Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
About this Site
Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
I've been writing for over 40 years, professionally for 30. If you're interested in doing the same, here's a simple four-step process that will make your writing all it can be.
Writing is easy to learn, easy to do. But it's the work of a lifetime. I'm still learning, and will be until I die. So get started now.
Write. Don't think, write. Write everything about what you want to say. Don't worry about grammar, or spelling. Just think about everything you want to say and say it. This is sometimes called "writing down the bones." It's simple, it's pure, it's exhausting, it's exhilirating. And when you're done you may have an unholy mess. Don't worry about it.
Find the story. After you finish your draft, and after you take some time away from it (an hour, a day, or even several days, depending on how long it is) go through what you have and find the story there. Look for the beginning, middle, and end.
If you're writing non-fiction, find your lead. Move your key point to the front. If this is a news story, you then take the next most important point, and the next, and the next, in order. (The inverted pyramid lets an editor chop from the bottom.)
If this is a magazine story, your lead is a sales pitch for what follows. You next want to tell the story in a coherent order, and finish with a revelation, a present for ther reader who finishes it, sometimes called a tag ending or rim shot.
If this is fiction, find a key moment of high tension and start there. Then tell the back story, and lead your reader toward the climax.
The Walt Disney Co., including ABC, ESPN, the movies, the theme parks -- the whole shebang -- is presently valued at about $50 billion. That's actually about one-sixth less than it was worth five years ago.
Apple Computer Corp., by contrast is worth $65 billion. That's about eight times more than it was worth five years ago.
I decided to note this after reading about how Disney wants to make a move on Pixar, for $6.7 billion, and how that would result in a "pivotal" role for Jobs at Disney, with Steve as Disney's largest shareholder. But before he bought that pig in a poke, you'd think Steve would consider how becoming the "largest shareholder" of a media company worked out for Ted Turner.
Uh, uh. Instead of selling Pixar, Jobs could easily offer a three-way Apple-Pixar-Disney tie-up, in which Jobs and his team would own about two-thirds of the resulting company.
So the question occurs, does Jobs want to run Disney?
One reason I haven't been around much lately is I have been (finally) reading Salman Rushdie's latest 2005 1997classic Shalimar the Clown.
Like all great writers Rushdie tends to be ahead of his time, sometimes far ahead. Just as his Satanic Verses presaged the new Age of Blasphemy, and made Rushdie itself was one of the first victims, so Shalimar describes a national suicide that could yet befall America.
Rushdie's subject is his beloved Kashmir, whose suicide remains an ongoing tragedy. His theme is that intolerance, not tolerance, is the norm, and that no one is immune. His final scene, in fact, takes place in a Beverly Hills bedroom.
There is no way for me to spoil this for you. Rushdie is the greatest writer living in the English language, because he knows so many forms of English. When he writes from India, his sentences are long, filled with the fragrance of allusion, often hilarious. When he writes from America his sentences become shorter, his adjectives fewer, his immigrant wonder clear. When he writes from Europe everything becomes action. I know of no other writer who can truly become different places like that. Some can become different people, Rushdie becomes the flavor of places.
The heart of the book is one page-long paragraph that starts on page 296 of the hard cover edition, after India has decided that the only way to end the crisis over Kashmir is to destroy its people. I'm going to quote only one sentence, and I hope it doesn't violate fair use (because it's a long sentence). Suffice it to say you want to read the first half of the paragraph, along with this, and then you'll be ready for a good, long cry:
It's actually the beta test for something called MyHeritage. It will act as a genealogical research site, helping folks find relatives based on facial characteristics.
The beta test lets you input a mug shot into the site, and have it select, from a collection of 2,000 celebrities, who you most look like. I know of one family where the father looks like Donald Rumsfeld (supposedly), the mother looks like Shirley Temple (supposedly) and the kids look like Muhammed Ali (also supposedly). And they're not even black!
Mingaling looks like Luci Liu (lucky girl). Who do you look like?
A posting from Bernie Goldbach in Ireland helped remind me of just how much progress we've seen in the last decade.
The best way to see it is through the eyes of people who are growing up.
I've got two right here.
Robin and John are part of the Internet Generation, just as I am part of the TV Generation. It's their vocabulary. It's where they're most comfortable. We have one TV in our house, and not too many fights over it, because both kids are more likely to be spending time online than slumped in front of the Idiot Box. (He likes Comedy Central, though, and she still likes cartoons.)
A decade ago they were well ahead of the curve.They're not anymore, which is fine by me.
A few points about their own use of technology:
They assume technology. (Robin's shirt refers to a robot her club made this fall.)
They assume an immense amount of choice.
They assume a PC will be available, at hand.
They take e-mail connections as a given. Also IM.
They type fast, although they don't know they're doing it.
They assume broadband is available. When it was down earlier this fall, well, it was rough.
They know how to avoid bad people, liars, and predators.
They are dedicated to favorite activities, no more likely to stray from them than, say, I am. The difference is their favorite activities change.
Your mileage, of course, will vary.
There are also the usual accoutrements of youth -- an assumption and acceptance of constant, even accelerating change. Optimism, impatience, curiousity, energy, humor, mood swings. And something I can't explain -- they get along with their parents. (I have no idea how we lucked into that one, frankly. But I treasure it.)
But it would solve a lot of problems, most especially for the Bells, who would be the idea's staunchest opponents, if it were proposed. (It's not being proposed. I'm just blogging here. This is a thought experiment.)
