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Category Archives: Commentary
Life Imitates Political Art
I live in Austin Texas. Yesterday in Austin, in the most surreal event to happen so far this decade, a software engineer called Joe Stack (good name that, for a software engineer) flew his his Piper Cherokee PA-28 airplane, loaded with 50 gallons of fuel, into the IRS offices in Austin.
Joe Stack simply snapped. It was an irrational gesture born of a hatred for the IRS, with whom he’d clearly had an adversarial relationship for years. Joe snapped. He put a suicide note on the Internet. He drove his wife and child out of the house. He set the house on fire and then he got in his airplane and crashed it into the Austin IRS building.
Events like this happen in good times, but they seem more common in harsh economic times. OK It’s tough out there.
Political Art
This was no more of a political act that me putting the cat out at night. It happens every now and then. In America as elsewhere, sometimes people snap. The normal outcome is that they get a gun and shoot a few people, before they get taken down. They don’t normally crash airplanes into buildings.
The only previous examples of crashing an airplane into a building was the immensely political strike of 9/11 and the strange loner action a few months later when a 15-year-old boy crashed a Cessna into the 42-story Bank of America Plaza building in Tampa, Florida. This too was a political act, if a very strange one. The boy left a suicide note indicating that he acted alone and that he supported Osama Bin Laden.
However, in America right now, the media, especially Fox News (the broadcasting arm of the Republican Party), tries to turn everything into a political act.
“If you put your cat out at night, the terrorists win.”
I heard about this event over the phone by the way. Probably because I live in Austin. The local jungle drums may this time have worked a little faster than Twitter. My wife was on the phone to her boss (she was working from home) who was interrupted on the call by her husband who had just been told of the event that had happened a few moments before.
The Austin press and TV were all over it instantly – and well they might be, because all the footage of everything could be syndicated across the world. Reporters were out interviewing the neighbours of the guy. There were reporters at the airfield just North of Austin, where the plane took off and there were reporters interviewing the survivors who had evacuated the building. Luckily only a few people were killed. It could have been worse.
Watching the news happen, I noticed the usual misinformation effect. There were reports, for example, that the air plane had been stolen. Not true. One wonders where they came from. Two jets were scrambled from Houston, in case some larger terrorist attack was in progress, but it clearly wasn’t.
It Was Just Life Imitating Art
We are all capable of delinquent, destructive and suicidal acts. We choose not to do them, indeed we choose not to even think of doing them. We could buy guns and shoot. We could go on the Internet and find how to make explosives and then make bombs. We could derail trains. We could drop concrete blocks onto traffic from bridges. Society has no defence against a lunatic who doesn’t mind dying. It has no defence against someone who snaps. But socity is big. It can take hits like that and move on.
If this had been a gunman, it would have been “just another crazy shooter”. But this was an airplane suicide and all previous acts of this nature in America were political. This event was tailor-made for the political amplifiers of every description.
- He was white and not Islamic. So was he another Timothy McVeigh?
- He hated the IRS. So was he a Tea Party wing nut?
- There was (almost unbelievably so) an FBI office and a CIA office in that building. So is there a conspiracy here?
- Will Fox News claim that “he was driven to this desperate act by the Obama regime”?
- Will MSNBC claim that Glen Beck has incited such crazies to acts like this?
No. He just snapped, and killed himself in a very destructive manner. That is all.
Google's Nexus One Error
I had a long discussion yesterday about Google’s phone that kicked the ball up and down the street. It concluded in an agreement that the Google phone is a mistake. Here’s the rationale:
- The Nexus One is really not that good, compared to the Droid, for example, never mind comparing it with the iPhone. That’s bad news for brand reasons.
- Google is not a device company, yet and it shouldn’t become one. It’s a tough road. Look at the problems Microsoft has been having with Zune, for example.
- Does Google even have it to become a device company quickly or even slowly. Does it really have the ability, not just to build a phone, but to keep a phone competitive.
- If it becomes a successful device company (which is, I admit, a possible route for it) then it will lose all those companies that are enthusiastically queuing up to build Android devices (cell phones or net books or tablets). They’ll go elsewhere – to Linux probably. The Google app store will be damaged.
- Why put yourself in direct competition with Apple on Apple’s territory?
- Google’s real revenue stream in the mobile market is adverts. That means it needs to inveigle its way onto as many devices as possible (via its app store). A phone of its own doesn’t help.
Google should bury the phone and do what it does best. It should forget about Chrome OS devices too.
Having said that: Kudos to Google for standing up to the Chinese.
The Coming of the iSlate
Despite the Kremlin-like secrecy of Apple, words has been leaking out for almost a year now about the coming tablet or (as rumor will have it) the iSlate. iSlate is a brand that Apple controls so the current reading of the runes suggest that Apple will be announcing the iSlate at the ned of january and will be delivering them by march. The rumor is so strong that it has added about 5 percent to Apple’s stock price.
Apple’s competitors (HP, Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Nokia, Motorola, and even Google) are going to find it hard to keep up pace. In fact only Google is likely to be able to. For them, the problem with Apple is that it innovates as a matter of course. Rumor has it (and you only ever get rumor about what happens within Apple) that the slate has been in preparation since about 2002. Commentators, myself including, are convincing ourselves (on the basis of no hard evidence whatsoever) that Apple has another iPhone up its sleeve.
