Take a look at the illustration below. It shows the market capitalization of the 10 top IT suppliers from this morning, in the wake of Wall St shedding over a trillion dollars of value. Of course, the tech sector is not the focus of the crash, but still considerable value has been lost.

If you want to compare pictures you can look at this bar chart (April/08)  , this one (December/07)  and .this one (Oct/Nov 07). A rough summary of the various companies is as follows:

The biggest falls in value (measured against the highest stock value in the last 12 months) have occurred with Yahoo! and Dell (both about 48%). The Yahoo! decline is easy to understand, since its stock price peaked with the Microsoft bid and Dell has been suffering for quite a while.

The next two biggest losers are Apple and Google (both having declined about 45%). Again this could be characterized as no surprise given that the stock prices for both companies were clearly persuming fast growth which neither company is now likely to achieve. Additionally Apple in the consumer market and Google in the advertising market are most likely to suffer revenue declines (or much slower growth) in the coming months.

The least declines were with SAP, IBM, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, all of whom major in selling to the corporate market. So if the stock market is saying anything here, it’s saying that those revenues are less vulnerable than consumer revenues right now – and that seems sensible enough.

However, I doubt if the market is indicating much in a definite way. In a market as volatile as this, financial distress often forces stock holders to liquidate some of their holding in a “dash for cash”. This can happen unevenly and lead to value anomalies that right themselves in time.

First The Myth

If you don’t read your Greek mythology, then you may only have heard the name Pygmalian from the George Bernard Shaw play of that name – on which the musical My Fair Lady was based. Thus you may think that Pygmalian is a woman’s name, as I once did. In fact Pygmalian is the name of the King of Cyprus who made an ivory statue of a woman, which he promptly fell in love with.

He muttered sweet words to it, clothed it in robes, put a necklace around its neck and brought it gifts. On the festival of Aphrodite he prayed to the goddess of love that she find a wife for him that was the image of his beautiful ivory maiden. Aphrodite did better than that. When Pygmalian returned home and kissed the ivory statue, it became flesh. Her name was Galatea and she was soon Pygmalian’s wife.

Shaw plagiarizes the myth to tell the story of Henry Higgins, a modern day Pygmalian, who makes a bet that he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, into a “lady” capable of impersonating a duchess and fooling the nobility at a social gathering. And of course, Henry Higgins eventually falls in love with the faux duchess.

The joke that Shaw is playing on the audience is the suggestion that merely by teaching someone the right accent and sufficient small talk to get by, you can indeed transform a flower seller into a duchess. You can’t. You are for sure putting lipstick on a pig, and when you do that the pig looks less attractive rather than more attractive. And no-one is fooled.

The Palin Phenomenon

In the US presidential election, John McCain and his the Republican allies have clearly watched the Shaw play and come to believe that the scheme is feasible. Like the original King Pygmalian they had a precise image of what they wanted; an up-and-coming conservative attractive preferably female politician, whose views are strongly aligned with the Republican base and who can be a political presence on the national stage. Unfortunately there was no such individual.

Sarah Palin almost fit the part, except for one big detail. In her ability to handle the media, she is Alaska’s equivalent of a Cockney flower girl. And so some Henry Higgins equivalent steps forward and makes a bet. He says “give me a month or so and I’ll have her handling press conferences better than a seasoned press secretary and she’ll out-debate Joe Biden.”

So they give her one speach to deliver at the Republican convention, which she pulls off rather well, and then they keep her from the press…

But unfortunately the latter day Henry Higgins discovers, after many mock debates and press conferences that you really can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Then the first time they let her face the press alone she blows it – and having blown it, her confidence collapses. She actually starts getting worse, with every press interview, because what little confidence and poise she may have had has disintegrated.

A Toxic Combination

The McCain campaign may well lose this election anyway. The majority of American voters will blame the Republicans rather than the Democrats for the financial crisis and that will likely be decisive. However the combination of a very old candidate with a VP that America has no confidence in, is going to cost votes that McCain can hardly afford to lose. He’s old and if he dies, she’s president. Palin’s presumed incompetence makes McCain’s age an issue and that makes his health an issue too.

The competence of Palin has now become a major talking point and it will remain a talking point until election day unless the McCain campaign ditches her. And for that to happen, she has to walk out into the snow without being told to – otherwise her sacking will become a talking point, and reflect on McCain’s competence.

Right now the odds on Palin withdrawing are getting shorter and shorter…

As the US election approaches, the paranoia about electronic voting machines grows. It is strange that the most technologically advanced nation in the world has so many problems with producing and implementing reliable voting machines. It is also a little bit bewildering.

The level of failure of electronic voting machines is bizarre to say the least. You’d think that before any electronic voting machine could be deployed in the US it would have to be certified as having bullet-proof security and perfect reliability. No so.