The problem is there is billions of dollars in copper infrastructure that is becoming worthless faster than the loans made to build it can be paid off. This fact is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about.
So throw those assets, and the debt behind them, into a pot. Sign yearly management contracts with the present owners (mainly the Bells) to keep those assets going.
Then anyone who wants to build on those assets (including the Bells) or provide services using those assets (like ADSL) can do so without discrimination. The Bells no longer have an incentive to stifle competition. They do have an incentive to build, to build fiber, to build what amounts to a cable system, because every dime they use in that effort is a new dime, and every dime that comes in as a result of that effort is their dime.
The Bells would all create management arms, and cash flow from the contracts. But the corporation as a whole would have a different set of incentives. It would want those costs kept down. It would be pushing all its assets into advanced services, and seeing the management company as a cash drain. Fine. If they try to starve the management company, there would be a process by which customers could complain and have a new manager appointed.
You're used to my occasional forays into (usually political) non-tech irrelevancy here at Mooreslore.
Well, I'm about to do it again, but this time, at least, I'm speaking of sport.
Specifically football, the game other Americans call soccer.
UPDATE: In the World Cup draw after this was written, the U.S. wound up in a group of Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. Italy is a favorite, the Czechs came within a game of winning the European cup, and Ghana is a hungry African side. Mexico, on the other hand, gets Iran, Angola, and Portugal. None are soccer powers (although Portugal used to be).
My kids have played it since they were very little. At the recreational level, it's a very safe game. At the highest level, it has become a very compelling game, thanks to replacing leather with lightweight plastics in ball manufacturing. The resulting spheroids are lighter, less dangerous for kids, less deadly for grownups, and faster, causing top teams to send balls whizzing all about the pitch. Not to mention creating a generation of soccer moms (and dads) in American suburbs.
Where you think J.K. Rowling got her ideas about Quidditch from -- cricket?
Anyway, turns out the U.S. has built itself a nice little mens' national soccer team. Credit goes mostly to Bruce Arena (pictured), one of the world's best coaches, but an American (and a former goalie).
Unfortunately he made one big mistake, fairly recently, one that will keep the world from having to watch a bunch of Yanks hoist their most precious trophy (to yawns from here) next summer in Germany.
One thing. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) must be simple, powerful, easily understood by everyone you do business with -- employees, suppliers, customers.
Fulfill the promise. Do what you say you will do, always, Any failure to meet your USP can be fatal. But failures will happen. Meet them with kindness, and redemptive behavior. Think of the result as customer make-up sex.
Don't lie. This starts with no lieing to yourself. Delusion is the first temptation of success. Always keep someone close who will tell you the truth about yourself, and let them. It's going to come out, whatever it is. The rule is not, don't let it. The rule is, don't do it.
Identify with your customer. It's not just, the customer is always right. It's, you're the customer. Your interests are their interests.
We're all publishers now. Your job is to organize and advocate a community or lifestyle. That's your business. Organize what your customers want into one place, and be an advocate for their interests.
Keep it simple. Don't let the complexity of a growing business tear you away from a simple, coherent message. Some profits aren't worth chasing. Stay in your niche.
We all grow older, even tech executives. And this week, my free weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com offers some thoughts on that. (Subscribe here.)
Think of it as another product of...the aging process (you should live so long).
Enjoy.
I have been thinking a lot about second acts lately.
Part of it is my work with Voic.Us. I'm having to become a system administrator, at least part-time. I am trying to recruit a staff, some paid and some not. I'm trying to be an executive.
These are roles I never took on before. I wrote about them, I critiqued them, but I never had to play them before. And there are times when they make me tired.
There are other reasons, on my regular tech beat, for me to think of second acts. The great tech companies founded by my generation - Microsoft, Dell, Apple - are all into the second act thing these days. Apple's is highly successful, as Steve Jobs has become a consumer electronics mogul, a content gatekeeper. Microsoft's second act has not been so successful. Bill Gates keeps fiddling with the deck chairs, and in the latest fiddling a guy near my age, Jim Allchin, found himself forced into retirement.
Here's a story that illustrates well the time we're living in. (The picture, from Pravda, shows Indian and Pakistani nuclear sites. Its meaning will become clear in due course.)
I had a meeting scheduled with a programmer for around 9 AM. I booted up my computer, and as soon as it came up Google Talk woke up with "hi" from Tariq Mustafa.
I immediately began trying to set up Tariq with my boss here in Atlanta, who was on his own IM connection, to get our meeting started. As I did so the doorbell rang, and in walked a co-worker, who promptly sat down at my home network to join in.
Well, nearly, judging from the latest re-org news coming out of Microsoft.
The retiree in this case is Jim Allchin (right), who has been the Windows guru there for years. What struck me was his age, 53.
I'm going to be 51 in January. And I'm launching a start-up.
Seriously, Microsoft is going through the middle-aged crazies, and the solution is in many ways typical. That is, push decision-making down the stack, toward younger managers. Let a hundred flowers bloom and all that.
The other big headline in here is that Ray Ozzie, the former Lotus executive who joined Microsoft last year as a chief technical officer, is being given line responsibilities for what's called the "software-based services" strategy.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's middle-aged trouble goes a little deeper than that.
NOTE: Many of the claims made in the item below have been questioned by Russell Shaw. See the full story here.
It's ironic, but my first invitation to use Google Talk came from Pakistan. From Karachi, actually.
