Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Rethinking Moore's Law: Interesting article about the changes coimg in the high tech industry: "The rules of this business are changing fast," Mr. Andreessen says, vehemently poking at his tuna salad. "When we come out of this downturn, high tech is going to look entirely different." "After all, corporate IT may moan about its legacy problems, but the electronics industry as a whole has the longest legacy trail of any industry in human history. Few people, even in technology, realize that the original 4- and 8-bit microprocessor architectures of the early '70s are still being built by the billions each year for use in everything from cameras to toys. We may be focusing on Pentium 4s, but its great-great-great-great-great grandfather, the 8008, is, quantitatively speaking, a greater part of our daily lives. What's more, we haven't even spun out all of the potential applications of the 8080, Z80, or 6502, much less the 80386, DEC Alpha, or the first PowerPC. And that suggests that in its relentless pursuit of the power curve of Moore's law, at the expense of the much less interesting price curve, the entire electronics industry may be unknowingly trapping itself in a giant and attenuated version of the dot-com bubble--living years into the technological future, only to be painfully snapped back to the human and economic present." 1:14:20 PM

Google background: Great information on Google and some of its background from notes on a speech by Larry Page, founder: Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. "Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..." "Inkjet printers made of legos" "Disk drive cases made of legos" "Actually, they weren't even legos. The point was to save money by building cheaper disk-drive cases. They were knock-off duplos from CostCo." "Why is google still around: We're lucky. Deep technical understanding of what we are doing. Not true of many companies (not Inktomi, of course). Everybody searches. Everything successful in terms of traffic has stayed successful in some way (except for napster; although kazaa's doing pretty well: kazaa is well-designed to be illegal; but not my idea of fun). How we make money: ads. I would never have guessed that we had ads for steel buildings... " 12:17:29 PM

Palladium: Good review of the concept from The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Under the plan, announced seven months ago under the name Palladium, new computers would be equipped with security hardware and a new version of the Windows operating system. The goal, Microsoft officials say, is to make servers and desktop PC's that people can trust. But critics say the technology, which Microsoft recently renamed "the next-generation secure computing base," could stifle the free flow of information that has come to characterize the Internet, and could give Microsoft too much control over colleges' own computerized information." This really concerns me as Microsoft historically has tended toward closed systems and forcing users to the Microsoft Way. I would hate to see the free information of the Internet disappear over the greed of corporate America and Microsoft. 12:11:16 PM

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