Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

…just touched down about a minute ago. Fascinating! What an outstanding achievement. One more trip and they will win the coveted x-prize, $10,000,000.

I don’t think people realize what a huge milestone this event will be in our history of human evolution. Much like no one could foresee the impact of putting the power of personal computer’s in the hands of ordinary people, so will we see such advances in space related technology and investment that we can not imagine now. This achievemnet will result in much more than space vacations for wealthy consumers.

The good thing about a space bubble is that it will have unlimited space to grow.

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I haven’t been posting as much lately because I have been busy working on some changes to my blog layout.

Basically, I figure that I create enough original material to support at least three blogs. I am going to keep enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS, obviously, as well as add two other blogs. First new blog I publish will be a photo-blog where I will blog my photo expeditions into the world. There will be one to three essay-type entries with photos per week, depending on how often I get out into the world and how much time I have available to spend on formatting the content layout. Photo content is much more labor intensive than regular text blogging.

I’ll still post some of my photos on enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS but the photo blog will journal my day-to-day shoots and will link directly to my photo gallery for full-sized, hi-res viewing. My photo gallery currently has only about 250 photographs but will have nearly two thousand once I finish this project.

The second new blog I publish will be announced shortly. It will be for the most part a specialty essay-type blog with two to three entries a week of at least 750 words.

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Could IBM be Peoplesoft’s white knight? A just-announced deal will pump 1 billion dollars into building a middleware layer inside PeopleSoft’s applications. That’s a lot of money, even for Dr. Evil! Our team coverage analyzes the deal itself, and what customers think of it (hint: giddy as schoolgirls).

IBM has been making some interesting moves lately. I like it. But $1 Billion sure seems like a lot of money to build a Websphere (J2EE) interface to PeopleSoft.

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The article about computer counter-measures on the internet that I mentioned in a recent entry is very interesting, like I said, and Mr. Paco Nathan (a chief officer for Symbiot Security) has obviously been doing some thinking on this topic. From the article though it is unclear whether one issue was overlooked or not mentioned by choice.

In any internet security scheme where there is such a thing as counter-measures, it is going to be an absolute necessity and absolute certainty that the consumer will have access to such tools as well. Just as in our society today we do not allow guns to be outlawed so tyranny will always find an inhospitable host, so will we find it necessary for the people to be able to defend their personal property rights and freedom in the virtual world.

Unfortunately, I can envision the day when internet travel is limited just as travel is today. We will only be able to go where we are welcome and where we are provided protection by the United States military or the police. Hostile states and neighborhoods provide no protection from computer attack and may even pro-actively attack any unauthorized entry. You may get mugged for your credit card information in certain “neighborhoods”.

Nathan certainly mentions the rights of internet users in his article, but it seems he focuses primarily on the context of consumer protection. I think these rights are to be protected by policies instituted by those who offer consumer services.

Over the course of the next few years there will be a major shift in the thinking around how the Internet is managed. The engineering details of that shift have far more to do with the advanced mathematics used by financial analysts and the protocols used by military operations than most of today’s computer programmers and network administrators may imagine. The end result, however, will be readily familiar to the consumer: It will be an on-line world where privacy and freedoms are protected, and risk is managed by the rules of credit cards and shopping.

I believe we have found over and over again that power corrupts. Corporate organizations certainly have not been exempt from this maxim. Personally, I don’t want my internet experience regulated by credit card rules unless I happen to be using a credit card.

The ability to hamper me from effectively using my computing resources would be a serious blow to my ability to provide for my family, regardless of who is doing the hampering. I dont want a credit card company hampering my abilty to use the internet any more than I do the the credit card thief. Threatening one’s livelihood can get you shot in Texas. Similarly, I want the ability, as a law abiding citizen, to be able to “shoot” someone who is threatening my livelihood on the internet. Especially when they already have the ability to “shoot” me.

Boiled down, when it comes to our computers, our constitutional rights must apply. In the virtual world the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms equates to the right to acquire and implement counter-measures.

From a seperate interview with the chief officers of Symbiot, who developes counter-measure solutions, Tim Mullins is linked with a comment that sums up my point of view well:

“The moment that I begin to incur costs, or the integrity of services that I pay for is reduced by any degree, is the moment that I have the right to do something about it.”

Sign me up!

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In this article regarding Oracle’s takeover attempt of PeopleSoft, James Gattuso makes the point quite well that the anti-trust inquisitions by the US Department of Justice are simply not relevant in the context of this merger.

The question for U.S. antitrust regulators is whether the merger would substantially lessen competition in the relevant market. But what exactly is the relevant market here? The bulk of Oracle’s business is in databases, but PeopleSoft doesn’t play in that field. The two do, however, go head-to-head in a lower-profile market known in the software industry as “ERP,” — “enterprise resource planning.” Essentially, this is the provision of software to help businesses with such things as inventory, customer service and human resources.