Specifically it was from a long-time online friend named Tariq Mustafa (known as Tee Emm), who works in the high-tech sector there.
I am really excited on this Google IM thing (and so would be tens of millions of users very soon). I think I was ahead of you just because of the time-zone difference. Anyway, here is the summary I wanted to share with you of the excitement.
Why the excitement? IM has been around for ages.
The excitement is because this isn't really IM. Or it's not just IM. It's VOIP, integrated from the start with IM.
What this does is absolutely kill international long distance in a way Skype only dreamt of. I'm actually a naive user, but I was able to download, and load, a VOIP client (with IM) in less than a minute.
J.K. Rowling conceived her entire series on a train. It would be seven books, matching the years spent at an English boarding school such as Eton.
Book Six was released tonight. Rowling herself appeared at Edinburgh Castle at midnight, behind a puff of smoke, to read some of it to some of her fans.
The series was conceived, however, on a train, as a growing-up story. The first book would be an 11-year old's tale told from the point of view of the 11-year old. The final book would be an entrance into adulthood, a mature book.
No one could hit that kind of timetable. It's amazing to me that the 6th book went on sale just 7 years after the first one arrived.
My daughter is a big Harry Potter fan. Harry taught her to read, despite mild dyslexia. First my wife read it to her, along with the second and third books. Then she read them herself, several times. She has grown up on Harry but she will still be grown before Harry will. So will the actors who have been portraying the title character and his friends. It's very likely the actors will have to be replaced before the seventh movie can be produced.
By the time Paul Winchell died, last weekend at 82, the BBC was only able to point out that he had done the voice of Tigger for Disney.
He was so much more. Like Hedy Lamarr, who created the technology underlying WiFi, he led a double-life, as an intellectual in the fun house.
For starters he was the first TV star I remember, one of many models for what became The Simpsons' Krusty the Klown. He had a morning show with puppets, more entertaining (I thought) than Kaptain Kangaroo, with more brain and heart (I thought) than even Fred Rogers. The puppets, which he made himself, were called Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff (right).
What I didn't know at the time was he was also a polymath, with a wide range of interests and a photographic memory. One of his interests was medicine. As an entertainer he manuevered into the worlds of famous physicians, including Dr. Henry Heimlich (then Arthur Murray's prospective son-in-law), and with his help won the first U.S. patent on an artificial heart.
Taken directly from his own Web site (he was working on streaming video at the time of his death) is a list of his inventions (remember he was self-taught):
I think it's important to note that the Mark Cuban of those novels is a fictional character. He has the same name, face, and background as the real Mark Cuban, but his motivations and actions are purely imaginary. The world of my alternate histories diverge from the real world right after the last election, with the imagined meeting of an American ambassador and a Chinese official. From there on out it's my world, not your world, not the real world.
There is, of course, a real Mark Cuban. You can find this Mark Cuban at his personal blog, BlogMaverick. It's telling that, to my knowledge, Cuban is the only blogging billionaire. I hope it's telling in a good way.
What they fail, utterly, to do is really give you a flavor for the wisdom Jobs imparted, so I have taken the liberty, starting below, of posting the entire transcript, as offered by McMullen.
Sit back and enjoy. Assuming again that the transcript is accurate, this may be the best commencement speech ever.
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement
from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I
never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten
to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No
big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the
dots.
One of the most common, and most damaging things civilized man has done to the environment is to pre-empt predation.
Predators are a vital part of any environment. They remove the sick from the herd. They keep the genetic line of prey strong. And they keep prey species from overpopulating.
It's natural that we don't want our oldsters or little kids eaten by wolves (which was a major theme of the old fairy tales). So in most of the civilized world we've removed predators from the scene.
Outside the cities and suburbs, of course, we've replaced the predators with hunters . One big difference, however. While animal predators prey on the old, the sick, and the stupid young, hunters (or sportsmen) want big antlers to hang on their walls.
But let's take off our orange vests and get back into town....(I found this guy at NASA. Heh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.)
My saintly wife will tell you how I do sometimes rant-and-rail, about this-or-that, how I promise to pull up stakes and move to, say, South Africa. But I never do. Because at the end of the day, I believe, we'll muddle through. Americans have seen worse and gotten by, I tell myself. The system is resilient. This too shall pass.
Not necessarily. I have spent the last few weeks reading Salman Rushdie's most recent masterwork, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Earth is constantly shaking, people are always dying, nothing is permanent in this book. Everything and everyone around the narrator is subject to sudden disaster and destruction. The survivor's job is to witness, then tell the tale.
In many ways 9-11 was a visit from Rushdie World. Rushdie himself had moved to New York by then, trading in his beloved Tottenham Hotspur for a New York Yankee cap. And the tragedy is a sub-text to the book. It can happen here. It does. It will. Think of it as evolution in action. Too many people are just no darned good. Their greed, their causes, their passions make them all like nitroglycerin. And the Earth itself is no better.
Yet Rushdie is still here. And I'm still here. And you're still here. For how long we can't know. And we all seem fairly prosperous. Those with talent, and those who are willing to change themselves, may witness more, may survive longer, and may (like Rushdie) leave a mark.
First it applies only to states where delivery of wines to homes is legal in the first place. Georgia is not one of those states. (Although that law is not always enforced -- once I got some Michelob in a press packet.)
"If a state chooses to allow direct shipments of wine, it must do so on even-handed terms," Justice Anthony Kennedy said. If it doesn't you still got tough luck.
