keeping simple

Category: business

  • Cleantech and history of software

    I’m on my way to Linz, Austria to participate in a panel at  an event called Cleantech Venture Forum. We’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking at ways to save power in data centers and mini-data centers (which may be a term nobody else uses).  If we look at the history of…

  • Patent trolling and guilty knowledge

    Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing in their own inventions. They got there by using other people’s inventions. [cite] No kidding.

  • US Elections and startup/small-business economics

    I’m surprised that John McCain’s proposal to make health insurance benefits taxable has not received more notice. For a startup, cash is expensive and hard to find and it is a tremendous handicap for US startups that we have to  pay a huge amount for insurance for employees. But under current US tax law, the …

  • Meaning of concurrent programs and IP

    Most of the new draft of the Concurrent Programs paper has to do with trying to specify problems and solutions in synchronization via an atomic “compare and swap” operation. Even these operations are surprisingly complicated once put under the microscope – or not so surprisingly complicated if you think about the details of using or…

  • clouds versus pcs

    George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But, in this article, Gilder reports on some smart people. The sheer massive use of electrical…

  • linux kernel

    From LinuxDevices Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers, working for more than 100 corporations. An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day. A new kernel is released approximately every 2.7 months. Since 2005, the kernel has grown at a steady pace of 10 percent…

  • who should control the internets

    Op-ed in the NYTimes from Damian Kulash Jr. of Ok-Go We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to…

  • end to end design versus BOM design

    Grossly simplifying, some products are Bill of Materials (BOM) products and some are Designed products. BOM products come to market via a process of generating a parts list and then integrating. In place of designers, BOM products have buyers and integrators. In place of innovation, BOM products have standards. The standards are preferably “industry standards”…

  • Sorcerers apprentice at ATT: Security and privacy and reliability collide again

    AT&T considers reading all the packets that cross its lines. Quite an interesting proposal. Tim Wu’s take The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such…

  • Google’s engineering culture

    Article in the New Yorker on Google contains a fascinating description of a product design meeting: Page and Brin had wanted an upgrade of an existing product, and they were unhappy with what they were hearing from the engineers. At first, they were stonily silent, slid down in their chairs, and occasionally leaned over to…