Month: November 2003

my farewell address

The following is what I sent to the “all-hands” mailing list at my workplace: farewell addresses are not uncommon, but too many of them are thinly-veiled gripes. I decided not to follow that model. Of course, it helped that several of the folks I have worked with over these past few months took it upon themselves to take me to lunch and shower me with gifts and affection: it’s to them and the other folks who work hard in trying circumstances that I dedicate these sentiments.

As some of you may know, this is my last week at the University of
Washington School of Law.

This institution is fortunate to have so many capable and dedicated
people, both staff and faculty. The move to this bright new building
and the benefits of having everyone under one roof will, I hope, lead
to an even stronger, more cohesive community.

It’s been said that the secret to luck is hard work: when I look around
this building at the place and more important, the people who make it
what it is, I have to agree with that.

So my wish of good luck is really just a reminder to keep up the good
work, and I know you will.

Thanks for the privilege of working with you.

who’s switching now?

Wired News: Xbox to Switch to PowerPC

[But] Richard Doherty, research director of Envisioneering Group of Seaford, New York, said the announcement could be the first in a more general shift by Microsoft away from Intel.

“It’s a very big win for IBM. It’s a clear change of direction for Microsoft, and it’s a very unfortunate surprise for Intel,” he said.

“There’s quite a bit of irony here,” he added, referring to the fact that it has always been assumed that Apple would move to Intel, rather than Microsoft moving to the PowerPC, a chip technology co-developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola.

It’s been said many times that gaming is driving the technology in the PC industry, from clock speeds to graphics capabilities. The clear message here is that when performance matters, the PowerPC is the right choice.

reviving the draft boards?

DefendAmerica News – Article

Local Board Members are uncompensated volunteers who play an important community role closely connected with our Nation’s defense. If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines.

Anyone remember Mr Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life” reviewing the draft applications, growling “1-A, 1-A” as he went?

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.”

Half a million troops on the ground, in the air or at sea to secure the peace in Iraq: that’s a lot to ask.

reliability in services

Lest anyone think I am just taking potshots at MSFT when I suggest that Google running on Win2003 might be less reliable than the home-grown architecture they use now, an anecdote might help.

When I worked at CNN.com, we ran almost exclusively Sun Solaris on Sun hardware and when I left, we had more than 100 machines in services. Having just one machine out of service, though it might be one of twelve identical systems, was a Big Deal and it didn’t take a day to get it resolved. Not that it happened very often: I’m trying to think of a second instance.

We had a fellow join us from MSFT and he took a tour of one of our data centers/machine rooms, remarking that it was nowhere near as impressive as Microsoft’s Internet Data Center (you could hear the initial caps in his phrasing). Why, we have so many machines, fully a quarter of them are down for maintenance or being rebooted at any given time, he explained.

A quarter. One in four. Twenty five percent. Offline, out of service . . .

So take the 10,000 to 15,000 servers mentioned in a comment to the previous post, and add 25% to the costs of the licenses you would need. It would get pricy very quickly.

good thing I’m leaving

My job at the UW is not paid for by the department I work for or even the school unit: the position is funded by a University Initiative Fund grant[1]. Essentially, I have cost the school and the department nothing for the 9 months I’ve been there.

I just checked my online payroll and employee information pages (the UW makes all this information available through a secure webserver: very nice) and it looks like my position is about to run out of funding. So it’s seems like a good time to move on.

[1]. The UIF grant program was a brainchild of the former and yet-to-be replaced president of the university: each unit kicked back 1% of their budget to a common pool and could then write grant proposals to get some of it back. This position was created as a result of a successful grant application and has been funded by the grant proceeds for the past three years.

can’t build it? buy it

Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?

According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft – desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business – approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.

So what exactly are MSFT’s strengths? Every business line is losing money except the OS business and that due exclusively to its monopoly status.

They bought HotMail but took 2-3 years to convert it’s infrastructure to Windows — many times longer than it took to build it initially with open source tools.

And now, even give their control of the desktop and their colossal bankroll, they admit they can’t build a search engine to rival Google and would buy it instead.

I hope it doesn’t go that way: I rely on Google and would hate to see it become unreliable.