Second the case applies only to direct from-the-vineyard sales of U.S. wine. Imported wines aren't included. Importers can't ship to consumers, only vintners can.
Malcolm who, you ask? Glazer owns the Tampa Bay Bucs. You may remember his eldest son Avram from the dot-boom, as the head of some nonsense called Zap.com, which tried to roll-up a bunch of disparate Internet assets into some super-duper-something. They got less than nowhere. (The parent outfit, Zapata Corp., had as its co-founder one George H.W. Bush. We'll just let that one sink into the heads of Manchester's tinfoil hat crowd.) Zap.Com also gives us an excuse for discussing this sports story in this here tech blog.
After 1964, history shows, American liberalism went off the rails.
It started slowly, but it eventually accelerated until liberalism, as an ideal, became anathema to the majority of a generation.
While most 1960s liberals remained wedded to the principles of the New Deal, and the system it created, other voices demanded more radical change. A continuing land war in Asia drained the moderates' legitimacy, inflation rose, and in frustration many leftists dropped out, demanding a revolution against legal authority.
In 2005 a lot of liberals are scared of right-wing extremism, the way their parents were scared of long hair back in the day. There are loonies trying to re-condition gays into playing straight. In Kansas the state government is trying to toss science in favor of miracles. In Washington there's a court-packing scheme reminescent of Roosevelt's own in 1937 (which is just as popular).
And, of course, there's Ann Coulter (above). I think of her as Grace Slick for the neo-Nazi crowd. Since she's anti-drug (and apparently anti-food) she has to talk mighty big trash to get her little followers hot-and-bothered. Why get mad? Why not just laugh?
Unfortunately most liberals are responding to this by wailing almost as loudly as Goldwater conservatives (like my dad) did in the mid-1960s. Liberals seem both apoplectic and incompetent in the face of opponents run riot.
Personally, I think liberals ought to keep their cool, preach values to Wall Street, and simply look sober.
A friend introduced me to a blog I'm adding to the blog roll, one that is only marginally about technology.
Seth Goldstein runs Majestic Research, a New York outfit that produces very high-end (and I hope very expensive) reports on trends for hedge fund managers. Before that he ran Site Specific. He advises Del.Icio.Us. He's smart.
His blog consists of long essays, published at long (for me) intervals, on a wide range of subjects. Recent pieces include one relating client Del.icio.us to German essayist Walter Benjamin, whose Frankfurt School was overwhelmed by the horrors of the Hitler era, another calling APIs "the new HTML," and a third seeking a system of PeopleRanking, very similar to my own piece Finding the Good Stuff.
His nose was long. His eyes were crooked. His face was horsy. The whole head seemed to be leaning to one side.
He was ungainly. He was unathletic. His voice was a croak and his laugh made you want to cover your ears.
The Prince was Ugly inside, too. His concerns were petty. His solutions were pedestrian. He argued in a pedantic way.
In all this he was no better than his subjects.
He did have one Great Gift. The Ugly Prince was capable of a great love. For love he would be constant, he would be sincere, he would be earnest and true.
TechNet wants more spending on math and science education, especially in middle schools, and more tech-oriented retraining for displaced workers.
Amen to that. Both my kids felt math was fun in 4th grade, but neither is pursuing it anymore. My son's school refused to challenge him in 7th grade, resorting to a curriculum he'd already learned, and he lost interest. My daughter was bedeviled by reading difficulties and her strength in math was ignored.
Then Doerr went off and spoiled it all by saying something stupid.
It was Yes Minister, a BBC comedy about the intricacies of bureaucracy.
I was surprised to learn this week that the Conservatives of Margaret Thatcher loved the show, because in fact its theme was that the permanent bureaucrats, led by Nigel Hawthorne, knew best. Every week he worked to undermine the policies of hapless minister James Hacker (Paul Eddington).
The beauty of the show, and one reason it would never be tried in the U.S., is that the status quo didn't hold. Eddington got the better of Hawthorne's Sir Humphrey Appleby as the show wore on, and at the end of the run Eddington's character actually became Prime Minister, head of the government.
What does the FBI have in common with Paris Hilton?
They're both making news this week as victims of hackers. (The image is from a conservative humor site. Some of the stuff is pretty good.)
We wrote about Paris earlier this week. (Here's a poem for the occasion. Ahem. I've seen Paris, I've seen France, girl pull on some underpants.)
Now ZDNet reports a new virus comes in the form of an e-mail claiming to be from the FBI. (Not to be undone, Ms. Hilton herself is the subject of a new e-mail virus, called Sober.K.)
As Matt Hines writes, "The mail is disguised as correspondence warning people that their Internet use has been monitored by the FBI's Internet Fraud Complaint Center and that they have 'accessed illegal Web sites.' The e-mails then direct recipients to open the virus-laden attachment to answer a series of questions."
It's about "pseudo-ADD" and continuing efforts by employers to make knowledge workers pay closer attention to what they're doing.
If they really want to help they should stop interrupting us with meetings, with memoes, and (sometimes) with bosses poking their heads in our doors to see how we're getting on.
Two can play the distraction game. But wait, there's more.
As executives, Brits have developed this wonderful, pugnacious, straight-talking chip-on-the-shoulder attitude in our time. It's a kind of "oh yeah, sez you" that owes more to soccer yobs than fox hunting.
The H-P brand is about teamwork, Frankel writes, but Carly transformed it into executive fiat. The brand became Carly, not the team spirit that built the company.
