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 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.

When Marketing Fails, Technology Sails

This column is absolutely right about “clutter” on the Internet inhibiting effectiveness. And Cory Treffiletti is right in stating no one cleans up the “old methods” when introducing new ones. I suppose we all have that problem.

But when marketing fails, technology sails. The success of firefox is 1) security (e.g. block tracking), and 2) no pop ups (no ad clutter). Whenever I deal with a “creative” marketing group that thinks the world is one big contextless contentless commercial, I always see a failure in the making.

As anyone serious in this biz knows, “it’s the content, stupid”.

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?

Women are Scared of Search? Or Simply Pragmatic?

Of course, any survey analysis is as good as the people who construct it. I did quite a bit of it in my youth, and I was very good at it, so I’m very critical of sloppy work. And since most people aren’t very good at survey analysis, they certainly produce some incredible howlers – especially about women and technology.

I just finished reading a Just An Online Minute… Sponsored Results Naïveté article and I fell over laughing at the “results”. What do they conclude? Simply that women aren’t as “confident” of their search ability as men, despite being just as successful (or not) in their searches as men? And somehow this humility reflects on women badly?

Sure We’re Open Source – Not

Alas, apparently that silly press release last week has totally confused the writing fraternity into thinking the 1990’s were actually the 1980’s (see Fun Friday – Homer’s Illiad to be “Improved” for Silicon Valley). Aside from the fact that Clinton and Reagan were both absolutely adored by the American people, I don’t think the 1980’s were really enough like the 1990’s to easily confuse the two decades, do you?

In this piece in cnet, “Unix got its start at AT&T, but Sun co-founder Bill Joy was instrumental in an open-source variant developed at the University of California at Berkeley. For half the company’s history, Sun used this BSD version of Unix in a product called SunOS”. I wonder what they’ve been drinking today?

Back in the 1980’s, BSD required an AT&T source license to obtain source code – a considerable expense for a company. SunOS required an AT&T license as well. At Symmetric Computer Systems, to sell our BSD-based Symmetrix 375 computer required an AT&T license and we only used BSD – not System V! Afraid it was true for everyone. But that’s not all.

Mediapost Cyberbullying 101 – “Everyone’s Doing It”

Mediapost published an essay on cyberbullying – “Cyberbullying has suddenly entered into popular consciousness.” So it’s a new phenomenon, right? Nope, it’s been around as long as electronic communications made it possible. It just wasn’t as visible since there were fewer channels of communications, plus if someone acted up you could get them thrown off. Now, in a global Internet, there is plenty of places to hide and plenty of eyeballs for venom – you just gotta know where to look.

Fun Friday – Homer’s Illiad to be “Improved” for Silicon Valley

Well, given the egos in Silicon Valley, it comes as no surprise that a press release like this would appear. It was so inaccurate that the Wall Street Journal got fooled and then had to reverse themselves and say Bill Joy is not a “venture partner” after all. Steve Lohr of the NY Times commented “yes, I was amused by the selective and heroic description of Bill and open source.” Of course, the NY Times wasn’t taken in like the WSJ, were they (press gloating allowed).

What next? Perhaps a new version of Homer’s Illiad, but with Bill Joy as “Achilles” (now why is he sulking in his tent this time? did he finish that book yet?), Michael Moritz as “Zeus” of course (since he makes even Steve Jobs tremble, and that isn’t easy), and of course the beauteous and coveted “Helen” played by Bill Gates, with Larry Ellison as his ambitious and calculating understudy “Eve” (oh, how did “All About Larry” get into the script?). Umm, maybe I’ll skip the premiere.

My personal favorite is how Bill Joy invented the open source OS way back in 1982. Now, I may be a bit hazy about this – I was at Berkeley then after all – but I’m pretty sure I’m married to the Bill who invented the BSD open source OS and my Bill isn’t the Bill who also worked on BSD sockets at Berkeley (and that Bill isn’t nearly as sexy as my Bill).

I’m also pretty sure everyone had to sign source license agreements and follow all that other nasty compliance rigamorole, plus pay a lot to AT&T / Bell Labs (prior – Western Electric) for the privilege of working on a commercial BSD Unix like we had to pay at Symmetric Computer Systems in the 1980’s. In fact, didn’t Sun only get out from under those nasty AT&T / USL royalties in the mid-90’s (with a buyout)? Gee, I don’t know why anybody cared about Linux or 386BSD in the 1990’s if BSD was already open, and why Sun and everybody else signed those nasty license agreements with AT&T in the 1980’s, or why AT&T / USL sued Berkeley in 1992. Do you?

But it got me to thinking – who did really invent the open source OS? We’ve got a lot of choices, ranging from Andy Tanenbaum to Dennis Ritchie, so go ahead and choose right now Who is the Father of the Open Source OS?

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.

Fun Friday – Huygens Probe Has Landed Successfully!

The Huygens probe has landed successfully on Saturn’s moon Titan. Congratulations are in order to the European Space Agency (ESA) who built Huygens and to NASA who launched, and delivered Huygens via the Cassini orbiter. Huygens is now in communication with Cassini orbiter for later transmission to Earth.

Huygens landed and is transmitting telemetry! So it didn’t land hard, fortunately. But what do you think it landed on? Mud? Liquid? Rock? Or an unfortunate Titanian?