Rodolfo Ruiz Blog

Nuevo Blog

2006-07-17T09:59:00.000-05:00

Para todos aquellos (como 2) que reciben mi RSS, este post seguro será una sorpresa después de tantos eones sin escribir. Bueno, es nada mas para decirles que apunten su rss reader a http://rodoblog.adoxis.com que es la dirección de mi nuevo blog.

Saludos!!!

360, PS3 and Revolution

2005-12-21T23:08:00.000-06:00

As the number of days left for Christmas shopping dwindle, it becomes harder and harder to find one of the most popular gifts this season - the XBox 360. If you can't find one, don't worry - it may turn out that the XBox (and the PS3 for that matter) are missing the boat when it comes to video games.

When you think about the "Jobs to be Done" regarding video games, perhaps the most important job is allowing the game player to escape from reality for a while and become immersed in a new world. Sony and Microsoft have decided that the best way to do this is to make the pictures and graphics on the screen as realistic as possible. Both are moving along the sustaining curve in that the traditional measure of performance for video games has been graphics. Both the XBox 360 and the PS3 have incredibly sophisticated graphics processors and support High-definition outputs. Both produce stunning graphics. And both have hefty price tags.

Nintendo has decided to go a different, and perhaps disruptive, route. No high definition for the new console, the Revolution. And while the graphics processor will be capable, it's not the cell processor that's going into the PS3. The price? Estimated to be half of a fully loaded XBox 360 or PS3. So what's the big deal? The controller.

The wireless controller eschews the typical joystick controllers used by the PS3 and XBox 360 in exchange for motion sensitivity. Imagine your character walking in the forest and encountering a dragon - a quick slash of the controller results in your character making the same slash with his sword. A lunge forward and your character lunges. Don't aim your gun with a joystick, aim it with your hand like a real person would do.

Nintendo is betting that the way to a more immersive experience is not through higher quality graphics. They believe that the graphics capabilities of the new systems are overshoot. Instead, they argue, make the gaming experience more real by having the player get more physically involved.

It's a new approach in an industry that has been focused on graphics for a long time. While it remains to be seen how successful Nintendo will be, they have to be commended on their attempt at disruption.

So if Santa doesn't bring an XBox 360 to your house this Christmas, it may not be the disaster that Microsoft would have you believe.

xUnit and testing frameworks

2005-12-08T14:48:00.000-06:00

Kent Beck published a unit test framework for the Smalltalk language in 1999. The architecture of SmalltalkUnit (or SUnit) represents a sweet spot, an ideal balance between simplicity and utility. Later, Erich Gamma ported SUnit to Java, creating JUnit.
JUnit in turn begat CppUnit, NUnit, PyUnit, XMLUnit, and ports to many other languages. A dizzying array of unit test frameworks built on the same model now exists. These frameworks are known as the xUnit family of tools.

All are free, open source software.

xUnit Family Members

Some of the most popular xUnit test frameworks are listed next, with brief summaries of their target language and testing domain. This is just a sample of the many xUnit-derived test tools. Anything else to add?

JUnit
The reference implementation of xUnit, JUnit is by far the most widely used and extended unit test framework. It is implemented in and used with Java.

CppUnit
The C++ port of JUnit, it closely follows the JUnit model.

NUnit
The xUnit for .NET. Rather than being a direct port of JUnit, it has a .NET-specific implementation that generally follows the xUnit model. It is written in C# and can be used to test any .NET language, including C#, VB.Net, J#, and Managed C++.

PyUnit
The Python version of xUnit. It is included as a standard component of Python 2.1.

SUnit
Also known as SmalltalkUnit, this is the original xUnit, and the basis of the xUnit architecture. It is written in and used with the Smalltalk language.

vbUnit
vbUnit is xUnit for Visual Basic (VB). It is written in VB and supports building unit tests in VB and COM development.

utPLSQL
utPLSQL is xUnit for Oracle’s PL/SQL language. It is written in and used with PL/SQL.

MinUnit
A great example of a minimal but functional unit test framework. It is implemented in three lines of C and is used to test C code.

xUnit Extensions

Beyond the xUnits themselves, many add-on tools are available that extend the functionality of existing unit test frameworks into specialized domains, rather than acting as standalone tools. A representative set of popular extensions is listed here.

XMLUnit
An xUnit extension to support XML testing. Versions exist as extensions to both JUnit and NUnit.

JUnitPerf
A JUnit extension that supports writing code performance and scalability tests. It is written in and used with Java.

Cactus
A JUnit extension for unit testing server-side code such as servlets, JSPs, or EJBs. It is written in and used with Java.

JFCUnit
A JUnit extension that supports writing GUI tests for Java Swing applications. It is written in and used with Java.

NUnitForms
An NUnit extension that supports GUI tests of Windows Forms applications. It is written in C# and can be used with any .NET language.

HTMLUnit
An extension to JUnit that tests web-based applications. It simulates a web browser, and is oriented towards writing tests that deal with HTML pages.

HTTPUnit
Another JUnit extension that tests web-based applications. It is oriented towards writing tests that deal with HTTP request and response objects.

Jester
A helpful extension to JUnit that automatically finds and reports code that is not covered by unit tests. Versions exist for Python (Pester) and NUnit (Nester).

Anything to add?

CMMi in a box???

2005-12-06T19:05:00.000-06:00

From microsoft's website:

"MSF for CMMI Process Improvement provides process
guidance designed to accelerate the achievement of
Level 3 - Defined Process - in the staged representation
of the model. Using this process template is no guarantee
of receiving a level 3 appraisal, indeed only 17 of the 21
process areas are covered. However, this process template
has been designed to enable a software development
organization to achieve level 3 with a minimum of
bureaucracy and the lightest possible
documentation set."

This whole "Process Improvement in a box" idea wigs me out.

Using a "Process in a box" will give me a requirements template, but it
_CANNOT_ ensure that I will fill out the template _WELL_, and that is the
real goal, right? One of the KPA's for CMM level 3 is Organizational
Training Program, and I don't see any process in a box providing that out of
the box. So processes in a box that promise level 3 are ... I'll let you
fill that in.

I am ESPECIALLY concerned when people try to pair CMMI and Agile.

Those two concepts have very different value systems; trying to mix them
is kind of like making a peanut butter and fish sandwich - yeah, it's
technically possible, but why would you want to do that?

Personally, I am much more interested in accomplishing "People Improvement" to create CMM-X level CULTURES.

Wallace, Gromit & an Engineer?

2005-12-01T08:40:00.000-06:00

Tea has never been the most exciting of products. In fact, the most exhilarating
thing to have happened in the tea industry in the last hundred years was the
invention of the tea bag - that universal, ubiquitous repository for the stuff
that finally put an end to that revolting experience of finding leaves on the
end of the tongue. Nevertheless, even the creation of the tea bag could hardly
be called a revolution.

And sadly, consumption of tea has been declining too. It has been eschewed by
the great British Public, of all people, by that other noteworthy beverage -
coffee. They have, it would seem, been enchanted by the smells of the Ethiopian
Sidamo, Sumatra and Gold Coast blend wafting its way out of one or more of those
US transplants along the local high street.

So what to do if you are unfortunate enough to be a tea manufacturer? Is this
the end of the great British cuppa? Not at all. Not if you are as clever as the
marketing folks at PG tips, that is. They didn't just sit and cry in their beer
and watch their market slowly evaporate, did they? Not at all.

By enrolling the help of the Nick Park's distinguished creations Wallace and
Gromit, this noteworthy division of Unilever shipped an incredible two and one
half thousand million tea bags in the space of one month.

That's right! By inserting a limited edition ( is 1.5 million a limited
edition?) Mug with the likeness of Gromit the Dog into its 160 pack boxes, the
tea flew off the shelves like hot cakes. And put tea back on the map for good.

Since the launch of this highly successful marketing campaign, the Gromit Mug
has been a sought after item world-wide, with collectors in Oregon even paying
over $25 dollars to one underpaid editor who bought entire consignments of the
things from Sainsbury's. (No names, please! - Eddie.).

So what does the success of the Wallace and Gromit characters in the tea
business have to do with an engineer's industry? Quite a lot, actually.

You see, like tea, many industrial products - such as bearings, pumps, memory
devices, air conditioning systems, computers and sometimes, some software
offerings - have also become commodity items. And they've also recently come
under fierce price pressure from far eastern manufacturers in China, Korea and
Taiwan. The makers of such products are clearly in the same hot water 'space' as
the people in the beverage business were.

But taking a leaf out of PG Tips' books, here's their chance to differentiate
their products. And make some money too. All they need to do is to put the same
sort of magic back into their products - to personalise them, to mass customise
them, to create an air of value if you will - in much in the same way as the
folks at PG tips did.

Now I'm not suggesting that a licensing deal with Nick Parks, the gifted creator
of the Wallace and Gromit, is the answer to everyone's problems. But thinking
along the same lines as the marketing folks as PG Tips possibly couldn't do any
harm.

We are the web

2005-11-30T16:54:00.000-06:00

I love this description of the World Wide Web of today, from Kevin Kelly in his recent Wired article We Are the Web:

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn’t everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Woa! Sounds like an awesome achievement, doesn’t it! But we’ve only scratched the surface. Remember, we’re in a world of accelerating change, so this is just the beginning. Strap in folks, we’re in for a wild ride!

Ringtones by Stephen Wolfram

2005-11-29T13:27:00.000-06:00

Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read two years ago, and one year ago and last summer, but instead just stared at it each day.

Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.”

Nerd heaven.

No more Slashdot for me (yes, you read right)

2005-11-22T15:13:00.000-06:00

Three sites I use often are Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular. If you want to find out what’s hot right now on the Internet, those sites will tell you (although Memeorandum usually gets the news even before these sites).

I saw a blurb on Programmable Web about DiggDot.us, which launched yesterday. Diggdot.us combines results from all three of those sites into one very clean interface. Stories have been de-duplicated, and they claim to have additional content as well.

Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.

If you are a news junkie, this is for you. Or at least, it will be once they have an RSS feed. Shame.

You read it here first

2005-11-22T15:09:00.000-06:00

MicroSoft’s Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) last Monday´s morning, a “specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.” And, wow, is Microsoft starting to get with it. They’ve released it under Creative Commons license, the same license that covers the RSS 2.0 specification. Anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon the specification even for commercial reasons.

See Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer and the FAQs.

For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.

SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.

New companies will be built on the back of SSE. And you heard it from me first!

What agile programming is not

2005-11-22T14:38:00.000-06:00

In the immortal words of Dilbert/Scott Adams, "Agile programming doesn't just mean doing more work with fewer people." See the cartoon.

Trend Spotting

2005-11-22T14:15:00.000-06:00

Wired Magazine has a great article this month on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard Tim’s name was in 1994 at NetGenesis when GNN appeared on the scene. I remember when it was acquired by AOL for $11 million and I thought to myself “holy – there could be real dollars in this Internet stuff.” The article reflects the way I think of him and the business he’s created.

Wired also had a short fetish review of the super-bitchin Optimus Keyboard. I’m ready for about five of these when it finally ships.

7 Questions to ask

2005-11-10T11:52:00.000-06:00

Due to recent experience, I wanted to post on some thoughts about recruiting and things to consider when trying to enter a small, mid-level company. Keep in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive list, merely a suggested seven.

If you are receiving employee options, what is the number of fully-diluted outstanding shares? Typically, option grants are a key component of compensation in a start-up and are often promoted as such. But the details surrounding stock options are often complex and confusing for non financially-oriented individuals. It is best for employees to understand as much as possible about their option grants (this subject could be the topic for an entire series), but the first place to start is to ask how many outstanding shares there are. From that point, one can calculate the percentage of the company an employee will own and a better gauge of the magnitude of this compensation component. It surprises me how many startup employees I know who are excited to have received a grant of x number of options, but never bothered to ask what relative percentage of the company that translates into.

Has there ever been a down round, a flat round, or a CEO change? Any of these three events are an indicator that the startup has faced some difficulties in the past and may not be on track moving forward. If one of them has occurred, prospective employees should seek out as much information as they can the context of the situation. After all, there are exceptions to blind the assumption that these are a black mark (e.g. a founding CEO stepping aside to make room for professional management could be an indicator of successful growth). However, if any of these issues have arisen, it is a signal to dig deeper into the health of the business.

What is the burn rate and how much cash is in the bank now? Even if a start-up is successfully executing, it could still face a cash crunch if it is not yet profitable. Employees should ask to find out how much longer the company will ride without the infusion of another round capital. While the actual answer to this question won’t necessarily provide a definitive answer about the ability for the company to access both cash and capital, it will open up a discussion about it.

What is the plan for exit strategy and its timeframe? The answer to this question is a soft one with many factors, and can always change depending on circumstances. However, it is best to find out management’s view of a possible exit strategy. Is the company pieced together for a quick flip, building for multi-year significant value creation, or plan on holding for the long term as an eventual cash cow (for founder/investors)? These expectations will affect not only how long employees may be working for the company as it exists today, but more importantly, the resulting surrounding corporate culture.

Could you meet the CEO, the founder(s), and those on the management team? Start-ups are all about the people involved. And there are a small number of people who are largely going to affect the organization. Even if an entry-level employee is going to work in engineering, I think it makes sense for him/her to meet the VP Sales; likewise, a marketing manager should meet the CTO. Yet it might not happen unless the prospective employee requests it. The handful at the top are going to have a profound affect on the future of the company as a whole and the position (regardless of function), and therefore it is best to meet as many people possible in the company possible before joining.

Are there plans in the next six months to hire anyone along the chain-in-command between your position and the CEO? Start-ups often have key vacant positions open as the companies expand and grow quickly. I recommend explicitly asking if there is an anticipated change in the reporting structure in the foreseeable future, as any modifications or additions (even those a few rungs up in the ladder) could significantly affect employees’ roles and responsibilities.

How many employees did/does/will the company have six month ago, now, six months from now, a year from now? Employee count is a strong (but not a perfect) proxy for management’s and investors’ outlook on the business. Start-ups hire ahead of growth (or at least predicted growth), which translate into a viable company, a healthy work environment, and future internal opportunities. Financial figures and projections are helpful indicators, certainly, but are often a distortion of the full picture (especially early on in a company’s cycle). The growth in employee count (or lack thereof) directly signals how much work needs to be accomplished how rosy the expectations are.

How Much Software can be Developed in a Year?

2005-11-07T14:13:00.000-06:00

QSM, a company that maintains a vast database about software projects, looked into how much code we can develop in a year. Click here(PDF) for the full report.

Only about 10% of projects they studied delivered more than 75,000 SLOC
in 12 months. But those efforts spent a pile of money cranking so much code so fast. These big projects burned 117% to 419% more cash than a similar 139,000 SLOC project delivered over a longer period. Fast is expensive.

About 60% of the projects shipped under 10,000 SLOC in a year.

The report concludes that the biggest program practically possible in 12 months runs about 180,000 SLOC, and will use a team of 70 to 100 people. It will cost two to four times more than the same project with a more relaxed schedule.

That works out to 150 to 214 SLOC per programmer per month.

Now, that is a men's room *TGIF Post

2005-11-04T16:02:00.000-06:00

Am i wrong?

Beat your competition, do not eat the crumbs

2005-11-01T16:04:00.000-06:00

Sorry that it took me so long to post again, but I have been preparing and learning about an obscure art in which sometimes we engineers cannot handle our big, fat brains. Marketing and sales.
Being confronted with some new soon to have responsibilities, I've been extensively studying and learning from the market.
And so, I began to wonder what do credit card services, mobile phone carriers, and financial services all have in common? An extreme dedication to the practice of arbitrage marketing.

Arbitrage marketing is used when you know that your products and your competitors’ products are equally unhelpful and hard to use, and that for every customer you tick off so much that they leave your fold for your competitor’s, that your competitor has done the same and their ex-customers will be coming your way. It is a strategy that forces customers to change lanes, but knows that since the road wasn’t built correctly, no one is going to get anywhere any quicker.

Example. Should I hold a BBVA credit card, or one from Santander? As far as I’m concerned, the service is equally bad, the interest rates are equally preposterous, the web-sites are equally as hard to navigate, down as frequently and calls to technical services are equally poorly responded to. So the only reason I would pick one over the other is because the other one ticked me off. And then when the new one ticks me off, I move again.

Every week I get about three offers from BBVA and SAntander’s competitors, so when I feel like it, I’ll move beyond them. It’s a commodity and no one is providing differentiated service.

Example. Mobile phone carriers. I use Telcel. Why? Because my father used Telefonica and had horrible coverage, a friend or two uses Unefon and hates her service, and another friend uses Iusacell and is always complaining about her network outages. Those are obviously not representative situations and I’m not meaning to speak badly about any carrier. My point is, I chose my carrier based on minimizing an expected poor result.

What though would I think about carriers, credit card services etc if I just made my judgments from advertising?

Iusacell is a hard worker and is always making sure I am taken care of, Telcel has a very attractive spokesperson (not sure how this would influence me, but they seem to want to stick to this strategy), Unefon is cute and the logo always looks to be having so much fun, and Nextel is the thinking-person’s carrier, just look how clever their ads are.

Citibank makes my world possible in a way no other credit card could do, American Express is relevant to me, just witness the introduction of the urban-oriented ‘black’ card, and the rest of the banks are always smiling.

The images projected by the advertising are beautiful, but totally irrelevant. I already have an opinion about carriers (or credit card services, or cars, or banks...) based on my experience and the experiences of those close to me. Their reputations have preceded them.

So all the money they spend advertising during baseball playoffs or anywhere else is in support of the arbitrage marketing strategy. They need to make sure that when I’m at my wit’s end with Telcel, that I choose them when I switch.

What though would be the opportunity if you decided that arbitrage marketing is not the correct strategy any longer, and you decided to follow proximity marketing?

Seth Godin describes proximity marketing as the opportunity to differentiate yourself in a crowded category by being BETTER than your competitor.

And how do I learn that you are better than your competitor? I certainly do not learn that from the latest creative campaign, no matter how fun-loving, image-relevant or attractive. I learn that because I experience your product as being better or, even maybe more importantly, I am told by someone I trust that your product is better.

Think about it from your customer’s point of view. Think how powerful it would be if your customer chose you not to minimize an expected bad experience, but because they are glad to engage with your product and company?

Arbitrage marketing is widespread and it is ridiculous, and wasteful. But it opens opportunities for those who are willing to walk away from it.

