSD (of course, we've had Mach's VM system in every 386BSD version and variant from our first public open source BSD release back in 1992 - a very fine VM system BTW and a favorite of mine). But to actually cut through the Linux hype and mention someone else - Wow! "Then of course there is Darwin, Apple's version of BSD Unix at the heart of its Mac OS X operating system, which would nicely provide IBM with a non Linux semi-open source alternative..."

Nice to see you say something nice about Berkeley Unix, John. Never thought I'd see the day.

Ah, Those Homebrew Computer Days

Alan Saracevic wrote an amusing piece about Mac Addicts and their antics. I laughed at their stories, but really isn't it just a continuation of their roots? My husband and business partner of long-standing William Jolitz was a Homebrew Computer Club member in the 1970's, and remembers how the "two Steve's" looked then - Steve Wozniak was a "pocketprotector jeans wearing hippie engineer sweating bullets taking too much time off from an HP tech position". Steve Jobs would have "his back against the wall with one knee cocked sizing up the marks watching Woz work the computer with a cheapo little TV plugged in". Is it any wonder the crowd they attract nowadays?

Woz was the friendly Steve back then, even dropping by the undergrad computer club at Berkeley and chatting with me when he was finishing up his degree and I was still pursuing mine (I was Treasurer way back then, even though I was in physics). To his credit he still funds our local schools, including my son's LGHS robotics team.

Steve Jobs didn't worry too much about hygiene way back then, apparently, because "vegetarians don't smell cause they don't eat any animal fats". Several people wondered at the time if he ate old sweat socks instead, if it really was a "you exude what you eat" kind of moment. But Michael Moritz' (of later Sequoia Capital fame) book on Jobs pretty much covered all this already (although I doubt the "sweat socks" item made it in).

But at least they had some of that Pete Townsend "lovely hippie" stuff in the positive sense. By the 90's it was a lot more unfriendly - I spent more time trying to damage control 386BSD fans and their crazy "take over the world" schemes (and killing each other's projects - a favorite Unix pasttime) than doing real work. Which was another reason for moving releases through Dr. Dobbs Journal (which started in the crazy Homebrew / West Coast Computer Faire days).

Uh, Do You Think They'll Suspect Something If We Call It "Big Brother"?

The Pentagon's TIA (Total Information Awareness) super-secret spy-on-Americans program headed by John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy was a big deal a few years ago - until Congress killed it. Turned out Americans didn't like the idea of their own government spying on them without cause, and even 9/11 didn't change their minds.

Robert O'Harrow Jr of the Washington Post has written an interesting book postulating that TIA would have probably succeeded if they hadn't chosen such lousy names like "Total Information Awareness" and a "creepy all-seeing eye for a logo".

One of the things O'Harrow illustrates is the set of shadowy business alliances TIA formed with personal data reporting companies such as Acxiom, ChoicePoint and Seisint. While O'Harrow focusses on how this information could be misused, his implicit assumption is that this information is correct but private.

But the likelihood of the information being accurate and hence actionable is not very high - certainly not high enough to deny someone a home or a job without the right of appeal and seeing the evidence. These reporting agencies do not verify information submitted, as anyone who has had bad data on their credit report can attest. However, there is no penalty for these companies supplying inaccurate information, even if such false information results in a loss of a job, rejection for credit, or even false arrest!

Americans are extremely ignorant of how the nexus of information is woven throughout their lives and caps how far they can go (where you can live, where you can work, what school your kids can atttend, ...), but one thing I hear consistently from people is how astonished they are when they discover they are a victim of false information supplied by a company that "appears" of veracity. Even correcting an error on a simple credit report is the responsibility of the consumer - even if they have had no notice that such information exists, because these companies are under no obligation to provide it (except in certain states where yearly "free credit reports" are mandatory, and even then the consumer must request one). Also, credit reports are only one piece of the puzzle - employers, colleges and universities, government agencies, and financial agencies increasingly rely on these companies to make / break decisions.

I hope more people will start to educate themselves on this subject. It's a lot harder to do so after you are blackballed.

Bells are Ringing - Please Don't Arrest the Bellringer

Is everyone getting tired of the "stress" excuse. You know, the "I can't make the meeting because I'm stressed out" or "I didn't finish the project because I'm too stressed" or "I forgot to take out the scapel after removing your appendix because of stress"... And all you're really hearing is "I don't want to do anything for anybody, so I'll say I'm stressed and act pathetic and you'll let me off the hook so I can go to Starbucks and gorge on mochas and pretend I'm working when I'm really looking at porn on the web".

First we had during our "season of sharing" Christmas stores refusing to allow Salvation Army Bell Ringers (you know, they stand with a kettle and ring a bell for the poor) to stand on their properties because they present "too much stress" to their customers! Even the bell was too disturbing, because it rings and they hear it and look at the silent ringer and the kettle for the poor and that makes them feel bad because they don't want to give the poor anything. And customers who are ashamed of themselves aren't gluttonous store customers, right?

Now, doing it one better (and who wouldn't), it's "stomp on a Girl Scout" time, in which CW Nevius voices the complaint of the Silicon Valley upper-middle-class whiner who is standing up and refusing to talk to little girls in uniforms about whether they'd like to eat a thin mint or shortbread cookie because they are just "too stressed". Aren't we all just wracked with compassion for these pathetic souls?

Oh, the pain, the pain. CW Nevius has tapped into a wellspring of self-absorption that is truly staggering in its banality and pettiness. And he's proud of it too - according to him, "But I have to say the majority agreed with the premise" that Girl Scouts are evil instigators of stress and it's basically a little girl's fault that some overpaid executive or underworked columnist is unhappy instead of relaxed and sipping a Mai Tai on the beach at Honolulu. For shame!

Will this insanity never end?

Oh, there are the other excuses thought up by supposedly college educated people who never show any industry and ingenuity except when they need to excuse their own lack of spirit and generosity. There's the "I don't know if this kid lives in my neighborhood" whine (like, it matters anyway - they're all Girl Scouts and part of the Girl Scouts of America), or the "I don't have enough money at the office to buy a candybar" snivel (wow, maybe you should think about quitting those 5 buck mochas at the local Starbucks if you can't handle a box of cookies), or even the "I don't know if their organization supports all of my special causes like freedom for ferrets" disingenous complaint (completely ignoring the fact that the monies are for the big picture things like girls education locally).

So what's driving this incredibly narrow and mean rant, aside from the fact that it's easy for big fat adults to kick little girls. Well, it has nothing to do with only buying from a local kid. No one knows the kids in the neighborhood anymore. That's a lie.

It has nothing to do with people competing at the office for selling. Given the greedy way folks consume in offices anything in sight, another box of cookies or chocolate bar is just great - gobble it down and don't count it in your diet. That never changes. That's a lie.

What's the problem? Simple - they don't want to give a dime to anyone else who might be able to do something good with it. They want to be miserly and hoard every bit of good will. They don't want to buy from the neighborhood kids because that kid might actually be doing good things for folks - they'd rather spend hundreds of dollars gobbling down cookies from the grocery store, because then no one gets anything out of it but them.

Greedy. Yep. Miserly. Absolutely. Morally and ethically bankrupt. Sure looks that way.

But they're embarrassed - that's why the "furtive" glances as they lie through their teeth.

Yes, they're stressed - turning away a girl scout dedicated to building a better tomorrow when they resent hope and optimism is "stressful". Walking by the kettle and being reminded that compassion is absent from their pathetic little life is also "stressful". Should we feel sorry for such creatures?

And that's why they got rid of the kettles - it made them feel bad when they didn't toss in a quarter for the poor. Why, that might mean one less mini-Hershey bar!

Call it for what it is - they're not embarrassed by being bad, but when the girl scout comes to the door or the bell rings at the kettle, they sure are embarrassed by being shown to be bad.

Trading Places in Silicon Valley

I was feeling low on a rainy day, and then read Mike Cassidy's story about a Santa Cruz family and their "reality" check on "trading spouses". It really made me laugh. Check it out - it'll chase those blues away.

Remember what the reality show biz did with the Amish last summer - "hey, let's corrupt these Amish for a summer hit"? Well, we aren't in Pennsylvania, so the best they could do was find a Taoist hippie bluegrass family and try to make them some kind of narrow control-freak isolated cult. But, hey, they got $50 grand, so what's the big deal on a little video "license", right? Ahh, the highs and lows of human nature - who could ask for anything more?

One of the reasons I developed ExecProducer was to allow people the ability to produce and create their own media inexpensively to frame their own images and memories, instead of relying on schlamazels with their own agenda. But I guess wave a few dollars and all good sense goes out the window. PT Barnum will always have a valued place in America.

Fun Friday: Gopher Traps, Pet Rocks and Wozniak, Tsunami Science, and Women's Video

Well, it seems fitting that we end the week, not with a bang but with the hard slam shut of a Macabee gopher trap. You heard me - gopher traps. Turns out at the Los Gatos History Museum roundtable last night we got to hear how Los Gatos was the leader in innovative gopher traps, and it's rather humbling to learn that after one hundred years they still are selling them. This certainly contrasted with Gary Dahl's Pet Rock (another Los Gatos invention), which didn't last more than a year - but oh, what a year it was. I still remember all those silly rocks sold in stores and thinking how crazy adults were to buy them.

