The Zeitgeist

Fusion IO showed off their new storage product at the Fall DEMO show last week (I love DEMO, my former startup DropZone Networks was DEMOMobile’s featured Wireless startup in 2004) and they blew everyone away with their new card which when it ships will put an amazing 640 GIGABYTES of NAND Flash memory onto a PCI Express card. YiKeS!

According to their FAQ,

The ioDrive™ is designed to deliver 100,000 IOPS (input/output per second) per PCIe x4 card, while achieving sustained data rates of 800MB/sec (Read) and 600MB/sec (Write)

This is just such a cool product - Imagine being able to store everything in your iTunes library, all your docs, media, everything in your online world in a non-volatile and incredibly fast package that could fit in a single card slot in your computer. Clearly they could make these in 1TB and larger sizes as well.

I ‘m sold. Sign me up! I’ll take at least 4 of them (Yes, I have that much data)… how much are we talking about per card here? According to their CTO, David Flynn, they’re targeting $30/GB for these cards when they ship in the Q1 of 2008. lesse’ …$30 per gig.. carry the one… plus… uh… wait. a. minute…. for a 640 GB card, we’re talking $19,200?!?!? Are they out of their minds? For that price I have have at least 2 (two) Apple XServe RAID boxes at 5-7TB EACH and use one as a backup for the other. I won’t get 100,000 IOPS but I’ll get a lot more storage. Heck, right now 1TB of hard disk is about $250 (Seagate 1TB drives); that comes out to just under $0.25 per gigabyte. For about $1500 I can put together (including case and motherboard) a ~4.5TB NAS box in an afternoon.

Of course, I’m really not making a very fair comparison between old slow traditional disks and what’s clearly a game changing piece of technology… however ~20K for 640GB of storage is just not going to sell into corporate IT no matter how great its performance numbers are (at the end of the day, its specs, tho’ impressive, trigger the sleep reflex in management; if they’re going to drop 20Gs on a piece of hardware they want to see something physically impressive). These guys need to rock the storage market by selling these things dirt cheap and showing everyone (esp. traditional storage vendors ) how fast the world can change.

So, FusionIO, what do you say? Great idea. Looks like an amazing implementation… Do you want to sell a few thousand of these cards before some Chinese knock-off comes in and undercuts you right out of business?  Or, do you want to change the face of the storage marketplace forever and make a few tens of billions along the way..?

This moronic kerfuffle over Ahmadinejad’s rant at Columbia has jumped the shark. Now, both Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and the NY State / NYC Governments want to punish Columbia University by pulling their funding and through other censures and sanctions. Hmmmm…. Well, well, well, remember this…?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Hmmm…. where might that be from? Anyone..? …Beuller? Anyone..? Oh, RIGHT! The US Bill of Rights. The most important part of the US Constitution! That text up there? It’s The 1st Amendment! I’ll bet if you look around your offices, you might find a copy somewhere. (Hint: Ask one of your staffers who knows how to read… )

Last time I checked, both the (clearly mentally ill and/or mentally deficient) congressman and the NYC/NY State pols invovled swore basically the same oath: “To protect, uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America” (and in the NYC/NY State case, the laws of the State of New York). I wonder, are they smart enough to get what that oath means? (’guess not…)

Seems pretty clear to me, they’re all blatantly, and with malice of forethought violating the law, and their oaths of office by threatening Columbia University over this event.

When are these childish, petty, ill-informed buffoons going to learn that the only way to fight hateful speech is with better, more informed, smarter speech..?

Ahmadinejad is clearly no Boy Scout.  No matter what side of the aisle you are on with regard to Iran, letting Ahmadinejad rant away didn’t really change anything,  and, judging from his performance, he didn’t help his own case one little bit…

Rogue Amoeba has announced a really nifty new product called RadioShift. This program for OS X will allow you to browse AM/FM radio stations around the world and set up programs to be recorded off the web, OR, if you have a Griffin Technology RadioShark, you can record them over the air.

I’ve been a fan for several years of Audio Hijack Pro, which I use to capture many, many podcasts and radio shows that aren’t podcast (I’m using it very simplistically, it’s actually a whole audio studio); my only big issue with it (and one I’ve requested they fix over the years) has been that it’s a pain to set up recording times for things that aren’t in your time zone (i.e., I have to figure out what the local time of a broadcast in, say, London is and then set Audio Hijack to do the right thing). RadioShift seems to fix that problem quite nicely by giving you a very expansive radio program guide that helps you find programs and set up recording schedules.

