Morality of Wealth Acquisistion

A very interesting article by John Kay, "Rent-seeking lessons from Mubarak to Louis XIV" looking at how different people attain wealth. When I reached the last two paragraphs I did wonder if John wrote this to prepare us for the revelation in today's news about the LIBOR rate fixing by UK and other banks.

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a small computer costing about 28 British pounds. The idea behind it is to encourage younger people and not-so-young to really understand what is behind information technology and computing. My daughter told me she had IT class at school but when I asked what it entailed I was horrified to find out that it was really familiarisation with the applications (such as MSWord) on a PC.

If your waiting for your Raspberry Pi to arrive it's time to go out and get the essentials that you need to run it. Unless you ordered anything other than the board that means: 

   1) a 5v power supply with a USB to USB mini cable
   2) USB Mouse

   3) USB keyboard

   4) Monitor or TV which has a HDMI socket

   5) HDMI-HDMI cable for above or composite cable to a regular TV (which is not ideal on the eyes but at least proves it's working)

   6) 4GB SD card and a reader to write the image to the card

   I am mentioning this because then you can get the Pi up and   running as soon as you get it. The WIKI is a good source to prepare for setup. It's a great feeling though when the lights come on and the boot starts writing to the screen.

My Raspberry Pi arrived last week. If your waiting for your Raspberry Pi to arrive it's time to go out and get the essentials that you need to run it. Unless you ordered anything other than the board that means:

Peter Day Interview With Reid Hoffman on The Startup of You

Recently I listened to Peter Day from the BBC's GlobalBiz radio program interview Reid Hoffman (Linkedin), the co-author of "The Startup of You". Here are my notes.

You are the CEO of your own business. There is a tool-kit that CEO's use - (i) knowing how a service works; (ii) how do you build out the next generation of product; (iii) figuring out how to navigate the media world; This tool-kit is equally applicable to the individual. We should remember that we are always a work-in-progress and retain a 'beta' mindset (always in development, always changing, always investigating) - you just get on with something sometimes before it's perfect. Part of living in the modern world is that you have to constantly invest in yourself. Watch out for the threat of early success - keep remembering the need to 'learn again' in order to keep ahead of the field.

Peter Day asked if it is true that 'only the paranoid survive' quoting the book by Andy Grove and Reid Hoffman agreed and said that one has to learn to expect change rather than stability as the metronome and that we need to factor it into our strategy. He advised on the benefits of talking to other smart people and taking small experimental risks. Peter Day went back to Andy Grove's book and said that just when everything in the garden is lovely and everything is just right that is just the time when disaster strikes.

"But does it really apply to me personally as well as an entrepreneur?" asked Day.
Reid: "I think so for several reasons because I think that the intense wins of globalisation and technology disruption massively affect industry and organisations and the question comes down to 'Do organisations adapt?'". If an organisation doesn't adapt then the individual needs to be adapting themselves because if the organisation has layoffs - how do you continue your career? The second thing is the way the organisation adapt really only happens if they have adaptable people working in the organisation. People who are paying attention to these kind of changes and are thinking about it: "How do you learn more? How do you adapt more? How do you take risks? How do you invest in yourself? So I think this mindset is key not just to folks who obviously start companies but anyone who does any job".
To hear the full program - listen to the podcast.

Disparate Views on the internet music model

On the 4th of January Forbes published Steven Bertoni's 5-page article about Spotify’s Daniel Ek giving the impression that, despite the financial downturn, the music biz and the new-media tech companies had finally consummated the marriage.

Shortly after finishing the article I remembered the "Information is Beautiful" graphic that showed/compared various revenues of music indicating that with Spotify the artist would receive $0.00029 per stream. This image is based on an excellent post at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been about pitiful digital royalties. The conversation about the music business and the models at the bottom of the page on Information is Beautiful is interesting because it has continued since the original post  and participants are both music creators and music appreciators.

I do not know whether it is by design or coincidence but the Forbes article appeared on the 4th Jan and on the 6th January The Cynical Musician published an up to the minute update on Spotify called 'A Realistic Look at Spotfiy and Streaming' in which he revisits the subject and does some more factual in-depth analysis and concludes in a slightly less than his usual cynical way. I found the article informative and well presented and Faza has unusually opened it up to share in order to continue and develop the ongoing conversation.

full marks for ingenuity to the Polish Postman

A friend of mine from England sent me a Christmas card and left out two items of essential information: the addressee and the house number. All the postman from Poczta Polska had to go on was that it was for someone in my street and it came from England. Full credit to him for initiative - he put 2 and 2 together and got cztery (4).

Dynamic Random Access Memory as a possible replacement for Hard Disks

Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) stores each bit of data in a separate capacitor within an integrated circuit. It is structurally simple (only one transistor and a capacitor are required per bit) allowing DRAM to reach very high densities. The transistors and capacitors used are extremely small; billions can fit on a single memory chip. However, the memory is volatile and data is lost when power is removed.

There is a a research group at Stanford University who say the goal should be to replace hard disks with DRAM. RAMcloud is a general-purpose storage system where all data lives in DRAM at all times and large-scale systems are created by aggregating the main memories of thousands of commodity servers. RAMCloud provides durable and available DRAM-based storage for the same cost as volatile caches, and it offers performance 10-100x faster than existing storage systems. By combining low latency and large scale, RAMCloud will enable a new class of applications that manipulate large datasets more intensively than has ever been possible.

With increaed throughput (1m ops/sec/server) and low latency access the implication is that we will see a new class of applications that operate large scale using very large datasets. Possible applications are: 

• crowd level collaboration;
• large scale graph algorithms;
• real-time information intensive applications
• applications using open linked data 

There are a number of issues that are being addressed by the research group including durability and availability, the right data model, concurrency and consistency and keeping up to date on the progress will be extremely prudent.

A useful introductory lecture by John Ousterhout is Professor (Research) of Computer Science at Stanford University can be watched here.

open source cloud and note about company naming

An interesting article by John Greathouse about Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems discusses the open source approach to cloud computing. Mickos used to be CEO of MySQL and he has a pragmatic approach to open source cloud and being in the business of providing a software platform for private cloud explains how the employment of a hybrid clouds can cater for unpredictable and variable workloads. In the video interview Mickos explains Eucalyptus Systems value proposition. They enable companies to run within their own firewall a cloud that is exactly like the public cloud, so it can be used for 'in-house' and hybrid situations.

The article goes in depth over two pages including a video interview and when I reached the end, I realised that there was some guidance from Mickos about company naming which neatly adds a contemporary twist to my previous blog about product naming. He offers some grounded advice for emerging entrepreneurs interested in starting a venture within the cloud ecosystem. Like most rapidly growing tech sectors, cloud computing has experienced its share of hype and hyperbole. Marten cautions entrepreneurs to avoid being lost in the current cloud mania, “If you are going to build a really successful company in the cloud (space), you should not give it a name with cloud in the name or some Latin name of clouds. Over time…there are too many companies that have similar names and it gets confusing. To name your company after the industry you are in…can turn into a banality and it doesn’t give the right impression. Find some other name than cloud something." The full article can be read on this page.