One of the more amusing moments of the roundtable occurred when the moderator carefully presented all of the other speakers, and then forgot to present their star speaker Steve Wozniak. But Steve more than made up for the lapse by talking nonstop about innovation, his time at HP, and why he loves building things. And I suppose that was the motivation for everyone sitting in that room - we all like to build things and make things better. Oh, and the free food behind the gopher trap display after the chatfest helped.

In other news, the scientific impact of the Indian Ocean tsumani is just beginning to be grasped - "NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth's rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet's shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters." Simply incredible.

Finally, Internet video is finally making real inroads, especially among women. iVillage announced that it has redesigned its Web site and "visitors to the women-focused site now see video offerings on each Web page". According to Peter Naylor, SVP Sales, "Demand is outstripping supply. I would love to get more video inventory". Videos are preceded by a 15-second ad from the likes of Kraft, Microsoft and NBC.

Haven't I always said "It's the content". And women, who are often viewed as less tech-saavy than men, seem to be leading the trend here. Not surprising - I'm a woman too. Have a great weekend.

Fun Friday: What HP needs is Lou Gerstner, but younger and with hair...

Well, the fallout from Carly's involuntary termination by the BOD of HP is continuing. John Pazkowski in his GMSV blog today quoted many agonized "What will HP do now!!!" analysts acting like the world ended while they bid up the stock at Carly's ouster. My fav is "They need someone to do what Lou Gerstner did for IBM, but it isn't obvious who that person is".

Hey, maybe he's on to something. What HP really needs is Lou Gerstner, but younger and with hair.

Dodging Bullets is a Lot Easier in Silicon Valley After Iraq

I just heard from Rick Bentley, a Berkeley physics alum - he's back here in the good old Bay Area from Iraq, trying to get back into CEO stuff at his security startup. Talk about "culture shock" - from meditations on bullets and murdered colleagues and finding yourself alone and unarmed on the wrong side of the Green Zone, to Silicon Valley startup and bizplans and product specs. Yet that's the way it is nowadays - the world is a much smaller place.

I like the weblog he's done talking about his experiences. So many startup execs today are extremely narrow in their outlook - maybe Stanford biz school and a few preppie connections, or perhaps locked up in an academic lab creating some new RFC. It's rare to find someone (especially in security) who actually learns what it's like for most ordinary people to survive in an unsafe world.

Personally, I prefer dealing with people who have developed some empathy for their profession through real-world experience, such as when the doctor for my daughter's broken wrist talked about his family's history of scoliosis while he was binding her injury and said "that's why I became interested in orthopaedic medicine". It's living life that matters most.

Fun Friday: It's All About Relationships, but Pass the Toilet Tissue

Very funny little item about Friends of Frank and deals in the urinals. Of course, how could I not remark on this amazing way of meeting and greeting - "Urinals", huh? Well I guess that's one way to have an all-male "members-only" club. :-)".

On the German side, a discussion of venture capital in Germany by Dirk Riehle and his concern that Germany is "facing a venture capital deal market failure" reaches a rather startling conclusion: "From the data some of the VCs presented, it seemed clear what's wrong with Germany, startups, innovation, and venture capital: There are not enough VCs". Given the terrible IRR's in recent years, I'm sure that several of the funds could "spare" their nonperforming VCs on a "permanent loan" status, kind of like the way museums get musty old pots out of their basement and off to someone else's collection.

But to get some balanced feedback, I asked William Jolitz what he thinks about this supposition, since he's the guy who handles the investment and international business side. "It isn't a lack of VCs that causes capital to be restricted. It's because of a lack of capital that there are few early-stage VCs due to the bubble burst - you have to make the dogs invested during the bubble perform before you're allowed to invest again".

"There's no difference between being a VC and a loan shark", as an east coast CEO likes to tell me, "except for the ties". :-)

Lunch at the California Grill - Malts and Talk

Rick Bentley, a Berkeley physics alum, has been written up by Mike Cassidy of the Merc in a really great article on Rick's experiences in Baghdad and running a security startup, Connexed. Not that I'm surprised - I introduced Rick to Mike and got to sit in at the California Cafe as Rick told stories while sipping a chocolate malt. I also enjoy seeing a real journalist at work, and Mike writes some really great stories that blend business with the human element in Silicon Valley. It was a pleasure to watch him work.

So read the article, and tell Mike to keep more like this coming. Oh, and stop by Rick's company site - security is important these days, and unlike some armchair CEO, Rick knows what it is like to live in a insecure world.

Fun Friday: A Tale of Two Women

I was struck by the contrast in reporting of two very different women in Silicon Valley. Matt Marshall writes of Joanna Rees-Gallanter, aka "Alley Cat", as she goes through a tumultous rolling close of her new venture fund at VSP Capital. As Matt puts it "She's got an interesting story, and it reveals the kind of grit it takes to get where she is. She told us about how people laughed at her idea of starting a venture firm, and how hard it was to transition from a non-traditional background. She even tried restaurants." It really is hard in a very male-dominated industry like investment to make inroads. My take to Matt: Rolling closes and last minute sells. Been there, done that. Stress city. I'm glad to see a positive story about a woman VC who's put together the team and closed the fund. Can't wait to see what she does with it. Keep these stories coming".

A very different view on Richard Koman's piece about Analee Newitz, who thinks the only reason people worked on TCP/IP or open source projects like 386BSD or Apache was to facilitate access to porn. Figures she's booked with O'Reilly - I suspect this reflects their inside view on women in technology loud and clear. As I put it to Richard: "Hey, so the open source movement has finally got a woman speaker - but instead of a real woman developer or researcher they've got a girl talking dirty. Wow! How enlightened they are... However, this strange exhortation to love porn has nothing to do with the real reasons for why new architectures and design in technology are developed, nor does it speak to the motivations of the developers. Just because pimps and johns are ready to exploit any technology at any opportunity doesn't mean it has anything to do with innovation, provides any value to society, or has any lasting impact."

"I doubt we'll soon see porn queens getting Nobel prizes, writing books of merit, or developing new solutions to problems of hunger, poverty, and injustice. But we will see lots of opportunists jump on the bandwagon as technology changes our society, proclaiming themselves as the "true" innovators as they gull the rubes. This hucksterism has always gone on. After ten thousand years of civilization, it's amazing anyone sees this for anything less than some oddball carnival sideshow - briefly entertaining, somewhat freaky, and definitely unimportant."

And that's why it's tough to be a woman in Silicon Valley. For every serious woman in business, technology, and investment, there are fools ready to say and do anything for their 30 seconds of Internet fame, and a huckster ready and willing to exploit them. While the Analee's of the world come and go, it's time we showed how annoyed we are - using our money - drop a line to O'Reilly telling them you didn't buy the Perl book and come to an open source conference to hear a woman talk about porn. You bought the book and came to the talks because you want to hear about the tech. Man or woman, demand they book real technologists who love open source. Don't settle for anything less.

Fun Friday - Datacenter Checksum Stories

In an e2e discussion on the loss of data integrity on Oracle TNS gateways that still exists today, one wag said "When Network General was adding more SQL decodes to the Sniffer(r), in the '90s, we had a presentation on the Oracle transport (TNS) underlying SQL Net traffic. TNS rode on Netware SPP, or TCP, etc. The fellow went into packet fields in detail and explained how Oracle also made gateway software available for Sun boxes to go from an Oracle system to an IBM SNA db system. The gateway received SQL on TNS on TCP on IP on Ethernet (for instance) and spit out SQL on TNS or whatever IBM wanted. As he expounded on TNS pkt fields, a few hands went up -- "What's the checksum field for if it's always 0?"..."It's unimplemented for now". "Well if it's unused and your gateway has bad memory, how do you know the data going into the db on the other side will be good?" Answer: "I don't know". (Thanks to Alex Cannara).

Of course, if the Oracle tech guy had gone to the Microsoft Research school of obsfucation, he would have said "The probability of this event occuring such that the reliability of the underlying link layer is impaired by an improbably low memory bit error at ten to the minus 12 excluding thermal radiative factors and charge displacement is so low as to be impossible, hence the question is irrelevent". Now, that's the way to talk the talk. I guess that's why Oracle is always Number 2 to Microsoft. :-)

Fun Friday - Fetches, Kvetches, and Hammerlund Catches

Well, it's Friday so I suppose I should go through the odds and ends catagory. The first item is a story about Rambus latest patent to speed up graphics. Dean Takahashi of the Merc is breathless in his admiration, "Micro-threading is the brainchild of a team of Rambus engineers led by Fred Ware and Craig Hampel. They were trying to figure out a way for memory chips to catch up with microprocessors and personal-computer components that have become faster over the years." Yes, memory bottlenecks are a problem and they do , and Rambus deals with it.

But what's their "invention", really. Instead of one 32-byte fetch, they do 4 8-byte fetches in parallel... this is considered "clever". Sigh. Actually, they're very smart at Rambus, but I think they spend way too much time with lawyers (and journalists) and not enough with engineers.

Byte Online decided to rerun my article The Problems of Personalization this month, and I got quite a kvetch from a reader who caught every typo the editor missed. Needless to say, I agreed with him, notified the editor, and had quite a laugh. It's good when your readers are so involved in your story that a double "and" is grating. So keep my editors on their toes and let me and them know if you find any other problems.