Why I don't write cook recipes

2005-10-20T14:57:00.000-05:00

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1) 532.35 cm3 gluten
2) 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3) 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4) 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5) 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6) 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7) 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8) Two calcium carbonate encapsulated avian albumin coated protein
9) 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10) 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 BTU/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radical flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six and seven until the mixture is homogenous.

To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredients nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 X 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnson's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

VC Fundraising Up 62%

2005-10-18T10:39:00.000-05:00

The latest Venture Economics Report is out. Venture capitalists rounded up another $5.4B during the third quarter. The total amount committed to 45 venture funds during the three months ended in September represented a 12% increase from the $4.8B collected by 54 funds at the same time last year.

Read - U.S. venture firms raised more in the first three quarters of 2005 than all last year (Red Herring)

Weblogs.com now belongs to Verisign

2005-10-17T18:03:00.000-05:00

Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I've heard it from multiple sources, who knows?

Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it's not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against...the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.

Todo a 12

2005-10-13T10:59:00.000-05:00

One of the most recent success stories in the retail business in my country is the fast-growing dollar store franchise, Waldo's Mart. It goes all the way to the edges and tells a compelling low price story. Bringing in the Pesos from October 6th's LA Times talks about the onslaught of one price retailing.

From the article:

One-price retailing is winning converts south of the border as Mexicans discover the joys of snagging mini-blinds, underwear and a six-pack of root beer for about a buck each. Like their American cousins, the Mexican chains offer food, beauty products, cleaning supplies and other staples, along with a grab bag of name-brand goods and novelties....

"People are not afraid of going into these dollar stores because they know how much they'll spend," said Monsonego, a managing director at Neoris, a consulting firm....

"It makes perfect sense" that the stores are catching on in Mexico, said Todd Hale, a senior vice president at AC Nielsen. "Rich people love low prices, poor people need low prices."

The low price story, when told transparently and honestly, is a powerful powerful message. WYSIWYG is also a failsafe.

Michael Moritz in the Holy Land

2005-10-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz goes to Israel and freaks them out saying that while Israel is nice, China and India are where it's going down.

Read - “Internet entrepreneurs can call us any time” Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz tells Israelis to realize that the new world is China and India. (Globes Online)

How will we die?

2005-10-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

David Brooks in the New York Times (if you have acces to TimesSelect, you can access the op-ed article here) explains how we are going to die:

"Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corporation study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition and we'll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another 20 percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We'll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few
life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die.

But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer's disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take 8 or 10 or even 20 years, during which we will cease to become the person we were. We will linger on, in some new state, depending on the care of others.

As the population ages, more people will live in this final category. Between now and 2050, the percentage of the population above age 85 is expected to quadruple, and the number of people with Alzheimer's
disease is expected to quadruple, too."

Bottom line: Neurological diseases and psychiatric illnesses represent the greatest threat to our lifestyles and economy. Beyond the untold human suffering, the economic burden of brain-related illness is already greater than $1 Trllion. What will it be in 2050?

What's Google really up to?

2005-10-11T11:36:00.000-05:00

Finally, somebody has figured it out.

Finding time to fix bugs before release day

2005-10-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

Pundits (and many other sources) predict Microsoft's Vista (neé Longhorn) operating system will comprise at least 50 million lines of code… assuming the troubled OS is ever released.

50 million lines of code. The scale is staggering. Expect a staggering number of bugs.

Though it’s easy to poke fun at Microsoft, I’m impressed with the company’s recent performance. Windows XP is, at least for me, a very stable product. The much reviled update service seems to be working; reports surprisingly suggest Internet Explorer has fewer security vulnerabilities in recent months than Firefox. But any 50 MLOC program is a monster. How will they test it?

Well-written C and C++ code contains some 5 to 10 errors per 100 LOC after a clean compile, but before inspection and testing. At a 5% rate any 50 MLOC program will start off with some 2.5 million bugs.

Testing typically exercises only half the code. It’s hard to devise tests that check rarely-invoked exception handlers, deeply nested IFs and nested loops. So the 50% test coverage number suggests Vista could ship with some 1.25 million bugs.

There are better ways to do testing that do produce fantastic programs. Code coverage, for instance, can insure every branch and conditional has been taken. It’s required by the FAA’s DO-178B level A standard for safety-critical avionics.

But the costs are unbelievable. It’s not unusual for the qualification process to produce a half page of documentation for each line of code. A 50 MLOC program’s doc might be 25 million pages long, consuming 50,000 reams of paper - a stack 2 miles high. Will Vista undergo this rigorous evaluation? Probably not.
Maybe Microsoft routinely uses a very disciplined approach to software engineering, including the mandatory use of code inspections. Again, the numbers are interesting. Since good inspections typically find 70% of the system’s mistakes, after inspection Vista might have 50 million * 0.05 bugs/LOC *0.30 defects left after inspection, or 750,000 bugs. If testing finds half of those, they’re still shipping with some 375,000 problems. Bummer.

What if Microsoft were certified to the highest level of the Capability Maturity Model? Level 5 organizations employ a wide range of practices to generate great software. A CMM5 project typically ships with 1 bug per thousand lines of code. For Vista that works out to 50,000 bugs.
This isn’t an anti-Microsoft rant. It’s a peek inside the problems any organization has when building huge programs. Though we do indeed have ways to build better code, the costs are huge, and scale exponentially as the program size increases.

The largest commercial embedded systems I’m aware of are some cell phones which have around 5 million lines of code, generally a mix of C, C++ and Java. Though few if any of these companies work at CMM level 5, that 0.1% bug rate would yield 5,000 defects, a hopelessly buggy product. One can only hope that the most important features (like making a phone call) work well enough for most users most of the time.

Firmware size doubles every 10 months to two years, depending on which surveys one believes. Programs are gigantic today, and will be simply unbelievable tomorrow.

Here it comes

2005-10-03T12:22:00.000-05:00

For a few months now, I've had that feeling of the impending rush, the way you might feel just before a thunderstorm or at the beginning of a much-anticipated play. I used to feel that way when a copy of Wired or Fast Company hit my mailbox in 1996...

The web is changing, and so fast it's almost impossible to keep up.

But Emily is trying.

Check out: Emily Chang - eHub.

In just a few weeks, she's collected literally hundreds of new companies/projects that are examples of things that are turning the web upside down.

Warning. If you are a buzz lover like me, this page can cause serious addiction.

Hang on, web 2.0, here we go.

Google's monthly secrecy

2005-09-30T13:40:00.000-05:00

Only 400 of the leeter than thou will be in attendance. It's by invite only and they're going to announce something that will change everything!

So is anyone else terribly excited for google's announcement?

I figured it would be best if I left speculation till a later date. I have been contacting some of my sources relentlessly in an effort to know a little more. Well, thus far I have come up with very little information.

I will stay on top of this for all you loyal readers out there... I have been searching the web for different clues; and I already emailed a friend I know who works at google. A peon, but a peon that is closer than I am to the google empire.

Read - Webpronews | digg (What's this?)

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

2005-09-30T13:33:00.000-05:00

Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Read - Microsoft Windows Officially Broken (Smart Office News)

What is a podcast?

2005-09-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

Recently, a friend asked me what is a podcast and how can he begin using and listening to them. Here is how Wikipedia defines it: "Podcasting is a method of publishing audio programs via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s)"

Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately.

Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device.

Think of your iPod as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates. Today there are a limited number of programs available this way. The format used is RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

To start selecting podcasts of your interest, you can check any of the following links.

Audio.Weblogs

Podcast Alley

iTunes Podcasting

Of course, you can listen to podcasts using any PC based or portable MP3 player. Me, I prefer iTunes to do so on my laptop and my iPod to do it on the run. You can also try the player created by the one that started it all. iPodder by Adam Curry

Here they go again

2005-09-27T14:52:00.000-05:00

WIPO's latest destructive regulation: The Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty. Jamie Boyle nails it.

Any Open Source Company Can Get Funded

2005-09-21T11:56:00.000-05:00

The NY Times continue the drumbeat that Sandhill Road is in a feeding frenzy to quickly fund new startups. The article profiles XenSource - a chip startup that would allow the running of multiple operting systems on a single chip. It also relays the conventional wisdom that any open-source software company can get funded.

Read - Fighting to Get in on the Next Little Thing (NY Times)

Blook

2005-09-20T14:40:00.000-05:00

Tom Evslin has launched his newest project – hackoff.com. It’s a blook (an online book distributed as a blog). I’ve been watching this evolve. In addition to being awesome content (this is the book that every entrepreneur from 1997 – 2001 wanted to write), Tom is using (as well as inventing) lots of blog / Web 2.0 publishing technology into the experience.

24, Lost – you’ve now got competition for my brain.

A great idea...

2005-09-19T11:29:00.000-05:00

Found this today - an announcement by IBM that they have started a program to encourage their employees to become math and science teachers. they will assist with a transition plan, some tuition money, mentoring etc.

I think this is one of the most valuable things IBM could have possibly done, and I really applaud their initiative. Now, I just hope that IBM in Mexico will do the same or similar.

Nanotech: What average Joe wants

2005-09-19T10:42:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies released a study of U.S. public perceptions on nanotechnology. Their definition of nanotech is the broad small-interesting-stuff definition, not molecular manufacturing. But since both types of nanotech have the same label, public perception will surely be shared to some extent.

People look forward to medical advances and improved products. But even so, they want to see more careful testing of products before they are released. Only 11% think that voluntary industry standards will be sufficient. That's a pretty low level of confidence!

Dr. Jane Macoubrie, the study's author, was quoted: "Thorough pre-market product safety testing was a key way people wanted government and industry to act to improve trust. Numerous named examples ranging from Vioxx to dioxin have created a widespread perception that industry pushes new products to market without adequate safety testing, and people feel industry too often has put its own interests ahead of consumer safety." People don't want a ban, but they do want governmental oversight.

People were also concerned about lack of consumer awareness of nanotechnology, and possible unintended uses.

When molecular manufacturing is developed, these issues will be even more urgent. Programmable nanofactories will pose little or no direct threat to consumers. But their products will be as varied as software, and some may be as under-tested and buggy as software. There will be a strong financial incentive to rush new products and technologies to market. And in the case of health care, there will be a strong humanitarian pressure for some new lifesaving treatments--as there is today.

Perhaps the biggest problem with molecular manufacturing will be "unintended uses." This could include a wide range of problems--from arms races that get out of hand, to products that are desirable to individuals but destructive to society.

If this study has an effect, it should encourage nano-related businesses to go out of their way to educate the public about their technologies. CRN and Foresight will have a lot of work to do, educating people about the differences between nanoscale technologies and molecular manufacturing, and the diverse reasons why both are important.

Startup Globalization

2005-09-19T10:07:00.000-05:00

Some very big transactions recently served as reminders that tech startups are now a global game. First, there was the sale of privately held, New York-based Linkshare to Tokyo-based Rakuten for $425 million. Then came the confirmation, on September 12, that San Jose-based eBay would buy Luxembourg-based Skype for up to $2.6 billion (with an additional $1.5 billion potentially to follow, depending on Skype’s performance over the next year).

Not that long ago, mergers and acquisitions among tech startups were predominantly a local affair, for instance, with one company CEO driving Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco to meet with another company's CEO to close a deal. Now deal-makers are assessing acquisition candidates as much for their global coverage as their revenues and technology strengths.

Continue Reading on Technology Review

Tadalist

2005-09-18T21:55:00.000-05:00

My process for blogging is fairly simple. I have two sources to come up with blog entries. One is a running idea log that I keep using tadalist. The other, and more frequent source is just the spur of the moment idea that I want to blog about.

Occasionally I will also write a stub of a post and then revisit it later, or I will write a complete post and then be dissatisfied with it and never hit publish.

My blog ideas list on tadalist is getting pretty long so I'll list some of the ones that I put on there a while ago:

Ideas:

NewsItem relevancy, rank by date or popularity or what? - Google just came out with blogsearch, so this is still pretty current. They search by relevant by default but also allow by date. For blog search I have to think that date is what really matters, or a micro-relevancy within a small time period.
The phone companies are dead. - Next one is pretty current too, what with Skype being bought by Ebay recently. Seriously, data transfer is getting cheaper all the time, and what is a telephone call but sending and receiving data? Phone companies represent an outmoded monopoly that we will be better off without. VOiP + wireless is coming to cell phones, and that's going to change everything, especially with wireless coming everywhere too.
Personalization rant - I just dont' like personalization. It's freaky, I dont' feel like i'm in control of it, it doesnt' work right, I don't know. Maybe someone will get it right for me one of these days, but right now I don't have much use for it.
Implement a bittorrent tracker in ruby - I thought this might be a fun project to learn ruby better.
Implement a MUD in ajax. - I keep thinking I want to see a casual web based mmorpg that uses ajax to create a dynamic game that I can play with other people.
Why isn't video blogging bigger? - I don't know, I'm coming to love podcasting, maybe it will follow the same historical pattern: Print->Radio->TV, blogs->podcasts->videoblogs
Using todoLists applications to manage information. - I use tadalist all the time, this list itself comes from tadalist. It's kind of like an internet scratchpad. Managing simple personal or small group information seems to be one of the next big things in internet applications, with 37signals currently leading the way.
The new way of searching - Why I'm using delicious and other tagging services to find things on the internet over google more and more, and how to do it.
Del.icio.us demo idea: you can see who is posting from where on delicious based on their timezone and language, it would be interesting to do something that tied bookmarking activity to world locations.
Delicious for groups - del.icio.us isn't polished or mainstream enough for this yet, but I wish that groups of people I knew used del.icio.us for link sharing, because it's really efficient and cool. And I don't like Yahoo MyWeb 2.0.
Why flash got it wrong and Ajax gets it right - I think ajax isn't the new flash, because ajax isn't trying to reinvent what the web really gets right: presenting documents of information to users. Flash applications also learn nothing from one of the most underappreciated benefits of the internet: a common user interface.

Product decisions

2005-09-15T16:04:00.000-05:00

In Time’s article on the iPod Nano, Apple reaffirms their mission to guide instead of follow their customers:

It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups.

You can and of course should listen to your customers. But to be able to innovate on their behalf, you need to place an even higher premium on your own vision.

Startups more valuable

2005-09-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

Valuations for startups are on average 16% higher today than they were a year ago, that according to VentureOne. A 16% rise might not impress many who have seen their home valuations rise a lot more than that in the past year, but still its good progress. Other findings include:
- It takes longer for VCs to get to liquidity thanks to fewer IPOs and fewer M&A activity.
- M&A may seem to have picked up but that is because there are some larger M&A deals; there are just fewer of them.

Read - Value of VC Backed Firms Hits an All-time High (BizJournals)

Some thoughts on Use Cases

2005-09-15T13:58:00.000-05:00

I was recently questioned about the pre and post conditions of use cases and decided to share a few thoughts here.

A pre-condition of the whole use case is presumed to be true. You do not test the pre-condition inside the use case, nor do you have an exception case for the pre-condition being false.

A post-condition of the whole use case is guaranteed to be true. Inside the use case, you must include statements so that the post-condition is always true no matter what alternative or exception is executed.

You will often find that the post-conditions of one use case are the pre-conditions of another use case, especially when working with lower-level (more detailed) use cases.

When writing pre and post conditions of a use case, think of the use case as a black-box atomic unit with well-defined inputs and outputs. Imagine that you are testing the use case in such a way that you cannot see its internal behavior - all you have access to are the pre and post conditions.

If you insist that you have different pre-conditions and post-conditions for different paths through the use case, then you do not have different paths through one use case. Instead, you have different use cases.

If you look at the use case in a white box manner, you may wish to define internal pre and post conditions of parts of the use case. These would represent internal state changes of the use case.

I see many people handling pre and post conditions of the use case in a very casual manner. I don't have a problem with that as long as it is clear that the writing is intended to be casual rather than rigorously correct.

A rigorous use of pre and post conditions is of great benefit to the testing team. It may be that the testing team will rewrite the pre and post conditions to be technically correct in order to assist in the testing process.

Office 12

2005-09-14T14:47:00.000-05:00

Microsoft puts their new UI on Office 12 (you can also watch it in action courtesy of the Scobleizer and Channel 9). It’s a pretty big departure from the current and previous versions of Office. They’ve also introduced more logical visual groupings in their toolbar, and seem to be favoring large and small icons in the same toolbar. Have a look and share your thoughts. And yes, it looks VERY MacOSX-ish

Google again

2005-09-14T13:40:00.000-05:00

Maybe I should consider a change in my blog's name to something like google tracker, or google learner, I have commented far too much on them in my lasts posts.
Anyway, when just my last post was about technorati demise, and the coming of new blog search engines, here is google with his proposal.
Sorry you old blog-searching guys, this is the day you have been all having nightmares about.

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Adios Technorati, Hola PubSub, Ice Rocket

2005-09-12T11:43:00.000-05:00

A number of well-trafficked Web commentators have already danced on Technorati's grave, with numerous comments on these sites by readers joining in. Most focus on how slow Technorati usually is. More often than not search results have become laughable thanks to spam blogs. Technorati's new tag project which lists the most popular blogs in categories is ludicrous. It lists numerous blogs on top 10 lists that have piss-poor Alexa rankings.
The lesson to be learned from Technorati should be that searching the live Web is extremely difficult. Yahoo, MSN and Google would be there if they had credible products. Moreover, as the live Web gets more and more important, this may well be the next defining moment for search leadership. It will be interesting to see if the A list search players buy or build.

Read - So long, Technorati (Kottke)
Read - Technorati Worthless (The Jason Calanis Weblog)
Visit - PubSub, Ice Rocket

Google here and there

2005-09-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

So there’s been a lot of Google in the news this past weeks, including this story in the NY Times where a bunch of Silicon Valley veterans hint that Google might be the new “evil empire”.

Towards the end of the article, though, there’s this paragraph:

For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft’s operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.

I strongly disagree with that. I agree that the central tenet of Microsoft’s success is that they have developed platforms, not just products — but where is Google creating a platform for third-party developers?

There are people writing hacks to hook Google Maps up to other software. And there are a ton of third-party search tools that simply redirect you to Google for web search (e.g. the toolbar search fields in Safari and Firefox). But that’s not a platform. What makes something a platform is that you can’t take it away without the stuff that’s built on it falling down. A Windows application doesn’t work without Windows. A developer can take the time to port a Windows app to other platforms, but you can’t just move a Windows app from Windows to any other platform.

Likewise from the users’ perspective. Big organizations can’t “just switch” from Windows, because they need their Windows software. Platforms are solid, because they are entrenched.

Just because lots of developers are integrating Google search into their applications doesn’t make Google search a platform; it’s just as easy to hook up to Yahoo for search. In my opinion, Yahoo even offers a better API for search than does Google, and their search results are pretty close in quality.

