A year ago tomorrow my friend Phil was killed as his plane crashed into the WTC. Phil’s memory lives on with many many people.
If you read this, please do something nice for someone today in memory of Phil - that’s what he would have wanted. It doesn’t have to be big - just help pass along some good will.
God Bless Phil’s Family.
Ray Ozzie on Tyranny, Terror, and Technology.
John Robb says:: “I have 95% of my PC’s processer available at any given moment. In a year that will probably be 98%, in three years it will be 99%. This model of the Internet is so messed up. The fact that over 90% of the computing horsepower on the Internet sits idle at any given moment is insane (in fact, 98% of my DSL connection is dead too).”
Question for John: what’s the utilization of your car?
Very interesting discussion about platforms. I’m sure this isn’t the end of this dialogue. (Response from Ray Ozzie with pointer to original note from Joel)
As an exec in a small software company, this is incredibly relevent stuff. Based on my past experience I definitely agree with Ray’s quote “…there is no question as to whether Apple or Microsoft or IBM or Lotus or Sun or Novell will have conflict with their ecosystem”.
John Robb discusses possible futures for Grid Computing. I resonate with his choice #1: “An application specific backwater. Networks of voluntary PC networks slaved to work on specific projects/games and clusters of servers dedicated to specific apps.".
Grid computing is far from new: chip design groups, supercomputing shops and folks like Pixar have been doing it for years and years. In my experience there are two fundamental issues:
Most single large applications are very difficult to break into pieces which can run reasonably in parallel (my years as an architect of massively parallel supercomputers drove this home).
Dave Winer pointed out the following article from CBS News. “Support for the First Amendment has eroded significantly since Sept. 11 and nearly half of Americans now think the constitutional amendment on free speech goes too far in the rights it guarantees, according to a new poll.”
Separately, I spent some time this weekend rereading parts of Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas” and pondering some of the back and forth on the web recently.
Question: what happens in the Lessig proposal if I have DCMA protected algorithms or content in my code?
I’m just catching up with the proposal by Lawrence Lessig and all of the resulting discussion.
As a software professional, the post that most hit home for me was Sandy Wilbourn’s post which touched on the underlying complexity of executing the idea.
I think there’s some especially tricky questions around the issue of what kind of software is covered. If I write a piece of software for a company under contract to them, is that covered?
Ray Ozzie’s first pass at a company policy on weblogs.