Mike Cassidy of the SJ Merc's column today on old ham radio antennas brought back memories. Last summer my kids sold my father-in-law's old Hammarlund HQ-129-X after realizing they were never going to use it (they spent the money on telescope parts). Now that they've got the Internet - why bother with radio? They buyer was a nice young undergrad from the Naval Postgraduate School ham club. I was told I could get a lot more for it from a collector, but this kid was really nice, drove over from Monterey and picked it up (it weighed about 40 pounds). So it got a good home and everyone was happy. Well, not quite. The antenna got taken down years ago and scrapped, so it wasn't part of the deal.

Fun Friday: Just Singing Those Conference Paper Registration Consternation Blues

OK, so we put together a very nice neat academic paper "Beyond Network Processors: Using Dataflow Architecture for Low-Power Low Latency TCP Processing" for a conference. A really fun paper to write and to read. So fun I'd rather place it in a journal, get paid, and get compliments from real readers than send it to a stodgy corporate fest (although a few conferences like ACE are real cool). But when you got to do it, you do it.

But you know how these things go - you submit a lot of work, get comments back of the variety of "you caaant spell" and "your such a bad writer" variety, get gonged by a "secret" competitor on the review panel that you all know is lurking there in the shadows, complain, resubmit, and so forth. After about a gazillion times (during which I've written more articles, books and papers than the entire committee together), you get an acceptance dependent on paying for your registration. Well, if the company pays, it's OK with me.

But sometimes I just think these conferences are just too amateur to be tolerated, especially with respect to their deadlines and requirements. The one thing you'd be serious about is a deadline, right? Nope, maybe not...

I received a call for papers via the end2end interest group. My colleagues were readying a final submission of the paper per the instructions in the call for papers email that was due. Yes, we tend to wait until the last minute - when you're geographically distributed that tends to happen.

They came to me desperate to find that the website said they should be registered two days prior, on Saturday no less. Yet this email has no registration requirement on it - only the submission deadline.

Did they screw up. Nope. I checked myself - assuredly, the date for submission had been moved back to later in the week (as is often the case), but they also imposed a registration deadline no one knew about. I reread this email call for papers - there was no registration requirement mentioned at all! So I don't find they were at fault.

Well, I tried to contact everyone I could think of on the committee, but I think everyone was out to lunch. I finally got a message back, by then too late to be of interest - we'd made other arrangement and everyone was back to work.

Honestly, I've been writing for professional and trade press for 15 years, and also done a number of papers over the years. So perhaps conference committees, who's only claim to fame is fairness and feedback, ought to work by more careful processes. Otherwise, they just seem like a bunch of flaky academics with an agenda. And that's definitely not worth anyone's effort to fight - or pay to attend.

You Can't Con all of the Icons All of the Time

Bravo to Alan Deutschman of Fast Company on his Icon book review. According to Alan, since Jobs won't cooperate with any biographer after Michael Moritz's successful book "The Little Kingdom" in the 1980's, "Jobs' freeze-out gives two options to would-be biographers: Either they can succeed at a bit of investigative reporting, or they can plunder the work of those who have. Unfortunately, the authors of "iCon" are guilty mostly of the latter." He then proceeds to rip the book apart, finding rehashes of his and Moritz's work. "I felt disturbed reading the brief prologue of "iCon," with its play-by- play of the crazed reaction of the crowd at the January 2000 Macworld convention when Jobs announced he was taking the title of CEO -- the same scene I used in my similarly brief prologue to "Second Coming." Then I relaxed while the next 135 pages were basically a condensed version of Young's earlier bio (which drew much of its best material from Moritz's "Little Kingdom"). Then, on Page 138, it began to seem as if Young had reached the end of his previous book -- and had begun to condense my book."

There is nothing more annoying than doing the hard work in original reporting / research, only to find someone rips it out of your book without even giving credit, or worse yet, distorts what you wrote so that it is completely wrong. I know - I had the same thing happen to me. I co-wrote a kernel design book, Operating System Source Code Secrets Volume 1: The Basic Kernel (see Jolix for more information) describing the design, implementation and internals of 386BSD and incorporating original work. No one else had ever done this work before in any operating system - we had done the long series of technical articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal on which some of it was based, plus years out of Berkeley with the majority of work. The book was released in 1996 to good reviews, but it was about BSD of course, and focussed entirely on evolving that architecture.

So imagine my surprise when the Chief Architect of Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) in 1998 came to my office with a Linux kernel book of about the same thickness. He was in charge of kernel issues with Linux and OPS. Since we had done kernel architecture and design, he asked me to assist him with understanding why the book discussed a major architectural mechanism in Linux when he couldn't find any corresponding system code supporting it in the release. Much to my surprise, it was almost word-for-word ripped from my book. Worse yet, it was entirely misleading - Linux had a fundamentally different architectural design and could never function in this manner!

We pulled my book out, and began to compare it in sections and chapters. Same as what Alan outlined happened to him in reviewing Icon, but more egregious in a sense, since what they talked about had fundamental differences with the OS they were documenting - it wasn't Linux either. So they ripped off their customer and mine by basically changing 386BSD to "Linux", and sold it as an original design work. Lovely, huh?

Like Alan, I've spent a lot of years building a reputation for original work, and I take a great deal of pride in my writings. Every one of my papers, articles, and books is my slant - not someone else's regurgitated offal. It's a privilege to write, and I enjoy it. And I also credit others - it's only professional and fair. Finally, and most importantly, in technical work lies and misstatements can have real consequences, from failed products and lost investments to (in the case of critical care and systems) genuine safety concerns. Technical works must be real, verifiable, and honest.

There has been a trend towards whole-cloth inventions of "author's platforms" and books with no regard for credibility and authority as an easy way for publishers to produce books without investing in real authority. I find this most disturbing. Heritage must matter, else nothing is reliable. You wouldn't want a fake doctor operating on you? Why would you want to buy a book from a fake author?

Fun Friday: Buckets of Bandwidth, SciFi High, and Silly Searches

First of all, my favorite search of the week from Google (search terms: NS32000 data sheet):
Jolitz Heritage - [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
... Based on the NS32000 microprocessor, it was a portable no wait state ...
In its latest incarnation, its on a huge fork mount made of sheet metal. ...
jolitz.telemuse.net/news - 177k - Im Cache - Ähnliche Seiten

Wow, those first processors sure were huge!

Second, courtesy of Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher, Verizon is introducing a new service with real bandwidth:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199

Sure beats the 128kbps that most SBC DSL users get stuck with. Of course, is it available in the heart of Silicon Valley, the land of innovation? Of course not. But Tom hasn't given up hope: "I'm still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He's in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won't work. Maybe he'll let me put my servers in his tool shed..."

Finally, Edward Rothstein of the NYTimes wrote a very thorough article on the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. It even includes a display of robots from various science-fiction movies and television shows like "Lost in Space" and "Star Wars". So if you couldn't get all the robots in Bots (see Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?), visit the museum that Paul Allen's money built - I'm sure you'll spot a few familiar faces.

Fun Friday - Daleks, Jedi, and Vultures, Oh My!

The very latest new and improved whiter than white venture capitalist trend is (drum roll) - "The Consumer Internet"! "Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures" writes Gary Rivlin of the New York Times. "The problem is that you've got all these software V.C.'s, they don't know what to do with themselves...They say, 'These are deals that make people a lot of money, and enterprise software is largely dead.' So now they've decided they're consumer Internet venture capitalists." (George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures).

Now, I know that you're reading this blog while shopping online, running your RSS feeds of the latest stock news, IM'ing to a friend, VOIP'ing on a conference call with a client, and secretly watching a movie you got from a p2p site. But did you know that you are a part of the consumer Internet and that there's money to be made off of you? Are you surprised yet? Are you holding your wallet tighter?

Daleks are fearsome creatures, indistructable, flustered by stairs, and good dustbins in a pinch. Perhaps that's why one disappeared from storage recently. "A spokesman said: 'There may be a black market out there for Daleks - but it's still a strange thing to steal'." (BBC News). So if you see something with an odd British accent saying "Exterminate", cheer up - it may be worth $500 pounds.

Finally, for the last word on the Apple-Intel alliance (a slashdot reader) :
"I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million Mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced."

Fun Friday: Jezebel is Gone, Bugs are Edible, and Disposable Camcorders

Well, Jezebel is gone. Jezebel, for those who don't know, was the jaguar at Happy Hollow in San Jose. All my kids loved to visit her when they were little (the oldest is now 20). I always thought she was smiling. We will really miss her.

For all those programmers out there - if you are really sick of those tedious debug cycles, there is hope. You can actually eat those bugs - in Mexico. "It's just like eating a regular hot dog, but with five or six times the nutritional value.'' (Juan Garcia Oviedo, Biologist).

Lastly, you know something is on the edge of complete obsolescence when it's still expensive to make but they have to sell it as a "disposable". That what Benny Evangelista tried in his review of the Pure Digital Technologies disposable (kind of) camcorder. The reason they say you want one - it does 640x480 30fps, and you can trade video files. Funny thing is, I can do that with a digital camera. And I own it. And it's small. And I can use the latest memory cards. Oh, and did I mention I own it.

