My grandfather appears to have grown up in a village in southern India, attended university in what was then Madras, worked as “private secretary” to one of India’s richest men and biggest landowners, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, all on his way to founding a weekly magazine, called Indian Finance, in... Read More »
A couple of days ago, I was home chatting to my son. The topic of conversation moved to recent events in North Korea; we touched briefly on a cartoon depicting satirical “last words” associated with the passing of Kim Jong-Il (“I told you I was Il” …. apologies to Spike... Read More »
I spent an afternoon this week at a partner company's all-hands meeting near Kona, where one participant told us about his weekend drive to the top of Mauna Kea – giving him spectacular views of deep-space objects from the world's premier telescope site. I used that story to open my... Read More »
Some people think that "social computing" in the workplace is a camel's-nose concession to frivolity. They hear "social" and think they're hearing the opposite of "business" (as in, "it's a social occasion") or the opposite of "significant" (as in, "just a social acquaintance"). They're wrong. The opposite of "social" is... Read More »
Luiz André Barroso, a Distinguished Engineer at Google Labs, wasn't promoting the cause of the cloud per se in his 2005 ACM paper, “The Price of Performance”; rather, he was arguing for the need to achieve radically greater levels of on-chip multiprocessing to reduce energy cost per transaction, in every... Read More »
As Dreamforce #8 approaches the line that separates "soon" from "now", more than one attendee en route to San Francisco has told us that the trip is already a success – because that person has already started conversations with more shared-interest people, via the conference version of Chatter, than could... Read More »
Tokyo With a high profile Goldman Sachs downgrade to neutral, Microsoft is entering a new phase in its struggles. It’s hard to ignore the rush of news of the company’s dramatic loss of market share in mobile, Steve Ballmer’s bonus penalty, and Internet Explorer dropping below 50% worldwide. But the... Read More »
Sometimes, the blogosphere hands you a perfect Yin-Yang pair of complementary ideas. On the one hand, a SETI searcher suggests that machine intelligence may be much easier to find than biological intelligence; on the other hand, GigaOM infrastructure guru Derrick Harris suggests that human intelligence, scalably and economically delivered ("Labor... Read More »
We're used to the idea that stretching something along one dimension must make it shrink in other dimensions, like a rubber band being pulled to the breaking point. The phrase, "stretched thin," might as well be a single word that's just a more emphatic version of "stretched." What's the alternative?... Read More »
"The tile guys are here." My wife had somehow turned off her alarm and forgotten to tell me that the kitchen tile job she'd been postponing for 5 years was about to get underway. Within a few minutes our house was teeming with 4 workmen, 4 cats, 4 dogs (don't... Read More »
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