The US Democratic Process

Before I dive into this topic, it’s worth explaining something to those who don’t live in the US and have never experienced a US election. First of all, it needs to be understood that, depending on where you are in the US, the number of votes you cast on election day can be very high. It varies from state to state, but you can be voting for the President, a senator, a congressman and a whole swathe of local officials including judges, sheriffs, constables and maybe even democratically elected bottle washers.

You may also be voting on propositions that have been added to the ballot on anything from gay marriage to the environment. So you may be casting many votes. The whole thing is made more complex by the fact that the names and voting possibilities change from district to district. Now you can simply “vote the slate”, which means voting for every single candidate that your party (Democratic or Republican) has put forward. In that case, one button is all you push, but you still cast many votes. However the voter may prefer to be selective, in which case you go through the whole “slate” contest by contest.

It naturally follows that electronic voting – where an electronic device presents you with screen after screen of choices and you select what you want – makes a great deal of sense. And, into the bargain, you can make voting machines more accessible for disabled voters and they can be multilingual too.

Flawed Machines

The only catch is that voting machines have to be secure and impossible to compromise. Unfortunately trying to rig the vote seems to be a local sport in some parts of the US and the voting machine industry seems to have great difficulty in producing a product anyone has confidence in.

If you do a Google search on electronic voting machine failure you get over 300,000 references, including many referring to accusations of actual and potential election fraud plus some simply describing bizarre (and incorrect) vote machine behavior. There’s a specially large amount of criticism for Diebold machines, which produce no paper record of votes cast. In fact problems with Diebold machines led to a satirical video from the Onion in February with the title
Shock, As Diebold Accidentally Releases Result of 2008 Election Early.

As far as I’m aware vulnerabilities have been found on every voting machine currently on offer in the US. However that is not surprising because voting machines are computers and there are thousands of ways of compromising the average computer, whether it runs Windows, OS X or Linux. Nevertheless it is not beyond the wit of man to invent a system that is pretty much bullet-proof. The banks, for example, run thousands of ATM machines and they don’t easily get compromised. There are also tens of thousands of personal gambling terminals issued by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which don’t get compromised.

Getting cash or placing a bet are, of course, different transactions to registering a vote. But designing safe electronic voting machines is a soluble problem.

[SinglePic not found]You may have stumbled on the news that Oracle is now in the hardware business or to be more precise, it is in the database engine business – and by database engine I’m talking about hardware specifically built for running big database applications – and in respect of big databases applications, I mean big data warehouses.

On Wednesday Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, unveiled the company’s Exadata Storage Server and a Database Machine – shown in the adjacent illustration, with the words Extreme Performance written down the side in red. The hardware is made by HP and you can think of this machine as being an implementation of the Oracle 11g database implemented over Oracle RAC with a complete Oracle software stack, plus Oracle Enterprise Linux.

From a software perspective much of this is familiar territory. The smart part is that the hardware has been designed for lightning query performance. Oracle claims that the HP Oracle Database Machine will run queries 10x faster or more. You can think of the whole configuration as having two parts; up to 8 HP Database Servers running Oracle 11g connected to 14 Exadata Storage Servers. The Exadata Storage Servers marry Intel multi-core processors with blocks of memory to specific disk resources, so that query processing for each disk happens “over the disk”. That’s where the performance comes from.

Does The World Need This?

It’s a logical question to ask. Database engines have been tried before (remember Britton Lee), but the only one that saw much success was Teradata. Other ideas like ICL’s CAFS (Content Addressable File Store) delivered the performance. But performance is never the problem with devices like this, it’s whether the overall architecture has longevity.

The fact that this is Oracle makes a big difference of course. The database giant has a right to try to move the industry along a different path – and I’m sure that this machine will see some quick adoption. On the HP side of the equation some commentators may wonder whether there isnt a product clash here, with HP also offering its excellent Neoview – based on the Tandem architecture. But first of all, HP is simply providing the iron, it is not selling the database machine. Secondly, Neoview performs best when dealing with mixed workloads whereas the Database Engine specifically targets multi-terabyte data warehouses. It is not a head-to-head clash although they will doubtless meet in the market place.

A more interesting question is how the HP Oracle Database machine stacks up against Vertica. (See this posting for details of Vertica). My immediate impression is that Vertica is both faster and cheaper, but that’s just an impression – we’ll get an accurate knowledge of this once there have been some real world bake-offs. Technically though, I suspect that compressing the data and pushing as much of it into memory as possible, as Vertica does, will turn out to be a better long term solution for performance.

The Need

One thing that is beyond dispute is the need for better database technology. Data volumes keep on doubling every year and companies keep on wanting to analyze that data. We are now entering the era of petabyte databases and there’s no reason to believe that technology built for the gigabyte era is going to be adequate.