For example, the Canon SD200 is a 640x480 30fps camera. Costs about $200. Uses standard SD cards you can buy anywhere. Plenty of room for switching cards or using a gig card. Has a very good editing feature for clips. You're not limited to most recent clip or anything like that. Also has great image capability. My son Ben Jolitz used this camera for a short comedy feature film festival entry (high school level) this year called "Bots" (see "Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?"). It's very very small and light - fits in a pocket. And he did a pro level production with it.

It has optical zoom, unlike the camcorder. If you want to spend more money, plenty of cameras have auto-stabilization (look at some of those Sonys, will ya, and they're 60fps!!!). You're not limited to 20 minutes - just switch memory cards, and they're getting bigger for cheaper all the time.

I suppose if you want a DVD fast, this might work. But there are so many DVD burners on the market. While I always love labor saving processes, I just can't endorse this one. Now, maybe if they decided to offer digital cameras instead...

Squandered Victory a Fascinating Talk

Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, spoke yesterday at a special PARC forum on "Our Squandered Victory and the Prospects for Democracy in Iraq". I must admit, I was skeptical that I would find him an agreeable (or even informed) speaker - I'm not a great fan of the Hoover Institution. But he knew his stuff, was right on the money about the money (the billions spent on this war), had lots of those "where did they get those guys" stories of screwups in Iraq (our guys - not their guys), and presented a thorough convincing argument for how badly the administration has bungled the job from an insider's perspective.

Why is he an "insider"? Apparently Larry Diamond was asked by Condoleezza Rice to go to Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond wasn't an Iraq war supporter, but he said he thought creating a "viable democracy" was important. He was there last year.

One of the best speakers I've seen this year. He answered every question, and met critics head-on. I wish more Americans could talk to him as someone who's really "been there". It's one way to cut through the spin and make your own "fair and balanced" decision.

Fun Friday: VCs Get Googled, Tempel 1 to Get Deep Impact

Well, we've finally got the lowdown on the post-IPO Google payoff, courtesy of Bill Burnham, and it's quite a tidy haul. How much? Theoretically "...all the way back in 1999 Kleiner and Sequoia each invested $12.5M in Google for a 10% stake. Fast forward to the Summer of 2004 and these stakes were worth $2.03BN at Google's IPO price of $85/share".

They had to back off on selling all that at the IPO, however, which meant they did even better. According to Kleiner's distribution statements (SEC Form 4) "... to date they have distributed shares worth $3.549BN. They still have another 2.6M shares worth $752M as of yesterday's close, so the total value of their stake is $4.3BN which represents a 344X return on their investment of $12.5M ... not too shabby".

What about Sequoia? "making an educated guess they have returned about $3.8BN to date and have stock worth another $940M left to distribute for a total return of close to $4.7BN which is about $200M higher than Kleiner's $4.5BN (with the mystery shares). Based on their $200M more in proceeds for the same stake and their careful doling out of shares to protect the market, Sequoia wins the award for best distrubution process".

For those of you not sponging off one of the Class A VCs, look toward the heavens (or NASA TV). Tempel 1 is scheduled to be hit by Deep Impact to determine if it really is a dirty snowball or a dirty dustball. Unless you have a rather large (11-inch or better) aperture telescope, watch it on the Internet - it will be Magnitude 11 and pretty hard to spot unless you're very experienced.

So for all those unhappy people who didn't make out like bandits on the Google IPO, repeat after me: "The best things in life are free". At least, until Google figures out a way to put banner ads on Tempel 1.

New York Times and the Politics of Academic Prejudice

Dr. Lawrence K. Altman in the New York Times today takes on the problem of poor academic peer review and fraud in scientific journals, and how their failure to carefully vet papers has resulted in public mistrust. However, the lack of oversight, audits, and failed analysis of scientific papers cited -- a good first step -- to anyone involved actually describes the symptoms of a more insidious disease. The greatest problem faced by researchers today is the ease by which anonymous reviewers of unstated credentials can blackball competitive ideas and promote others they prefer with impunity. Thus, instead of a battle of ideas openly discussed, papers are promoted merely for reinforcing entrenched ideas already espoused by the reviewer or for spinning trendy ideas in which the reviewer may have a stake.

I have heard academics and researchers candidly discuss paper rejections based not on good science but on bad blood and old rivalries. Professor John Doyle of Caltech, a respected researcher who has won prizes for his papers, often quotes the ludicrous academic paper rejections he has received, primarily because he has (self-admittedly) not spent enough time stroking the reviewers at conferences prior to actually sending in a paper so as to "prepare" them and get "buy in to the idea". And after poorly reasoned (if not completely untrue) rejections, the coup de grace is always that the paper is "poorly written", no matter how well-published and credentialed. It is a scandal. Is it no surprise then that many researchers are now spending more time writing for trade press while the quality of papers in journals diminishes?

Recently at Stanford I was gratified to hear Dr. Shri Kulkarni of Caltech brazenly discuss his dislike for "paying" journals to publish his work when magazines like Nature gladly accept his articles and pay him for them. Perhaps as a Berkeley alumna who has written both academic papers and published extensively in the trade press, I am inclined towards the intellectual honesty of both Dr. Kulkarni and Dr. Doyle for putting the stranglehold of personal and professional bias in scientific review on the table -- after all, both of them received their Ph.D's from Berkeley, and both of them refuse to remain silent on this outmoded, repressive and ultimately anti-innovative process.

Fun Friday - Men Expect Success, Women Work for Success

On the talk show circuit, if there isn't a "us versus them" crisis, they'll invent one. After all, ratings matter, and the best ratings are gotten from the "battle of the sexes", never mind the reality.

The latest fad, seized upon by fervent talk show hosts, academics of questionable credentials, and ideological rantists is that of the "academic gender gap" where girls are supposedly pulling ahead of boys. Crisis indeed! It must be the girl's fault, or the school's fault. It must be favoritism. It must be bias. Or is it?

It may be less than glamorous to put the responsibility for working hard towards a goal on the shoulders of the person who benefits most from it - after all, isn't this what all those "Great Generation" types told boomers? You have to put your nose to the grindstone, work up the ladder, and eventually you'll have your reward? Remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper? You don't want to be a grasshopper, do you, freezing while the hard-working ant lives in a cozy home...

Like, who wants to listen to that stuff? That's like "eat sensibly and exercise and you'll control your weight" - no one wants to do that either because 1) working towards a long-term goal is hard in an immediate gratification culture, and 2) there's no one to blame but yourself if you fail. Better get a pill, or better yet, blame someone else.

Personal responsibility, diligence, hard work, and those other virtues of a bygone era don't play well in the "agony" talk circuit - they operate on the "blame, complain, and act insane" method of discourse (modus vivendi is Latin to these folks). So if boys are doing poorly in school, it must be someone else's fault. Right?

In the midst of this irrational debate, as one dispairs of any reason or sense, Sophie Theis, a 17 year old high school student for New America Media, elegantly pins the proverbial tail on the donkey with the keen observation that girls are succeeding more because they are willing to do the work, writing "The gender gap is all about the energy invested in school, not the intelligence".

According to Ms. Theis, "When girls talk about grades, you hear stress and effort. They worry about competition and vocalize their anxiety over grades. When admired males talk about school, the conversation is often a contest to see who could put in the least amount of effort to do the best". Who could succeed if they aren't invested in the work? And who is to blame if the individual is unwilling to work for such a goal?

Lest people think I'm biased against boys, guess again. In my own home I get to closely observe the "teenage male malaise" in action with my son Ben Jolitz all the time and the "teenage girl grade anxiety" from my daughter Rebecca Jolitz. Yes, he's a gold medal science fair winner, an Intel Promising Young Scientist scholarship grantee, and all that stuff. And she's a dedicated student and artist. I am very proud of them both. But I'm not blind to the "I aced the test without studying" stuff - especially because, as Rocky said to Bullwinkle, "That trick never works".

Having run predominately male engineering teams in a predominantly male technology industry after getting a degree in a predominantly male major (physics), I'm pretty used to this form of bravado - demos and project code walks can be very grueling, kind of like Psychoanalysis meets the Inquisition. And there's nothing guys love more than to point out the "loser" flaws in other guys. So just go ask any teenage boy (who actually will give you the time of day) if any of the guys he hangs with have "ever tried to ace a test without studying and flamed out" and you will get story after story of loser city. Like a gambler, they always go back for one more "spin of the wheel" thinking "this time I'll win". The "aced sans study" myth is too powerful a drug and too cool a boast. Girls do it too, but if "...the admired female is smart, concerned about school and active in achieving her success", once burned means twice shy.

As Ms. Theis notes, "Males still want and expect success, even as they disown any appearance of working for it". She feels that this attitude is an attempt to rebel against conformity. At this point, with a little more experience under my belt, I'd have to say that while notions like rebellion are sexy, this takes a back seat to two little words - "bragging rights".

And bragging rights, unlike a credential, are rarely subject to close scrutiny - even when you don't make the grade.