Now that Star Trek is officially dead (no new shows or movies, even in production) the time has come for a new idea.
Here's one.
Stardate.
It's an anthology series, built around various scientific "principles" that define the Star Trek franchise.
Think of it as Science made into Drama.
Yes, it's an excuse to make science exciting. (Just think of the educational spin-offs we can produce!) And the production costs are low enough to put this on the SciFi channel (where Enterprise should have been all along). Or might I suggest a pitch to Discovery Networks, which has got proven talent in making science fun with shows like Mythbusters?
For host, might I recommend Stephen Hawking? Playing the role Alistair Cooke made famous, he opens each show by describing the science (and the Star Trek technology) on which the show will be based. (I might recommend getting several scientists for this role, perhaps one for each specialty. But Hawking is a name. He'll do great for starters.) Or, with confidence this show will last for decades, Lance Armstrong, who's already under contract to Discovery, who knows how to read a cue card, and who owes his life to science?
The printer is in Moto, a Chicago restaurant, and it's programmed by executive chef Homaro Cantu. The paper is the same stuff you see on some birthday cakes, made of soybeans and cornstarch. The ink is edible, and the flavors are powders placed on the paper after it's printed. This means he can create a 10-course "tasting menu" that won't leave you bloated -- just well-read and out several Benjamins.
Cantu is making paper sushi and menus that can be crunched into his gazpacho for "alphabet soup."
Has Microsoft, and its ecosystem, built planned obsolescence into PCs so as to force upgrades?
I know this is tinfoil hat territory, but hear me out. (The tinfoil hat on the left is being modeled by Elizabeth Kramer of Pleasantville, NY, daughter of the blogger Kathlyn Kramer.)
In theory the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of all PC hardware extends not years but decades. There is no theoretical reason for an old machine to stop working, and refuse repair.
Yet that's just what is happening here.
It started a year ago. My 6 year old Windows 98 machine started acting up, refusing to boot, and Scandisk just wouldn't complete. A big part of the problem, I concluded, was the Norton security system I had installed.
But PCs were cheap so I changed it out. I got me a new Windows XP set-up for about half the price I'd paid for the original box back in 1998, and felt like I'd gotten off cheap.
One big difference between IBM and Microsoft today is that, while both are filled with "high bandwidth" people, those at IBM seem to have a greater creative freedom.
This presses all kinds of buttons for me. I'm a Wolfram fan. I like open source (and IBM is still rumored to be working on an open source JDK). I like music. I love the link between science and art. And the idea of an engineer learning to play music (or tap dance) is also attractive. Something else to think about is how Reiners pushed most of his links into a resources sub-head at the bottom of the story.
Gary Wolf has a piece at Wired which had me shaking my head for some time.
Several folks have pointed me to it. It's an imagined memo, dated three years into the future, after Linus Torvalds has supposedly gone to work for Mr. Bill Gates.
The idea behind the imagined memo, something I've written about extensively recently over at ZDNet's Open Source, is based upon building a Linux desktop suite. Wolf's point, apparently, is that Microsoft moving to Windows isn't that far-fetched, that Steve Ballmer doesn't get it, and that Gates has the imagination to listen to the market rather than the yes-men in Redmond.
I have been singing the good news about Moore's Law for many years now. It spurs productivity, it spreads knowledge, it increases the rate of change across the board, etc. etc.
But there is a dark side to all this that most who write on technology don't talk about. (The image is from Youngstown State University in Ohio.)
That's what I call Moore's Inverse Law of Labor.
Simply put, Moore's Law makes large productivity gains absolutely necessary. To compete in a Moore's Law world, you have to continually replace people with technology, and move folks' time into more productive tasks, or they fall behind.
This is true for individuals, for business, for government, for nations. It has very profound implications for all of us.
Before you start thinking what's that for, imagine yourself in an Airport facing a nasty business flight. Imagine if you could turn on your phone and watch that DVD you got from someone else for Christmas.
The two brief items below are examples of a new feature here at Corante, called Blink.
Blinks are quick hits, references to stories happening within our beats. Just a link, maybe a few words, based on something we found of interest but have yet to think about thoroughly.
I get no credit for any of this. Your encomiums should go to Hylton Jolliffe (right), our fearless leader, who has also been implementing other changes to make our blogs more "competitive" for reader interest (and advertiser dollars) as we go into 2005. It's true his forehead is too small and narrow for him to be a truly "handsome man" as I am, but we at Mooreslore are hopeful the course of time may change that.
I have been privileged to have written with Hylton for nearly two years now. He is honest, innovative, fair-minded, a good man in every way. I've chided him in the past that he should be rich as well.
Maybe (blink, blink) we can get to work on that now....
He is known to the lay person, if at all, for a program called Mathematica, which has done as much for the acceleration of change as Moore's Law itself.
By boiling down what you can do with mathematics into a computer program, Mathematica freed science from waiting on mathematics to analyze data. The program helps you devise formulae that work, so the results you get are proven. When people would say "it's not rocket science" they were often referring to the combination of math and science required to launch a rocket. Now, thanks to Wolfram, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
Not only that, but Mathematica made Wolfram's Wolfram Research a going concern, a real business. It freed him from the demands of academe. He truly became the elephant that could tap dance. (He's no Gates, but he's pretty good at it.)
Still, as they always say, what have you done for me lately?
Regular readers of this space will remember my review of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The use of technology was artful, but the story-telling suffered.
