Erdos Had The Number First

The funny thing about TiVo hiring is that they have the ability to put want ads on their own TiVo boxen. That, honestly, is pretty cool. My wife does usability work (and of course, Tivo is hiring Usability People), and even she was impressed.

The only problem is that it seems like they are casting a pretty wide net. I know, as a hiring manager in the past, when you put up a job posting you get deluged with resumes. Even if the job isn’t a cool job, and TiVo is pretty cool place to work (I suspect, you could at least get good discounts on the boxes).

The official google blog says No on
Issue: ClickFraud. Which is a good thing.  Consider this a retraction of some of my previous post on the subject.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the “perfect economic solution” to click fraud is to “let it happen”.

But is it really? In other media markets when the content provider makes false ad charges two things happen: The first is, as Schmidt points out, the value of the add deminishes and people are willing to pay less. The second thing is that advirtisers stop doing buisness in that market, which is the important thing about #1. Fraud changes the market, and it changes the market dynamics. Economic markets don’t function efficiently in the presense of fraud.

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How can we, and I mean the royal We of All Humanity, push innovation while retaining justice and humanity?

You may think “That’s crap, we’re doing it now.”  Well, I disagree with you.  I think that modernity is faltering, and that scares me. It scares me becuase i’m a _HUGE_ fan of modernity.  One of the reason I think it’s faltering is that the proliferation of choice and plenty is causing huge ammounts of ennui and people are reaching back to a romantized past of simple times.  This is not new,  ven Martin Buber in “I and Thou” noted that

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets and great teachers.  They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that commended to them live a wretched life

And he wrote that in 1923.  Way, Way before economists started noticing the paradox of choice.   Ok, so the problem is choice, then we eliminate that.

That’s no good either.  Central planning is a failure; markets work.  Without choice people are not free, and without freedom we are not completely human.   So what do we do?

What? you didn’t think I knew did you?  My arrogance only goes so far, it seems.

So,  it’s the worst violence that New Orleans has seen since Katrina and the chief of police says (in the Chicago Sun-Times) what:

Capt. John Bryson said police think the shootings were either drug-related or some type of retaliation attack. … ”I think the motivation we’re looking at is pretty obvious,” he said. ”Somebody wanted them dead.”

Somebody wanted them dead?  There’s five bodies riddled with bullets and all you can come up with is that someone wanted them dead?  Holy Crap!   Hey Chief, are you sure?

No, it’s not called Grendel, though it ought to be[1]. MS released the Windows Computer Cluster today and holy crap could this be an important technology for MS.

Why is that? The biggest thing is the integration with Active Directory. Now, I’m no MS fanboi, but AD is some pretty cool tech. Having this tool (the CCS) integrated with AD is important because it means that you can have your admins work in a tool they already know.

This integration, combined with the scheduling part of the CCS, means that you can define machines that are workstations by day and clusters by night. This is a big deal because, before this, you had to dual boot. Dual booting a rack of computers is a HUGE pain in the admin.

With this tool you could have your rack of 42 1U Quad AMD servers (with a total of 168 procs) service 336 office workers (at least) via windows terminal services, and then after hours run that whole thing as a supercomputer. Wash, rinse, repeat.

You would be very surprised how many organizations can benefit from this kind of thing (yeah, most of them are financial or insurance, but it’s still a lot). This tool is not a killer of Beowulf, but it will certainly make some waves.

Footnotes:

[1] I know, grendel got killed by beowulf, so maybe it’s not a name that marketers would pick. But it sounds cool, doesn’t it?

I woke up yesterday, as is frequently the case, by my nine week old son and I had a poem just sitting on the tip of my tongue and I thought “Wow, that’s pretty good. Better than the stuff you wrote before.” But then, when caught between the getting up and writing it down and staying in bed…of course I won’t forget I said and then. Wait … no I lost it.  And now I only remember it was there, but nothing of what it said.

So,  I’ve upgraded to the latest wordpress.  And I got a new theme.  I’m still trying to figure out the word-press theme engine.  It’s, well, not as straitforward as I would like it to be (but then again, if it was then nobody else would be able to understand it because it would be so back-asswards).

You have such fine clothes indeed
when he said he didn’t want a yes man
I believed him
well I believed what
I thought it was supposed to mean
but “Not A Yes Man” covers
so much ground
Not a No man has a slightly
different
sound and yet
I thought I was more Know
than no or
perhaps only just some Snow
and there was no
magic in that Old Top Had I’d
found only
echos of orphaned dreams
and why I
was melting
melting
melting
Gone from North to Eastern
Witch crushed
beneath Dorthy’s House
and those fucking Munchins
dancing and breaking into song because
their tormentor is gone
Really and Truely Dead
ding dong and
it seems that
he did want a Yes Man
after all

===========================

It’s been on year to the day since I quit my last day job.  The poem above I wrote the other day when I was thinking about that job, and my old boss.  Strange that.

Let’s put aside the fact that Sony’s PS3 dreams may not come true. Let’s put aside the fact that they are have released a bug-ridden DRM CD and then claimed they didn’t do anything wrong.

Lets talk about the fact that Sony owns the rights to Stargate AND Stargate Atlantis. Which is why they are not available on iTunes.

You see, I lost access to the SciFi Channel, thanks to the Worst Cable Company EVER: Telemedia (you can contact the Better Business Bureau for more on them). I can still see Battlestar, because it’s on iTunes.

Sony, hear me now! Let My Programs Go!