Fun Friday: DSL Debacles, Celebrity Linux, and Ubuntu

Tom Foremski of Siliconvalleywatcher.com has picked up my little meditation on how telcom companies keep competitors from serving DSL even if they don't want the business (see DSL Debacles and Competitor Cheats) with the headline "Lynne Jolitz tries to get DSL on a DSL line". We've got a few comments on this one relating to dark fibre which some folks might find interesting.

On the celebrity front, I've been waiting for the ultimate celebrity distro, and finally it's here - Paris Hilton Releases Tinkerbell Linux. Now, I know that ever since 386BSD everyone and his dog does Unix releases, but I'm gratified to see the dog finally get her due. And unlike my rather dry technical discussions of OS open source, Paris has added the touch of glamour to Linux that I've always wanted to see in BSD: "First," she writes, "I think The Open Source Movement is, like, really hot. I've been dabbling with coding for ages, but it's taken me some time to find the courage to release it. As you know, I'm a shy and modest person, and wasn't sure if it was good enough for the strict standards of the coding community." What's next? - Brittney Linux, the kind you can dance to? :-)

Finally, it probably comes as no surprise that there is a lot of source contributor turnover in open source kernel projects, what with the low user esteem, nonexistent pay, endless "such terrible food and such small portions" complaints, burnout and rampent piracy. But usually it's the "control freak" kernel developer that's blamed for everything. So it's refreshing to see why major Linux contributor Matthew Garrett left Debian for Ubuntu: ""In his own blog, Garrett relates his gradual discovery that Debian's free-for-all discussions were making him intensely irritable and unhappy with other members of the community."

Why he likes Ubuntu? The "technical code of conduct" (which means talk distro and code, not politics) helps, but the key is to see an end to discussion and make a decision. "At the end of the day, having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases."

I wish them well. 386BSD also enforced a code of conduct similar to Ubuntu's today. But unless there is genuine respect for their developers, the poison of ridicule can erode even the best of intentions. I've watched Ubuntu take some of the best ideas we pioneered a decade ago with 386BSD Release 1.0. I hope they learn from history and don't just imitate it.

Fun Friday - CNET says "The only good girl geek is a dead girl geek"?

As the last slice of pumpkin pie vanishes and the pot of turkey soup slowly simmers on the stove (and yes, I do make turkey soup - it's good for you), a few items for post-holiday tech cheers and jeers...

A guest columnist on Matt Marshall's VentureBeat, in an attempt to appear Internet-saavy, made a slight mistake - he called Vinton G. Cerf, Google exec, Turing winner (among other honors), ICANN chairman, and co-inventor of TCP/IP, a man who has also served on the Board of one of my companies, InterProphet, "Vince". So naturally I pointed out this slight error. And you'd think that would be the end of that since anybody can google Vint - he's all over the Internet for goodness sakes!

But alas, assuming someone will use the power of the Internet to avoid looking the fool is just silly I suppose...

Or perhaps I'm just too "snarky" (no, I don't think it's a compliment) according to a would-be Internet commentator who scribbles that "Vince" is an acceptable way of abbreviating "Vincent" and I shouldn't get all worked up about it, which might be OK if Vint's full name wasn't "Vinton". So back into the breach to correct a shill who's fingers are faster than his brain cells: "After all the work he and the other Internet pioneers have done to provide "instant access" information, it seems it takes very little effort to google "vint cerf" and read his official bio". The moral of the story: even when you're obviously, completely and utterly factually correct, there's always an idiot awaiting a debut.

Speaking of debuts, CNET, a tech news organization that I used to enjoy until it went downhill about a year ago (option scandals and cheap hires will do that) has made my 2006 top-ten idiot in journalism award, and that ain't easy. And Dru Lavigne, who took them on, has made my "top ten smart tech women" list for her Top 10 Girl Geeks list for women in technology. Dru put this list together in response to CNET's completely disingenuous list consisting of five long-dead women scientists, a non-existent cartoon character, a long-dead novelist, a non-tech living "social" newsreader for the BBC, and two non-tech living celebrities - signalling pretty clearly to girl geeks everywhere that CNET believes the only good girl geek is a dead girl geek.

Wisely, Dru split the list into "influential females in open source" and "influential females in the IT corporate world". Also wisely, I made the open source list (#7).

Dru notes that it took her a half hour to create the list "...mostly because I have a terrible memory for names and had to use Google to jog my memory". [I'm gratified that someone else uses google to look up folks - given all the difficulty over the spelling of Vint's name, I was beginning to worry Google wasn't used by anybody except trackback spammers]. Dru also notes that these names aren't exactly star-quality in the tech press, adding "Be honest now, how many of these had you heard of before? How come these aren't household names within the geeko-sphere?".

I can answer that question easily - the so-called tech journalist crowd has always been, shall we say delicately, a mite hostile to real technologists, male and female, perhaps because most of them hated their middle school math teacher and lived in fear and loathing of chemistry and physics (if they even took the class). As such (and I swear to you this is true), many of them can barely type their name into google for vanity searches, much less interview a technologist or scientist, and they get all intimidated reading anything deeper than Reader's Digest "Humor in IT" (well, maybe they don't have a "humor in IT" column yet in RD, but if there was humor in IT, I'm sure RD would publish it).

Because of this anti-science bias coupled with the demands of editors to produce "tech-stuff" (yep, I've heard it that way), a smart woman technologist is the most unnerving interview of all to these folks - unless, of course, she's already dead. Yes, yes, I know - I've written a lot of articles in the trade press myself, so it can't be all bad, right?

Seriously, most editors are very cynical about the intellectual capabilities of their readership. And paradoxically, most bright technologists are poor communicators and writers. So as media is undergoing a tremendous paroxysm while transitioning from print to online, the desperate pursuit of eyeballs through celebrity (or as Dru succintly puts it "...in which universe does the word geek bring up images of Paris Hilton, Daryl Hannah, and Lisa Simpson?") and ranchiness prevails (the SF Chronicle's "Open Source Sex" column comes to mind - not that I object to the content of such a column if you like that kind of thing, but does it have to exploit "open source" in the title when it has nothing to do with open source? Isn't open source exploited enough as it is by companies like Microsoft and Oracle? Can't women write about real open source issues without appearing like common sluts?).

I'm afraid that the open source community just hasn't been that supportive of its women members over the years, and our own internecine ideological wars - especially in operating systems - has led to a very hostile environment and a tremendous loss of talent, especially among women (not to mention caregivers of children and parents). A lot of men and women would say this is starting to change for the better. So to see the more mainstream press moving towards a disparaging view of women in tech just as we're starting to see a resurgence of talent in open source is disappointing. But there is hope - Dru says she didn't have to work very hard to create a very creditable list. So maybe things are starting to look up. After all, hope springs eternal - even in Silicon Valley!

Fun Friday - Apple Phone Home, Supremes on Science

Apple, the Benetton of compsys, is poised to announce their own blackberry ripoff for the stylish crowd, as Michael Kanellos notes. Now, I know a lot of people who live by their blackberries, but I guess they're not the glitterati - just the people who, like, invented networking, or designed the chips used in these devices - so I guess they don't count. Anyway, after settling that unsettling patent conflict, RIM I suspect isn't worried...

Kanellos is correct in his evaluation of Apple's competitors in this market - all established, ruthless, and adaptable - and that experience in building this product matters. Actually, experience building any product matters, but Apple has often gotten away with slipshod manufacturing glitches that corporate and international customers would never tolerate. Service also matters in the cellphone biz - reliability, coverage - you don't want to be lost in the woods without a signal as some CNET editors have recently discovered. Finally, making a fancy video phone work well is a lot more than just hardware - just walk into any cellphone store and make a salesman take and send a video clip from one of their fancy video cellphones - you're likely to find they don't know how. All in all, Apple had better deliver well here - but I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.

Cornelia Dean in the NYTimes wrote an interesting piece on the conflict between scientific method and legal reasoning that is worthwhile reading for technologists. In a revealing moment during the current case before the Supreme Court on regulation of carbon dioxide to control greenhouse gases inducing global warming, Justice Scalia was quoted as saying "Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I’m not a scientist".

Lest people think this is a recent problem, a patent attorney who argued before the Supreme Court many years ago told me that during one case involving computer methods and software one of the "lesser lights", in a recap over the algorithms used, moaned to another justice "We're not going to hear about logarithms again, are we?"

Strange Friday - Anna Nicole, Jim Gray, Nowak

The last few weeks have had such a bizarre series of news items that I must admit have distracted me. Some of these items involve people I actually know or things I really care about. Others are simply too strange to ignore, especially when they make the front page of the NY Times and every other news organization I read.

Jim Gray, lost at sea! Jim and I have spoken and corresponded about the work I've done at InterProphet with SiliconTCP and no drop routing over the years. He's an old Tandem alum and colleague of William's (see The Google Test). It's so startling that I almost believe if I sent an email to him right now telling him I disagree with one of his observations, I'd get an email right back clearly and succintly debating me point-by-point.

Rumors are flying. Jim's in Mexico swigging tequila. Jim's sailing to Australia. Jim's hiding in a cove. All silly statements. Jim's a family man and almost obsessed with his ideas. Anyone who knew the man knows that. But until this mystery is solved, there will be mean-spirited badmouthing, and the only people it hurts are the ones who meant the most to him - his family.