Seen in a regular theater "The Polar Express" is a similarly unsatisfying experience. But in IMAX, in 3-D, as I saw it today, that's another experience entirely.
From the moment the child rises from his bed, fearful of having missed Santa's visit, fearful it's just his dad waiting for him to sleep, you're transported into the world of the story. Disbelief is suspended, which is the film's entire point.
Really. All of us. Doesn't matter how you bundle up. Under your clothes there's nothing but skin.
Somehow this manages to shock teenagers, especially male ones. Remember all that sniggering over "x-ray sunglasses?" (Ladies, just think of your little brothers, or your friends' little brothers.)
Well now, they're real. Vodafone is shocked, shocked, that Japan's sexually-repressed boob-heads are buying the device, popping it on their camera phones, and, well, sniggering at the results.
While in Redmond early this year I learned a little secret.
If you want Bill Gates to take an idea seriously, you build four slides (don't worry if they're busy), stick them on one sheet of paper, and get that paper in front of him.
That's how Microsoft makes a decision, and if you think about it, it makes some sense. Is the proposal clear, is it clean, is it complete? Put it on just four slides and you can probably tell at a glance.
Well, that's kind of the idea behind the film TimeCode. Which is why I recommend it to Microsofties. (Send me your reviews.)
I mentioned to the editor at a local paper here that Fry's was coming to Atlanta. After responding to his reply of "huh?" I was given permission to take the day off and check it out. (Logo from Contourdesign.com.)
Fry's is a temple of geekdom. Not just geekdom as a workstyle, but geekdom as a lifestyle. So it sells resistors and other discrete components alongside hard drives and motherboards. But it also sells such geeky esoterica as meditation fountains, pizza cutters, and $2,500 refrigerator-freezers.
At the new Atlanta store, which is actually 25 miles from town in suburban Duluth, it was those big boxes that were moving fastest. My kids and I watched a parade of giant pick-ups pull up to the front door and cart away appliances that would be the envy of restaurants, and Stadium-sized big screen color TVs.
Ringtones are fun, but they are what they are, right?
Not necessarily.
A company called Notesenses (in Sweden, naturally, you betcha) has introduced Moodies. It's basically a software-driven service that lets you customize the sound of a polyphonic ringtone in any of four directions – aggressive, musical, happy and romantic.
IBM, the default leader in voice recognition (everyone else went under), has teamed with Honda to produce a better talking car.
The new version will not only integrate with maps and tell you where you want to go, but with other databases as well. Some 700 commands are possible and there's a 1.2 million entry database of street names in the thing. (This model of the 1917 Porter used in the 1960s series, starring Jerry Van Dyke and the voice of Ann Sothern, is available for $125 at Gasolinealleyantiques.)
But this is really just the start of something, and then only if Honda can gain share so IBM can sell more systems.
My alma mater, Rice University, has an Owl for its mascot. Ever since I graduated, in 1977, people have never tired of giving me the bird.
As a mascot the Owl is lacking something in the ferocity department. We like to think it makes up for this with intelligence. But we had no idea that meant this, the ability to catch prey using dung as a tool. (Picture from the BBC story.)
That's right. The burrowing owl makes its home in small tunnels, filled with collected dung at their entrance. Dung beetles come to feed on the dung, and voila! Tasty snacks for the taking. (Hey, Aggies, don't knock dung beetles until you've tried them.)
All that bird needs is a remote and a La-Z-Boy and he's ready for Homecoming!
Mia Hamm, who ended her career today in a 2-1 win over Brazil for her second Olympic gold medal, was the most important athlete of her time. (Image from womensoccer.com.)
She was not the best athlete. That would be Lance Armstrong. She was not the best soccer player. That would be Pele. She may not even be the best athlete in her house, since she recently married Nomar Garciaparra.
But history will write that she was more important than all of them.
SSEYO has announced miniMIXA, an audio mixer for Windows smartphones.
As part of the roll-out a Reading, England arts festival will use it this weekend to mix what is being played “on-the-fly.”.
This could do to the cell phone market what programs like Musicmatch did to PCs.
The impact could be massive. Ringtones could be created at concerts, and sold right after the show. On the other hand, concert-goers could potentially bootleg the same concert and offer better mixes, free, within hours after the show.
This leads to Dana's Law of Creativity Software.
The cheaper it is, the more people can use it, and the lower the premium paid for poor results.
If you want to see what this thing is capable of, check out these sample mixes for yourself. Or, if you don't have a Windows cell phone, get a taste for the technology by downloading Sseyo's PC plug-in.
But, no matter. John Anderson, whose property the boys were using as their Cape Canaveral, had a cunning plan. He reportedly suggested, "Hey, why not put it on eBay?"
My 13-year old son dragged me to see this Will Smith vehicle today. It tells the story of an evil, soulless corporation (check) whose creatures seek to destroy freedom in the name of security (double check).
But wait, it gets better. (Of course, if you click you'll learn the whole plot, so consider this your spoiler alert.)
A lot of people were shocked over the weekend to learn that the University of Wisconsin has as many CEOs among its alumni as Harvard, and more than anyone else. (And, yes, they're including the campus at Green Bay. Image from Chunder.Com.)
Here's how they do it:
A big pool. Wisconsin has a lot of campuses, not just Madison, and 29,000 undergraduates.
A small goal. The winning number was 15.
Grad school. Most Wisconsin graduates who made it didn't end their education there. They went on to get graduate degrees, often at more prestigious places.
