Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Book of the month Book of the month, or so, is "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google," by Nicholas Carr. It's a good read--and gets you to thinking a little, too. His main thesis is what he sees as the parallel development of electricity generation and computing. He tells an interesting story about the development of the centralized electric grid. Originally (and in Edison's vision) every facility would generate its own electricity. Then some visionaries saw the potential of generating in a central site and delivering electricity to users. Thus came the huge growth of electricity--and appliances and uses. Carr sees the same thing in the development of cloud computing where things move off the local server or PC. As Carr probes deeper into potential consequences of this computing move, he sees a problem with Google. Not only does it collect a tremendous amount of personal information about us, it also assumes it knows best what we're looking for on a search because of past selections. This has the effect of narrowing our views. We lose the serendipity of surprise in searches. With this I agree. On the one hand I don't like all the search results that are gamed by SEO people--such that when I want to contact a hotel on the road the first 30 hits or so are hotel aggregation sites and not the site of the hotel I want. But on the other, I like getting a broad look at things. You don't know what you don't know. Carr's other rant is about these young entrepreneurs making billions off of user generated content. It's as if they are stealing our stuff and making fortunes. In this analysis (and I've heard others) he is off base. They aren't selling our content. They're selling the popularity of their service. I'm on Flickr because it's a great service. Great place for me to store photos so that others can also see them. I like the service and I don't mind in the slightest that the developers of this service cashed in. They earned it. Anyway, it's a good read. 1:46:27 PM    comment []

Is OEE just hype Keith Campbell at the Over the Edge blog on packaging machinery sparked an interesting discussion on OEE. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is potentially a great metric for analyzing and comparing manufacturing performance. A word of warning on using it to benchmark, though. Be aware of definitions. And if you implement it, make sure that your definitions of components of the equation are firm. For example, downtime. If you allow operators to enter downtime reasons, they may just pick the easiest one to explain and skew the numbers and mask underlying problems. 7:05:06 AM    comment []