[…]

As it turns out, neither Oracle nor PeopleSoft dominate this market. The leader is a German firm, SAP, which by one measure has 25 percent of that market.

[…]

To get around inconvenient market-share numbers, some critics of the acquisition have urged a bit of market gerrymandering. Instead of looking at the whole ERP market, regulators would look at smaller fields such as inventory software, human resource software and the like.

Why would a pro-business administration be focusing on such anti-growth measures as blocking business initiatives? Especially ones that could help us compete better with dominant players overseas.

The reason I ask is because there does not seem to be any anti-trust issues from a common sense perspective. Oracle and PeopleSoft don’t make the same type of products. I would really hate to find out that there is some kind of politics going on here when Americans really need jobs. Jobs that are usually created as a result of business activity. Business activity like an Oracle and PeopleSoft merger.

This is a real good example of why W always wants the ability to hire and fire in these new departments that have been created. Hiring and promoting good people and firing morons is essential to running a good operation.

Gattuso sums everything up quite well:

Nevertheless, antitrust regulators may still stop the PeopleSoft acquisition. One is tempted not to feel too sorry for Oracle, as it was the first to set the hounds loose. Yet the real losers would be consumers, who would enjoy a slightly less efficient, slightly less vibrant, software industry.

But I would like to extend the loser list to include the economy. And I think the effect of blocking such a large business initiative in this nascent period of market recovery will have a chilling affect on the broader market more than just “slightly less”.

It is stunts like this that makes people hate politicians bureaucrats so much.

{via: Technology Liberation Front}

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I cant believe Floridians are in the path of yet another major hurricane. What are the freakin odds? I expect the damn thing to move into the gulf just because the odds of one state getting hit three times by a major named storm within a month must be quite high.

Also, I think the timing of these storms are very suspicious. Karl Rove must be operating a nuclear-powered hurricane generation machine south east of Grenada so the Bush’s can claim they are the re-builders of Florida. I am surprised Kerry didn’t actually show up to work just to vote against the obviously politically motivated relief package.

If he were president, Kerry would look into the treasury, see the big IOU, then look at all his precious programs for “those who need it the most” and be forced to tell Floridians, “Sorry, we cant really afford to send help beyond what is already provided for. So when you run out of water, tough!”

Maybe the good people of Florida could lash Bob Graham to a pier somewhere in the Keys to appease the Kracken. It probably wont work, but its worth a try.

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Here’s an interesting article on the importance of route planning for Waste Management and how they tackled the daunting task:

Once dozens of variables are combined into a route knowledge bank, WasteRoute uses algorithms to pick the most efficient paths. These algorithms sort through the myriad issues Waste Management executives face daily: Is construction delaying a driver? Are there promised windows of time to pick up waste? Is a driver close to running more than the 60-hour-per-week maximum imposed by the Department of Transportation?

It is a fairly detailed and thought provoking article. The bottom line from an abstract point of view is that small gains in efficiency on a large scale operation can result in significant gains in productivity.

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As the world’s largest information technology (IT) company in the world and the world leader in patents for the 11th straight year, IBM offers a world of opportunity for imaginative and innovative individuals [THE WORLD OVER.]

Okay, I added that last little bit.

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While getting the kids ready for school this morning, we were watching “The Proud Family”. Penny Proud had a new boyfriend who was into Napster, except in the cartoon it was “EZ-Jackster.”

Penny was convinced no-one was getting hurt and that the world deserved free music. As a birthright no less.

The cartoon showed the big record moguls with gold adorning their bodies and dripping from their walls. Then they showed.. damn I cant recall the rapsters name– Sir Jack Alot or something silly like that. Anyway they showed the repoman taking his 100″ big screen TV out of this ridiculously large mansion. His royalty checks had dipped to only a nickel.

It took Penny being fired from her job at the local record store by a crying, bankrupt store owner to see the err of her ways. It was only then that she realized what a horrible thing she had been doing.

Or was it? I wish that I was able to sue and put corporate executives in jail who wont keep my pay rate up where it was before the internet began to change everything. Even spending a lot of money and time on retraining, I will likely still be making almost half as much as I was in 2001. And that’s if I can get a decent paying job without any “real-life” experience in the tools I’ve retrained in.

To stay viable the recording industry must face the music and get on to the internet in a big way. And I don’t mean selling CD’s over the internet. As I’ve said before, on more than one occasion, suing your customers is not a good long term strategy. Personally, I think the era of the RIAA is over. New age production techniques loosens the stranglehold that the record producers have on the industry.

Isn’t that a good thing? I think it is.