For all the speculation that Google’s goal is a “web OS” that supplants Windows as the lowest-common denominator platform for getting on the Internet, and for all the talk that Microsoft (and, in particular, Bill Gates) sees Google as a serious threat to their monopoly-powered golden-egg-laying geese, I just don’t see how Google is building a platform for developers that even vaguely competes with Windows.

“Follow the money” is as good a way as any to define a company: the point of business is to profit. This is why Apple is not, and has never been, a software company: their profits come from hardware sales — computers, and, now, iPods. Microsoft is a software company: their profits — billions of dollars every quarter — come almost solely from software.

Judged by their profits, Google is an advertising company. They don’t profit from search, they don’t profit from software. They profit by selling ads. This isn’t to belittle them — I think Google is a terrific company, and they are profiting handsomely from ad revenue ($369 million last quarter). They’re market leaders because their ads are better for everyone — they’re far less obnoxious than traditional web advertising (so they’re better for users), and yet they’re also more effective and cheaper (so they’re better for advertisers). And their software is, in many ways, ingenious.

If Google has a platform, it’s an advertising platform, not a developer platform. I’m not even saying Google should have a developer platform — I’m just saying they don’t. Any software that uses Google as a back-end for web search could be modified to use Yahoo or MSN by changing a few lines of code. Google Desktop might be popular, but it’s nowhere near as cool as Yahoo Widgets (a.k.a. Konfabulator) in terms of acting as a developer platform.

Plus, if Google is such a threat to Microsoft, why is it that all of their non-web software only runs on Windows? (“Google’s Windows-Only World”.)

Business-wise, Google’s software is just an excuse to show ads. Google’s search results and apps like Gmail serve the same purpose as the editorial content in magazines and newspaper. Google may or may not become a direct threat to Microsoft in the future, but in the here and now, the entrenched monopolies that ought to feel threatened by Google are newspapers. Newspapers, especially local small- and medium-market newspapers live off the revenue from classified ads. But because most towns have only one major newspaper, classified ad prices are artificially high. Google is primed to burst into this market, with targeted local ads that are cheaper for advertisers and easier for users to find what they’re looking for or interested in.

This all goes for Yahoo, too — their profits come from advertising, and they’ve been breaking into local markets long dominated by newspapers, such as movie theater show times and job listings.

Google-vs.-Microsoft may well be the battle everyone wants to see; but the battle that’s actually going on, for real, today, is the obvious one: Google-vs.-Yahoo. And what’s weird about this is that the Yahoo-Google rivalry is a good one — ignoring it to focus on a purely-hypothetical-at-this-point Google-Microsoft rivalry is like ignoring astronomy to gab about flying saucers.
See Also

* Robert X. Cringely: “Has Google Peaked?”:

But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google’s corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn’t supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.

I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won’t be all that surprised if they don’t. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.

* Danah Boyd: “Why Microsoft-Only Development Is Foolish Business Logic”:

Companies keep competing on a product-by-product basis, forgetting that they need to be competing on a paradigm level. And forgetting that they need to be competing collectively, not individually. By creating a product that only works on Microsoft, you solidify Microsoft more than you compete with them. You may be competing on a product level, but in the long run, you’ve done Microsoft more good than harm and you’ve just made your competition more difficult. You’ve given people another reason to stay on Microsoft. Why? How can this possibly be good business logic?

* David Pogue: “Google Gets Better. What’s Up With That?”:

Ever heard the old joke about the two psychiatrists who pass in a hallway? One says, “Hello there.” The other thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

In high-tech circles, that’s pretty much what people are saying about Google these days. If you hadn’t noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it’s now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today’s culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it’s all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

My Apple stock soared today!

2005-09-07T15:32:00.000-05:00

Just in case you have not checked it out just yet (I seriously don't think that anyone who I know reads this blog has not) go feast your eyes and senses with iTunes 5, iPodNano and ROCKR.

iTunes EQ Plugin

2005-09-07T15:30:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows that the best way to ensure that one is getting the very best quality audio is to invest in good hardware, and only listen to full CD quality (or better) music. However, not everyone can afford a professional audiophile setup. Macosxhints.com has what one man is calling the universal “perfect” settings for the iTunes equalizer. That is to say, that he claims that these settings will make improve the sound of widest range of music types. Of course, when ever someone makes a claim like this, there will be some who refute the assertion. Delving into the comments on the post reveals a comment by a very experienced audio engineer, who presents quite a negative attitude. The engineer claims that the “perfect” preset is the opposite of what should be done, and presents a preset that reverses the “perfect” preset.
Now, I make no claim to be an expert in audio, and my Dell and Altec Lansing speakers are far from ideal, but, to my ears at least, the “Perfect Negative” preset does improve the sound of my shoddily encoded MP3s.
Check the post out for yourself, and see if it doesn’t make your music sound better.

Del.icio.us

2005-09-06T13:43:00.000-05:00

I’ve used del.icio.us some over the past few months as I’ve played around with user tagging. However, I’ve been struggling with tagging – I use Firefox and am an “in context” browser (e.g. I don’t want to end up on another web page when I do an action like “tag” something.) So – my use of del.icio.us was a lot lighter than I thought it would be since it “broke” the way I browse.

The VeryDelicious Firefox plug in solved this for me when I stumbled upon it today. It’s perfect – I now have a toolbar in Firefox that lets me add up to three tags for a web page without leaving the page, knows my existing tag list (so I can choose from them), and let’s me go directly to my del.icio.us page for a specific tag. Worth checking out if you are a del.icio.us and Firefox user.

Mowing the lawn (and being paid for it)

2005-09-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

Almost two months since my last post. Thank you to all of you who sent me notes asking me to continue writing. I will maximize my efforts to do so. Specially now that big plans are coming to town and I will need to prioritize what should I do with my time.

Thinking about priorities, I recall that every Sunday when I was growing up, my dad would give me a list of the chores I had to do that week. Some, like taking out the garbage, were daily tasks. Others, such as my regular assignment of mow the lawn, could be completed anytime—as long as they were done by noon on Saturday. I knew I could do it on Monday, Wednesday or even Saturday morning. But I quickly figured out that the sooner I got it done, the more I could enjoy the rest of the week.

Without even realizing it, I was learning an important life lesson: pay now, play later. I could have waited until the last minute to do my chores. But if I had, I would have risked missing out on some fun activity my dad had planned for Saturday afternoon—an activity I knew I'd have to skip if I didn't get my work done. So I chose to make the effort on the front end.

Whether you're doing household chores or building a company, practicing the "pay now, play later" principle requires one key element: discipline. What exactly is discipline? It's the means to getting what you really want even when you don't want to do the thing necessary to get it.

The ability to make right decisions is critical to success in life.

That's true, but good decisions have no value without discipline. Decision-making takes care of goal-setting, but only discipline results in goal-getting. "Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everybody wants to live long, but not many want to exercise. Everybody wants money, yet few want to work hard. Successful people conquer their feelings and form the habit of doing things that unsuccessful people do not like to do. The bookends of success are starting and finishing. Decisions help us start; discipline helps us finish."

In other words, when it comes to success, good decisions and discipline go hand in hand. Good decisions minus discipline equals a plan without a payoff. And discipline minus good decisions equals regimentation without reward. Only when we have good decisions plus discipline do we have a masterpiece of potential.

Now, it's not easy to practice discipline. In fact, it can be downright painful at times. We all know what it's like to do something that we don't want to do but know we should do. That's the pain of discipline. But if you don't engage in that kind of pain, you open yourself up to the pain of regret, which is far more excruciating.

This leads me to an obvious question: How do you develop discipline? Although it is not an easy question to answer nor I am a discipline Yogi, here is what works for me:

1. Set deadlines and priorities. Don't make a list of everything you have to do and start working from the top. Prioritize your to-do list. Determine which projects you need to accomplish first and how much time you need to get them done. Then give yourself a deadline and get busy.

2. Challenge your excuses. I get so tired (angerly tired) of whiny people telling me why they couldn't, shouldn't, didn't and wouldn't. Put the violin away and start taking a hard look at the so-called reasons you cite for not being able to get things done. As I like to say, it's easier to go from failure to success than from excuses to success. As long as you're making excuses, you're
never going to make it.

3. Remove rewards until the job's done. Marathon runners don't stop for a break after each mile, and neither should you. I'm not saying you shouldn't divide your work into manageable chunks or celebrate the achievement of intermediate goals. Just don't have that Krispy Kreme doughnut too quickly.

4. Stay focused on results. Jackson Browne once said, "Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways." Staying focused on achieving results—with the priority items on your to-do list, I might add— will keep you from acting like an octopus on roller skates.

If you want to be successful—as a leader, as a parent, as a member of society—you have to pay the price. You can be disciplined and pay on the front end, or you can take the seemingly easier path and pay on the back end. Unfortunately, if you play now and pay later, the payment's much heavier. As I often say, hard work is the accumulation of the easy things you didn't do when you should have.

So, learn from my boyhood mowing-cleaning strategy. Pay now, and play later. Because if you pay now, you'll get to play a lot longer.

Managing Creativity

2005-07-18T10:45:00.000-05:00

From an article in July's HBR:
A company’s most important asset isn’t raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It’s creative capital—simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. Professionals whose primary responsibilities include innovating, designing, and problem solving—the creative class—make up a third of the U.S. workforce and take home nearly half of all wages and salaries. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. That much is certain. What’s less certain is how to manage for maximum creativity. How do you increase efficiency, improve quality, and raise productivity, all while accommodating for the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process? Read more...

It's a great time to be an entrepreneur

2005-07-12T11:45:00.000-05:00

There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one. Here’s one example.

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

Why on earth is there a 30X difference? There’s probably a lot of reasons, but here are my top four. I’m interested in hearing about what other people think are factors as well.

Hardware is 100X cheaper
In the 10 years between Excite and JotSpot, hardware has literally become 100X cheaper. It’s two factors – Moore’s law and the rise of Linux as an operating system designed to run on generic hardware. Back in the Excite days, proprietary Sun hardware and Sun hard drive arrays had to be bought. None of it was cheap.

Today, we buy generic Intel boxes provided by one of a million different suppliers.

Infrastructure software is free
Back in 1993 people had to buy and continue to pay for maintenance on everything they needed just to build their service -- operating systems, compilers, web servers, application servers, databases. You name it. If it was infrastructure, they paid for it. And, not only was it costly, the need to negotiate licenses took time and energy. I remember a story of one of my oldest friends having a deadline at Excite that required him to buy a Sun compiler through their Japanese office because it was the only office open at the time (probably midnight) and he needed that compiler NOW.

Compare that to today. Free, open source infrastructure is the norm. Get it anytime and anywhere. At JotSpot, and startups everywhere you see Linux, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, etc. No license cost, no maintenance.

Access to Global Labor Markets
Startups today have unprecedented access to global labor markets. Back in 1993, IBM had access to technical people in India, but little Excite.com did not. Today, with rent-a-coder, elance.com and just plain email, we have access to a world-wide talent pool of experts on a temporary or permanent basis.

SEM changes everything
Ten years ago to reach the market, expensive distribution deals had to be signed. People advertised on television and radio and print spending a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half”.

It’s an obvious statement to say that search engine marketing changes everything. But the real revolution is the ability to affordably reach small markets. You can know what works and what doesn’t. And, search not only allows niche marketing, it’s global popularity allows mass marketing as well (if you can buy enough keywords).

So What?
It’s nice that it’s cheaper, but what does it mean to entrepreneuring?

More people can and will be entrepreneurs than ever before
A lot more people can raise $100,000 than raise $3,000,000.

Funding sources explode which enables more entrepreneurs
The sources of funding capable of writing $100,000 checks are a lot more plentiful than those capable of writing $3,000,000 checks. It’s a great time to be an angel investor because there are real possibilities of substantial company progress on so little money.

More bootstrapping to profitability
With costs so low, I think you’ll see many more companies raise angel money and take it all the way to profitability.

Higher valuations for VCs.
And, for those that do raise venture capital, I think it means better valuations because you can get far more mature on your $100,000 before you go for the bigger round.

All in all, it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.

2005-07-07T09:05:00.000-05:00

They called it the "Miracle on Ice."

Twenty-five years ago, a team of American college hockey players overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to beat the heavily favored Soviet team—and, soon thereafter—win the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
"It may just be the single most indelible moment in all of U.S. sports history," Sports Illustrated wrote of the team's gold medal run. "One that sent an entire nation into a frenzy."

Another team that sent the US—or at least the part of that country that enjoys professional basketball—into a frenzy was the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Led by the likes of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, this team posted the best regular-season NBA record of all time (72-10) and went on to defeat the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1996 NBA Finals.

The 1980 U.S. hockey team and the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls were quite dissimilar. One was made up of little-known amateurs; the other of superstar professionals. One was a significant underdog; the other was a dominant force all year. Despite these and other differences, however, both could easily show up on a list of the greatest sports teams in US history.
The way these two groups of players melded together to reach their goals is inspiring, especially for people who value teamwork as much as I do. Individually, none of them—even the immensely talented Michael Jordan—could have accomplished what they did together. They needed each other to succeed.

As obvious as it seems to me now, I didn't fully grasp the importance of teamwork until I recently. When I began to evaluate the first half of my life, I got discouraged because I realized I had not achieved what I wanted to accomplish thus far. I was disciplined, I worked hard, and I thought I was helping people. But something was missing.

Eventually, I realized what that something was. Although I had concentrated on developing myself, I had not focused enough on building a great team. That, I concluded, was a major mistake—one that had kept me from reaching my full potential.

At 32, I realize that my success is not going to be determined by my gifts, my abilities or my opportunities. It is going to be determined by my ability to develop a great team.
Ever since then, developing my team has been my No. 1 priority.

The results are well worth the effort because of what my team does for me.

1. My team makes me better than I am. If the members of my team were here, they'd tell you the same thing.

2. My team multiplies my value to others. These people don't add to my worth when it comes to contributing to others; they multiply it greatly.

3. My team enables me to do what I do best. Because the members of my inner circle complement me and do things I don't do well, I am able to focus on the things that I can do well.

4. My team allows me to help others do their best. Having a team allows me to move people around until they're in what I call their "sweet spot" or "strength zone"—the place where talent meets passion, resulting in fulfillment and excellence.

5. My team gives me more time. Without a group of trusted colleagues, I'd have to do everything by myself—or at least keep a close eye on it all. With a great team, others can shoulder key responsibilities, freeing me up to concentrate on my top priorities.

6. My team provides me with companionship. I'll be happy when I can call my team players some of my best friends.

7. My team helps me to fulfill the desires of my heart. Not only that, but they help me fulfill them in a way that often far exceeds my expectations.

8. My team compounds my vision and my effort. When you're surrounded by a great group of people, the well-known acronym for TEAM really is true: Together Everyone Achieves More.

The best part is that these benefits don't just apply to me. A great team can do all this for any leader who, as I did at 32, stops trying to be a one-person show. As Andrew Carnegie said, "It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you can do alone."

Is Open Source Innovating?

2005-07-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

A Google engineer named Douwe Osinga recently posted on his blog an argument that Open Source software is not innovative. He compares open source to the Soviet Communist propagandists who railed at the US for allowing poverty while people stood in bread lines in Moscow.

This argument however is completely fallacious, most of the important innovations occuring today in non-'webservice' application development are coming out of open source. (Rails, Bittorrent, Wiki Engines, Ajax Frameworks, etc)

Software patent blackmail is not just terribly harmful to open source software development, it hurts all software development.

Copying other people is core to any invention, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

I could write a whole essay on why Open Source IS innovative, right down to the development model itself, but I don't want to give more attention to this argument than it's worth.

Code to $

2005-06-27T18:03:00.000-05:00

I'm convinced that most people think about software companies in an upside-down way. The common belief is that when you're building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn't been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. People sometimes call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works. If you understand this, it's easier to make the right strategic decisions.

The trouble with build-a-better-mousetrap is that there's not a lot of evidence that it works. First of all, many of the most successful software companies (Microsoft and Oracle, for example) don't really "innovate" in the sense that they are not really solving problems that haven't been solved before. In any market, it is exceedingly rare that you get to keep your invention to yourself. Everybody has competition. Wall Street Weenies and lawyers starting high tech companies tend to think they can protect themselves from this with patent protection. Ha! I can hardly think of a single case of a company successfully protecting themselves from competitors because of a patent. (Stac is the only case I can think of, and where the heck are they?)

The next problem with build-a-better-mousetrap is that we've reached a state with Internet software where there is too much money around chasing the same lame ideas. Call it the idrive-xdrive-swapdrive-freedrive phenomenon: suddenly thirty-seven companies pop up offering exactly the same service for free. There are a zillion examples of this. Petshops-on-the-net. Urban-video-rental-delivery. Cosmetics websites. When this happens, the business challenge switches from being a technical challenge that needs good programmers to being a marketing challenge that requires, somehow, the ability to break through the pack and establish a brand name, something that is vanishingly improbable. Not only that, but VC money is impatient. That means that investments which take a really long time to develop won't get funded, which is why anything really interesting or hard to copy won't even get funded. One reason that there are over thirty companies whose entire goal is providing free hard drive space on the Internet is that writing the code for such a service is so easy.

I'll talk later about a different way to think of software development. That's it for today... Come back tomorrow...

Biz Growth

2005-06-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

I constantly get asked and more constantly, I ask myself what rules are involved in business growth. After thoroughly think about it, this are the governing dynamics :

Rule 1: Establish and maintain a strong sense of purpose
Rule 2: Thoroughly understand the marketplace
Rule 3: Build an effective growth planning system
Rule 4: Develop customer-driven processes
Rule 5: Put the power of technology to work
Rule 6: Attract and keep the best and the brightest
Rule 7: See the future more clearly

I'll post more on each one on subsequent posts, as I don't want my readers get lost in kilometric posts each day. Easy, right?

AJAX, GreaseMonkey, Bloglines and Firefox

2005-06-26T20:27:00.000-05:00

Yes, I confess, this post's title will bring me a lot of traffic due to its high profile words. I say, bring 'em on!

After that said, I've been playing around with Greasemonkey lately, looking to see what all the hype was about.

The cool thing about Greasemonkey is how easy the scripts are to write and how it opens the door for anyone who can do simple javascript to tweak things that bother them.

One thing that bothers me about Bloglines is that it doesn't show the number of unread items in the title like GMail does. I leave GMail and Bloglines open all the time in tabs, so it would be convenient if I could just look at the titles to see if I should switch over and pay attention to them.

