Useful reference on building a dpkg from source: Rolling your own Debian packages part 2.
Excellent read on the iPad as a desktop virtualization thin client. If you’ve seen any science fiction (StarTrek, Babylon 5, etc) they all use iPad/tablet like computers. The traditional laptop/desktop form factor requires you working at a desk. If you’re doing anything standing up, normal computers fail.
The problem I think Desktop Virtualization will have is:
1) The problem with keeping all your data in the cloud is you have to be able to get to the cloud. So, it only works where you have wifi or 3/4G, and its useless on planes or in rural areas.
2) All the desktop export protocols sucks. I’ve not used VDI, but VNC is teh suck, and RDP is only usable if you’ve got a good WAN connection. The iPad will work fine for carrying it to the conference room, but not for being able to get into your work PC at home to finish that memo your boss wants. (Speaking of protocol suckage, I’m seriously considering moving my primary PC to Win7 w/ VMWare Workstation so I can RDP into it when I need to. But thats another post about Command Center 3.0)
3) The iPads 1024×768 screen resolution is straight out of the late 1980s. Grabbing your desktop off your desk terminal (1680×1050) and moving it there will make all your windows difficult to use. At least windows lets you resize from all corners and not just the lower right like on the Mac.
I like to buy companies I use. Some stocks I’m considering:
VMWare – Cloud infrastructure provider.
Amazon – Not of the consumer shopping, but because of all the neat stuff they’re doing with EC2, S3 and Mechanical Turk.
Citrix – Xen masters and purveyors of Go To Meeting and Go To MyPC.
Apple – the iPad is the laptop killer for causal couch use. It’s a multimedia Kindle. Sucky name though.
@lance (an ATDC startup guy) pointed me to a pretty good Op/Ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.
Let me say that of all the NYT people, I respect Friedman the most. His Lexus and the Olive Tree sits up there with Mystery of Capital as one of the best economics books of recent years. It also sits up there with The Pentagon’s New Map as one of the best national-security books of recent times.
His Op/Ed today was that Obama should shift his focus away from health care reform, regulation and stimulus and more towards “stimulation”, ie the creation of a start-up culture among America’s youth.
Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.
I couldn’t agree more. If you look at most transformative technologies that weren’t created for military purposes, they’re all done by the small businesses. DARPA created the internet, but AOL and Mindspring put it in every American household. Xerox created the GUI, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates put it on every PC. Bell Labs created Unix, but geeks in Berkley and Finland created the versions that run most of the Internet.
There is very little Government can do to create stimulation that doesn’t involve getting the f— out of the way. And getting the government out of the way doesn’t suit the politicians of either party.
Starting your own business involves risk. The current left-of-center administration is about eliminating risk. Everyone must have Health Insurance. Everyone must have retirement insurance. With the Unions, everyone (who is a member) must have job security. You can’t take risks when the Government prevents you from doing so.
Not that the typical right-of-center politicians are much better. They are beholden to the large companies who fear transformative change. They fear it because all large organizations, be it Fortune 500 or Government are dysfunctional. They can’t innovate like the small guys. What they can do it hire lobbyists to make it harder on the small guys.
Friedman also illustrates he doesn’t get the “Tea Party” backlash. The Tea Party Movement isn’t all about stopping things. It’s about the ability for people to make their own choices. It’s about stopping the one-size-fits-all equal-outcome-for-all mentality of the far left. The Tea Party Movement is about letting the individual succeed or fail based on their own merits, not on the whim of government bureaucrats. In short, it’s about freedom. Something that has been missing off the agenda’s of the last several Presidential Administrations.
If Barack Obama wants to create an Innovation Movement here are my suggestions:
o Drop Health Care Reform. People can’t quit their W2 jobs and strike out on their own when they have no idea of they’ll be hit with a massive financial penalty for not carrying bloated all-you-can-eat healthcare insurance. Encourage catastrophic plans, and medical savings accounts.
o Commit to a repeal of the death tax, or at worst no more than 10%. Small Businesses can’t survive if at the time of the owner’s death his/her heirs have to pony up 50% of the value of the business to the IRS.
o Reform S-Corp taxes so that money re-invested into growing the business doesn’t appear as taxable on the individual’s 1040 form.
o Grant capital-gains tax relief for people who sell assets to re-invest them in small businesses. If an Angel Investor wants to sell the Apple stock they bought in 1984 into the next big thing, let them do so without penalty. Set the basis at the 1984 purchase price.
o Fire anyone in your administration who suggests the idea of raiding people’s 401ks.
I’d like to donate to the Haitian relief efforts. However I don’t know who to donate to. I’m not going to text some number to some other number and let some slimeball phone company keep $7 of the $10 like I’ve seen going across twitter.
I’ve donated to the Salvation Army and Americares in the past, but based on the sheer amount of junk mail (and blankets – yes Americares sent me a fucking blanket) I’m pretty sure my contribution went to nothing more than killing trees to send me snail mail to donate more money.
So, who can I donate to who won’t send me shit for the next 60 years?
Now this is what we should be spending our R&D money on.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
- Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
- Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
- Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
- Coolant Self-regulating
- Proliferation potential None
- Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
via Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine.
If your company seems evil, the best programmers won’t work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn’t the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it’s largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.
Why are programmers so fussy about their employers’ morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don’t have to work for a company they have qualms about.
But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance. [1]
via Apple’s Mistake.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. "Come again?" "We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther." "Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500 miles?" Read the Rest
