Fun Friday: Google Test Positive, Laser Bits, Gender Blues

While we were working on getting all those Jolix 386BSD fans their Porting Unix to the 386 articles (we have been swamped BTW – and yes, there’s more coming), a few other items of interest this week…

If you made money on Google (or if you wished you had made money on Google), you might try using The Google Test to evaluate your next investment. According to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, “Entrepreneur William Jolitz posits a contrarian view on YouTube, praising its expensive use of bandwidth as a key to its success. Read on about how YouTube meets the “Google Test.“

Bandwidth-driven business models may seen counter-intuitive to a technologist – after all, we like to make products that make money, and when we fail we tend to face a firing squad. So I can understand it when a techie gets all worked up about those $1M/mo bandwidth bills without getting anything in the way of dollars back. It’s always bothered me that companies like Google, YouTube, and MySpace seem to violate laws of nature. But guess what, kids – making these big Internet moves doesn’t seem to have as much to do with moving $$ product (after all, any techie can upload a movie or make a GenY webpage with a plethera of packages) and more to do with getting eyeballs and mindspace. Yes, this was true when I was at IGN Networks way back in the dotcom bubble, and it’s still true today.

So I heartily recommend that tech guys and gals read this little piece, not to depress you, but to allow you to learn how those top-flight venture firms like Sequoia make their decisions. After all, if they want to spend the money, aren’t we up to the challenge of making it work out?

On another exciting topic, looks like Intel and UC Santa Barbara have made a a promising breakthrough in using laser light to make a much faster interchip switch. According to the article “The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second.” As one of my engineering friends said when we chatted, this makes low-power SiliconTCP all the more valuable (see InterProphet for more information).

Finally, an interesting essay from up-and-coming Renkoo CTO Joyce Park on women role models in business and her dismay over the HP Dunn affair. Since I’ve written on this topic often, I couldn’t help putting in my own two-cents. 🙂

Happy weekend reading – there will be a “Google test” on Monday.

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.

When Video Kills Your Drive – Quicktime Waxes Track 0

Alright! Yes, sometimes I do read slashdot when it’s amusing, and the discussion of how you can create your own custom panic screen (or BSOD window) for OS/X via an API is amusing (my son Ben points this stuff out for me – he feels it’s one of his sacred tasks). Joke panic screens have been around a long time, but the battle over “how much information to give people” has led to many not-so-amusing battles, especially when we were creating 386BSD releases and did the Apple approach as an option long before Apple switched to BSD and did the same thing we did. I like information and transparency, but not at the cost of frustrating and annoying lots of people…

But aside from this old debate, probably the funniest *real* programming error discussed (yes Apple, you did it again) was the Quicktime capture bug a video engineer discussed, where it merrily fills up the drive with video and then, when you’ve run out of space on the disk, overwrites allocated blocks. Yes, allocated blocks! And where did that leave our poor engineer? With no track 0. Even Apple couldn’t put that one back together again – they had to give him a replacement drive, and that’s a complete admission of defeat, because as everyone knows Apple is very cheap. (Disclaimer – I have worked in manufacturing, and we all are very cheap in this regard because hardware returns make a nasty entry on your income statement – show me a systems vendor that doesn’t care about hardware returns, and I’ll show you a vendor that won’t please shareholders).

But the question begs – is there another way to recover from a track 0 loss on a disk drive? Well, we faced the same problem at Symmetric Computer Systems years ago, and we recovered that disk, albeit not the way you might think…

DSL Debacles and Competitor Cheats

OK, so I need DSL at a few locations, so I check out pricing, find a good reputable provider, and book the orders. We do this all the time, right? It’s a no brainer.

But what happens if one of those locations just happens to be in an area your phone company just doesn’t want to service? And worse yet, what if they don’t want anyone else to service it either? Do they let their competitor take the business anyway, leaving them with the line maintenance? Or do they say the line is no good? Well, if you think you can get away with it, why not lie? And so we begin a saga of how keeping competitors from serving an area can be as easy as the magic words “load coils”… because how do you prove they don’t exist, and that this is a ruse to keep out service (violating tariffs galore)? Well, I do know one way…

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?