I looked in the greasemonkey script repositories, but I couldn't find this tweak :(

So I set out to write a Greasemonkey script to fix this annoyance. You can do Ajax stuff with Greasemonkey via the GM_xmlhttprequest function, so I combined that with the Bloglines API for getting the number of unread items.

and voila, here it is:

// ==UserScript==
// @name          Bloglines Unread Items Title
// @namespace     http://rodolforuiz.blogspot.com
// @include       http://bloglines.com/*
// @include       http://www.bloglines.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
GM_xmlhttpRequest({                                                
 method: 'GET',                                                  
 url: 'http://rpc.bloglines.com/update?user=email@email.com&ver=1', onload: function(changeTitle) {
    var unreadItems='';
    var i=1;
    while (changeTitle.responseText.charAt(i) != '|') {
       unreadItems = unreadItems + changeTitle.responseText.charAt(i);
       i++;
    }
    if (unreadItems == '0') top.document.title = 'Bloglines';
    else top.document.title = 'Bloglines (' + unreadItems + ')'; }
 });                                           
})();

Note, you must edit this script to input your email address.

If you happen to have a + or special character in your email address, you'll have to URL encode it.

Please, let me know if it worked for you or any other enhancement that you code yourself. Remember, thsi script is GNU protected - meaning, copy it and do to it whatever your will is :)

Open Source's next crusade

2005-06-09T15:24:00.000-05:00

This is a big question; I am going to take a stab at it. It’s no secret that open source has conquered the lower layers of the stack namely the operating system layer with Linux, the App/Web server layer with Apache and JBoss, and of course the DB tier with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Some proprietary vendors have embraced open source to their advantage and sometimes used it to hurt their competitors (like IBM’s commitment to Linux to hurt Microsoft or SAP’s support for MySQL to annoy Oracle) while other vendors have a very hard time finding a new source of revenue such as BEA.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that open source’s next crusade will take place. The first obvious area is enterprise applications and some people believe strongly that the second one is IT management. Open source software usually thrives where systems take forever to implement and require big upfront software licensing fees charged by large proprietary vendors making it inaccessible to SMBs. I believe that CRM, ERP and PBX are definitely in this category. In that order there are strong open source projects that are trying to claim market shares namely SugarCRM, Compiere and Asterisk. I could have added the popular Nagios project for the IT management space which extended and supported by companies like GroundWork. Obviously, today these companies are no match for Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft or Cisco but they are gaining ground every day and their popularity is a clear indication of where OSS is going next.

I also believe that the penetration of open source in the enterprise application world might be even faster than its penetration in the underlying layers simply because there is a big market opportunity for services and the open source community will be much more enthusiastic about developing enterprise applications to solve real world (sales automation, HR, billing, supply chain, health records…) problems for themselves and their clients than developing operating systems which can be boring at times.

An interesting debate would be: How can large proprietary vendors continue to make money and grow? My modest and personal answer is that, among other things, they have to invest heavily in R&D to always stay ahead of the curve and change their licensing model. IT buyers are much more educated, they are willing to spend money as long as there is a demonstrable and durable ROI. Salesforce.com is a good example; they offer more functionality than SugarCRM and they don’t charge licensing fees upfront. It’s an affordable monthly fee that customers pay as they go. By the time Siebel realized they had to offer a subscription-based offering, Salesforce.com was already public. It was too late.

Impossible and difficult

2005-06-08T11:39:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I'm talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it's not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much time. At least, the developers don't think so.

If people are up against impossible schedules, in my experience, they stop thinking. They cannot imagine a new technique or tool will help them. So even if their configuration management is in the pits, they will limp along instead of acquiring and using a new tool. And a change in technique is even worse. People who can't imagine any way to success resist any ideas like iterations, implementing by feature, test-driven development, or even peer review of code. (This happens to testers too, it's just that my examples here are for development.)

People aren't stupid. When they're up against an impossible schedule, they will hunker down and do what they can, so they won't be fired. That's all.

But with merely a difficult schedule, people will consider alternatives. They know that with alternatives they could make this into a not-so-difficult schedule, and they may be willing to take the chance on a different technique or tool -- or even both.

So if you have an impossible schedule, don't try to change anything. Or, change enough of the schedule that people have a little breathing room to try something new. But don't expect people to try something new in an impossible schedule. The personal risk is too high. It's much safer not to take a risk and miss the schedule than it is to take a risk with something new and miss the schedule.

So if you want your project staff to think, make a difficult schedule, and then set a personal challenge: "How can we make this schedule more reasonable?" In my experience, this is the kind of challenge many of us thrive on. But don't set a stretch goal. That discourages thinking and will encourage people to throw out any good ideas that have not yet become good habits.

Kudos to myself on my new role

2005-06-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

So now you are a technical program manager. You climbed from trainee, senior engineer, team lead, project manager to program manager. You planned your career and made the sacrifices.
When staff set up the office pool, you went back to night school. While colleagues went to the local bar, you were in class with the statistics tsar.
While teammates looked for the easy chore, you volunteered for the quality program de jour. When colleagues were on the slopes, you kept the project off the ropes.
While your rival hatched political schemes, you were leading tiger teams. While the boss was on the links, you discovered how the customer thinks.
You endured staff meetings, suffered cubical seating, and dodged performance review beatings.
As you don your coveted title of the Geek Godfather, you will realize the job is poles apart from your aspiration. Even the best-prepared engineer can be blindsided by the realities and limitations of the job. The stakes are high and rife with risk. Here are a few misdemeanors to avoid. First, you have little time to run the program. Even though you are the Big Kahuna, the daily work is now out of your hands. Your time and influence will shift from direct to indirect: articulating and conveying strategy, institutionalizing rigorous processes, and setting value and tone for projects – not the typical skills of an engineer.
Ironically, the transition from engineer to program manager leaves a sense of lost control. Initially, you feel more like Seinfeld’s Kramer – restless, disjointed, and sketchy – than like his alter ego Peter Von Nostrand: cool, calm, and collected. New program managers tend to gravitate back to the comfort and familiarity of daily operations at the expense of mounting strategic, financial, legal, personnel, and stakeholder demands.
It is critical that you learn to relinquish responsibility and manage through delegation and accountability. Like the bridle, the keel, and the fulcrum – it’s about leverage. Without leverage, you will lose control.
Second, you are always sending signals. The high profile of a program manager is viewed as a perk of the job. Au contraire. The extent of scrutiny and interpretation of your every move can be vitiating. The stealthy days in the lab, computer room, or office are gone. Your microphone is always on and the cameras constantly rolling. Also gone are speculative discussions with managers, employees, and the public. One day you explore the intrigue of open source software and the next day you wake up with a new Linux server farm. One day you complement the use
of rate monotonic analysis and the next day you are listening to a briefing on vacation scheduling via rate monotonic analysis.
Consider carefully your actions, conversations, and messages. Strive for simplicity, clarity, consistency and master analogies, metaphors, and allegories to communicate your message.
Third, beware of shooting stars. Like the grass on the other side, it is tempting to reach for another’s guru. Do not be blinded by that light. Shining stars in one environment fade in others. Ask the Yankees about Alex Rodriguez’s playoff performance. Moreover, stars do not stay with
organizations long. Supernovas that jump, like free radicals, to your program are susceptible
to other enticements. Ask the Cleveland Cavaliers where Carlos Boozer is playing this year.
Bringing in a superstar resembles an organ transplant. The new body rejects the prized organ. This battle consumes resources that take away from the healthy parts of the body that soon cause other health problems. Transplanting a star into your organization will no doubt cause resentment, conflict, and impede team morale.
My advice: grow your stars from within. Internal stars know the culture, garner employee support, and are more loyal. If you do star search, assure the luminary can shine in your program.
Finally, issuing commands can be costly. The consequences of orders expand proportionally to the breadth of command. Unilateral commands that overrule thoughtful decisions trigger resentment, insecurity, and perplexity.
Excessive intervention, inquisition, and supersession create bottlenecks as employees are excessively inclined to consult you before acting.
As program manager, you will have to make decisions and give orders. When doing so, be selective, deliberate, and inclusive with a broader plan of action in mind. If not, your
office will resemble the lines at Seinfeld’s famous Soup Kitchen – no funding for you! Next!

Inflection Point

2005-05-24T18:20:00.000-05:00

The burgeoning Linux vendor industry is facing its first challenge from beneath as companies like SpikeSource, SourceLabs, and Optaros compete with them for support contracts. Who will win, and what will the open source community gain or lose as a result?

Meanwhile interesting technology like Ruby on Rails and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) has turned the world of web apps on its head. The web as we know it was built on HTML and some combination of the LAMP stack. What web will emerge from AJAX'd Rails, Plone, PHP, and Perl apps? And where's Java in all of this?

And even at the bottom layers, the world is changing. Linux has thrown out the BitKeeper source control system and is looking for an open source replacement. Xen is spreading the virtualization gospel to the Linux vendors. And Microsoft is open sourcing software! Something is definitely afoot ...

Placebo (no, not the band)

2005-05-23T22:31:00.000-05:00

Everybody already knows how powerful the brain is. Take a sugar pill that’s supposed to be a powerful medicine and watch your symptoms disappear. Have a surgeon not perform bypass surgery on your heart and discover that the angina that has been crippling you vanishes.

The placebo effect is not just for sick people anymore.

Why do some ideas have more currency than others? Because we believe they should. When Jack Welch or Malcolm Gladwell writes about something, it’s a better idea because they wrote about it.

Even as your culture of ideas and marketing enters its long-tail, open-source, low-barrier, everyone-has-a-blog era of mass publication, we still need filters. Would your iPod sound as sweet if everyone else had a Rio? Would your Manolo Blahniks be as cool if everyone else were wearing Keds?

Arthur Anderson audited thousands of companies, and those audits gave us confidence in those companies, made them appear more solid, which, not surprisingly, made them more solid. Then, post Enron, the placebo effect disappeared. Same companies, same auditors, but suddenly those companies appeared LESS solid, which made them less solid.

The magic of the placebo effect lies in the fact that you can’t do it to yourself. You need an accomplice. Someone in authority who will voluntarily tell you a story.

That’s what marketers do. We have the “placebo affect.” (* The knack for creating placebos.) Of course, we need to persuade ourselves that it’s morally and ethically and financially okay to participate in something as unmeasurable as the placebo effect. The effect is controversial and it goes largely unspoken. Very rarely do we come to meetings and say, “well, here’s our cool new PBX for Fortune 1000 companies. It’s exactly the same as the last model, except the phones are designed by frog design so they’re cooler and more approachable and people are more likely to invest a few minutes in learning how to use them, so customer satisfaction will go up and we’ll sell more, even though it’s precisely the same technology we were selling yesterday.”

Very rarely do vodka marketers tell the truth and say, “here’s our new vodka, which we buy in bulk from the same distillery that produces vodka for $8 a bottle. Ours is going to cost $35 a bottle and come in a really, really nice bottle and our ads will persuade laddies that this will help them in the dating department… nudge, nudge, know what I mean, nudge, nudge…”

It would be surprising to meet a monk or a talmudic scholar or a minister who would say, “yes, we burn the incense or turn down the lights or ring these bells or light these candles as a way of creating a room where people are more likely to believe in their prayers,” but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing. (and you know what? there's nothing wrong with that.)

It’s easier to get people to come to a meeting about clock speed and warranty failure analysis than it is to have a session about storytelling.

We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business. Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to to help our customers by allowing them to lie to themselves.

The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. The sound Dasani water makes when you open the bottle is more of the same. It’s all storytelling. It’s all lies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In fact, your marketplace insists on it.

From Lord Vader Himself

2005-05-22T21:44:00.000-05:00

If you've been around the blogosphere, you've likely come across "The Darthside: Memoirs of a Monster." This clever blog is written in the first person form of Darth Vader himself, a character in the hyper-popular Star Wars series. The blog attracted the attention of Slashdot, then eventually G4 did a spot on "Attack of the Show". Hilarious, and at times poignant, today may very well be the final entry in the blog, as the Darth One goes to bring his son before the Emperor (which, being in the omniscient role of the reader, we know what will happen).

Open Source in Latin America

2005-05-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

In 2002, then-US Ambassador to Peru, John Hilton, delivered a threatening letter to the Peruvian congress using his public office to act on behalf of a very powerful American private interest. The letter, which was leaked to the press, stated that the Microsoft Corporation and its chairman Bill Gates disapproved of Peru debating a proposed law, Special Bill 1609, which favored the use of free software in public administration. Hilton warned its passage would harm US-Peru relations.

This incident was only an early salvo in a brewing international conflict. As nations of the world increasingly turn to free software to cut costs and promote local development, powerful North American commercial interests have responded by bullying. Sometimes they have done so by proxy, such as using public servants like Ambassador Hilton. Sometimes they have threatened legal action to intimidate outspoken critics such as Brazil's National Institute of Information and Technology (ITI) president Sergo Amadeu, who compared Microsoft business practices to that of drug dealers. Sometimes, they have threatened governments directly, such as last November, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threatened to sue Asian governments that choose to use free software.

Part of what distinguishes free software (also called “open source” or “libre” software) commercially from proprietary software is a matter of licensing. While all software is protected under copyright, commercial proprietary software is often licensed under terms that create additional restrictions, such as limiting where one can use such software and who may be allowed to use it. Often proprietary commercial software includes licenses to explicitly deny users many basic rights, including ability to modify software to fit their needs or access their own data, the right to speak about the functionality of the software they purchased, or to resell or give it to others when they no longer wish to use it. In contrast, free software expressly asserts and grants these fundamental rights through licensing, and does so in a way that enables others to fully reclaim these rights such as by providing source code.

While both free and proprietary commercial software have co-existed uneasily for a long time in many parts of the world, I believe what has made certain private North American commercial interests respond directly in Latin America is that many nations there have chosen to promote the use of free software, specifically in public administration. There already is a long history for the support and use of such software in Brazil by the Workers Party, starting from the days when they controlled the state government of Rio Grande Du Sul and instituted private/public sector partnerships through projects such as procergs. Most recently the government of President Luiz Lula Da Silva has chosen to use free software solutions built around GNU/Linux exclusively in a project to make computers available to the poor, as recommended by MIT this past March.

Free software in public administration is not just about software for special government programs such as digital inclusion for the poor. This is a battle about the purchase and use of all software by national governments and the terms such software will be provided under. This is about the procurement of servers and database applications used to house government data. This is also about the software that will be purchased and used on the desktops of government office workers every day, and whether they will continue to purchase and use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office under the terms of a monopoly supplier, or free software alternatives such as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.

As Latin American governments increasingly use free software, suppliers will need to adapt to provide it. Private industries that interact with government will also be affected to remain compatible with, and provide additional private markets for, those vendors. All of these create a national economic environment that certain companies, such as Microsoft, would need to change in order to fully participate in.

One reason free software is being promoted by Latin American governments is a question of initial cost. In Brazil, they expect to save over $1 billion dollars annually through the use of free software and elimination of license fees. Many other Latin American governments are of course keenly aware of the cost benefits of free software. In some countries, such as in Peru and Argentina, they have tried passing special procurement laws to more rapidly increase the adoption of free software in government. In Venezuela, the use of free software in public administration is now supported directly by President Hugo Chavez.

While it is true that the total cost of using software is not represented in the purchase price or license fees alone, most other factors also tend to favor free software and better explain the potential for large cost savings through its use. One reason is commercial-free software will often work on existing and older hardware rather than requiring new hardware to be purchased. Another is that since proprietary commercial software publishers depend on the number of licenses they can sell, it is often desirable to require as many additional software sales to perform a given level of work as possible. It should therefore come as no surprise that I often find the same workload that can be done, for example, with a typical GNU/Linux system may require three or four times as many proprietary servers, which also represents additional hardware and support costs.

Free software also can result in lower costs through the absence of monopolies. One cannot achieve a monopoly in free software in part because there will always be another free software publisher that can supply the same goods at a lower cost should this occur. This is in fact one of the main reasons for governments to prefer using free software instead of proprietary commercial software: When money is spent on proprietary software, only a small proportion of that money goes towards funding useful services and software development, as a large part of it goes as a monopoly rent to the shareholders of the proprietary software company. On the other hand, in the world of free software, there are no such monopolies, so money that is spent on free software is available for creating jobs and hence offers other direct and local economic benefits. In Latin America money that is spent on proprietary commercial software serves mainly to make already-rich foreign software publishers even richer.

In trying to create a market for or to promote the use of free software, many Latin American countries, such as Peru, have often chosen to do so through procurement laws like special bill 1609, which cover how a government will purchase goods and services. These laws typically state the terms of purchase that a government will use. Often they are designed to prevent bribery, and to make the process of government purchase transparent. This is often done through the use of competitive bidding. Competitive bidding allows products created by different manufacturers and publishers to compete in providing the same service, and by doing so, prevents the government from being forced to rely on a sole source supplier. Proprietary commercial software by its very definition and restrictions is software that can only come from a single provider.

In providing opportunities for Latin American citizens to directly participate in development and the worldwide commercial software market locally, free software offers incentives for forming a local software industry that can then compete on an equal basis with that of any other advanced country in the world. What we often forget is that software does not require expensive plants or high capital investment to develop. Software may only require people who are free to use their skills and natural talents. Certainly, the nations of Latin America can and do produce people with such talents and skills. Free software means these people can practice these skills for their own benefit and the benefit of their society as a whole without having to look for work in or migrate to foreign lands. By choosing to procure free software, the national government can directly encourage this.

If Latin American countries choose to create an economic environment that accepts participation by free software, existing corporations need not be excluded. Companies like Microsoft could choose, for example, to change the way they license their existing products. They are also free to adapt and offer services based on existing free software already in the marketplace. Instead of competing in these new markets, some companies have responded by trying to make it impossible for Latin American governments to choose and use free software at all. These companies not only resort to bullying, but also lobby our government to modify free trade treaties and use international organizations to include conditions that try to make it impossible for Latin American nations to choose alternative products or develop local markets.

I have often seen WIPO used in this way to promote the private commercial interests of wealthy corporations. WIPO is often used to promote treaties and laws that export both the North American corporate notion of pharmaceutical and software idea patenting to developing nations. Private corporations use these same treaties to then enforce existing North American patent monopolies, thereby preventing the development of competitive local industry. Another example of market control through trade treaties is the “IP rights chapter” of the Free Trade Area of The Americas (FTAA) treaty.