Then there's the incredible astronaut-spurned story of poor Lisa Nowak, married with three kids to a fellow US Naval Academy colleague and Mission control specialist. Astronaut and US Navy Captain, she crash-landed after she was dumped by fellow astronaut US Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein for a younger Navy colleague, Captain Colleen Shipman, weeks after her marriage broke up (and reportedly also caused Oefelein's divorce the prior year). The 900 mile frantic drive in diapers to Orlando, the absurd attempt at intimidation, and her obvious distress are as plain as the mugshot taken after she was apprehended. Nowak's family is shocked, her kids and husband are probably sad and angry, the astronaut corps is upset, and I'm sure PAO is fielding a lot of unpleasant calls. Lots of "conduct unbecoming an officer". I predict many meetings, interrogations, medical evaluations and examinations -- with Oefelein's conduct meriting very close scrutiny in this affair. An absolutely horrible day for NASA.

Just last week my kids completed months of work on a research paper that outlined how we could begin to colonize Mars by 2027 for the Exploravision science competition -- a competition that asks the students to envision a technology 20 years from now.

Rebecca spent many hours devising and revising the Mission Manifest. Ben spent a great deal of time working on the orbital dynamics. They both researched every project on the NASA drawing board and incorporated modified versions of the NASA CEV, LSAM and EDS to control costs and encourage reuse. Of course, they did come up with a very unique transport vessel. I don't know how they will be judged -- after all, it's not like they're describing an IPOD brain implant or virtual reality "Second Life" that gets the marketers excited -- but space is a big vision. Maybe it's too big for these times and expresses an optimism that jaded adults refuse to acknowledge. But the juxtaposition of these two events underscores the need for compassion, optimism and wonder. Perhaps an emphasis on these elements necessary for creative living might have saved a Nowak from the abyss.

In a way, NASA PAO must be breathing a sigh of relief. Only the death of a sex symbol like Anna Nicole Smith could have pulled Lisa's travails off the front page of the New York Times. If you look at the comments, many people are genuinely affected by her death. Most of them are women. Many men see her as either a tool of others or a slut. Of course, her entire life was dedicated to indulging the slut image some men prefer, but the fact that her death has had such an impact is relevant -- and connected -- to the Nowak story. Both stories describe a woman's fall from grace into infamy. Both are characterized as "love-gone-wrong". And both invite moral judgments on each woman's life as mother and wife, while the men-in-their-lives conduct remains essentially unblemished. It's no surprise that women are more sympathetic than men to both these women -- it appears should a girl decide to live by conventional rules of conduct like a Nowak to climb to the top, a cheating man can still take her down, and if a girl plays by the media's rules of conduct to become a "celebrity", everyone (including the woman herself) will conspire to take her down. Sin and redemption -- without the redemption.

Of course, life is much more complicated then this. We don't know what happened in Nowak's life. We don't know if what we have read about Anna Nicole's life was true or just a fabrication of a publicist or tabloid journalist (I use the term journalist loosely) -- so just like Nowak, we don't know what happened in Anna Nicole's life either. And even with all this Internet babble and analysis and blogging, I doubt we'll ever really know. And that's as it should be. There's a secret part in every soul, and it deserves to remain secret.

On a sideline, I've noticed many fans of Anna Nicole recalling the death of Princess Diana and comparing the two. While I don't feel the same sadness her fans feel at ther death, I do remember how sad I was at Princess Diana's death. I found her admirable. Perhaps some of my personal admiration and interest was due to the fact that she and I were born about the same time (GMT), and I suppose I felt she was a kindred spirit. It was not a logical feeling, but it was an understandable one. So I'm not going to run down those folks who are upset at Anna Nicole's passing. Let them feel the loss. Maybe it will make them act a bit more kindly to one another.

The American "Can't Do" Culture

In the aftermath of the terrible slaughter of 32 students and professors yesterday at Virginia Tech, there have been a number of calls to action on staunching the proliferation of guns, and counter-calls for more guns. My son came home from school, and the first thing he asked me was "Is it true that the first thing Bush said after the Virginia Tech killings was he supported gun rights?" The answer was - Yes, he did. The blood was still wet on the ground and ideologues were commending the killer for possessing (although not using) guns.

If it appears like madness prevails in America to us Americans, it is a certainty to those outside of America...

I've found UK media like the BBC and The Times to carry more balanced, thorough and thoughtful coverage of what happened than America with it's "survey of the moment" swing media can accomplish. The view from our brothers and sisters across the sea is that we are a society driven by our passions for individuality to such a degree that all sense of community, compassion and sense have vanished. "But why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?" Gerald Baker of the Times asks us. His answer is that "the simple truth is that Americans themselves remain unwilling to take drastic measures to restrict gun availability. This is rooted deep in the American belief in individual freedom and a powerful suspicion of government."

But the answer is simpler than that. Speaking as an American, I've watched our cultural watchward devolve from "can do" to "can't do". We can't find a resolution to the problem of weapon proliferation not because there are not many different ways to handle the problem -- there are many things we could do short of banning all guns or arming babies -- but because we'd rather be "right" than good. Or as Larry Ellison famously put it, "It’s not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail."

It's not easy to be an American when you have to live up to (or down to) the standards of Larry's beloved philosopher-king Genghis Khan: either win and live or lose and die. So most people don't even play the game -- they opt out, using "can't do" as an excuse to avoid the high-stakes risk of failure. We "can't do" anything about (take your choice): guns, immigration, poverty, hate, globalism, climate change, and so forth.The student-killer who destroyed so many lives yesterday took the opposite tact -- he gambled that if he was a loser, he'd make everybody a loser. Same game, just a different outcome.

Technology isn't immune to this disorder. When the Columbia was destroyed, the first reaction from NASA was one of "Oh well, what could be done?" before any real analysis had even been done. I was so shaken by this response -- this wasn't the NASA that I knew -- that I penned a letter to Aviation Week asking why people were so eager to say that nothing could have been done before the facts were in. It was published as the lead letter in the Columbia disaster issue, and I was told later that it had influenced a number of people to press for a complete investigation. During that investigation we found out why NASA had responded in such a manner -- the entire organization had become so disfunctional that mandatory meetings were ignored, studies were dismissed, concerns from engineers were squelched, and management was locked in political battles over fiefdoms and budget. Nobody was minding the store. And everyone was engaged in avoiding blame (becoming the loser). Can't do was in full swing.

In the computer biz, "can't do" is a mantra. We can't innovate because we "can't do" technology cheaply. It doesn't matter that historically technology starts out expensive and moves towards a triple-zero point (zero volume, cost, power) only after extensive deployment and use. Outsourcing is a good idea when you carefully plan and manage your contracts, and have a good product roadmap, but it can't save you from unsound or premature business decisions. The hope is that once it is outside the country and the scrutiny of coworkers and investors, nobody will notice if anything goes wrong. Can't do is great political cover.

Can't do empowers the current business practices of outsourcing innovation long before it becomes viable or profitable in a desperate attempt to cushion the shock of bottom-line development costs. The result is simply technology transfer to other countries, where they may or may not use it for their own purposes. But with it out of sight and mind, nobody will be blamed when it fails. And what do we as Americans get out of it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Can't do saves the jobs of the incompetent and the devious.

The Internet is as old as the space shuttle program. It wasn't invented yesterday, nor did it become the powerhouse for companies like Google until it had been in use for over 20 years. Yet we still want that return on investment now, or else we'll be considered losers in the game of life.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. We let "can't do" ruin our lives and excuse efforts to bridge viewpoints, instead rushing for safe harbors to hide while ceding the public discourse to extremists.

Please, everybody. Can't we try for a little "can do" for a change? I know that's risky, but isn't it better than hiding away while bullies kill our kids and steal our future?

And to our concerned cousins across the sea, I ask you for your compassion. It's hard enough for an addict to kick a heroin habit, much less a national disorder.

The Game of Life - Windfalls Matter, Education Doesn't

Nicholas Kristof painted a portrait of China as the emerging leader of this century through their serious and aggressive education goals in an article in the NY Times a few days ago. He compares his own daughter's "excellent schools in the New York area" to a peasant school in Guangdong Province and finds it lagging two grades behind -- an appalling discrepancy. When well-traveled, well-educated affluent Americans pale in comparison educationally with China, you'd think Americans would begin to understand the "competitiveness" concerns Silicon Valley has been screaming about for years. After all, if the top classes of American society cannot compete with the children of peasants, what does that say about American competitiveness in a global economy? Yet America does nothing more than wring hands and complain while China pulls ahead. Why?

Perhaps the witty essay by Lawrence Downes ("Love and Debt") today holds the answer. In his exploration of the newly revised "Game of Life" from Milton Bradley, he found that players who chose to forgo education and have children did much better in the game than those who deferred having children, spending time and money on education. Debt just happens, with no downside consequences -- no foreclosures, no homelessness. There is no connection made between career, salary and education. In fact, to make the game more interesting those who are not educated were far more likely to win lotteries or other windfalls than those who are educated. In the world of Milton-Bradley, a doctor is more likely to end up poor than a "strawberry picker". A degree is simply a means to more debt, and not a means to social mobility.