Exploitation of Child Labor in Tech? I Can’t Hear You Over My IPOD…

This spring I interviewed a number of “The Tech” museum award laureates who have used technology to improve the human condition (usually extremely frugally). One of the most exciting innovators is Saeed Awan, director of the Centre for the Improvement of Working Conditions & Environment based in Pakistan. They tackled the problem of child labor in the rug weaving industry. Instead of simply outlawing the practice (which would be futile because these child laborers are the major breadwinners for their poor families), they “engineered out” child labor by developing a “improved, ergonomic and, most important, adult-friendly loom”. Coupled with economic practices (loom ownership allows bidding on lots by adults), this innovation moves the breadwinner status back to adults (primarily women) and moves children back to schools. A perfect use of technology and worthy of a “tech” award.

But where technology providers giveth, technology providers also taketh away…

Itanic Readies for Final Sinking – Multiflow and HP Tech Aren’t Enough

Alas, “itanic”, aka “Itanium” is resurrected again, this time debuted by Intel as a “chip with two brains”. But the critics aren’t impressed, and to save money for senior management Itanium soirees, Intel middle managers are to be tossed into the cold big blue.

Well, this is no surprise to those chip-watchers who talked down Itanium from the beginning. While Dell and IBM have fled to calmer X86 waters with the likes of AMD, HP has been steadfast, selling 80% of the chips Intel has shipped.

Of course, many wonder why HP is such a firm holdout when everyone else is baling? To understand how we got where we are, we actually have to ask the question “Where did the Itanium come from?” If you think it all sprang fully formed from Andy Grove’s head, you’re quite wrong. And you’d miss the story of long-ago acquisitions, agreements, and ambitions…

Berkeley Physics Bids Farewell to Nobel Prize Winner and Colleague

Last Sunday in the Great Room of the University of California at Berkeley Faculty club, the physics department held a memorial for Dr. Owen Chamberlain, physicist, activist and Nobel prize winner. Owen, who died on February 28th, 2006 after a long bout with Parkenson’s disease, was a protege and colleague of the late Dr. Emilio Segre, with whom he shared the 1959 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery of the antiproton.

Dr. Segre died in 1989 (the same year Owen retired) and the Berkeley physics department held a very nice memorial service for him as well. I suppose one reaches a “certain age” and memorial services start to appear on the calendar (don’t get me started with the ever-aging computer side of the business – one could end up going to funerals every month at this rate). My Berkeley physics advisor, Professor Frank Crawford, retired in 1991 and died in 2003 after also suffering from Parkinson’s for about a decade. While Dr. Crawford was known for his love of music, he had a bit of a rebellous streak, best exemplified by his “corrugohorn” – a length of flexible corrugated brass pipe that he turned into three basic horns: a bugle, a neck horn and a slide corrugohorn. He used to boast that he was the only member of the Berkeley physics faculty with a peddler’s license, and I think that is probably still true today.

Owen was a complicated man in a department known for strong personalities and beliefs. He was an activist involved in causes ranging from nuclear disarmament (he was one of the Manhattan Project boys and knew what it could really do) to free speech. He was one of the few people who dared to engage Dr. Teller in debate, because as Dr. Charles Morehouse recalled “Teller would drag everyone else around the stage”.

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.

Real Women and Men Like Technology

Well, I was planning to discuss why we don’t need MAC addresses anymore, but then I ran across this little google search on “women don’t like technology” and I was intrigued enough to check it out. Not surprisingly, even a small datacenter like TeleMuse Networks checks out some of the more interesting keyword searches once in a while.

While I certainly wasn’t surprised that the Lynne’s Blog entry entitled Why Women Don’t Like IT? Ed Frauenheim of CNET and Anthro 101 is right up there on page one, I was bemused to find the rest of the entries didn’t seem to have much to do with women and technology and what they think of it. In fact, except for the gizmodo reference to nagging robots, fluff about sex, health and humor (well, maybe humor fits) abounds. The whole page is singularly notable for its absence of relevence.

But wait – what if we change “women” to “men” and do another google search on “men don’t like technology”? Will there be a marked difference in the results, with in-depth technology discussions instead of the frivolous stuff we see in the women’s popularity domain? Are men taken more seriously than women in the world of Internet inquiry?