One way I have seen Latin American countries respond to WIPO and other patent bearing treaties has been by banding together with other developing nations around the world to help promote a development agenda for WIPO and bring it into harmony with the wishes of the UN General Assembly. Yet powerful American and European commercial interests have chosen to use the WIPO chair to explicitly bar NGOs representing the interests of developing nations from attending or participating in WIPO discussions on a development agenda even those organizations already duly certified and recognized with observer status.

The people of Latin America, of all people, surely know well what corporate bullies are. Last century many nearby Caribbean nations were routinely invaded by US Marines as part of the banana wars to prop up the interests of specific North American corporations such as United Fruit. While last century's bullies came with tanks and guns, the bullies of this new century come with laws and treaties they wish Latin Americans to adopt that undermine the heritage and the most basic rights Latin American citizens enjoy, not for the benefit of Latin America, but once again for the benefit of private North American corporate interests. The right to innovate is not a privilege to be restricted to a tiny minority, is not even a right specific or exclusive to the question of free software alone, but is a basic and fundamental right every human being must be free to enjoy.

REFERENCES

"Microsoft's big stick in Peru", Wired Magazine, July 27, 2002.

David Sugar, "Bill 1609 Will Be Good for Peru's Economy: an Open Letter", Linux Journal

"GNU.org.pe: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft" Linux Today, May 7, 2002

Lawrence Lessig's blog: www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001983.shtml

John Lettice, "Use Linux and you will be sued, Ballmer tells governments", The Register, November 18, 2004

Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa, "PROCERGS: todos os estados deveriam ter uma" Olinux.com December 29, 2000.

Todd Benson, "Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend" New York Times, March 29, 2005

Terry Wade, "MIT official advocates open-source on computers for poor in Brazil" Computer World.com, March 18, 2005

The use of open source represents annual savings of US$ 1.1 billion for the Brazilian government. (www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/apr04/p136apr04.htm)

Gregory Wilpert, "Venezuela's Public Administration to Use Open Source Software" Venezuelanalysis.com, December 30, 2004

"The WIPO Development Agenda and Why You Should Care About It" Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Paul Walcutt, "Why the Banana Wars" Experts: Central/South American History, January 10, 2004

Linux Fan, Windows User?

2005-05-12T17:09:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine has lately been heckling me about the fact that I use a Mac and a Linux box at home. It strikes him as odd that I'm always writing and talking about open source and yet don't wear that Linux on my sleeve, night and day. I use a Windows XP at work and all of my development and day to day work is Windows based.

Anyway, as I explained to him, I promote Linux all day, every day. I just don't personally prefer using it. Were my alternatives Windows and Linux, Linux would win. I sincerely dislike the Windows interface, and don't like the inability to tinker (in the limited sense that I, as a non-hard core geek, tinker with my software). But that is not my choice: Windows or Linux. Because of a fortuitous series of events, I also have the choice of BSD/Unix. This gives me the stability of Unix with the flexibility of open source. What's not to like?

So, to my friend's question, I aggressively promote Linux where it's a no-brainer (data center, edge of the network, embedded devices), and somewhat cautiously promote it on the desktop, where the average user resides. I don't want to have anyone get suckered into using a system that is not yet as easy to use as a Mac or Windows machine. There's no sense in burning that bridge. Linux desktops have a buying audience today (engineering, fixed-purpose desktops), which audience will continue to grow as we make it better. Use it where it fits best.

Java and Open Source

2005-05-11T09:43:00.000-05:00

Regarding Java and Open Source, I have some good news and some bad news...

The good news is that Java is "open" in the sense that you can look at its source code
The bad news is that it's not truly "open source" according to the official definition.
The good news is that you can see the source so you can work around problems.
The bad news is that you can't actually fix the problems in the JDK.
The good news is that you can fix the problems in your own version of the JDK.
The bad news is is that you can't distribute your own version to your customers.
The good news is that you could always email your fix to Sun and hope that they incorporate it.
The bad news is that that's never really worked at all.
The good news is that Sun has now set up a real mechanism to submit bug fixes,
The bad news? Well, we'll have to wait and see if there is any bad news.

IBM's Own Geronimo

2005-05-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

In what must be a harbinger of things to come, IBM announced today its acquisition of Gluecode, an open source provider of the Geronimo (Apache) application server and portal management software. To those who still can't get their minds around open source - revenue models and such - this acquisition will be perplexing in the extreme. What did IBM buy, anyway, given that most of what Gluecode sells is open source, available to all for free?

This misses the point. As with any industry (technology-centric or not), acquisitions are as much about customer base (likely not IBM's modus operandi here), expertise (bingo!), and leadership (product, market, or otherwise). I believe IBM simply wanted a strong foothold in a growing open source project, especially given Apache's traction in other areas of the enterprise (e.g., web servers). They bought into Gluecode's leadership in Geronimo (through its employees who work on the Geronimo project).

I doubt the acquisition required IBM to give up much (or any) cash, so it's a win for IBM, and gives Gluecode liquidity. Nice all around.

Except maybe for Red Hat, which persists in its Quixotic quest down the JOnAS road. IBM hasn't been cutting Raleigh any favors lately.

And, on a parting thought, it's funny to me how much Gluecode has changed over the past year. When I spent a day with Winston (then CEO) and his team a year or so ago, they were a portal/business process management company. Geronimo was just a dull gleam in their eyes at that point, but I remember Winston telling me they were thinking of picking up some expertise in that area. One year later, Gluecode's website is awash in Geronimo (announced in July 2004), and light on the very products/technology that make up its history (Portal/BPM). It's interesting how quickly the company should change its emphasis...until you see who its hires have been in the past year, which makes all the difference (in an open source world) as to where the company could claim its strongest leadership.

Source of the code, not source code.

Seeing What's Next Review

2005-05-09T11:13:00.000-05:00

When Clayton M. Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997, the title added an important new conceptual catchphrase to the lexicon of technology management. Innovative companies in any technology-based industry, Christensen explained, must balance the need to perfect the products that made them successful and at the same time watch for the next great new technology. The dilemma Christensen identified is that companies become so enamored of their past innovations that they are unable or unwilling to adapt to new technologies that offer dramatically different levels of performance and price.

Now Christensen has teamed with two of his former MBA students—Scott Anthony and Erik Roth—to write Seeing What's Next, which promises to guide readers in the art of predicting industry change so that they can avoid falling victim to the innovator's dilemma.

This latest book is in many ways easier to read than the original landmark volume or its 2003 sequel,The Innovator's Solution. The first book examined in excruciating detail the workings of the disk drive business—an esoteric technology practiced by companies whose names are unfamiliar to most. Now, the telecommunications business is the primary case study, making the examples in this new book much more meaningful, since the technologies are better understood and the names of the companies familiar to most.

Western Union leads off in the study as the quintessential victim of the innovator's dilemma. In the 1870s, the company passed up an opportunity to buy the patents for the telephone, because it could not envision any market demand.

The decisions of Western Union management, Christensen points out, were perfectly logical given their view of the market and technology. They were focused on long-distance communications, and the early telephones worked only over short distances.

What they overlooked, he notes, was the disruptive nature of the new telephone technology. It met the needs of a different market—people who wanted to send a message across town instead of across the country. Because these people didn't consume telegraph services at all, they were of no concern to Western Union. But as other companies developed the telephone, it soon eclipsed the telegraph.

The Western Union lesson illustrates one of three situations that Christensen warns readers to watch for if they are to "see what's next" and be open to future breakthrough possibilities. In addition to nonconsumers, the second group to watch for is what he calls "undershot consumers," who use the existing products but are frustrated by their limitations and willing to pay for enhancements. Examples here are those who were willing to pay extra for mobile cellphones in a later era.

At the other extreme are "overshot consumers," who, he notes, are more than satisfied with current products and are unwilling to pay for further improvements. As an example, Christensen sites MCI's ability to sell streamlined long-distance communications services at a discount to businesses, undercutting AT&T's full-service long-distance offerings.

The lessons are important ones for all engineers and technology professionals. To be successful, engineers and technologists must design devices and processes that perform efficiently and reliably. This naturally causes them to favor familiar and proven technologies. But unless they are vigilant, they risk getting stuck in a rut and being bypassed by bolder, new competitors.

Christensen believes these lessons also apply to any industry impacted by technology. Seeing What's Next includes brief examinations of the effect of Internet-based distance learning on higher education and the repercussions of new medical procedures and tests on the delivery of health care.

But, although this book is recommended reading for anyone involved with technology, there is one note of caution. Unfortunately, Christensen is succumbing to his own innovator's dilemma. This is his third book on the theory of innovation. While he's improved his ability to explain his concepts, readers of either of the previous two books will find little new substance in this one.

Living in Suburbia

2005-05-07T13:06:00.000-05:00

Respected analysts such as those at John S. Herold Inc, the first analysts to call BS on Enron, have gone so far as to predict when each of the big oil companies will peak, which they think will all happen by 2009 (Total S.A by 2007, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, Royal Dutch/Shell and Eni S.p.A by 2008, ChevronTexaco by 2009). A recent report by David Coxe, an analyst working for the Bank of Montreal, said that the worlds largest oil field, Gharwar in Saudi Arabia, has started to decline, or peak. Other analysts such as Matt Simmons and Colin Campbell, the head of the Association for the study of Peak Oil (Aspo) all agree.

Of course Saudi rejects all notion that their oil fields will ever run out of oil, but promises by them to increase production last year failed to materialise and the recent 500,000 barrels per day increase was not Saudi Light crude as expected, instead the new oil was heavy, sulphurous oil that only a few refineries can use and is common when oil fields start to decline.

So, what does peak oil mean for all of us? According to James Howard Kunstler in Rolling Stone Magazine, it'll mean that we'll all have to move out of suburbia, grow our own food and accept that life will never be the way we once knew it. He also says that alternative energies won't help the world ween off of oil because they're not developing fast enough and therefore oil is a stronly inelastic good and the price of oil will continue to rise. This notion that alternative energies are underdeveloped was reiterated by a French bank, Ixis-CIB, who recently warned that oil could hit $380 per barrel by 2015. The analysts argue that this is possible because alternatives are not developed yet and the world will rely on oil no matter what the cost. The analysts also said existing new oilfield projects would not be enough to satisfy unprecedented growth in demand from developing economies, particularly China.

To help curb the dependence on oil, the International Energy Agency has also advised that all oil consuming nations remove subsidies that they give to oil. Theses subsidies distort the oil market and removing them will promote the development of alternative energies which is badly needed if we want to continue living the dream in suburbia.

Technological Solutions & Cultural Solutions

2005-05-04T18:40:00.000-05:00

...A recent thought:

There can be no technological solution without a cultural solution. Cultural solutions are more valuable and profitable than technological solutions.

Agree/Disagree?

Agree!

It's kind of obvious to me that since it's the people within the system that are needed to buy into and use the technology, the "cultural" aspects are primary for the acceptance and use of the technology.

Also, how the technology is applied and the efficacy of it as a "solution" is also dependent on a cultural component. Is the technology being used to simply pave the cowpaths, speeding transactions and analysis in the system's old way of thinking about and doing things, or is the technology a means of supporting a significant improvement that involves a new mindset and set of operating rules -- a "new culture"?

On the other hand, the benefit of a technological solution is that it can help to do just that -- institutionalize a cultural solution so that it gets a chance to eventually become the old method subject to another solution.

Bottom line -- significant, meaningful, profitable results come from the cultural solutions. While they may be made possible or supported by a tech solution, the technological aspect may be neccesary but not sufficient.

IT Growth Predicted for Latin America

2005-05-04T18:36:00.000-05:00

How is the global tech sector doing? It largely depends on what currency is being used for measurement. Forrester measured the global revenues of 35 large IT vendors in US dollars. They found that the Asia Pacific market is the strongest for vendors, with revenues calculated in a mix of US dollars and Japanese yen likely to grow by 7% in 2005. The Americas (that means us) is the next strongest market for IT vendors, with a prospect of 6% growth in US dollars for 2005. Vendor revenues in euros for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) are the weakest, with 4% growth for both 2004 and 2005. Thus, exchange rate changes that have favored US IT manufacturers are masking a slow growth period for IT globally. Computer hardware revenues are strongest, especially in Europe; software, IT services, and IT outsourcing revenues are more even by region but are growing moderately; and communications equipment spending is weak in the US but stronger in Europe and Asia.

Java vs .NET

2005-04-30T00:50:00.000-05:00

* Companies, focused on a more robust and secure solution that will manage more data, tend to choose J2EE.
* Companies that need a solution faster, and with less business complexity, tend to choose .NET.
* .NET has an edge in client-side development because more tools are available.
* Sometimes the challenge can be finding developers with skills in both platforms or retraining Java developers to use .NET or vice versa.

Endless debates swirl around the technical merits of Microsoft’s .NET platform vs. Sun Microsystems’ J2EE. Both companies tout their products’ scalability, security, interoperability, speed, support for other products and more. But what about the business case for either platform? What sorts of companies are using which platform for what, and what reasons are behind the platform choices that firms make? Is the balance of power between these two powerful platforms shifting?

Short answers are dangerous when it comes to discussing J2EE and .NET, but in terms of which platform lends itself better to which sort of project, research tends to indicate this: Companies that are focused on a more robust and secure solution that will manage more data tend to choose J2EE. Companies that need a solution faster, and with less business complexity, tend to choose .NET.

A Forrester Research study from September 2004 in which 322 software decision-makers were questioned reports that J2EE is stronger than .NET in industries such as utilities, telecom, finance and insurance. .NET, on the other hand, is stronger in manufacturing, retail and wholesale, media, business services and the public sector. The report’s author, Randy Heffner, writes that “Firms that spend a higher percentage of revenue on IT are more likely to do the majority of development on J2EE. And .NET is more often the focus at companies facing weak business climates.” The report also reported that more than half of the surveyed firms were using both J2EE and .NET.

According to Gartner analyst Mark Driver, that’s the reality—most large organizations are using both platforms. In fact, he rarely encounters a company running only one. And although he sees plenty of momentum right now around .NET, Driver says that’s simply because it’s a newer platform. “There’s a lot of hype around it,” he says, while Java isn’t as exciting because it’s no longer new. The Java programming language has been around for about 10 years; Sun first introduced J2EE in mid-1999 as a platform-independent, Java-centric environment. Microsoft, in turn, announced .NET in 2000 as a major new platform and infrastructure strategy for the company.

For the most part, Driver says, Gartner tends to see J2EE and Java used for larger projects, with companies who have “a heavy need for multiple tools from multiple vendors, and the ability to deploy on non-Windows platforms.”

Also, vendor commitments heavily influence the choice of platforms, Driver points out. Large companies tend to run mainframes somewhere in the mix, which means they work with companies such as IBM, BEA, Sybase, SAP and Oracle. “Companies are going to use what those vendors are using, which is Java,” Driver says.

Eric Newcomer, CIO of IONA Technologies, agrees. Particularly in large companies, platform decisions in the past tended to be made on a departmental level. In fact, IT environments have grown up that way, Newcomer says, leading to today’s often-fragmented enterprises. IONA approaches that fragmentation by making products that allow business applications and middleware from various vendors work together. Customers tend to be fairly large, including financial, telecommunications and government systems.

As company size increases, so does the likelihood of seeing multiple platforms in use, agrees Joe Fernandez, director of product marketing for Web test products at Empirix. Fernandez’ company sells quality assurance and testing software for both J2EE and .NET applications—many customers are Fortune-100-sized companies. “As you get into larger businesses,” says Fernandez, “there’s an increasing likelihood [of seeing] both Microsoft and Java technologies within one organization.”

Along with fragmented departmental decisions, a large number of applications at large companies have come through acquisition, Fernandez points out: “The IT infrastructure comes together in lots of different ways.” For the most part, though, he believes large companies are still running Java, although he sees Microsoft moving its way up the food chain.

Selecting the right platform

Regardless of what others are running, when it’s time to make a platform decision for a new project, you’re still left with a tough decision. Simple categorizations like Java-big and .NET-small might apply, but only to a company starting from scratch without any existing software or history, points out Brian Lyons, CIO of Number Six Software.

Number Six specializes in mature software development techniques and large projects and companies, including various levels of government. (Lyons has put together a presentation brimming with resources on both sides of the debate, which are available for download at www.numbersix.com/csdi/documents/ThePlatformWarsx.pdf.)

Starting with a clean slate, a company really could choose a platform based simply on “the business people knowing what their significant business drivers are, and [the technical people] knowing what the tech drivers are,” Lyons says. More realistically, of course, companies must weigh a number of factors in choosing a new environment, including current platforms and tools, overall cost, skill sets of current staff, future estimates of growth, technical staff choices and management preferences. Since his company typically enters the picture when there’s already some infrastructure in place, Lyons says, “We look at business and technical drivers, as-is components, and help make a decision [on a platform].”

In general, there’s some agreement on the broad project categories that each platform is best for. IONA looks at it as an ease-of-use vs. complexity tradeoff, Newcomer says. “I think that the .NET framework and Microsoft, in general, have grown their business around the ease-of-use idea... They make their tools easy to work with. For simple, GUI-intensive [projects], the tools from Microsoft really have the edge.” On the other hand, he suggests, “for more complex coding, where it’s not as easy to access the features of the language, you may prefer to use Java... Perhaps you want to tune it for performance and for high scalability.”

Many factors to consider

Gartner’s Driver points out that many considerations should play into the platform decision. His advice includes carefully considering the product development lifecycle. If you’re looking at a three to five-year lifecycle, he says, where time to market is dominant, .NET might be a better choice, other things being equal. That’s because in shorter development cycles in which upfront costs are dominant, Microsoft can be a plus. “For ease of use and produce-ability, Visual Studio is a very, very nice development environment.” Although there are no absolutes, he emphasizes, Visual Studio can mean that .NET is a faster and cheaper choice for shorter development cycles.

On the other side are the larger costs and longer development time of a five- to 10-year lifecycle, or projects with more than 500 concurrent users and heavier legacy integration features. In those cases, Driver says, consider the additional flexibility of being able to change course over time with less impact. That points to a Java platform, because “I can switch middleware and I can switch tools, not at zero cost, but at less cost.” All of these options, he points out, presume a heavy consideration of return on investment and total cost of ownership.

On the other hand, if you’re already mostly a Microsoft shop, much of this simply may not matter. “If you’re Microsoft-centric,” Driver says, “there’s not a whole lot of reasons to look behind .NET.”

Gauging developer availability
Along with many other considerations, one element to weigh in choosing a project platform is what developer resources are available now, at what cost, and how that might change in the future.

