I’ll be giving a 5-min talk at Ignite Seattle next Thursday on the topic of airplane engines. I think they are trying to expand the talks beyond computer technology and there is a bunch of interesting things to talk about that should appeal to the “I want to know how everything actually works” crowd.
The funny thing about aircraft engines is they are based on similar technology as car engines, but in many ways they have been frozen in time by a number of factors. Many of the things that are automatic and high-tech in your car are still manual in an airplane because the manual approaches are more reliable, plus we tend to put a bit more effort into training about how the thing works than your typical car driver.
The other facinating thing is that despite the technology being basically the same for the past 60 years, pilots have recently rediscovered techniques that let us get 20% or more better fuel efficiency out of our engines. I’d actually been flying for 5 or so years before I took a course and finally learned about what’s actually going on in an internal combustion engine and how to get the most out of it.
AnandTech has an update on future Intel CPUs that discusses improvements to hardware-based virtulization. In the current generation of CPUs, some of these key instructions are very expensive and this article claims they are sped up by 25-75%. This seems like a good reason to hold off for the Penryn generation of chips, especially for new servers. Virtualization seems like the only way to go for any new data-center deployments- a quad core 1600mhz FSB 3.2GHZ CPU machine in the late summer seems like a really nice bet.
For my desktop machines this seems less important but I’m still planning on holding off for the 45nm “shrink” to get a new desktop and it looks like this is going to be where that shows up.
A fair amout of Controversy has erupted around the Wired article and specifically the leak of the Microsoft briefing document on Fred Vogelstein and the article. I’d been planning on writing a few bits on PR from the perspective of the small-company technology person (ok, from the perspective of me). This whole thing is just the encouragement I need to try to break the whole thing down and rather than writing a long manifesto, I’ll try to get this out in multiple smaller posts.
First of all, in the spirit of “transparency” I should mention that I spoke to Fred while he was working on this article. To the best of my knowledge I didn’t contribute anything material to his story, but I’ll just say that Fred has the admirable quality of wanting to get the context right when he writes about something and I’m under the impression that he used multiple sources to try to understand how Microsoft actually works. To me this is just good, professional journalism, but in an environment of tight deadlines (pushed faster by the web) and a typical push for good juicy (juicy == sensational) stories it can be a rare thing.
One of my favorite aspects of being a manager at Microsoft was the opportunity to interact with a bunch of interns every summer. The intern program is a great thing on many fronts (at least in the majority of cases where it is managed right- I’ve heard of a few horror stories but they are rare). The interns get to spend a summer in beautiful Seattle, get exposed to all kinds of upcoming technologies, network with a bunch of people around Microsoft, and hopefully contribute to some real, eventually shipping product. Meanwhile Microsoft gets to check out the best and the brightest of the new crop of students with a 3 month interview.
One of my favorite experiences with interns has always been to expose them to some PR basics. They come in and having read about Microsoft in the press for years get to see the real thing from the inside. It is always fun to talk to them about how big the difference is between the reality on the ground and what the public sees. But it is also important to understand that this difference is usually not just caused by sloppy journalism. It is often a combination of both poorly we had communicated the real story, plus just how hard of a job it is to synthesize all this flood of conflicting information into a concise article. This gets to one of the reasons that I really like to talk to the press when appropriate- given how everyone is trying to spin them and how hard it can be to collect good information, it seems like a good thing to do my best to get accurate information out there.
I’d also like to be clear that I’m not an advocate of full-100%-transparency. For example, lets take the Microsoft memo on Fred into context. There is really nothing in that memo that I find too surprising. Most of the contents of the memo are the kind of stuff that we all have floating around in our brains, just here a team of people needed to collaborate on something so they wrote it down. Sure I have a different interpretation of bits- the piece where they say “it takes him a bit to get his point across” I’d more interpret as an aspect of his care in getting the story right. But it also goes as a perfect example why certain things like a briefing for a meeting or someones review document shouldn’t necessarily be made public.
In David Brin’s book “Earth” privacy has been essentially banned. Everything that anyone does is public record unless you do some explicit registration under the secrets act. This creates an interesting situation, but at least most people are aware of this environment and this makes them more careful about what they say/write. Transparency can be very destructive if it is thrust on you when you are unaware. For example, even though I doubt there is anything interesting in them, I would not be happy seeing Fred’s notes of our chat published. I’m not willing to publish the entire content of my email inbox, and clearly anything I post on here goes through at least some basic filter of what I think is appropriate for public consumption. Duh.
Fred Vogelstein wrote an article in the latest Wired on Channel9. It does a good job capturing the tension inside a big company like Microsoft between new-media approaches like Channel9 and traditional PR and marketing.
A couple of days ago Hillel wrote a post asking why record labels exist anymore. I think I said something dismissive at the time. I agreed about the main point but even though costs have gone down a ton, like a VC, they put a big investment into growing the brand of a given band and getting it enough exposure.
Or do they? Today the NY Times writes that some record labels are signing acts and just producing two songs and selling them online. This really begs the question of just what value they are providing in this scenario- you have to assume they are signing someone to some pretty oppressive contract for probably less than $10k worth of value. Now I’ve got to totally agree that their old role is obsolete. If they are like VCs, they are like some form of slimy VC that preys on the unsophistication of their target, preys on their lack of business experience, and meanwhile acts as a drain on society as they fight to maintain their old position through legal means rather than business smarts.
All that I can say is there is one clear sign when you have a dying industry (or business). When they start spending more money on lawyers and lobbyists than on product, you know the end is coming. I wish I could say the end is near, since all too often they can stretch out things for a long time causing much disruption as they do.
One other comment on this topic- personally, I do find the shift away from albums to individual songs sad. I like albums. When I buy music on eMusic, even though I have the option to do everything as individual songs, I usually buy the whole album. I often find that those other tracks grow on me later, they help me get a better understanding of the artist, and (here is the key) eMusic makes it all cheap enough that its no big deal. Its not some $17.99 per CD BS, its more like $5 (or less on the plan I’m on), so its easy to take chances and collect every last song by each artist that I like. If there is someone in the music industry that doesn’t understand this as a great opportunity to make lots of money, while being customer-friendly, they really don’t get it.
Or maybe this is just another way that I’m clueless. I suppose I still don’t get ringtones, so that counts me out as a judge of popular culture. Or as Art Brut say- “popular culture - no longer - applies to me (x4r)”…
In the end the rocket failed before it got to orbit, but this is still huge progress toward private space-flight. Its also really cool that they provided this video- they had a live web-cast of the launch and posted this video from the on-board cameras. Good stuff, and looking forward to SpaceX launching these things all the time.
TechCrunch has a new post up on Google’s new PPA product. TechCrunch concludes that the affiliate networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. Unless I’m missing something in how Google’s new product works, this is totally misunderstanding how the existing affiliate networks are used. They aren’t used in the traditional ad-sense model of “sprinkle a few links” on the page- if they were, the actual action rate would be so low that it would be a disaster for the publisher. For example, I tried out the Amazon Omakase links for a bit in various places which works in that model and got absolutely nothing.
Most existing usage of the affiliate networks is much more targeted. I’m mentioning a specific product, so I include a link directly to the product. If you are reading about the product on my site, you might be likely to buy it. If Google were to offer publishers a product where they could place specific ads on their sites, THAT would be a huge earthquake in the industry, but this one doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal to any of the existing players (yet).