I’ve just downloaded it: it looks like, as usual, the folks over at Rogue Amoeba have created another really, really elegant, well crafted and super-useful piece of software.

Apparently a 6th grader, Arjun Mehta,  in San Jose landed $6.5M in a series A round round led by Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures, STIC and Novel TMT Ventures for his idea of an in-game commerce system called Playspan.

My first reaction is a combination of “Wow… smart kid!” and “Holy crap.. we ARE in a bubble again if VCs are funding 11 year olds with $6.5M A rounds…”

Of course, the article in TechCrunch is very light on detail, so I am betting that this may well have been the kid’s idea, but his parents are probably SV entrepreneurs who are using the kid’s talents as a hook to sell the idea to the VCs. Still, great to see kids stepping up early and learning to get in the game. Kudos to the parents (or whomever) who are (hopefully) mentoring this young guy, and for using his talents as a lever to get funded!

[update: according to Metaversed,  PlaySpan’s co-founder and CEO is Karl Mehta, who, though it’s not stated in the article is probably Arjun’s Dad.  So, I was right .. .clever parents!  Is this a great country or what?!? :)  ]

[update: Several “Wall St Insider” type sites claim this letter is a hoax… digging a little deeper, several of the people named in the letter can actually be found on LinkedIn and are working at JPMC according to their LinkedIn profiles. However, even if this is a hoax, there are plenty of people — I know a few of them — who have written and published similar farewell missives… my opinions on its usefulness and the intelligence of such an action still stand.]

Here’s a supposed “Today is my last day” email, ostensibly from a now ex-JPMorgan-Chase employee that is making the rounds. It’s a pretty familiar litany of the backstabbing, duplicity and other poor behavior that goes on in IT on Wall St. (where “Wall St.” == every financial firm on the planet).

The sad thing is that if this is for real, and this guy’s true identity ever gets out he’ll likely never work in IT (anywhere) again. It’s not that what he’s describing isn’t most likely true — it IS. I worked on Wall St (including at JPMorgan, as well as Citigroup, and BearStearns) for the better part of 20 years, and I’ve seen all the stuff he describes, and much, much more. Like all big organizations, all these firms have insane, petty politics, lots of incompetent managers, and inane and broken processes and policies.

So what… Welcome to the world of work.
The downside for this guy is that in IT, and especially in the financial services IT world, people tend to circulate from firm to firm; sometimes back and forth between the same firms… more than likely he’ll run into a lot of these folks again, and if not them, their friends and associates. As horrible and stupid as all of the political BS is at these places, it’s usually not actually personal. There’s a saying in academia: “The politics in academia are so intense because the stakes are so low!” And the same thing is true in IT in financial services companies.

Interestingly, we IT folks actually make modern financial services possible, but because we’re on the cost-center side, and not the profit-center side, the senior management utterly dismisses IT as an annoying but necessary evil. The real money, power and bonuses come (obviously) from being on the money/deal side. Because the bonus pie is so small, and the actual power is so thin on the IT side, the politics and general stupidity can and does rise to simply insane, comical levels. It goes with the territory. However, eventually the really bad, technologically clueless managers age-out and retire; the other folks get stuck in one job because of their own technical or managerial limitations or general incompetence; they’ll either evolve or get out-sourced. Really good technologists keep learning and growing, and either move to better and higher-value positions if they want to stay in financial services, or, like I did, they leave Wall St. and become entrepreneurs where the can indulge their creative passions without the politics and other silliness.

However, this letter is making the rounds, and there are a lot of managers who won’t hire people who burn bridges like this… as annoying as his job was, a better approach would have been to exit gracefully, and, hopefully cultivate his former antagonists as references. Nothing says “hire-able” more than someone who can get a recommendation from a boss he hated or from co-workers with whom he disagreed. These days, having a good online profile on something like LinkedIn where prospective employers are going to scrutinize your career is more important than the momentary satisfaction of venting your spleen. And, you know what? Very quickly, your emotions about all the silly politics and inside-baseball competition/rivalries of jobs you’ve had fade quietly into the background noise of your life anyway; but poison pen letters you’ve loosed into the world? …not so much.

The upshot is: Don’t Try this at Home, Kids: Save the character assassination for your tell-all memoir when you’re very old, very rich, and never need to work again.

