keeping simple

Category: software business

  • fault tolerant patent

    So I don’t understand the novelty in the methods here over the Glazer patent. The replica supervisors provide interfaces to the replicas that are the same as the interface provided by the operating system. Thus, when one of the replicas makes a call to the operating system, the corresponding replica supervisor is invoked and the…

  • Great software patents: fault tolerance

    software patent

  • The coming bust in venture cap

    According to Forbes (thanks to Trevor Loy for the link) The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its history. Returns are pathetic for most funds, the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut, and with the shares of many big publicly traded tech…

  • the male weirdness of computer science

    ELLEN SPERTUS, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “”Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different…

  • Avaya’s bizzare business model

    Years ago, we got some equipment from Avaya – not terrible, but not wonderful. A junior tech with no signature authority signed a contract with them that says in big letters on the top “until 2005”. In 2007 we got rid of the equipment and now have spent over a year attempting to cancel the…

  • Investors and software patents

    Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.

  • SCADA system security in the internet era

    This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere. Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies transferred control of generation and distribution equipment from internal networks to supervisory control and data…

  • 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 …