Erdos Had The Number First

So Dell just hired the fourth horseman (OK, he’s not that bad, but its not a good sign) X-Motoroller Ron Garriques
. Here’s the deal, Moto is dead. They got lucky with the Razr but they are getting their lunch eaten by the Koreans.

And this guy is one of those people who thinks that if they just make their products pretty everything will be fine. Well, here’s the problem:  When you comodify yourself, you can’t differentiate.  Dell makes a commodity product, they are the GM of the computer world. Which is the source of their problems, the Chinese can out-dell Dell.  And so, now they are thrashing around, looking for Silver Bullets and they’ve pounced on this guy. I’d bet they’re seeing Apple be so successful and think “hey man, if our boxes looked good we’d be able raise prices!”. The problem is that people already understand Dell to be a company that produces comodity boxes.  They’re not going to see a nice looking Dell and convert any more than a Porche driver buys a Chrysler because she found one that looks nice.

The other problem is that Cell phones are not computers.  People can afford to make fashionable phone choices because they’re cheap.  Edgy computers are not cheap, and a cheap edgy computer won’t sell. Dell already proved that with Alienware (which had a really nice placement last week in USA Networks’ Psyche).   They’ve hired the wrong guy on many fronts.
Dell?  Sell!

It’s funny, I never thought about Flash as an application development platform. Its not that I didn’t know you could write programs in ActionScript, it’s just, well, it’s just Flash. I also don’t think this is a positioning problem that Adobe can easily rectify. One of the bigger issues that Flash faces, in my opinion, is that is has some pretty serious Usability Problems and presents issues with search engines and the stuff like that. Sure, Adobe has a download-able accessibility kit, but that is something else rather than a core component of the architecture.Then I read Bruce Eckel’s “Hybridizing Java” posting and I now have to think about it. On one hand, Mr. Eckels mentions that he has been hired by Adobe and that may color his feelings. But he is, again in my opinion, one of the more level-headed technologist out there. I like his books, and pretty much consider him to be someone whose opinion deserves consideration.

I honestly think that my consideration would be a lot easier, though, if the development environment for this stuff didn’t cost about $1000.

I know, I already sound like a breathless fanboi. But trust me, this is not just a johny-come-lately to the XML camp expressing praise. What I really love about XML isn’t really XML itself but the applications that can be written with it. Like the XMLResume library.

If you have ever written a resume, you should go now (don’t even both reading the rest of this posting until you See The Glory) to XMLResume on Source forge and check it out.

The biggest thing that has me right now so, so happy is the ability to filter elements of your resume. I’m in the camp that you should always target your resume to each employer. This is because it is up to YOU the job seeker to present yourself as attractive to the potential employer. You should never rely upon the innate brilliance of whoever is reading your resume to translate it for you.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Way back during the Great Bubble I had an interview. I was then working for a very large Options clearing firm, and we were processing a little more than half of all of the options trades done in the world. I figured that the people who were interviewing me would understand these things. The interview started out with one guy saying “You’re coming from a pretty small environment, what makes you think you can cut it here?” They did, indeed have a largeish environment. I was stunned. In my head I thought “Huh? you don’t get it: my CEO’s bonus last year was more than the gross sales of all the companies you’ve ever worked for combined! What makes me think I can cut it? Are you nuts?” and on and on and on. The problem during this interview wasn’t this guy. He was, after all, interpreting what he read on my resume according to his own experience and world-view. The number of server and admins was not very large comparatively. If I had been coming from a warehouse operation or some other data-center he would have been quite correct. I didn’t offer him the information in a way that he could have understood.  Now I can, and XML made that possible.

What a wonderful world.

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.