In an interesting geographical split, Number Six Software’s Lyons sees more J2EE and Java in use on the East Coast and more .NET in the Midwest. That’s partly because the federal government is still heavily vested in Java, which sways the results. It also tells you that if your company is in the Midwest, .NET developers may be slightly harder to find, since there are more work opportunities there for them.

“There’s more Java developers out there [right now] than .NET developers,” Gartner’s Driver confirms, but “in the end, there will be more .NET developers, just because of the sheer number of projects.”

Because Microsoft continues to be the dominant vendor at the lower end, Driver says, that favors a larger number of .NET developers eventually, since there will always be many more small projects than large ones. The low end “is still Microsoft’s business to lose,” Driver says. “It’s like a pyramid—non-mission critical stuff underneath and enterprise on top… After all, how many HR systems does a company have or need?”

“From what I’ve seen,” Empirix’ Fernandez says, “it’s still easier to find Microsoft developers. Microsoft has a large developer community and is doing a good job of training people on the latest [technologies].” Another observation, Fernandez says, is that when J2EE first came on the scene several years ago, “we had a harder time finding Java developers… Java has now been around for [a while]. So that developer community has grown and is a little more accessible.”

Who you can find also depends, of course, on what skill level you’re looking for. At Number Six, Lyons says, the company needs high-end, sophisticated developers for both platforms. “At that level, I can’t say that there’s any difference,” Lyons says, “either in salary or in ease of finding [candidates].” If you’re just beginning a .NET project, Lyons says, “you might find people on the Visual Basic side, but [they’re] not really enterprise designers.”

At IONA, Newcomer echoes that sentiment. “We need high-level developers who are multi-lingual—C++ and Java, for example.” In general, he says he’s found that Java developers tend to pick up C# programming, which is specific to the .NET environment, very easily. In general, Newcomer says, “Microsoft does a tremendous job of training people,” ensuring that there’s a steady pool of talent available.

Sometimes, the challenge can be finding developers with skills in both platforms, or retraining Java developers to use .NET or vice versa. In what he says is a fairly common type of IONA customer, Newcomer describes a recent scenario at a large bank. “They had all this .NET, lots of [.NET] developers, lots of Java app servers, and now they had to put them all together. But they had few people with skills across both platforms.”

The world is equally divided

Is either platform growing more quickly than the other? Although both Java boosters and Microsoft fans claim growth and dominance, most observers don’t see it. “At IONA, we see the world still roughly divided between Java and .NET developers,” according to Newcomer. “It could be tipped slightly toward one or the other, but our role is to try to integrate these disparate systems.”

One factor to consider on the Java and J2EE side is Linux. “We’re certainly seeing more Linux in the enterprise as a low-cost alternative,” Empirix’ Fernandez says. “It can offer better cost and scalability advantages.” Linux may indeed have an effect on J2EE, Gartner’s Driver says. “As [Microsoft] moves the battlefield higher and higher into the enterprise, they have a guerilla war flanking them—Linux. [And] Linux and Java have a very tight affinity.”

The growth and popularity of Eclipse, the open-source tools framework initiative, might also help by making Java more accessible, Fernandez says. “That’s always been the challenge for Java—the complexity. Eclipse is a platform the Java community rallies around.”

That you can run Java on many platforms is still a big differentiator, Fernandez says. “Microsoft has talked about that, but it’s not a reality yet in any meaningful way.” He mentioned the Mono project as an example, but says that “in terms of released software, we haven’t really seen anything yet.” The Mono project, begun in 2001, is an open-source development platform based on the .NET framework that can run existing programs targeting either the .NET or Java frameworks.

Although it’s technically true that J2EE supports multiple operating systems and .NET supports just one, Number Six’s Lyons finds that an oversimplification with little grounding in fact. “I think it’s an emotional issue,” he says, because “people like to feel [that they’re] not locked in.” But the flexibility espoused by Java proponents is largely an illusion, he says, since changing operating systems isn’t trivial on any platform.

“If you’re running [IBM] WebSphere or WebLogic,” Lyons says, “it’s not a no-brainer to change. People feel they’re not locked in, but really they are. You’re kidding yourself if you think you can just flip a switch and change.” Available development tools can also be a deciding factor, Driver says, “The development tools available for Java, “do a good job at the more component-based, service-oriented projects, [but] don’t compare to Visual Studio.”

The widest gap with tools, he says, is in client-side development. “That’s much easier in .NET than Java.” On the other hand, “Microsoft tools aren’t so good at formal engineering practices.”

As Microsoft continues to get more serious about enterprise frameworks, larger teams and tools for distributed development, it will start to release better products for those purposes, Driver says, beginning with Visual Studio 2005. Microsoft’s next-generation software development platform has been delayed repeatedly but is expected later this year.

Competition is good

With the market fairly evenly split between the two platforms, and with many companies straddling the divide by running both, a business case can clearly be made for either product in almost any situation.

There’s one fact that nearly everyone agrees on: both .NET and J2EE will continue to thrive in the market, since each has individual technical strengths, the backing of major software companies and huge followings.

The heated competition will continue to push both Sun and Microsoft to augment, support and bolster their competing products. Whichever platform you’re running or contemplating, that kind of competition is good news.

Estimating a project

2005-04-29T10:36:00.000-05:00

When a project or collection of projects is in the idea or concept stage, you want to put together a high-level estimate to see whether or not the project is worth pursuing. You typically do not want to spend too much time working on a detailed estimate at this point, since you do not know if the idea is a worthwhile. Basically, you just want to know the relative magnitude of the effort. While you may be asked to provide a high-level estimate of the cost, the business people are also struggling to try to understand and quantify what the benefits of the project will be.

The most accurate way to estimate a project is usually to build a work breakdown structure and to estimate all of the lowest level individual work components. This is a bottom-up approach. It is also the most time consuming and is not appropriate for the initial estimating that you do early on in the funding and prioritization process.

Instead, you will want to utilize a top-down approach, trying to gain as much estimating confidence as possible while also taking as short a timeframe as is practical. To give you a few examples, the following are all top-down techniques that should be considered. Depending on the project, you may find that one or more techniques will work especially well. If you think the effort is large enough to be considered a program (collection of projects), then you need to take your best guess at breaking it up into a corresponding set of projects and then estimate the projects at a high level.

Partial Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

In this approach, you would start building a traditional WBS, but you would only take it down one or two levels. At that point you would estimate the different work components, using your best guess, or one of the other estimating techniques listed here.

Previous History

This is by far the best way to estimate work. If your organization keeps track of actual effort hours from previous projects, you may have information that will help you estimate new work. The characteristics of the prior work, along with the actual effort hours, should be stored in a file/database. You then describe your project in the same terms to see if similar work has been done in the past. If so, then you have a good idea of the effort required to do your work.

Analogy

Even if you do not keep actual effort hours from previous projects, you may still be able to leverage previous work. Analogy means that you describe your work and ask your organization whether a similar project has been done in the past. If you find a match, see how many effort hours their project took and use this information for your estimate. (If the organization does not track actual effort hours, find out how many people worked on the project, and for how long, and then adjust the hours as needed.) Analogy is similar to the Previous History except that in the Previous History technique you have some structured method to compare historical projects to the one you are estimating. In the Analogy technique you do not have all the facts, so you are relying instead on comparisons with prior projects that seemed "similar".

Expert Opinion

In many cases you may need to go to an internal or external expert to get help estimating the work. For instance, if this is the first time you have used a new technology, you may need the help of an outside research firm to provide information. Many times these estimates are based on what other companies in the industry are experiencing. You may also have an internal expert who can help. Although this may be the first time you have had to estimate a certain type of project, someone else in your organization may have done it many times.

Parametric Modeling

To use this technique, a pattern must exist in the work so that an estimate of one or more basic components can be used to drive the overall estimate. For instance, if you have to implement a package in 40 branch offices, you could estimate the time and effort required for a typical large, medium, and small office. Then, group your 40 offices into buckets of large, medium, and small. Finally, do the math to estimate the entire project.

Ratio

Ratio is similar to analogy except that you have some basis for comparing work that has similar characteristics, but a larger or smaller scale. For instance, you may find that the effort required to complete a software installation for office A was 500 hours. There are twice as many people in the B office, which leads you to believe it may take 1000 hours there.

Estimate in Phases

One of the most difficult aspects of estimating projects is that you do not know exactly what work will be needed in the distant future. To reduce the level of uncertainty, you can break the work into a series of smaller projects and only give an estimate of the most current project, with a more vague estimate for the remaining work. For instance, many times you can provide a high-level estimate for an analysis phase, during which you will gather business requirements. After you have the requirements, then you will be in a position to estimate the rest of the project (or at least the next major phase). At that point, management can again do a cost-benefit calculation to determine if it makes sense to proceed with the rest of the project.

Summary

When you want to do a quick estimate of project cost, you want to use some type of high-level, top-down approach. Depending on the characteristics of the project and the type of information you have available, these approaches can actually be very accurate. Worst case, they should at least give you a decent ballpark estimate. From an expectations standpoint, this type of high-level estimate should be 25% to +75% accurate. That is, if you estimate the cost of the project to be $100,000, you would expect the actual cost to be in the range of $75,000 to $175,000. If your management or customer would like more accuracy than that, they need to give you more time to allow you to uncover more details, or lay the work out at a lower level.

DB Atrophy

2005-04-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

Ok, looks like I'm diverting too much from my daily job activities. So, here is something most of my readers will enjoy (yes, I'm talking to you programming fans...)

I feel we, the software development community in general, are suffering from a disease called "database atrophy" and most of us don't know it.

We are so dependent on the services our relational database servers (RDBMS) provide, that many of us could not live without them.

I believe this RDBMS dominance is causing us to yield but a fraction of the power in our computers.

Object-oriented languages have been around for decades and the next few years, at least, will clearly be OO language dominated. There is no serious contending platform besides Java and .NET today.

Still, the promises of OO, such as high-quality and reuse, are not fulfilled.

With rare exceptions, the OO culture simply does not exist. People are still uncapable of using OO to drive complexity out of their business logic.
And the reason for that is RDBMS dominance. There is absolutely no way of doing OO with your live data in an RDBMS.

10 years ago, people thought using "data-aware" GUI "objects" coupled to their database was using OO. Today, many people think that using an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool to map dumb data-objects to database records, is using OO. :(

ORMs such as Hibernate, Castor and Toplink are central players in this depressing context of ours. On the one hand, they provide a palliative in the absence of true OO but, on the other, they actually hamper the community by illuding it and giving OO a bad name.

But I believe a brighter future is inevitable:

OO design patterns are starting to kick in.
IDEs are starting to invest in decent OO design support rather than database-coupled "RAD" development.
Open source project are cross-pollinating best OO techniques such as refactoring, test driven development, implementation independence, etc.

Feel free to participate.

This post is dedicated to denouncing the symptoms and causes of database atrophy and providing a vision of what we can do in full health. :)

And as my experience has shown me to behave, I should not only pinpoint the problem, I should also provide a solution, here are 2 projects that can cause your brain to kick out that atrophy you have been living with.

db4o - "Objects are here to stay"
Prevayler - "Persistence is Futile"

My Own WiMax Hot Spot

2005-04-26T15:19:00.000-05:00

I know, I know. Am I not supposed to be the geekiest geek in my circle of friends? Am I not supposed to have all the stuff I usually talk about? Well, I don't. Until a couple of weeks ago, I finally got broadband in my home and finally set up a wireless network. Finally I have access to the 'net from my home's thinking chair!

WiFi is such a big leap into the lives of everyone and while not broadly installed in Mexico's homes, it is starting to carve its path. In this line, this week, Intel announced that it has begun shipping its first WiMax wireless networking chips to OEM manufacturers. Other manufacturers will soon follow, and the hype level will increase accordingly. But there is also plenty of noise coming from pundits saying that WiMax is a long time from being a major factor. I'm in the middle on this. The impact of WiMax devices is probably a couple years away, but the impact of WiMax on the market can't be over-estimated, and that's already begun. The big winners in this, oddly, are probably BitTorrent users. If only in this way, WiMax will shortly change our world.

WiMax, if you don't already know, is the IEEE 802.16 wireless networking standard that has people excited because it will support high data rates over long distances, sometimes up to 30 miles. Think of WiMax as long-range WiFi. From a logistical standpoint, WiMax beats the heck out of WiFi because you can plop an access point into the middle of town, feed it with a DS3, and have the whole town broadband-ready in a few days. That's the dream, and I am sure it will be eventually realized.

The reality behind the dream is that WiMax operates in several frequency bands, some unlicensed and some licensed. Next year, for a few hundred dollars, you'll be able to buy a WiMax access point operating in the 5.8 Ghz band and offer service to your neighbors -- and ONLY your neighbors. At the power levels authorized for unlicensed use, 5.8 Ghz WiMax is not going to offer significantly higher performance than does 802.11a today. Unlicensed WiMax will be a short-range service. In order to go those 10 to 30 mile distances, you'll need to operate at a lower frequency with more power, which means using licensed spectrum, which means paying real money.

So a WiMax metropolitan area network is likely to owned by some concern with deep pockets, not by you or me. In that way, WiMax is not at all like WiFi. The big wallets are already coming into play as telcos, mobile phone companies, long-distance phone companies, and others start grabbing for those local frequencies. What we'll eventually see are two to three big players in most markets, and we'll still be sending someone a check every month.

But this is NOT a bad thing. WiMax will provide broadband competition in a way that WiFi never could. While WiFi was always at best a broadband extension, WiMax can be a broadband alternative to DSL and cable modems. This third player will lead to more competition and lower prices. That's why it is good.

Competition has an impact on more than just prices, though. Service providers can also compete on, well, service. We're seeing that right now in the U.S., where cable companies are jacking-up their Internet speeds in an effort to keep customers from going to DSL, just as telcos are installing fiber-to-the-home to steal video customers. Adding a third major competitor in the mix will only accelerate this trend. And if Power Line Internet becomes a reality it, too, will push service levels.

We've seen this before in mobile telephones where competition has driven down prices and made most services part of the package. We'll see more of that, too, with Internet service.

Which brings me to BitTorrent, which apparently is sucking up 30 to 40 percent of all Internet bandwidth though most Internet users (not you -- those other people) have never heard of it. BitTorrent is an Open Source peer-to-peer file-sharing application that is popular for distributing huge video files because it cleverly uses the assistance of your client computer to help redistribute to other downloaders those parts of the file that you have already received.

The powers that be -- ISP's, movie studios, etc. -- hate BitTorrent. The ISPs hate it because of all that bandwidth sucking and the movie studios hate it because they think Bit Torrent is being used to steal their property.

Now let's look forward two to three years. Broadband will be pervasive by then and in nearly every city, users will have the choice of DSL, cable, WiMax, and possibly Power Line Internet service. Average speeds may be slightly higher, average bills will be slightly lower, and the market will be perfectly poised for video-on-demand (more properly download-on-demand) to replace much of broadcast and cable television as we presently know it. And when that happens, when the movie studios have finally realized that they can cut out the networks and the cable companies and sell or rent directly to you and me for less money but more profit, the way they'll do that is by embracing BitTorrent.

Why not? BitTorrent drops the studio cost of downloading movies from $0.50 or so to nothing at all. BitTorrent is more reliable and scalable than any movie studio web site will ever be. The ISPs just have to come around.

That may be easier than it first appears. ISPs hate BitTorrent right now because it costs them real money for real bandwidth. But they, too, are planning to offer video services and BitTorrent is really, really good for that. In the super-competitive broadband ISP environment of two to three years from now, I'm predicting that the ISPs will come to realize that BitTorrent is actually their friend.

What bugs ISPs right now is that they are paying a lot of money for the bandwidth being used by BitTorrent. But what is key to understand is that the bandwidth the ISPs feel sick about is INTERNET bandwidth, not the bandwidth of their own networks. If BitTorrent traffic is grabbing 30 percent of total Internet bandwidth, that means an ISP is paying 30 percent of its Internet bill for BitTorrent traffic. But remember that ISPs over-sell their Internet bandwidth by 100 to 200 times, which means that BitTorrent load might be 30 percent of the backbone connection, but less than one percent of the internal network bandwidth.

There is a solution here and that's to keep most BitTorrent traffic OFF the Internet. Comcast now has more than seven million broadband customers. What are the odds that you could make your BitTorrent download just as fast linking solely to other Comcast customers? For obscure content, sure, you reach out over the Net, but for American Idol, you can get it just as quickly without ever hitting a backbone.

My prediction, then, is that competition from WiMax and other new broadband providers will force ISPs to be more open, that movie studios and others will realize BitTorrent can be an ideal distribution medium, and that ISPs -- by localizing most Bit Torrent traffic -- can make customers happy and save money, too.

We'll see.

Individual Tagging with RFID

2005-04-25T11:08:00.000-05:00

Many people who know me and now read this blog have asked me why I haven't written any post about RFID. Being someone that always tries to show the technology wherever I go, here is my first RFID related post. HEB, please don't get mad at me for writing about Wal-Mart :)

In a recent shenanigan at a Wal-Mart store, techno-fraudsters printed out fake barcode labels and, in one instance, a $100 mattress rang up at checkout for the price of a bunch of bananas. But what if Wal-Mart had been in the habit of attaching RFID tags rather than barcodes to mattresses and bananas? Would the emerging wireless technology have saved the day?

The answer is "No"—at the moment, anyway. For RFID to work as an antidote to in-store theft and fraud, tagging is needed at the individual item level. And, to be charitable, item-level RFID tagging isn't likely to become much of a reality until the end of this decade—that is, unless we're talking about ultra high-end designer clothes (think Prada), or maybe costly pharmaceuticals (think controlled substances such as OxyContin, a drug marketed by Purdue Pharma as an analgesic).

In current trials at Wal-Mart, Target, U.K.-based Tesco and other large retailers, RFID is being deployed almost exclusively at the palette and carton levels. Essentially, that's because item-level RFID continues to face two humongous hurdles: high pricing and mounting privacy concerns.

Although RFID advocates keep pointing to an idyllic future when RFID tags might cost three to four cents each, even the "passive" variety will still run you more in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 cents today. And in contrast to some of the more costly "active RFID" technology, passive RFID tends to be much more subject to data tampering.

In the low-margin land of mass merchandise stores, it'd clearly make no sense at all to apply a 30-cent tag to a $1 bunch of bananas—or even to a $2.50 greeting card or a $10 tube of sun lotion.

On the other hand, it's already economically feasible to attach the same sort of tag to a four-figure handbag or a five-figure suit—something Prada's been proving quite well at its RFID-enabled showrooms in New York City.