The big question that musicians and record execs have to answer is will the public buy their music if all the Napster’s suddenly become unavailable. Downloading music is a market issue; not criminal issue.

Is this whole issue really about fairness, or about who controls a multi-billion dollar industry?

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I bet ya’ll wish I’d hurry and publish some stuff to start moving all that crap off the front page.

Well, started a fresh new week today after a too short Labor Day Weekend. Maybe I can get back to some kind of normal blogging… whatever that is. My ongoing affair with the tar-babies last week was beginning to take a toll. Relentlessly being called a string of hateful names by people whose sole purpose for doing so is because you called someone an “asshat” is one of the bigger incongruities I have documented on this site to date.

They didn’t get no cherry over here. I’ve been around this block a few times before. The last time it was varying-intensity warfare drawn out over the course of more than a year. It involved someone who I, as well as a few others, believe was trying to scam the repossession industry by trying to get them to buy in to a bogus “trade association.” Its pretty well documented in the Larry the Liar category in the topic links to the left. If you are not interested, I’ll tell you the ending… we were right.

Another time was with a software vendor in the same industry right after 9/11. The thread was dubbed “The Patriot Thread” and is still referred to that today by those who remember it. It seemed at the time a lot of moral relativism was en vogue with the liberals. And it has yet to cease. That is why we have all this “Islam is a peaceful religion” bullshit meme going around.

Another quite disturbing time was when several industry leaders in a certain industry publicly denounced a well-known and well-liked locksmith vendor as being a lying cheat for taking a contract to supply key codes to a large lender. A very large lender. They figured he was cutting into their key business. When I opined that I thought it inappropriate to use the industry forums for that type of hateful rhetoric, I became the focus of a heated name-calling smear campaign once again.

Like I told the geeks, if you want to play ad hominem attack, I am their guy. Mr. Metaphor. Dennis Miller looks at me in awe. (Although I give him the edge in the obscure references dept.) Hell we can still keep going if they want. I am already depressed over it, may as well make them ride it out with me, huh?

Its likely to take a trip to the big city to get over this one.

Looking back at these situations, the common thread is that each and every time I was drawn into these things was when I spoke up just on account of principle. I noticed that it is a job that few people take on. Lets see, patriotism on two occasions. Plain ordinary decency on the locksmith matter and Consumer Advocacy on the Larry the Liar deal.

People really don’t like that, do they? Damn thankless job, it is

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I remember some time ago when Google first started coming out with all their extra little Google goodies, I was especially happy with the ‘define:’ function. It was better than having to go to a dictionary site because it saved time. A dictionary is a tool, not a general interest site. People always tend towards use of the most efficient tools; not cumbersome tools. This is by definition of what a tool is for: efficient enhancement of productivity.

However, I quickly got tired of not getting an answer for the words I had misspelled. Like most writers I frequently use words that aren’t in some of the standard spell check dictionaries like slang, idiom, cliche, foreign phrases, jargon, etc. so spell-checking is the primary reason for me to use a dictionary. But Google’s ‘define:’ functionality does not return a definition for misspelled words. Being of the adaptive type, I then realized that Google’s spell checker, which is largely taken for granted or ignored by most people, is one of the best out there. So if I want the accurate spelling of word, say like ‘termagant’, I just do a regular Google search for the particular word. If it’s misspelled, Google lets me know and gives me an alternative. As a bonus, in one transaction, with out having to leave Google’s efficient interface, I almost always get the correct spelling and a several definitions on the first page.

What’s interesting about searching this way is the page ranking. Almost universally (as of this writing) thefreedictionary.com is ranked #1 and American Heritage #2. thefreedictionary.com never gives the definition on the Google page. Understandably, they want the hit. But they have a competitor just beneath them that gives the definition on the Google page, thus saving the tool user valuable time. (If you do this a lot you know what I mean.)

Once noticing this, an inquiring mind wants to know why. Why would thefreedictionary.com be doing whatever it is they are doing (doing something is always expensive) to get the #1 page rank when their product is given away for free by the person with the #2 rank. I can see zero real advantage of a #1 ranking over a #2 ranking. I would say the top three have a slight advantage over the rest of page one, but all of page one leaves page two in the dust as far as the value of the ranking goes.

So what gives? I don’t know. But here is my guess:

They are banking on the very, very slight psychological advantage of the #1 rank over the #2 rank, which is negligible in my estimation. They are rightly thinking that they will get every dissatisfied customer of the #2 ranked site. This will be almost a universal reaction because psychologically the consumer knew they should have went with #1. And, however large the population of Googler’s who use the “I Feel Lucky” search option, they get that benefit too.

Is it working for them? I don’t know, but I wish I had access to the data.

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