In the real world, we laugh at such silly notions -- after all, it is a game and games aren't real. We all know that debt is real and inescapable. Credit reports make or break obtaining mortgages and using credit. Interest rates can escalate on the basis of one late payment, causing people to spiral deeper and deeper in debt for old purchases. It isn't debt that "happens" -- it's poverty. So why should we care? Perhaps because the games we play very much reflects our biases and wishes, sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

Salaries and job security are tied very much to education. Those who start off poor and ignorant are statistically likely to remain that way if they do not better themselves through education. In Silicon Valley, there is a tremendous demand for educated workers. Whether you believe there is an H1B visa crunch or not, it is inescapable that engineering and programming jobs are increasingly going overseas to get the job done. This is not just because of lower salary costs (the costs of administering an overseas contract when factoring in time, travel and oversight ends up more in the realm of two-to-one, not the 10-to-one HR drones like to quote), but because countries like China and India are turning out more and better engineers, scientists and programmers than America.

According to Computing Research Association's 2005-2006 Taulbee survey of Ph.D.s in computer science and computer engineering (CS & CE), instead of increasing the number of CS and CE doctorates, they have been steadily decreasing since the dot-com boom, so that the "number of new CS majors in fall 2006 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,798)". China and India are simply picking up the slack. In addition, the CRA notes that "54 percent of CS doctorate recipients in 2004 held visas", up 8 percent in two years. As Americans shun these majors, more and more foreign students are taking their places in American universities. And those students are the ones Google and Microsoft and the next big startup will hire.

Very few people who hang around the house watching TV and having kids ever win a lottery. Those divorced from society are much more likely to end up in prison or hospitals. People who are impoverished through lack of education, access or debt aren't likely to get that magical windfall -- that get out of debt free card that Milton-Bradley promises them. In fact, according to mathweb's lottery calculator, if I had to pick six correct numbers in any order from 1-49, the odds of my winning are 1 in 13,983,816! But this doesn't even scratch the surface -- restrictions on ordering and numbers reduce the odds significantly. According to PBS Frontline, the odds of winning the California Super Lotto Jackpot are 1 in 18 million! Despite the enormous reality distortion field that surrounds the occasional "lucky" lottery winner (Steve Jobs RDF is nothing compared to this), the truth is it isn't going to happen to most everybody -- just a few folks. Is that a good basis for financial security? According to a 2006 survey from the Financial Planning Association and the Consumer Federation of America, "one-fifth of Americans (21 percent) [and] 38 percent of those with incomes below $25,000" believe that winning the lottery is the means to personal wealth and debt mitigation. And it should be noted that 30 percent of those with no high school degree believe in a lottery saving them, versus only 8 percent of those with a college degree.

While people who have a college education often have more relationships, opportunities and financial leverage, those who have not built this economic network rely on fantasies of wealth. Milton-Bradley built this fantasy into their world, with a twist -- the lower the status and profession chosen, the more likely the player to get windfalls. The higher the status and profession chosen, the more likely the player would accumulate straight debt with no windfall potential. The message to children who play this game is pretty clear -- don't bother to go to school, stay home and have babies, play the lottery and everything will be fine. Hmm, I don't know about you, but that's not the way every millionaire and billionaire (yes I know a few well) in Silicon Valley got their wealth...

To be successful, a game must hold the promise of a world that we wish were real. Games reflect our values and aspirations. If Americans didn't believe more in lotteries instead of education, why would they push games like this on their children?

Bill Gates has recently joined with Eli Broad to spend $60 million to push education to the political forefront as a nonpartisan "single-issue initiative". According to Bill Gates, "The lack of political and public will is a significant barrier to making dramatic improvements in school and student performance". Mr. Broad adds that "We’re trying to create a Sputnik moment, to get people to see that our very economic future is at stake." So far, even with all their money spent on advertising, they are having little effect on the political campaign. Not surprising, really, when three of the major Republican presidential wanna-bes don't believe in evolution (so much for healthcare and biotech investments) and Democrats spend their wad on other matters like Iraq.

This disdain for education as the key to success is why America will lose and why China will win. But Milton-Bradley will probably sell a lot of games. And isn't that what America is all about?

Fun Friday - College Textbook Sticker Shock

I took my daughter Rebecca shopping for her textbooks a few weeks ago at the college bookstore. I walked out stunned with a $300 bill for a soft-cover math book (used) and a soft-cover set of chemistry books (new). And I didn't even buy any English books yet!

So Michael Granof's op-ed piece Course Requirement: Extortion in the NY Times hit a nerve with me, and probably every other parent writing those college checks. Granof, a professor at the University of Texas, proposes a "site licence" approach to textbooks based on the projected number of students enrolled, just as a corporation purchases software. Books would be available electronically, or could be purchased in hard-copy form for an additional fee. Instead of being in the paper-pushing business, publishers would become more like software companies focussed on managing contracts for their materials, managing revenue streams, and finding new material and providing updates and revisions. Colleges and professors would be willing to experiment more with classes and new authors, because they wouldn't be locked-in to the used book market. Textbook authors would find more small markets for their books - it's all electronic - and could focus on new work and timely revisions for a global economy with deterministic royalties. Libraries and bookstores could invest in "instant book publishing" machines and materials (one machine sampled built an entire book in 15 minutes) and would no longer be risking significant investments in academic inventory (both new and used). And finally, students would find their out-of-pocket expenses for books get more in line with other segments of the book industry.

Hey, as a technologist I'd rather deal with electronic forms of content than hunt for a book on Amazon. As a textbook author, I'd love to spend my time writing new works in operating systems and networking and getting it to students and professors right away rather than worry about whether my older books are being resold and resold until they're obsolete. And as a parent, I think we'd all like colleges to be in the business of educating our kids, and not in the business of book inventory management.

Fun Friday - Nobel Peace Prize for Gore Validates Global Climate Change Concerns

Well, the Nobel Peace Prize committee decided that global climate change is important enough to award the Nobel to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some are already protesting that concerns over rapid changes in the environment have nothing to do with peace, but it's pretty hard to promote peace when people start warring over rapidly-dwindling resources as drought, flooding, and loss of habitat threaten their very existence.

Of course, there are many people still in denial that their lifestyle can and does impact the earth - we're actually all in this together. There are also many political and commercial interests who fear that recognition of this problem worldwide will impact their private deals before they mine out the money, and like the tobacco companies of an earlier generation feel compelled to promote and package rhetorical nonsense to muddy the waters. There is no absolution in denial, but there is vindication in an international award.

Silicon Valley, the heart of technological innovation and a lot of "green" investment, has embraced the concept of global climate change and there is a great deal of investment in this area. This is a complex problem demanding real long-term commitment and funding, and since it took us a while to get to this point, it won't turn around overnight. But we're well-educated, innovative, and opportunistic, and there's a lot of gold in new clean technologies, so expect the unexpected! Until we get there, I hope you enjoy this short video "tone poem" entitled Global Warming - A Threat to our Life. It reminds us there is still hope for our world. I think the Nobel committee would agree.

Silicon Valley's Middle Class Dilemma

Almost everyone I know likes to claim that they are "middle class". Yes, I know I live in Los Gatos, a nice little town that in many ways resembles Santa Monica or La Jolla. We've got a great library, a Christmas parade (I once marched in it with my kids as "California pioneers"), a nice neat downtown, several great parks, and what is generally considered a very good school system (although my daughter decided to short-circuit a slow educational malaise for Ohlone College after 7th grade). Yet we're all "middle class". Not wealthy. If pressed, someone might say that local resident Steve Wozniak is probably wealthy, even though he eats at Bakers Square during pitches.

But wealthy? No, most everyone I know (even several VCs) don't feel wealthy. Oh, they hope to be someday. But with $5,000/mo mortgages, insurance and taxes going into Silicon Valley tract houses that went for $30,000 new in 1967, they definitely feel middle class. And scared they'll lose it all if something - anything - goes wrong.

The problem with definitions of "middle class" is that they don't take into account debt load and age. Many people who appear affluent in expensive areas of the country have very high debt load, dominated by mortgages. The only reason they survive is that good old mortgage deduction on their taxes.

People buy houses based on their current income and debt (unless, of course, they fell into the subprime disaster - note that many people who qualified for better ended up with these mortgages because brokers made more off of them). What if they lose their job, or their medical insurance tops out and they have to go out-of-pocket on medical bills? In this case, the fixed asset value of their house doesn't help much, unless they can unload it at a profit fast, because once the debt load rises or you can't validate the old mortgage with a paystub, you can't refi and pull money out of that asset. But you still have to pay mortgage, taxes, maintenance and all that stuff. And in costly areas like Silicon Valley, that adds up real fast.

And finally, if you're over 40, there's a good chance you'll not get as good a job, pay-wise, than you had when you were younger. We see it all the time here in Silicon Valley. It has nothing to do with education - I see very educated people here past 40 saying they're "retired" rather than admit they have no job prospects. It has nothing to do with connections or talent - many of these people have established track records of products and successes and everybody knows it. It has everything to do with age. Nobody wants an employee over 40 because 1) the medical costs go up - I paid $70/mo for a 20-something in my engineering group in one of my startups and he had a major car accident that cost Kaiser plenty, while several 40-something engineers had monthly medical costs 10-times that and never got sick - and 2) old guys and gals aren't "cool", and investors and the few old survivor executives only want to be surrounded by youth to feel young.