Meanwhile, midmarket apparel stores such as Benetton have also been toying with the idea of item-level RFID. So, too, have retailers such as Tesco, which sells products across a broad spectrum of prices. But privacy advocates have been working hard to squelch efforts in this direction by mounting pickets and threatening boycotts.

For instance, during the spring of 2003, Benetton's previously announced plans to test item-level RFID came to a halt after a U.S.-based group called Caspian (Consumers Against Privacy Invasion and Numbering) threatened a boycott.

Later that year, picketers stood outside a Tesco store in Cambridge, England, protesting the supermarket chain's decision to automatically snap photos of shoppers who picked up packets of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades. The packets had been marked with RFID labels as part of a trial with Gillette.

After the razor-blade test ended in June, Tesco proceeded with an item-level RFID trial of DVDs at its store in Sandhurst, England. Still, Caspian kept urging a worldwide boycott of Gillette products around RFID tagging concerns

I predict that when item-level pricing does reach widespread deployment, it'll happen initially in pharmaceuticals. And in this context, the wireless technology will first come into play more as an anti-counterfeiting measure than as a theft deterrent.

On November 15, 2004, the FDA's Counterfeit Drug Task Force recommended a multilayered approach that includes RFID to help combat drug counterfeiting.

That same day, Purdue Pharma rolled out a pilot program for integrating passive RFID tags into the labels on 100-tablet bottles of OxyContin—a substance with "an abuse liability similar to morphine," according to its manufacturer. The first shipments of RFID-tagged bottles went out later that week to Wal-Mart and H.D. Smith, a big pharmaceuticals wholesaler.

Backing from a regulatory agency like the FDA might help to curb the privacy protests. It will definitely help to spur R&D in the overall area of item-level RFID tagging. And as some of you may recall from Economics 101, as supply of a product increases, prices will fall—or so the theory goes.

So some time after 2007—the timeframe now targeted by the FDA for RFID compliance—more retailers will probably start turning to item-level RFID to protect against theft of nonpharmaceutical items—even on $1 bunches of bananas, and more certainly, on $100 mattresses. But don't expect to see widespread item-level tagging any sooner than that.

Are we near the end of Moore's Law?

2005-04-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

In Gordon Moore's original observation, made in 1965, he argued that the number of transistors per integrated circuit increased as an exponential function, doubling about every year. The pace wasn't able to sustain quite this level, but Moore made a downward revision in 1975, saying that they doubled about every 2 years. Some claim that he revised it to 18 months, which, in the past 20 years, has proven even more reliable (Moore's original paper-[pdf]). When this prediction was made, the processor was cost-effective at 50 transistors per chip. Soon after, Intel produced the 4004, the world's first single chip microprocessor. The 4004 contained 2300 transistors, and was shrunk to an eighth of an inch wide by a sixth of an inch long. Today, the Itanium 2 chip contains half a billion transistors, or 2²⁹, to look at it in context. Wikipedia has a pretty nice graph of the relevant data.

There is now good reason to suggest that Moore's Law, which has been so reliable for so long, may be on the verge of losing its relevance. Many have suggested that Moore's Law can no longer be maintained because of economic factors or technological limitations. The intent of this post is to show why the opposite is true. I believe we are on the verge of outstripping Moore's doubling time.

Chip manufacturers are confident that they will be able to continue to maintain the pace of Moore's Law for the next decade. As of the fourth quarter of 2004, transistors in microprocessors were a little over 100 nanometers(nm) across (a nanometer is 10^-9 meters, or one one-billionth of a meter). If we assume that the transistor gets proportionally smaller in order to maintain chip size, then in 10 years, we would expect the transistor to be 10 nm across, and that the processor would contain 50 billion of them. If the industry leaders are correct, this should be well within our capabilities. But in 2003, several members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Zhirnov, Cavin and Hutchby, submitted a paper that proposed that we may be about to hit a wall when it comes to scaling electronics.

Their paper, Limits to Binary Logic Switch Scaling--A Gedanken Model [pdf], proposed that switching in transistors is limited to constraints defined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The paper used the term "energy barriers" to describe the potential between the gate and the carrier, but no matter how great the potential difference, eventually the tunneling of electrons and holes will become too great for the transistor to perform reliable operations. In short, the two states of the switch would become indistinguishable. This cannot be allowed in a binary system, but it would happen if its size gets as small as 4 nm. Indeed, this would be the size of a transistor produced in 13 years, keeping strict adherence to Moore's Law.

They add that the heat from these transistors will be very difficult to moderate, because to do so would require somehow diverting the heat produced by this 5 nm device away from the processor. Alternatively, the entire processor could be cooled, which would produce more heat than it takes away.

In addition, there are rising costs for the producers of these chips. From the Wikipedia article

It is interesting to note that as the cost of computer power continues to fall (from the perspective of a consumer), the cost for producers to achieve Moore's Law has followed the opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. As the cost of semiconductor equipment is expected to continue increasing, manufacturers must sell larger and larger quantities of chips to remain profitable. (The cost to "tapeout" a chip at 0.18u was roughly $300,000 USD. The cost to "tapeout" a chip at 90nm exceeds $750,000 USD, and the cost is expected to exceed $1.0M USD for 65nm.) In recent years, analysts have observed a decline in the number of "design starts" at advanced process nodes (0.13u and below.) While these observations were made in the period after the year 2000 economic downturn, the decline may be evidence that the long-term global market cannot economically sustain Moore's Law.

On what basis then could it be suggested that Moore's law could possibly be outstripped by technology? What evidence is there to suggest that we can possibly speed up the pace of electronics advancement better than we have in 40 years of exponential improvement? For this, we should look to some of the current advances in nanotechnology.

Exhibit 1: MIT's Technological Review. This article suggests a way that we may begin to solve the problem of heat dissipation. In the last year, nanoscience has managed to create something that has eluded electrical engineers for many decades. The (5,5) single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) is a superconductor at room temperature (a nanotube is defined by a chiral vetor- 5,5 in this case. The dimension is a function of this vector, and knowing something about the chiral vector will provide insight into how the nanotube looks when it is rolled up. This is an example of an armchair configuration). It is 0.55 nm in diameter, and has already been used in an experimental transistor. Unlike any other transistor currently being produced, The SWNT can take on properties of both P- and N-type semiconductors simultaneously, depending on the gate voltage (more information on nanotube electronics).

Exhibit 2: Quantum Computing. Why be content looking for smaller ways to perform the same old processes? There are now a number of alternative processors starting to move into the realm of feasability. At Almaden Research Center, the seven-qubit (quantum bit) quantum computer has already managed to run Shor's factoring algorithm. Take a standard computer with 'n' bits, and a quantum computer with 'n' qubits. If the two computers can process a bit with the same speed, the quantum computer can run through 2ⁿ states in the same amount of time it takes the conventional computer to process just one.

The DNA computer is also worth mentioning here. The distance between levels on a DNA chain is 3 nm, and a typical human chain is a couple of centimeters in length. That means each DNA chain is capable of storing 7 million DNA-bits, each of which is capable of 4 different "states," adanine, thymene, cytosine or guanine. That's 4^7,000,000 possible states, and during cell division, this gets processed in just over an hour!

Exhibit 3: The human brain. According to the linked article, the human brain should have the capacity to process 100 million MIPS (million instructions per second) or 100 trillion instrutions per second. From SIGNAL magazine,

On an evolutionary scale, current processing speeds of 1,000 MIPS place robots at the small vertebrate level. "A guppy," [Hans] Moravec, [of Carnegie Mellon's mobile robot laboratory] says, adding that besides carrying out their specific functions, autonomous robots are only aware of their immediate surroundings. However, he predicts that increasing processing speeds will bring more capable systems within a decade. Once robots are commercially available in large numbers, many solutions for issues such as hazard recognition will arrive through incremental use and modification. "There is no substitute for field use for learning about problems and solving them," he says.

What this indicates is that computers are catching up fast. If Moore's law holds, then in 30 years, computers will be able to "think" faster than humans. Even before computers overtake the human brain, they may well become capable of improving on their own designs. The possibility of computers eventually rendering humans obsolete is touched on in Vinge's Singularity (original paper).

What these arguments still fail to take into account is the type of human ingeneuity that drives future innovation. There is incentive to revolutionize computing, because if alternative processors catch on, any company still trying to develop conventional microprocessors will quickly be left far behind. Any kind of unforseen breakthrough will shorten this timetable, causing the exponential slope of Moore's Law to accelerate even faster.

So, here it comes. My prediction is that computer processors will improve by a factor of 4 in the next two years. Then, while they approach the limit to smallness, they will slow down and follow a more natural 1.5 year doubling time. Once DNA and quantum computers, or some other revolutionary type of microprocessor becomes an effective replacement to the conventional semiconducting microprocessor, Moore's Law will cease to be an effective predictor of the future of computing.

Foreseeing the Future

2005-04-22T06:12:00.000-05:00

Ok, after almost five days out of writing due to some health problems, here is a bit interesting article to read in this month's Scientific American by a group from Rand on decision making given an uncertain future.

The article talks about using simulation to develop "robust" solutions. These are solutions that "perform well when compared with the alternatives across a wide range of plausible futures". The authors uses this method to examine long term environmental regulations, although I sure would like to develop one myself to examine the results of decisions in my own life! Wouldn't you?

Get a Chair and Start Thinking...

2005-04-18T06:12:00.000-05:00

I have a designated "thinking chair" in my office. Or more accurately, since I only have one chair, I have a designated "chair position" in my office.

I don't sit in it when someone drops by to talk. I don't take power naps in it. I use it only for thinking.This chair doesn't think for me, but it does speak to me every now and then. If I've gone a few days without sitting in it, its presence subtly reminds me that I'm not devoting enough time to the all-important task of thinking.

When we fail to make thinking a priority, we develop what author Gordon MacDonald calls "mental flabbiness." This may not sound like a life-threatening condition, but some ways, it can be quite dangerous. Here's how MacDonald explains it:
"In our pressurized society, people who are out of shape mentally usually fall victim to ideas and systems that are destructive to the human spirit and to the human relationship," he writes. "They are victimized because they have not taught themselves how to think, nor have they set themselves to the lifelong pursuit of growth of the mind. Not having the faculty of a strong mind, they grow dependent upon the thoughts and opinions of others. Rather than deal with ideas and issues, they reduce themselves to lives full of rules, regulations, and programs."

You can't be an effective leader with a mindset like that—it's just not possible.

Fortunately, there is an antidote to mental flabbiness: making time to think. I realize this can be a daunting assignment for people whose schedules are already bursting at the seams. And yet, when we don't make thinking a priority, we're actually sabotaging our own creativity and success.

Think about it. One of the highest commodities in a person's life is a great idea. A great idea has transforming power. It can take you places you may never have dreamed of going. But great ideas don't come out of nowhere. They begin as thoughts. So it stands to reason that the more time we spend thinking, the more great ideas we'll have.

The good news is that it doesn't take hours of thinking each day to generate ideas and stay in good mental shape. You can accomplish a great deal in a few moments of concentrated, intentional thought.

Let me give you two examples of how this works in my life. Every morning, I devote three minutes to what I call "big-picture thinking." I look at my schedule for the day and ask myself one simple question: What's the main event? Of all the things I'm going to do, of all the people I'm going to see, of all the experiences that I'm going to encounter, what's the main event?

You can't prioritize your day if you don't see everything in your day. That's why I practice big-picture thinking in the morning. I have to pick out my main event early, because whatever it is, that's where I had better be at my best. I'm human, and I don't always hit the ball out of the park. Sometimes I don't hit the ball at all. But at the main event, I had better hit a homerun. Big-picture thinking helps me achieve that goal.At the end of the day, I spend another five to 10 minutes doing what I refer to as "reflective thinking." I go to my thinking chair and spend time reviewing my whole day. I ask myself questions such as, "Who did I see today? How did I add value to those people? What lessons did I learn?" Reflective thinking doesn't take long, but it's an incredibly valuable exercise because it turns experience into insight.

Can you imagine what would happen in your life if you practiced big-picture and reflective thinking? You would stop wasting time on things that don't really matter, which would give you more energy for the really important activities. You would be more organized and efficient. You would experience less stress. Most importantly, you would also take more away from each day that would enable you to lead better the next day.The best way to start this process is to designate a specific place to think. It doesn't matter if your "thinking chair" is in your den at home or your office at work. It just has to be a spot where you can do nothing but think for a few moments twice a day.

The bottom line is this: If you find a place to think your thoughts, you'll have more thoughts. If you find a place to shape your thoughts, you will have better thoughts. And if you find a place to stretch your thoughts, you will have bigger thoughts.All this, from just three minutes in the morning and five to ten minutes at night. As you can see, the results far outweigh the time investment.

Prepare Your Code for Globalization

2005-04-17T11:48:00.000-05:00

Many of us in software feel pretty smug right now: We "made it." The crash came, the jobs left, but we survived. We persevered. We studied, we worked, we applied ourselves, and we made ourselves worth employing in a down market.

Well, it's going to get worse. I will explain. Most of us realize that the economy moves in cycles: Things change, new jobs are created and old jobs become obsolete. The 1930's created many jobs in the automotive industry, but who used those machines? In the midwest, tractors replaced the horse and plow, and enabled a single person to do the work of dozens. Of course, this made it uneconomical to be a farmer.

By the 1970's, globalization came to the auto industry. Instead of the big three, competition came from Japan, Korea, and Germany. Many Americans felt pride, even loyalty to their country; Yet, when the import cars came with the same quality for fifty cents on the dollar, American money went overseas, and the jobs went with it.

Right now, globalization is hitting the office furniture industry. The American companies that are doing well have stopped building themselves: They are importing components and doing assembly work, or have moved plants to Mexico, India, or other areas with cheaper labor and materials.

Globalization is coming to technology.
This comes as no surprise to many people: The largest company in India is TaTa Consulting, which has been offering trained software consultants for rock-bottom prices for years. Twenty years ago, author Ed Yourdon wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. After ten years and major changes in the economy, Yourdon wrote Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer. You see, communicating across continents and time zones is hard. Then came the internet. Yourdon wasn't wrong...just too early.

Right now, today, it's possible to write up a specification for a piece of software and send it off-shore for far less than it would cost to develop in America. In this age of tightened belts all around, why would anyone buy American software when they can buy it from someone else for one tenth the price?

Of course, this article is titled "Prepare your code for globalization". And so, I intend to provide strategies that can keep you employed and earning more and more even if your competition charges less and less.

Keep in mind the reality; Businesses want to reduce cost and risk while increasing revenue. To succeed as a software developer, don't try to sell working software for less money than others; instead, reduce cost, reduce risk or increase revenue for those companies. I will discuss a few ways to do these things, and do them well.

1) Provide Guarantees.
So the other person provides a lower hourly cost. So what? Does that mean that the total cost is going to be less? Most people that deal with software contractors know that an estimate is rarely worth the paper it's printed on. That's why fixed-price and fixed-date contracts are so appealing to customers: It moves the risk from the shoulders of the customer to the selling organization. As long as the buying organization is certain to make money, hourly rates won't matter. (How do you compare $6/hour and "We think it'll take about six months" to "$10,000 and it will be done in three months." How about to "I'll take 30% of gross revenues. If you don't make a dime, I don't make a dime...and this will enocourage me to make it good enough to re-sell")

2) Analyze the business and provide a better solution
Joel Spolsky once wrote that "Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want." In other words, the attitude of "Just give me the requirements" fails because it has the customer solving the problem; the software developer becomes just a glorified technical writer that knows how to write in the language of a machine.

3) Dramatically decrease the defect rate
Are people willing to pay for quality in software? Sadly, generally, the answer is no. Quality in software is hard to measure; unlike automobiles, there are usually no crash or endurance tests to compare against, especially for custom software. Yet we all know that plumbers, electricians, and roofers with a reputation for quality have more work orders than they know what to do with. Producing software with less defects, that is usable, that does what the customer expects will net a major competitive advantage for years to come.

4) Create well-documented, maintainable code
Despite all the jokes about job security, companies want well-documented, easy-to-understand and easy-to-change systems. This allows them to reduce risk, and, as we've previously discussed, reducing risk has tangible, measurable value to a company. The great thing about increasing the value of what you sell is that you can now charge more for it.

5) Provide better feedback
If you prioritize every feature, you can work on the most important features first. A series of small releases gives the customer the most important features first, and the opportunity to provide feedback. This is not a new idea; It is one of the core ideals of the Extreme Programming model, and it's an excellent way to give the customer more while costing you less. (Think about this: Most large projects run late and over budget. Many small projects do not. Instead of "biting off more than we can chew" next time, why not refuse to run a large project and instead run a series of small projects?)

6) Show the customer how you will make them money or allow them to cut costs.
This one is a no-brainer. It's easy to charge more for your services and still win the bid if you are selling something fundamentally different: This is why McDonald's franchises sell for more than Johnny Pizza Time franchises. Imagine the two sales pitches:

Johnny's: "Hey, for $10,000 and 3% of your sales revenue, I'll let you use my name, my sign, my recipies, my suppliers for food, cups, plates - the works!"

McDonald's: "For $1,000,000 and 8% of your sales revenue, we'll give you everything Jerry does - plus throw in a lease on a furnished building in residential area X. We'll promise no McDonald's competition (except the ones you own) in a 50-mile radius of your store. We'll provide management training for your people. In fact, here's a breakdown of our 200 stores in areas with a similar population to X, and their sales compared to expenses for the first five years of business. As you can see, since 1995, only 10 of those stores failed to be profitable within three years, and they were all profitable within five years."

Conclusions
From the last example, you can see that McDonald's and Johnny's are selling two fundamentally different things. They both seem to "solve" the same problem: "I want to own a fast-food business." McDonald's chooses not to compete on price; Instead, they compete on delivered results.

Most banks compete on delivered results for investment. While they may occasionally advertise that they have low or no minimum balance, it is far more common to hear about a low rate for a loan or a high rate for an investment. If we are to survive the coming bust, we must Promise and Deliver Results. These results must substantially differentiate us from other, cheaper competition.

If you try to build a house and base every decision on cost, you will probably get what you deserve. Most people know this, and factor other things into the decision. As the software industry matures, we must learn to provide and market those "other things." In order to survive, we must stop being glorified technical writers and become businessmen...and the need for good businessmen is not decreasing, but instead it is constantly increasing.

