Incumbent Power and Total War in High Tech

Mario, a senior studying Political Science and History at the University of Washington, is one of my oldest friends. I’ve had the pleasure of learning a lot about political science from him.  In particular, I remember a discussion with Mario on the concept of total war – a type of warfare where every and any asset of a country is used to wage war – and how it’s changed since World War 2 with the advent of nuclear weapons.

The Dangers of Sibling Rivalry in the Mobile Processor Market

A long time ago, the word “Pentium” made geeks shake in excitement. For years Intel used the “Pentium” title to refer to their processor brand as a whole (and later – the upper-class of the  brand).  When you bought an Intel processor, you’d get a Pentium: Pentium 2/3/4, Pentium: Extreme Edition, Pentium D.  Now Pentium refers to Intel’s lower-end Core 2 Duo and later Core i7 brand; they’re the same die of the processor with half (or less) amounts of the ultra-speedy on-die L2 and L3 memory cache, effectively reducing performance markedly but making the processor cheaper and take up less power as a consequence.

Of course, you don’t hear about the Pentium much anymore. Instead, you hear about the Atom. This is unfortunately starting to turn out to be a problem for Intel.

What the Hell is Web 2.0?

We ran into the group at Microsoft’s party on top of the Venetian hotel’s Tao nightclub in Las Vegas. Microsoft rented the multi-story bar out for the night to celebrate the commencement of their UI (user interface) design and technology conference, MIX. It was the sort of extremely trendy and chic-tech event that Valleywag would like you to believe is the norm around Silicon Valley. My friends and I got very lucky and were invited to attend, and we soon found our college student selves enjoying Tao’s open bar in the most appropriate and civilized manner as tech conferences like these often dictate.

This is to say, we went and ordered drinks at the open bar by saying things like “yo – give me another Jagerbomb,” or “I’ll take the most extremely expensive thing you have on the menu,” or my favorite “can I just have the bottle and give it back to you or something?”

Gains from Specialization and How Carol Bartz Plays For Keeps

Carol Bartz is pretty “G”. Armed with spunk, brilliance, and an impressive background, she helped Autodesk fight off an upstart company by the name of Adobe to retain their advantage in the CAD software market. She’s on the board of directors at Sun, cusses like a fuckin’ sailor, and probably shoots her chrome .45ACP sideways while she throws “westside” with the other hand. She’s the perfect person to turn Yahoo! around and put it back on track.

ChromeOS: Great for Technology, Not the Second Coming.

I like Valleywag. Like a lot of geeks, I love to pop it open and read about what stupid hijinks are going on in technology. The ubiquitous Silicon Valley gossip rag serves as a frankly horrifying combination of Wired, the now-defunct Fuckedcompany.com, the Weekly World News, and Playboy. Scathing, scandalous, and often sexual, Valleywag is one of those things you talk about in hushed conversation over a glass of wine at a dimly-lit bar in Palo Alto or yell about over some loud house music while holding a Stella at a party in San Jose. Valleywag is all about the ‘Valley’s fairyland image of geek money, sex, and power.  And we, the people living in the much more muted version of its stories, eat it up.

Stop Making Linux and Open Source Ideological

Recently, Slashdot reported that Free Software Foundation (FSF) leader Richard Stallman criticized Debian’s decision to include Mono in its future releases of its Linux distribution. Mono is an interpreter for Microsoft’s .NET platform that allows certain prorams coded for the Windows .NET platform to be executed inside of Linux natively. Arguing that this maneuver further indebts the development of GNU Linux to Microsoft, Stallman vehemently arued that it was a mistake and will have dire consequences for the continued development of Linux, open source, and free software as a whole.

MIX[1]: Silverlight Burns It Up

There’s a lot to talk about for the first day of MIX09. Let’s get to it.

MIX09: Day[0]

When Microsoft offered to send Edgar, Parris, and I to their visual design and web computing conference we were interested. When we found out it was in Vegas, that we each would get a luxury suite, and that we’d get a chance to hobnob with some very important people in the industry, we asked where they needed our signature.

So, my next few posts will be about MIX09 and my experience there. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the next few days, and I’ll be both blogging about my experience and producing videos with Parris about what’s going on.

Getting to Vegas was interesting. Because my flight was out of SFO, I had to jump on Caltrain at 5:00AM from San Jose to get up to the city. After an uneventful flight to Vegas, I joined some of  the other students in seeing what’s going on in the world of technology. Among them:

• A bunch of students from Purdue’s  SIGGRAPH club.
• Animation majors from CSU Fullerton.
• OSU User Interface Design students.
• Etc.

I had some Japanese food at a nearby mall with the Fullerton guys, hung out, then walked the strip before I went to sleep. After having less than 2 hours  of sleep, I needed the rest. The huge bed made it a lot better though. I may have felt like Tony Montana watching MSDN in the bath, then faling asleep in a bed the size of my apartment.

On a final note, two days ago I was saddened to hear that one of my friends from high school passed away. Daisuke Kaneko was an amazing guy, and I was one of the lucky people to have met him. Daisuke will be missed by his friends and family. Thank you for everything, Dai. Heaven got a whole lot funnier.