Maybe that's where the real Silicon Valley "wealth gap" lies. The super-rich winners believe they are immortal and beautiful (even if they are old toads) because they are rich, and only wish to deal with others like them (the current minimum in venture circles these days is about $100M) and they use the young to flatter their egos and not necessarily to line their pockets. The people who made them their successes - the generation of hard-working scientists, engineers and businesspeople that created the wealth - are disposable because their very presence is a reminder that the "wealthy" got there because of them.

So what happens to the guy who made that open source project succeed, or that gal who got those semiconductor patents together? They're "retired". Put out to pasture. There are no second chances in Silicon Valley.

The only bright light in this little meditation is that we should be happy they still use "retired" in the conventional sense, and not the Blade Runner sense.

VC Loses Weight, Music Loses a Legend

SV is buzzing about former Mobius VC Heidi Roizen's new vanity music CD Skinny Songs. Since leaving the investment game, Heidi decided to dedicate herself to losing weight (don't you wish you had the time and money to do that?), but was dissatisfied with her exercise music. So she turned "songwriter", crafting lyrics like "For years we were together, every Saturday night,/we'd go out dancin', you'd hold me in tight,/but you were unforgiving and you wouldn't let me grow/Now I can't put you on - but I can't let you go" (Skinny Jeans) and "I use wills of steel, at every meal, to control my every bite/And with my xray vision I can see without a doubt/There's a skinny girl inside me, I've just got to let her out" (The Incredible Shrinking Woman - isn't that the name of an old scifi movie too?). She didn't write the music, sing, play, or produce of course, since she doesn't know how, but she does know how to fund a project...

Meanwhile, Dan Fogelberg, a true artist, died of cancer yesterday, and the world got a little bit dimmer somehow. Dan was one of my first strong musical influences along with Christopher Parkening (I learned to play guitar from Parkening's classical guitar book and no, I don't use a pick because classical guitarist use their fingers!). I played and sang Stars and Be on Your Way while other kids were listening to disco.

I haven't played his songs in close to twenty years I'm ashamed to say. When I have time, I spend it on my own compositions (and yes, I write the music, lyrics and sing and play, but my husband does all the digital production, and no, it's not a business, it's just for fun). But even after all these years, I still remember them.

So I pulled out the guitar last evening. The fire was warm and so was the music. I sang Longer while my husband listened and my daughter drew. Our cat Tiger came over from where he was sleeping, jumped up next to me and leaned his head against the guitar body.

Thank you Dan for your wonderful music. You inspired a young girl to pick up a pen and a guitar and sing for the pure joy of it. I know your heavenly debut will be wonderful. But we will miss you here.

Fun Friday - Jim Gray Tribute Scheduled

Jim Gray was lost at sea a year ago, but he is not forgotten. His family has joined with UC Berkeley, the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society to hold a day of technical sessions in his memory on Saturday, May 31, 2008 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley.

Jim was a Turing emeritus and computer science legend. There will be speakers discussing his contributions to fault tolerance and database transaction processing from notable companies like IBM, Tandem and DEC, as well as his later interests at Microsoft Research in handling massive processing and storage for astronomical and high energy physics datasets. This promises to be a fitting farewell to a man of dedication and intellect.

Smarter is as Smarter Does

The desperation for eyeballs on news websites has led to a lot of "People" styled columns, especially in the NY Times. But I just couldn't resist commenting on the "Who's Smarter: Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg?" column, if only because I know something of the players and their backers.

I know journalists like to fancy that there's something special about succeeding in this field - after all, they're the ones who write the story *after* the success, but rarely bother to return calls about our "nifty new product" when we're nothings. And since they come in late, they are rewarded with spoonfed twaddle by the PR guru, whether it's "Pez trading made me rich" (EBay) or "We baked wafers in our oven and that's that" (HP). Journalist eat up this stuff, because 1) you've done their work for them by writing a story any idiot can comprehend and 2) maybe any idiot - even someone like him - can steal an idea and become rich. But life is a bit more complicated and interesting than that.

So what's it really about? It's all about connections, and BillG used his most effectively. It was a lot harder in the late 1970's / early 1980's to get investment than today, and the amounts were a lot smaller. Bill made his initial win with BASIC - in fact, he got really mad when the HomeBrew Computer Club was giving out tapes of it for free and wrote a "cease and desist" letter demanding royalties. HomeBrew was the group where Woz showed off his nicely polished cherrywood box Apple prototype BTW. I believe it's now residing in the Computer History Museum.

A lot of folks ask "Why is Bill Gates so cheap?" Since there wasn't a ton of cash available like today, Bill ran the company pretty frugally, and revenues on sales were important from the beginning. It did help that his dad was an investor and had the connections in his home town. In Silicon Valley, getting a million was amazing for a computer company, much less software. In 1982, we got less than a quarter of a million in venture for a company that did an entire pre-Intel computer company (the processor alone cost $400) from motherboard to operating system and we did it and sold it (for those interested in ancient history, computer wise, this was Symmetric Computer Systems, and the processor was the National Semiconductor 32000). The point was you had to build fast and sell fast. There wasn't a lot of cash in the kitty then, and you had to show you could *make* money.

FaceBook, in contrast, while a great concept, doesn't have the same constraints. It isn't capital-intensive like the computer hardware and software companies of the 1970's-1980's. They don't have to demonstrate quick revenue (I doubt they know what a pro forma is, but you had to do up a good one and stick with it in the 1980's). And they have access to huge amounts of cash unthinkable 20 years ago.

20 years ago, a typical venture fund was pretty small by standards today and investments under $100k were commonplace. Now $500M+ funds abound, but the number of companies they invest in are about the same. It's ironic that it's never been cheaper to do an Internet company but the amounts invested in them are hundreds of times that of companies like Microsoft. This also implies that home runs instead of base hits become the driving focus, with even more cash plowed in to win.

So who's smarter? Maybe both, but for different reasons. BillG because he knew how to use his connections and make money quickly, and that mattered to his generation. And the Zuck, because he knows how to make a big noise with a lot of cash, and that seems to be what matters for his generation. You see, even in an age of deconstruction, context really does matter.

The Number You Have Dialed, "S U N" is No Longer in Service

Sun Microsystems is gone. It is no more. It has met its maker. It is pushing up the daisies.

Given Sun's long sad decline and incredible mismanagement, many are probably happy to dismiss it as a has-been that never actually did anything - grave dancing is a peculiar Silicon Valley tradition. But Sun's demise does matter. Sun was the annoying colleague that was occasionally brilliant and creative but also had some very irreligious and disreputable habits that were unforgivable but too often forgiven. As it aged, it became a sotted gouty Henry VIII of Unix, irritable and tyrannical.

But there are also the memories of a young strong idealistic Sun, freshly spun out of Berkeley and eager to take on King Log IBM and DEC the Usurper. We shared the same roots - Berkeley, BSD, courses, research. We all bumped shoulders in the early days of Berkeley Unix and earnestly argued over technical proposals and RFCs now long forgotten. We left Berkeley to go out and build entire operating systems and computers, invent languages and protocols and processors, and create new businesses - and we fought for each and every dollar and technical advantage along the way. It was a blood sport, and we enjoyed it.

Several years ago I was talking to a student at the Vintage Computer Faire about the Symmetric 375 and Berkeley Unix. I had put together a board illustrating the birth of a venture-backed computer systems startup for those too young to know - photos of the empty offices, prototype wirewrap boards, checks to AT&T for Unix licenses and a tape of System V which we never used because we used Berkeley Unix, biz plans, reviews, articles, investment prospectus and materials, technical drawings, product materials. As I went through the life cycle of the investment, the systems built and the market created, he was fascinated in a "Gee, this is King Tut's tomb" way. When I finished, he started to go into the usual GenX I-don't-care mode, saying "Well, it wasn't a Golden Age, but...". Then he stopped, thought a moment, and corrected himself - "Actually, it *was* a Golden Age, wasn't it?". In a "new age" of marketing gimmicks and established players where innovation is considered bad form, I could understand his confusion. He'd missed out on all the fun.

So raise a glass to the Golden Age of Systems and the Demise of Sun. But do not mourn overly much - there will be other Golden Ages - but this one has most assuredly passed.

Can we "Tawk"?

Phil Bronstein today asked the unmusical question "What Tech Buzzwords Make You Go, "Huh?". He brings up terms like "interstitial" (like, look it up buddy, it's in the dictionary) and "open source" (if you don't know this one by now, you're doomed).

But what if the technical term is, to put it delicately, eff'd up?

A story from the legendary editor of the late great Dr. Dobbs Journal, Jon Erickson, told to yours truly to illustrate: One of the cover stories was on Thompson AWK language and as editor he set the enthusiastic tone (yes, some folks get really excited at the thought of AWK) with "TAWKing with C++". However, somebody wasn't minding their p's and q's (when they actually did mind p's and q's). When the magazine cover came back for final review it said something slightly different - "Twaking with C++".

I don't know if meth-heads read DDJ, but Jon wasn't too pleased. Reportedly everyone could hear it thrown across the room and wham into the door. Oops.

Later, as a joke, the staff put together a fake cover with another "twak" reference. This is why journalists are heavy drinkers and why editors have short tempers.