The rest of the explanations hereare nonsense. They are part cow college stereotype, part political stereotype. If Wisconsin were an ethnic group, they could sue.
Cycling has been my sport for over a quarter century. (Picture from CNN.)
I rode as a kid, even felt like I invented bicycle motocross on a lot near my house in the mid-60s. But I didn’t really become a cyclist until 1978, after coming back to Houston, Texas with a journalism degree and a burning hope to become a writer.
Joe had another friend, a closer friend, an athlete friend by the name of John Howard . (Right.)
John Howard wasn’t a tourist like me. John was a legendary Texas rider, rolling over the FMs at speed, swallowing the land in 100-mile gulps.
Still, it was a paltry fame to be a cyclist in 1970s Texas, and no great European team wanted John to lead the great races. He became, like the great street ballers of the city ghettos, both lonely and angry.
He finally found something worthy of him, a new event in Hawaii called a triathlon. He would train to learn to swim 2.5 miles in surf, and run a marathon, but between there was the bike, an easy ride (for him) of 112 miles, in which he could grab hours on rivals. He won the third one, in under 10 hours – you can look it up.
Joe was even then, when I heard from him, mentioning this new, young rider, this great athlete with the even-better name, Lance Armstrong. (Image from LanceArmstrong.Com.)
A name from fiction, that. You can’t make up a better one. Say it a few times. Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong. Was there ever a more American name?
And the story that went with it…Joe told me Lance was raised by his mother, that his father abandoned him as a child, and that what he wanted most was what every such child wants, to make the money to get her a home. He linked the asphalt of my Texas salad days to the hunger of the basketball courts near where I now lived.
As the days passed, after Joe and his wife had gone back home, I asked myself, “what happened to me?”
I’d been on my bike for that race, going back-and-forth across the course, first on the flats, then on some hills. It had felt good. (Image from a great organization, Yellowbikes.org.)
The race was covered then, on TV, by ESPN2, which put together a daily package that ran in the late afternoon, complete with music. I was faithful. When Lance won the prologue I was hooked, although I was really awaiting the battle between Marco Pantani, the previous year’s winner, the great il Pirata of the mountains, and Jan Ullrich, born in East Germany, the biggest engine in the field, the 1997 winner, the Diesel.
Try to even drive up L'Alpe d'Huez that fast. So let's put this into perspective. (Image from the London Telegraph story.)
The Tour d'France has had many great champions in a history going back a century. It opened the country, it defined a culture, it created the ultimate test of athletic endurance and courage.
On behalf of cancer survivors (and we have them in our family too) we're all asked to Wear Yellow and Live Strong.
Good advice. For a good cause.
There's a hero of mine in France who finally started doing that this afternoon (after nearly a two-week break). I hope he can keep it up the rest of the week.
For the next week I'm off for a long-planned cruise of the Bahamas with all the other Blankenhorns. (The picture may be the actual boat. Certainly it's the right port.)
My Aunt in Florida set this up, after having had many informal reuinions with my dad and her two other brothers over the years. But my dad passed five years ago, Uncle Tom has been gone nearly two decades, and Uncle John is now an 80-plus widower.
I guess she figures it's up to my generation now, so she is getting us all together on a boat where we can't say no, which is actually a pretty good idea.
Anyway, while I'm away, please enjoy some of these other fine Corante blogs:
The first members of the Hall of Fame are Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Jules Verne. (The initial members of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 were Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson.)
This seems to be the week for neat inventions, although most are from Japan.
Let's start with the most startling. An invisibility cloak? (The image is from the BBC story linked above.)
Seriously. Susumu Tachi has created a material he calls "retro-reflectum" that lets the wearer project what's in front of him to those behind, effectively rendering him invisible.
And the best the U.S. Army can do, with all its billions of dollars, is...blue.
Actually, Huw Lobb outran -- 40 horses. (The picture is from the BBC Web site.) And the story should bring a smile to the eye of millions of Britons crying in their pints this morning.
We've always known that men are built for the long run, not the sprint. Many African tribesmen routinely bagged their game by following it until it tired and they could kill it easily.
So a quarter-century ago the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells set out to prove the point. It put together a wonderful course of 22 scenic miles across the countryside, and put up 1,000 pounds for the man who could outrace the town's horses to the finish line.
Every year the prize fund rose, and every year the horses won.
Until this year. Until Huw Lobb, who takes home the entire 25,000 pound (about $40,000 U.S.) stake. And while the man lives in South London, was there ever a better Welsh name?
So raise a pint of something cold to Huw today. Raise one to Wales. And raise one to yourself. If Huw can beat the horses, surely you can win something today for your own self.
Forget the Reagan Dime. And the $10 bill (pictured, from CNN).
The Ronald Reagan gold $2 coin. Heavier than anything else in your pocket. Perfect for tipping the barber or the bellboy. Saves the treasury money. Lasts for years. Helps the coin machine industry. Helps retire the $1 bill.
Replacing someone else's money will just anger someone. Creating new money will associate Reagan with something unique and very real. (Roosevelt is on the dime because the March of Dimes originally fought polio, which Roosevelt had.)
Republicans will stop using small bills that clutter their wallet and go for these coins in droves. It will be a public service, even patriotic. And based on the Republicans I know it will increase the size of many tips, a little trickle-down for the economy.
