Dealing with Mean People – A Silicon Valley Manager’s Perspective

I suppose it had to come — the inevitable “What made that poor boy do such a horrible thing?” brooding and hysteria after the Virginia Tech murders. Already people are seeking to blame culture, video games, racism, conjectured bullying / criminal exploitation in his past, and so on, as if that makes it all understandable. Sadly, no matter how you slice it, nothing will balance out with the horrible crime this kid’s committed — the murder of innocents — and to spin wheels trying to do so misses the point. No action like this is redeemable.

Instead of focusing on a hateful monster, we should ask a different question. Why, when the world perpetrated a terrible evil on one man, who witnessed murder on a mass scale, suffered deprivation and want — who literally witnessed the face of evil during the Holocaust — did he give his life to save his students? Professor Liviu Librescu did not give in to meanness and cruelty, although his life was shaped by the meanness and cruelty of others. If anyone should have had a “reason” to be bad, he was the one. Yet he is the model of all that is good in people. He was literally “good” in times of evil.

Speaking as a manager, I’ve seen my share of hostile angry employees. Silicon Valley is extremely competitive, and some people don’t thrive in the pressure cooker of high-stakes startups…

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…

When Bad Things Happen – Cellular and Internet Provide News, Experience Overloads

Today a gunman at Virginia Tech went on a rampage, killing and wounding scores of people at two locations on campus. Details are still emerging, but there are some examples of how the use of Internet and telecommunications technologies has impacted both the school and the country.

There were four technology issues that have arisen over the course of this event: 1) problems with notification of the crisis via email to students affected, 2) overloading of the local cellular network, rendering student cellphones essentially useless, 3) the overloading of the university servers during the crisis, preventing students from learning in real-time what what going on from their school, and 4) individuals cohering conflicting information on news sites via Wikipedia and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Fun Friday: Social Media in Silicon Valley

The Social Media Club held one of their renowned discussions on trends in social media in Silicon Valley this week (at NBC11’s new facilities). Discussions were held in a “round-table” fashion on topics such as ethics in Internet media, tracking accountability in reports, localization of reporting, the diminishing value of professional journalism, GenY’s and community media, and many others.

I spent most of my time in ethics and youth media, but one of the topics fascinated me – the problem of enticing and overcoming resistance to viewing in-depth media (like news stories and thought-pieces) in a sound-bite Internet-minute world. It’s no mystery that there’s a lot of stuff competing for your attention, from screaming banner ads to link farms loaded with trash. On most portals (especially video portals such as YouTube) the flea market prevails – maybe you’ll find something good, but mostly it’s junk. And as junk rises to the top of the charts, more junk is tendered, crowding out works that actually might be good for you. The Internet, instead of appearing as a rich knowledge base of the world degrades to a monoculture of junk food media. So if you do have something of value, how do you convince a viewer that it is worthwhile to spend the time? And this is where Jane Austen and the telcoms come into play…

When Internet Rants Go Too Far – How Vulgar Commentary Masks Naked Power Struggles

Sometimes I have problems categorizing articles I discuss. Perhaps this item would have fit in “women & technology”, but I don’t think this is exclusively a “woman’s problem”. Since I’ve seen this since the days of Unix and experienced the brunt of it during the pioneering days of open source and 386BSD, I think it may belong in a broader category than that peddled by the vanishing newspapers.

Fun Friday: Turing Goes Pink

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.