Do You Smell Smoke — Oops, there goes a Server!

It takes time, but it’s lovely when you get borne out in an article, as Martin LaMonica discusses how Google manages to handle all those search queries. And it’s really simple – get cheap X86 machines, use an open source stripped-down kernel, fiddle with the filesystem to do simple block transfers with a simple triad mirror (master – dual slave) configuration. So low-cost, easy, and direct.

Of course, I recall the enterprise guys at the time laughing at using commodity cheap servers for “real enterprise applications”. So I guess Google isn’t a real enterprise application company, hmmm?

But there is a little nit in the ointment, so to speak. Power! Having lots of cheap servers and simple management reduces people overhead, but at the cost of much greater power consumption. As Urs Hoelzle, VP Operations and Engineering at Google says “”The physical cost of operations, excluding people, is directly proportional to power costs,” he said. “(Power) becomes a factor in running cheaper operations in a data center. It’s not just buying cheaper components but you also have to have an operating expense that makes sense.”

Girls Can Do Calculus and Physics and Astronomy and Look Nice!

Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed a psych professor who claims that girls don’t do calculus in high school because they didn’t do well in algebra in middle school (training their brains). Funny, she’s also got a book coming out. Her comments don’t jive with the research or studies, but, hey, it reinforces stereotypes and makes her money, right?

Perhaps we should interview middle school teachers on what they see “in the trenches”, or maybe we parents should take a glance at the honor roll lists. Girls are usually the A students in these subjects. Often the validictorian is a girl, which meant all A’s. More girls than boys are on the highest honors (all As). By this simple objective measure, clearly girls on average are training their brains by ” reinforcing and strengthening their skills in math and science” just as boys are.

All this nonsense about outside activities compensating for middle school boys increased ability (“building blocks and train sets”? – come on, she seriously thinks middle school boys are into this stuff?) without any serious objective measures and studies is academic doubletalk.

When Unbridled Competition Breeds Contempt for the Team

The computer biz is a very ruthlessly competitive profession, so it’s no surprise that our kids in Silicon Valley are also very competitive and individualistic. But there’s also the concept of the team working towards a goal. And when that basic underpinning is lost, so is respect. Contempt for members follows – whether we’re working on a new storage device or operating system, or on a robot.

So where are we heading? Julie Patel wrote a balanced article on why the very successful Gunn High School robotics team imploded, resulting in their disbanding. It contained enough to read between the lines as to what really happened. It’s a good Silicon Valley morality tale on how contempt can replace respect, suck in even “responsible adults”, and ultimately take out everyone on the team.

Why You Can’t Buy SpamQuiz!

I was puzzled recently when a friend couldn’t get his email through to me. We have our own spam filter we called SpamQuiz which nicely takes care of Nigerian pleas and lottery solicitations. SpamQuiz is not a product – it’s a project we did at TeleMuse Networks testing ISP correctness and email management. However, when I mentioned it on a special interest group email as part of our email changes a few months back, I found by the next day people were trying to piggy-back on our fame by “creating” a product called SpamQuiz for sale. Sigh. The world is full of crooks, isn’t it?

So just for the record – don’t buy SpamQuiz thinking that’s what Lynne Jolitz, open source pioneer and co-inventor of 386BSD – the First Open Source BSD Unix Operating System, SiliconTCP and Massive Video Production (MMP) created and uses, because it’s not from us! And it’s not a product for sale because 1) we’re not in the spam business and 2) we’re not crooks. We just build cool technology. If you’re a researcher or want to try it out for fun, I may help you – but that’s not a product.

But back to my friend. Since he wasn’t a crook, why was he getting trapped by SpamQuiz? Well, since the point of SpamQuiz is to catch nonconforming ISP’s and their bad emails, it was likely that his ISP had some small issue that could be cleared up. It couldn’t be all bad, could it? Or maybe not. So we traced the email. It’s a wonder he get anything through anybody because his ISP looks like Spam Central.

Things I Hate About the Net

Seana Mulcahy in today’s MediaPost talked about “Things I Hate on the Net”. Now, she’s not a techgal – she a marketing / branding babe – so among her listed items the usual litany of email scams, popups / popunders, spyware, broken / dead links, site registration, poor integration (what else is new), audio surprises (you know, those suddenly singing or talking little bursts when you’re on a conference call – it’s happened to me), and click-happy sites. Most of these are products of bad site design that are easily remedied – fire the marketing department and get a good designer. But some of these are tech-derived marketing inventions (surprise!) intended to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in our crazy-quilt Internet. We wouldn’t see much of the latter right now if a fundamental issue was resolved. And it’s actually a business mindset, not just a marketing or tech mindset.

So, “What do I hate about the net?” Simple – you can’t evolve anything new or tune something to get around problems, because everyone bets on failure and wants to exploit it for their own private purposes. I hear this all the time from technologists, inventors, and businessmen. “Take no risks”. And it’s betting on failure that spawns all these customer plagues today that Seana so loathes.

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”. 🙂

Come On Charlie Brown, Just Kick the Football

Love the “Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown” quote by Nathan Brookwood in CNET about the Dell / AMD relationship. It always seems so close, and then it slips away. Intel always holds the relationship.

Nathan may be right in saying last year it came the closest ever because of Intel’s slips in so many areas. But instead of running with the ball, AMD fumbled by assuming they could rely solely on their 64-bit advantage for the sale. That isn’t enough I was told. One exec who’s negotiated agreements with Intel and AMD and companies like Dell told me that AMD needs to get “the whiphand” on Intel in some way to get the Dell close. AMD doesn’t have that whiphand. And I know why. It came up chatting with an editor who wanted to know the background on Intel’s preannounced new product. You see, he knew I’d been there, so he wanted the story again. So here it is…

Oh to be a Xorn!

Got around to reading Bill Gurley’s MMPORG article and enjoyed the walk down the Unix role playing game lanes. When I talk to the LA crowd about MMP (Massive Multiplayer) gaming, they always love the connection to Rogue, Adventure, and Zork. In fact, on the Symmetic 375 we have the best versions of rogue, and since the kids now own the machines (20 years old, NS32000 BSD Unix, and work perfectly – I have PCs that have failed in 2 years), they prefer the 375 versions to the “enhanced” ones today (see A Wandering through the Vintage Computer Faire).

I remember telling Jim Anderson (Adventure) years ago about how I was inspired by his invincible thief, so when I was asked to create an arcade game (PackRat) that would appeal to girls in 1982 for Atari Coin-Op, I put in a character of an invicible rat who would pick up the valuables and walk off (the graphic artist took it further and she put the rat in a leather jacket – he was very cool).

A ROSE is a ROSE – Reordering Segment Engine

Ashlee Vance wrote that Intel will be introducting “I/O Acceleration Technology” to “attack greedy TCP/IP stack” consumption – in other words, latency through the stack. “Customers often find that their servers spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with network traffic when they should be hammering away on application data.” This sounds very familiar – we told them years ago that “all processors wait at the same speed”.

Back in 1997, when I filed a provisional patent on just such an approach, I had an interesting meeting with Intel’s processor side. We called the technique ROSE then, for Reordering Segment Engine for a product we envisioned called the Network Accelerator – and yes, this was before Adaptec and Alacritech and all those other TOE guys. It was the first in a series of parallel processing refinements, which dealt with the layer 2-7 issues of TCP/IP (the discussion was under NDA).

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.