If it does, it will be game changing.
And there’s still another shoe to drop. The reason that Apple TV is such a moribund product is the the Apple genius engine has yet to put its finger on what the home media device needs to be. The Apple TV is currently a joke of a product, but deep inside you know that eventually it is going to be something much better.
I’ll do a full New Year review of Apple in the coming week, but right now my view is that the next decade belongs to Apple and Google. They are Castor and Pollux, although which of the two is mortal has yet to be determined. (In Greek myth, Castor was mortal but Pollux was immortal).
I wrote a piece yesterday about Firefox and why I’m abandoning it, I’ve also been writing a whole series of Xmas “words you don’k know” which currently includes the following words: #1 Hwoelor-tid, #2 Brumalia, #3 Protomartyr, #4 Dulocracy, #5 Pohutukawa, #6 Hagiolatry, #7 Sinterklaas, #8 Prolicide, #9 Apophoret
There are 3 more to be added before I’m done.
HP, 3Com and the Emerging Server Market
The financial markets reacted positively but not deliriously to HP’s announced acquisition of 3Com. What does HP’s acquisition tell us?
Well first of all, it tells us that Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, has a coherent and ambitious plan. HP is the biggest IT company by revenues (about $120 billion) and it’s a tough company to run. It has challenges. The printer market that served it so well now appears to be in decline. The PC market that was once so healthy is now in disarray. The only truly active part is at the low end with cheap netbooks and laptops, where the margins are thin and the Chinese are playing hardball.
When Mark Hurd took control from the somewhat unloved Carly Fiorina, these revenue shrinking challenges did not exist. Compaq had not yet properly been digested and the server market was in a much healthier state. Hurd embarked on a series of acquisitions including Mercury Interactive ($4.5 billion) and Opsware ($1.6 billion) to strengthen the software portfolio, EDS ($13.9 billion) establishing a large consultancy arm in one fell swoop, and now he has snapped up 3Com for $2.7 billion.
Knocking On Cisco’s Door
There’s no real mystery to the 3Com acquisition. HP is up-front in stating that it will compete head-to-head with Cisco. And that’s no surprise really, because Cisco announced its intention to dive into the server market about a year ago. You could say that Cisco and all the server vendors were on a collision course, but HP was probably the company in Cisco’s cross hairs, with its dominant share of the Intel server market. HP already had some networking jewels, with its successful Procurve switches and the acquisition of 3Com gives it a much larger customer footprint (especially in China) and a great deal more technology. So it’s game on.
Taking a broader perspective, what we are witnessing is a convergence in the IT industry. When we talk of Cisco, we’re really talking about the Cisco – EMC – VMware alliance, which gives Cisco a credible position as a “one-stop data center vendor.” We’ve never had such a vendor, HP is clearly heading in the same direction and it has a big consultancy arm that it can flex. The question I guess, is whether IBM, Dell and Oracle (with Sun) feels as though they have to join in the fun. We’ll be able to tell from customer behavior I guess.
Back to the Mainframe
From the perspective of the data center, we may be returning to “the mainframe days”, when you didn’t buy new computers so much as incrementally add to the configuration you had, boosting its power with more processing punch, memory or storage.
The server market is rapidly becoming a blade market which means you’re locked in to the blade cage. The networking is now the same, a cage into which you can slot switches or servers as you please. It doesn’t mean that data centers will fix on a single provider. Everyone understands that a vendor needs competition to stay honest. But it’s likely that the days of the commodity server are coming to an end.
Along with a few other people I noticed that in the wake fo the Great Recession, the server market collapsed much more steeply than anything else. The simpel truth is that virtual machines have freed up servers to deliver mor eof their power than they ever did before and buying server after server no longer makes sense commercially or organizationally
The game is changing.
What is Data? I Mean, Really, What Is It?
Let’s try to answer this question in a top-down manner.
A great deal of data lives in computers; exabytes of it. Recent estimates published by Caltech suggest that the world generates 2 exabytes of data per year, but that figure is itself growing. The amount of data we store grows by about 60 percent a year and there’s no end in sight. It just keeps on growing. Every now and then we have to invent a new “largest measure of data”; megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte and the very latest word in data volumes; yottabyte. A yottabyte is a billion billion megabytes. Right now there are no yottabytes of data, but there probably will be in a few decades.
The words “data”, “information” and “knowledge” don’t quite convey the utter importance of data within an organization. It is, in many ways, the life blood of an organization.
Before computers existed we kept information on paper mainly, but also stored it in photographs or on film. In those days we stored a lot less data, partly because storing it was expensive. Go back centuries, to before printing was invented, and we stored even less data. Books had to be written by hand, so data storage was really expensive. There was probably only a few gigabytes of stored data in the whole world, even counting copies of books. And there were monasteries whose only purpose was to write out new copies of the Bible – Xerox machines of a kind.
Continued here – clink on this link.
Note: This is a posting in a series of data integration postings that are being published by Pervasive Software.