Whenever anyone suggests that the quality of writing doesn't matter so much as the truth of what you're saying, I point them to Kurt Vonnegut. (The image is from an iText primer at Sourceforge.)
Vonnegut, now 81, is one of the great writers of our time and, thank goodness, he's still got it. As with Picasso, Lennon and the other great artists, he can throw off brilliance easily, casually, almost without thinking. It's awesome.
Every day we get from him is something I treasure. So is every word. As with everything he has ever written, his message for our time is frightening, apocalyptic, and compelling:
The AP had great fun with the story of the "nude" cement garden statues in Tennessee that neighbors forced the owner to cover up. (The picture is from BBC America. Wait for it...)
Just don't you forget the Clue. After the red "sarongs" were placed over the naughty bits, the statues sold like hotcakes.
There is a vital marketing lesson there. Point out your key features. Make the obvious appear forbidden. If you let it all hang out you look like a tramp, but if you expose your best feature (a little bit) everyone will think you're beautiful. That's the difference between clothes and fashion.
Martin is known as "Mr. Long Term Care," he is currently in an assisted-living facility, a victim of young-onset Parkinson's. What he has to say today doesn't relate much to technology, I know, except insofar as technology can help to make the pain of his daily life bearable.
He is a great man, a good friend, and a fine writer. If you really want to know the future, the dark distant future those of us lucky enough not to die young or violently are all heading to, then hearken to his words:
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
I've been writing for over 40 years, professionally for 30. If you're interested in doing the same, here's a simple four-step process that will make your writing all it can be.
Disney.
One reason I haven't been around much lately is I have been (finally) reading Salman Rushdie's latest 2005 
Just in time for Christmas, Atlanta blogger Mingaling (right) offered me (and therefore you) access
A posting from 
It's a crazy notion that is going nowhere.
You're used to my occasional forays into (usually political) non-tech irrelevancy here at Mooreslore.
Easy to say, tough to do.
Here's a story that illustrates well the time we're living in. (The picture, from 
Well, nearly, judging from the latest re-org news coming out of Microsoft.
Hear me out.
When the tornado warning sounded near my home last night I found I couldn't get a view of what might come through the trees.
By the time Paul Winchell died, last weekend at 82, the BBC was only able to point out that he had done 
Regular readers of this space will know Mark Cuban as a recurring character in my two online novels, 
Now that Woodward and Bernstein have confirmed 
One of the most common, and most damaging things civilized man has done to the environment is to pre-empt predation.
Why hasn't the World of Always On arrived?
As the U.S. Senate prepares to take up the 
...no giant leap for wino-kind.
The U.S. is in the process of losing its last friends, the Brits.
As previously noted I will be at 
After 1964, history shows, American liberalism went off the rails.
A friend introduced me to a blog I'm adding to the blog roll, one that is only marginally about technology.
Remember a week or so ago when I wrote about how someone had cracked their iPod's DRM 
A delegation from the TechNet lobby, including 
Al-Qaeda wanted 
My favorite TV show turned 25 this week.
What does the FBI have in common with Paris Hilton?
Katie Hafner has a story today 
I love the Brits. (But I love everyone.)
Now that 
An ink-jet printer that makes gourmet food? 
Has Microsoft, and its ecosystem, built planned obsolescence into PCs so as to force upgrades?
One big difference between IBM and Microsoft today is that, while both are filled with "high bandwidth" people, those at IBM seem to have a greater creative freedom.
Gary Wolf has a piece at 
I have been singing the good news about Moore's Law for many years now. It spurs productivity, it spreads knowledge, it increases the rate of change across the board, etc. etc.
Now here's the perfect gift for the gadget freak on your list, assuming they have the right phone and Windows XP.
The two brief items below are examples of a new feature here at Corante, called Blink.
Regular readers of this space will remember my review of 
Under our clothes we're all naked.
While in Redmond early this year I learned a little secret.
I mentioned to the editor at a local paper here that Fry's was coming to Atlanta. After responding to his reply of "huh?" I was given permission to take the day off and check it out. (Logo from 
Ringtones are fun, but they are what they are, right?
IBM, the default leader in voice recognition (everyone else went under), has teamed with Honda to produce 
My alma mater, Rice University, has an Owl for its mascot. Ever since I graduated, in 1977, people have never tired of giving me the bird.
The most politically subversive movie of the year is not Fahrenheit 911*.
Michael Eisner would you please go now?
A lot of people were shocked over the weekend to learn that the University of Wisconsin has 
I went out on my bike today in a celebratory mood.
Cycling has been my sport for over a quarter century. (Picture from 
Joe had another friend, a closer friend, an athlete friend by the name of 
Joe was even then, when I heard from him, mentioning this new, young rider, this great athlete with the even-better name, Lance Armstrong. (Image from 
As the days passed, after Joe and his wife had gone back home, I asked myself, “what happened to me?” 
By 1999 Lance was ready to try the Le Tour again. 
Try to even drive up L'Alpe d'Huez 
For the next week I'm off for a long-planned cruise of the Bahamas with all the other Blankenhorns. (The picture may be the actual boat. Certainly it's 
Finally!
This seems to be the week for neat inventions, although most are from Japan.
Actually, Huw Lobb outran -- 
Forget the Reagan Dime. And the $10 bill (pictured, from 
Whenever anyone suggests that the quality of writing doesn't matter so much as the truth of what you're saying, I point them to Kurt Vonnegut. (The image is from an iText primer at 
The AP 
Today we have a guest blogger, 
