fighting the lack of good ideas
Back in August 2008, I had a one-week “quick start” professional services engagement in Nutley New Jersey. It was supposed to be a super simple week: install HP Server Automation at BT Global. Another ProServe engineer was onsite to setup HP Network Automation. Life was gonna be easy-peasy – the only deliverable was to setup…
Schneier has a recent article on security concerns for IoT (internet of things) devices -Â IoT Cybersecurity: What’s Plan B? We can try to shop our ideals and demand more security, but companies don’t compete on IoT safety — and we security experts aren’t a large enough market force to make a difference. We need a…
Google bought Android and made great things with it. They also had an interesting audacity to announce an “open, modular” phone that ‘anyone’ could design from, and make components that would play nicely together (like IBM did with their initial ISA architecture releases back in the 80s). (Microsoft then flipped the tables on IBM and…
continue “modularity is great – if you commoditize the right complements” »
Recently on one of the podcasts I listen to, I heard an offhanded comment made about how history is taught not in patterns but as facts. For example, “On the 18th of April in ’75, hardly a man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year”. Rarely are the “whys” explained – understandably…
In e99 of Exponent, Ben Thompson makes a compelling case for his idea that Amazon Echo (Alexa) is an operating system – and that Amazon has beaten Apple (with Siri) and Google Home (with Assistant) at the very game they both try to play. And I think he’s onto the start of something (he goes…
continue “apple tv – how apple can beat amazon and google” »
A few years ago I wrote about why I like good vampire and zombie stories. I had an epiphany this week related to that, that I thought you’d all find interesting. If vampires exist, zombies can not exist [long] in the same universe. Why? Because they’d be eliminating the only source of food for the…
Ben Thompson* (temporary paywall) makes an excellent first-order analysis of Elon Musk's bid to acquimerge SolarCity with Tesla. But he, uncharacteristically, stops short of seeing the mid- and long-term reasons for the acquimerge. It's about SpaceX. It's about Mars. It's about the Moon. Musk knows that he needs an incredibly-solid pipeline of technology to get…
continue “tesla’s solarcity bid isn’t about energy production” »