How Career Imprinting Shapes Leaders

2005-04-17T08:30:00.000-05:00

In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to work on a project managed by Frank Stepic, now head of engineering division at GE Aircraft Engines. He was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One chilly day, I dragged myself out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Frank came in and found me propped up at the console. He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After he'd poured it into me and buoyed up my spirits, I asked him how he found time for such things with all the management work he had to do. He gave me his patented grin and said, "Rodolfo, this is management."

Frank knew what all good instinctive managers know: The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. - PeopleWare, DeMarco/Lister, Pg. 34.

Having worked with him, imprinted in me his leadership style. There is a good book on this subject that I recommend. usually when reading it, you can discover how much people in the past have influenced you in how you behave, usually more than you think. Here is an interview with its author and here is a link to amazon where you can get a copy of it.

How to start on blogs

2005-04-13T23:35:00.000-05:00

Many people have e-mailed me to ask, “How can I read blogs more easily?” Perhaps more importantly, “Why should I read blogs at all?” I started to write on this topic myself and stumbled on an excellent article by Stephen O’Grady over at tecosystems. He says,

The purpose of this post is to give the many people who still haven’t gotten into blogs—i.e. not my regular readers—a simple, step-by-step example of how to dip a toe in the blogging waters.

The article is entitled How to Get into Blogs 101. It is definitely worth a read if you are interested. One of the most helpful parts of his post is how to set up a blog reader.

Are open source developers rock stars?

2005-04-12T17:08:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a rock star. I wanted to play guitar, get up on stage, and have everyone scream while I cranked out some hard rockin' tune. I wanted to see lighters held up in the crowd as I finished my last set - dripping with sweat, completely tired, and no energy left. Leave it all on the stage - that's what I wanted. My friends all felt the same - we talked about it all the time.

Well, that never happened. Instead I went to college and spent more time in the computer center than I did at parties (well, not really...). The only thing I cranked out was code. Later, I got a job writing software and I've been working with computers ever since.

While I still listen to a lot of music and have Gigs of tunes on my iPod, my dreams of being a rock star have faded. I still think about them once in a while, but more than that, I now think about open source. So do a bunch of my friends.

I met a guy at a book store, a while ago. (I hang out in those kind of places now instead of the record shop.) He writes financial applications for a mutual fund company. All he wanted to talk about was JBoss. He'd spent some time working on the JMS implementation but had gotten too busy to continue. He wanted to get back involved as soon as he could. All those people who were building the latest JBoss - he wanted to be one of them.

In his eyes I saw the same stars I used to have. I used to think that way about Axl Rose and Bon Jovi. I wanted to be one of them. When I was younger, I ran out to buy the latest Guns n' Roses album - now I run out to get the latest build of Gentoo or Hula.

Open source developers are the rock stars of the software world. The parallels actually go pretty far. You can say they don't get the money and fame, but I think you're wrong. The average open source developer probably makes more at his or her job than most local musicians make. I've met open source developers who have founded software companies and are doing pretty well financially. As far as fame goes, they may not do quite as well as real rock stars but some do pretty well; Linus Torvalds is fairly famous, but I guess not like Kurt Cobain.

They're also usually the most talented developers. Rock stars get where they are in the music world by being great musicians; open source rock stars get where they are by writing great code.

Naming their projects is a lot like naming their bands. When you hear people talking about Subversion, Ethereal, or Excalibur (all open source projects), it's hard to tell if they mean software projects or rock bands.

A good friend of mine called me once and went on for 30 minutes about how he was submitting a patch to the Jakarta Struts project (a JSP framework from the Apache Software Foundation). His patch would allow you to define validations for one input field based on the value of some other field (e.g., if you fill in a last name, make sure you fill out a first name...). He was totally excited about it and went into all the details of how he built it.

After he was done telling me about it, he was almost out of breath. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a lighter, and stood there holding it lit in the air.

Leave it all on the stage.

How to Blog Safely

2005-04-12T01:14:00.000-05:00

Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They're the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends--or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss.

If you blog, there are no guarantees you'll attract a readership of thousands. But at least a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you'd least want or expect. These include potential or current employers, coworkers, and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address or screen name into Google or Feedster and click a few links.

The point is that anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn't stop you from writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or accessible only to certain trusted people.

Here we offer a few simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation. If followed correctly, these protections can save you from embarrassment or just plain weirdness in front of your friends and coworkers.

Blog Anonymously

The best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously. But being anonymous isn't as easy as you might think.

Let's say you want to start a blog about your terrible work environment but you don't want to risk your boss or colleagues discovering that you're writing about them. You'll want to consider how to anonymize every possible detail about your situation. And you may also want to use one of several technologies that make it hard for anyone to trace the blog back to you.

1. Use a Pseudonym and Don't Give Away Any Identifying Details

When you write about your workplace, be sure not to give away telling details. These include things like where you're located, how many employees there are, and the specific sort of business you do. Even general details can give away a lot. If, for example, you write, "I work at an unnamed weekly newspaper in Seattle," it's clear that you work in one of two places. So be smart. Instead, you might say that you work at a media outlet in a mid-sized city. Obviously, don't use real names or post pictures of yourself. And don't use pseudonyms that sound like the real names they're based on--so, for instance, don't anonymize the name "Annalee" by using the name "Leanne." And remember that almost any kind of personal information can give your identity away--you may be the only one at your workplace with a particular birthday, or with an orange tabby.

Also, if you are concerned about your colleagues finding out about your blog, do not blog while you are at work. Period. You could get in trouble for using company resources like an Internet connection to maintain your blog, and it will be very hard for you to argue that the blog is a work-related activity. It will also be much more difficult for you to hide your blogging from officemates and IT operators who observe traffic over the office network.

2. Use Anonymizing Technologies

There are a number of technical solutions for the blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.

Invisiblog.com is a service that offers anonymous blog hosting for free. You may create a blog there with no real names attached. Even the people who run the service will not have access to your name.

If you are worried that your blog-hosting service may be logging your unique IP address and thus tracking what computer you're blogging from, you can use the anonymous network Tor to edit your blog. Tor routes your Internet traffic through what's called an "overlay network" that hides your IP address. More importantly, Tor makes it difficult for snoops on the Internet to follow the path your data takes and trace it back to you.

For people who want something very user-friendly, Anonymizer.com offers a product called "Anonymous Surfing," which routes your Internet traffic through an anonymizing server and can hide your IP address from the services hosting your blog.

3. Limit Your Audience

Many blogging services, including LiveJournal, allow you to designate individual posts or your entire blog as available only to those who have the password, or to people whom you've designated as friends. If your blog's main goal is to communicate to friends and family, and you want to avoid any collateral damage to your privacy, consider using such a feature. If you host your own blog, you can also set it up to be password-protected, or to be visible only to people looking at it from certain computers.

4. Don't Be Googleable

If you want to exclude most major search engines like Google from including your blog in search results, you can create a special file that tells these search services to ignore your domain. The file is called robots.txt, or a Robots Text File. You can also use it to exclude search engines from gaining access to certain parts of your blog. If you don't know how to do this yourself, you can use the "Robots Text File Generator" tool for free at Web Tool Central .

Blog without Fear

Blogs are getting a lot of attention these days. You can no longer safely assume that people in your offline life won't find out about your blog, if you ever could. New RSS tools and services mean that it's even easier than ever search and aggregate blog entries. As long as you blog anonymously and in a work-safe way, what you say online is far less likely to come back to hurt you.

Resources

C|Net's guide to workplace blogging: http://news.com.com/FAQ+Blogging+on+the+job/2100-1030_3-5597010.html?tag=nefd.ac

How Tor works: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html

Anonymizer's Anonymous Surfing: http://www.anonymizer.com/anonymizer2005/1.5/

A list of fired bloggers: http://morphemetales.blogspot.com/2004/12/statistics-on-fired-bloggers.html

The Bloggers' Rights Blog: http://rights.journalspace.com/

A history of free and open source

2005-04-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

From GrokLaw:

Historian Peter H. Salus is writing "A History of Free and Open Source". We thought that, with ADTI back with its Grim Fairy Tales, it would be useful to tell the FOSS story truthfully and in a scholarly way, so readers now and historians in the future can rely on the facts. Here's the first installment, the Introduction, and I know you will enjoy it. Look for the next episode on the 6th or 7th of April and every Wednesday or Thursday after that.

Read more...

iPod's social impact

2005-04-11T11:05:00.000-05:00

If you're still hungry for more riveting news on the social impact of the iPod, see NYTimes article about this (free registration, etc, etc), it turns out iTunes playlists are more about bling and less about revealing your true self! Who knew? This week the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center released an anthropological study revealing that when co-workers share playlists on office networks, they're more concerned with the image a cubicle-mate might draw from seeing, say, N'Sync or MC Hammer next to your name than the fuzzy feeling they might get from a tearful Celine Dion ballad you've given them access to.

Since I became the owner of a U2 Special Edition a couple of months ago, I've been grappling with the sociological effects it's having on me. I live in Monterrey, Mexico and one of my favorite aspects of living in this city is staying constantly engaged with my surroundings -- a big part of that is all that's pulsating around you. When you block out sound, sure you have the privelege of your own personal soundtrack, but you drown out all the city's noise and character that makes it a vibrant place to live.

How do you think this has impacted random exchanges, homeless donations, dating? Have you experienced a similar ambivalence? Or noticed other sociological effects of your white-horned friend? Have you come across any related studies on this?

Open Source Software Search Engines

2005-04-09T17:39:00.000-05:00

Lately I was thinking about all the open source code which is available around the world. I was asking myself, how it would be possible to search through all this code and to use it for studies and analysis.

Of course, this is not a new idea and I was surprised how many tools try to address this topic in one or another way...

Source Code:

http://www.koders.com/

From the site: Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.

http://www.jexamples.com/

From the site: We analyze the source code of production Java open source projects such as Ant, Tomcat and Batik and load that analysis into a database designed for easy searching. You enter the name of a Java Class.method you want to see example invocations of and click Search.

http://archive.devx.com/sourcebank/

From the site: DevX's Sourcebank is a directory of links to source code and script posted around the Web. Use the Search option to find terms within the source code. To cast the widest net, use the search with All Types selected. Or, you can browse through a subset of the code by categories (below). First, select a filter, such as C or Java, by clicking on one of the square buttons and then choose one of the categories (such as Mathematics) from within that filter.

http://gonzui.sourceforge.net/

From the site: gonzui is a source code search engine for accelerating open source software development. In the open source software development, programmers frequently refer to source codes written by others. Our goal is to help programmers develop programs effectively by creating a source code search engine that covers vast quantities of open source codes available on the Internet.

Components, Libraries:

http://www.codezoo.net/

From the site: CodeZoo exists to help you find high-quality, freely available, reusable components, getting you past the repetitive parts of coding, and onto the rest and the best of your projects. It’s a fast-forward button for your compiler.

http://www.jarhoo.com/

From the site: Searches for jar files or fully qualified java class names usually performed under 2 seconds. Package or non-qualified class name searches may take around 10 seconds

Javadoc:

http://www.jdocs.com/

From the site: JDocs is a comprehensive online resource for Java API documentation. All the javadocs for a variety of popular packages are loaded into our db-driven system, and users can contribute their own notes to virtually any class, field, method. In short, JDocs provides a knowledge base defined around the major Java api's themselves, so you can find the information you're looking for right where it should be... in the documentation!

http://javadocs.org/

From the site: You can search from the url, eg: javadocs.org/string

http://ashkelon.sourceforge.net/

From the site: ashkelon is an open source project. It is a Java API documentation tool designed for Java developers. Its goals are the same as the goals of the well-known javadoc tool that comes with J2SE, whose user interface most java developers are quite familiar with.

The Language of Freedom

2005-04-09T10:57:00.000-05:00

Open source licenses promise to everyone what many in the community refer to as software freedom. The terminology of freedom is emotionally satisfying, but it has proven to be very confusing.
Freedom is an important subject in law school. Constitutional law courses address such topics as the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But freedom seldom comes up as a topic in classes devoted to business issues such as contract or tort law, or software licensing. Law school courses on intellectual property deal with copyright and patent, but they don’t teach about freedom, referring instead to the rights of the owners of those legal monopolies.
As a result, there is no easy conceptual basis for integrating the language of freedom into the legal language of software licenses. For example, where the word free is currently used in software licensing contexts, it usually means zero, as in free of charge or free of defects.

Neither of these meanings is intended by open source licenses.

Not that software freedom isn’t definable. The Free Software Foundation lists four essential kinds of software freedom:

1. The freedom to run the software for any purpose
2. The freedom to study how the software works and to adapt it to your needs
3. The freedom to redistribute copies of the software
4. The freedom to improve the software and distribute your improvements to the public

That list, it turns out, can be satisfied by many different software licenses. Both the GPL and the BSD licenses, the earliest open source examples from the late 1980s, ensure those four kinds of software freedom, although they do it in vastly different ways.
Proprietary software vendors love the software freedom provided by the BSD license, but some of them hate and fear the software freedom guaranteed by the GPL. So once again, the concept of freedom by itself is only marginally helpful to understanding open source licensing.

Open Source Use Survey

2005-04-09T10:01:00.000-05:00

The EU-funded FLOSSpols project is carrying out a followup survey of Open Source / Free Software developers worldwide.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, the programme leader and author of the findings paper from the previous report, writes about the survey:

The EU-funded FLOSSPOLS project is carrying out a survey of developers worldwide. This is a follow-up to the original FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) survey in 2002, which was one of the first and most comprehensive surveys of developers - who they are, how they work and why they do it. The new survey aims to provide an update, include new developers, and answer some of the questions that were raised by the first one. In particular, how do developer communities help in learning skills and generating employment, and why is the level of participation by women so low?

According to Danese Cooper, the self-proclaimed Open Source Diva, who recently left Sun to join Intel, Ghosh will also be joining her and other notables on the new OSI board.

On a sidenote, this jumble of acronyms (FLOSS, FOSS, OSS/FS) is getting out of hand; if only people could be persuaded to settle on a single, easy to pronounce, collective name for Open Source and Free Software... Maybe we should just call it Commons Software, and hope that it doesn't give rise to more "Open Source is communist" trolling.

On the way to big apps

2005-04-08T14:21:00.000-05:00

The open-source Linux operating system now runs on about a quarter of all computer servers. That's remarkable penetration in a very short time. Does it mean we'll start seeing Linux desktop PCs catching on, as many people in the tech world keep hoping? Maybe that will happen in China and Brazil, or in low-cost environments like call centers.

But the question of how much market share Linux on desktops will gain over the next few years isn't the one to be asking right now and misses the more dramatic shift in the software business. Conquering the desktop doesn't really matter anymore. Most of the really interesting software these days runs on central servers. We access it via our PCs through the Internet or a corporate network. And on those servers is a wide range of open-source software applications that are making impressive gains. There is Linux, of course, which is already a slam dunk. But on top of Linux, open-source middleware like the MySQL database and the JBoss Web application server are beginning to get some traction. MySQL is the database that powers big chunks of Google, Travelocity, and Yahoo. JBoss has come out of nowhere to match BEA and IBM in the Web application server market. According to one survey, JBoss actually surpassed both IBM and BEA late last year in the sheer number of Web apps deployed. All the pieces are now in place for open-source applications, especially enterprise applications, to emerge.

There already exist, for instance, open-source versions of customer-relationship management software (SugarCRM), enterprise-resource planning software (Compiere), and clinical-information management software for hospitals (Medsphere's Vista), among others. These budding open-source enterprise applications -- and there are lots more in the works -- are aimed right at the heart of traditional enterprise software vendors such as Oracle and SAP. "The enterprise software model is broken," argues Medsphere CEO Larry Augustin, who in a former life was the founder of VA Linux. Enterprise software is heavy, ugly, and expensive. It requires a long sales cycle, and even longer to install, and it's out of reach for most small and medium-size businesses. Rather than being used to improve products, an astounding three-quarters of new license revenue in the enterprise software industry is instead plowed right back into sales and marketing. That means, as Augustin likes to point out, that the business model of a traditional enterprise software company is effectively to charge customers a ton of money to convince those same customers that they need the software in the first place.

The advent of open-source enterprise software promises to turn that business model on its head. Since the software is free, there are no huge, up-front licensing fees required before a customer can try it. (Open-source software companies like Medsphere and SugarCRM charge instead for ongoing maintenance and support.) Consequently, open-source software companies don't need to spend as much on sales and marketing. In fact, they tend to spend hardly anything at all on it. Customers can try the software before they buy it, and the hundreds or thousands of outside developers who contribute code to the software are also great advocates for the various products. "That community is our sales and marketing," Augustin says. There are other benefits to going the open-source route. Any business can customize the software to its own needs, the software is inherently more secure, since holes can be plugged by any programmer as soon as they're noticed, and it is not dependent on any one company being around in the future to keep supporting it. The biggest potential advantage, though, is that enterprise-class software can now be used by small and medium-size businesses that previously could not afford it. This underserved market is the last great growth opportunity for the enterprise software industry. "With zero acquisition costs, someone with only a few hundred employees can now take advantage of something that was only available to large enterprises," says Peter Kronowitt, a strategic planner and resident Linux expert at Intel. Adds Augustin, "Some people say open-source is a destroyer of markets, but lower cost means broader market availability." The trick for open-source software companies will be not only to win over those smaller customers but also to convert them into paying customers by upselling them maintenance and support contracts.

The open-source upstarts will also need to compete with other low-cost alternatives to enterprise software that do not rely on open-source. On-demand software utilities like Salesforce.com are playing on the same weaknesses of the old-school enterprise software players by offering competing software for an affordable subscription. The only thing for certain is that as open-source moves up the software stack -- from the operating system to middleware to applications -- proprietary software vendors of all stripes will need to lower their prices or offer something new and wonderful and not yet available for free. Can you imagine?

Open source books on sale

2005-04-05T22:32:00.000-05:00

Bookpool.com has a nice outlet sale on Open Source book titles. Check it out!

How much money in Open Source for 2004?

2005-04-05T22:13:00.000-05:00

Only in US, Over $200 million dollars if you count the 'big ones' (MySQL, Red Hat, JBoss, etc) That's a lot of money, and only the tip of the iceberg.

Money is flowing into open source startups at a furious pace, which makes me prompt the question:

Why aren't you starting one? (I am...)

I will dedicate myself to research how much money is invested in Mexico for these matters. But I can foresee it will be a daunting task since information in Mexico does not flow as easily as in US.
Does anyone have a good source for this?

On technology and culture

2005-04-05T22:02:00.000-05:00

This is my first post. Although I am located and am a Mexican citizen, it is in my interest to keep this blog readable for the most audience and so, I will post most of my comments in English.

Please share any comments that you may have.