Security: don’t even get me started on the security challenges in an environment full of widgets, gadgets and 3rd party web services. Suffice it to say that when this rock gets turned over, lots of ugly stuff creepy-crawly things will slither out.- Chris Keene blogging on the state of AJAX in general and on his company’s acquisition of TurboAjax

uh.. yeah. What he said! I am doing lots of AJAX in the stuff I am developing, and being a security guy in many of my ‘past lives’ I am bullet-proofing everything on the server side (not much you can do to protect the client side. Sorry; it’s the price we pay for “cool,” or as my dear friend Chuck Yerkes might have said: “Secure, powerful, pretty: Choose two.”) On the larger front about the AJAX universe needing a “RedHat”-like consolidation…. it might be premature for that to happen just now - there’s too much interesting framework-level stuff still being developed, but it’s going to happen eventually… AJAX just like every popular technology platform will hit a standardization-level critical mass where in order to be widely used (read: used in “enterprise markets”) it will have to have the same level of managerial trust that Java and other now-mainstream development tools do.

On the bright side, at least we have advanced to the point where its possible to bring new ideas into the mainstream of IT, and people with attitudes like this:

“Within an EDP Center, programming languages should be standardized. If it’s COBOL, PL-1, or FORTRAN, so be it. And the bright young mavericks with their ALGOL, PASCAL and god-knows-what-else will just have to conform.”

- John M. Carroll in Computer Security Magazine, 1977

have, hopefully, long ago gone off to their reward in some dreary retirement home.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
–Edmund Burke

A student, asking a question of John Kerry during a post-speech Q&A session at the University of Florida is TASERED for asking a question about impeaching George Bush, and John Kerry stands by and does NOTHING. Naomi Wolf delivers the details on this horror (btw, the video of the incident is really quite disturbing to watch).

Oh, and Mitt Romney apparently thinks tasering people exercising their 1st amendment rights is oh, so very funny…

The NYTimes has killed of their ill-considered “Times Select” service (dubbed a “paywall” by most observers). Thanks goodness, I say: About freakin’ time!

What was shocking to me about Times Select was how clear it was that the NYTimes management just didn’t get the idea that putting its single most valuable asset, it’s Op-Ed page, out of reach of the public diminished the Times’ ability to leverage its brand and its message. If there was ONE THING that the Time’s should have always given away it was the Op-Ed… their only serious competition, the Wall Street Journal, got it from day one: they opened up their Op-Ed pages for public consumption — and got their ideas out into the world. They charge people for the other stuff — the reporting. The Time’s decided their ideas were only valuable if people paid for them, and paid the price in prestige and, most certainly, in lost readership. The Times’ management appears to be claiming that increases in ad revenue now allow them to liberate the Op-Ed pages. What a bunch of hooey… more than likely someone applied a clue-by-4 to the back of a certain Times’ scion’s head, and woke him up to the idea that with Murdoch owning The Journal even more conservative opinoin pieces will get wider play, and that they won’t even be in the game.

Now the times can get back to being the influential “paper of record” again… well, if they stop simply being stenographers for the current administration, anyway.

Google is offering a US$30MM prize to any private group that successfully lands a probe on the lunar surface and returns high-resolution video imagery. Personally I think it would be great, anything that opens up space and helps expand our horizons is great… sadly, I think the minute that really starts to (pardon the pun) take off, it’s going to run right into this little bit of craziness: Bush Administration Declares Right to Control Access to Space.

On the other hand, given the amount of money in the hands of space enthusiasts (for example: Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, to name the obvious ones), and all the places in the world that are perfect launch sites, unless the administration is going to declare war on every possible launch site, I don’t see what they can do to stop it: I mean, you can’t embargo physics books, or electric components, computers, kerosene and peroxide (the ingredients in rocket fuel), etc. (This sort of runs right into this post on the eventual dissolution of nations-states). Another technological genie that’s just about out of the bottle… this will be fun to watch!

Although URL typos can be amusing; this one is getting a bit long in the tooth. “The Zeitgeist Movie” is quite a popular film about religion, global conspiracies, and 9/11. It is NOT, however, a product of this company/web site.  This internet domain, zeitgeist.com, has been owned by me (David HM Spector) since the 1980s. If you are looking for a link to the film, please click HERE - http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/. Of course, if you’re interested in technology, software development, Web2.0, and good food, please stick around. 

For those wondering what’s going on, this web site is my personal and professional domain, used for my consulting business for over 20 years, and long, long, long before the folks who made The Zeitgeist Film had ever heard of the Internet. In fact most likely long before YOU had ever heard of the Internet.  In fact when this domain was created, there was no “Internet” only the ARPAnet. You arrived here because of a simple and natural mis-understanding: the presumption that “zeitgeist.com” must be the folks who made the movie you’ve heard about.  No worries… it’s been happening a lot.

Oh, and no, it’s not for sale. Thanks for asking.