Lead in toothpaste, poisoned food. What next you ask ? Your identity.
Based on Brian's reasoning, one could infer (all else being equal) that given the supply side reduction in cost, the demand from customers should increase along the curve (e.g from P0 to P1 or P2), decrease for competitors offerings, or force competitors to lower price and eventually give away their software as well.
The numbers all seems to vary around a flat line (before adjusting for inflation) like the graph on the right ('08 till Q3). Perhaps the demand curve has shifted to accommodate the lower price ?Meaning customers that were using the software before, are still using it but only playing less, and potentially not buying any complimentary services and no disruption has occured in the marketplace. Or alternatively the software stack being distributed for free, is a part of a competitive marketplace in which price is not really as big a differentiate as it is made out to be, i.e a somewhat inelastic (with what Brian called the FYO being waay up there). Customers are already entrenched with competitors who offer other marginal benefits, complimentary products or innovation driven by the revenue stream. Or perhaps lowered costs have led to lower perceived quality, thus reducing demand. