Well, it finally happened. The Turing award went to a woman. Frances Allen, IBM Fellow, began her career teaching FORTRAN in 1957 (the year of Sputnik) at a time when nobody really knew what to do with those big clunky room-sized computers and “computer science” didn’t exist as a discipline. By the end of her career, she had worked on parallel computing and high performance computing initiatives such as PTRAN, and also become a mentor to many younger scientists. An honorable career.
Moms in Tech, Really? Impossible!
The NY Times today featured an article on MomsRising, a “post-feminist” group that’s concerned about discrimination in the workplace against mothers. They’ve got a website, petitions, and all that, and of course are speaking a cross-politics lingo that everybody loves. I wish them luck.
So what’s this got to to with tech? Technology has been the bellwether for this country’s economy, and is the driver for the global economy. The pivotal works I co-authored which pioneered open source operating systems are commonly referenced today throughout Europe, Asia, Central/South America, Africa and the Middle East. Because of globalism, the US-centric dominance of a handful of companies no longer exists. Open source has been key to this.
So how do women fare in technology? Not very well…
FilmLoop and Alexa – When Fake Rankings Kill Companies
There’s much sturm und drang about the nasty setup and selloff of a little company called FilmLoop in the business community this week. While there can be much debated about liquidation preferences, drag-along rights and sharp practices, there is one issue relevant to the datacenter operator – the claim by some VCs that Alexa rankings are a good validator of an Internet company’s audience and future traffic. And now, since we’ve stepped out of money-land and into datacenter-land, let’s examine this assumption a bit more carefully. Is Alexa a good validator of a business, or not?
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.
Academics versus Developers – Is there a middle ground?
Jim Gettys of One Laptop per Child is engaged in a furious discussion on the networking / protocol list as to whether academics should take responsibility for reaching out to the Linux community and maintaining their own work within the Linux code base. His concern is that networking academics, when they do bother to test their pet theories, use such old versions of Linux that it becomes infeasible to integrate and maintain this work in current and later versions. The flippant academic response is usually of the form of “we write papers, not code” variety (which isn’t precisely true and actually then brings into question the relevence of said papers and the claimed work that stands behind them).
As Jim says himself, “If you are doing research into systems, an academic exercise using a marginal system can only be justified if you are trying a fundamental change to that system, and must start from scratch. Most systems research does not fall into that category. Doing such work outside the context of a current system invalidates the results as you cannot inter compare the results you get with any sort of ‘control’. This is the basis of doing experimental science.”
This is an old dispute, and one that has its roots in the creation and demise of Berkeley Unix (BSD) distributions. So perhaps a little perspective is in order.
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?”
Denice Denton and the Politics of Ugly
On June 24, 2006, Dr. Denice Denton, Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, leaped to her death from the roof of the Paramount apartment building shortly after her release from the UCSF psychiatric hospital. “Didn’t you meet Dr. Denton at Google?” asked my husband. “Sure did – I wrote about her” I responded as I struggled with the coffeepot (see UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology). “Why?”. I was totally unprepared for the next sentence: “She killed herself this morning”.
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…
Global Warming, Prop 87 and Investments in Silicon Valley
A few weeks ago, Stanford held their Global Climate and Energy Project workshop – three days of presentations on how we can innovate on global energy technologies to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The talks ranged from solar energy technologies to bioenergy storage to carbon mitigation / capture / separation / storage, plus a plethera of poster presentations. The key issue is a simple one – we’ve got to replace our energy needs – particularly coal – with carbon-free technologies to keep atmospheric CO2 under 550ppm. And that means changing our way of doing business and our way of selling lifestyles.
The Minutia of Getting a Flash Video to Play Right Every Tme
OK – you’ve got it all together. The video is ready to download and play, it’s tested, we’ve watched it, the flash works (or Quicktime or whatever vintage you prefer). We watch customers watch it over and over. Things are going great. Then, someone somewhere tries to download it over the web, and it fails. The refresh button is hit over and over, it continues to fail, and that disappointed person just gives up. Why didn’t it play?
Looking over the logs today provides a window into just how difficult it is to provide 24/7 perfect video streaming to any type of computer anywhere. These problems vex the biggest and smallest vendor because they are based on architectural flaws so fundamental that these occasional failures are impossible to guard against.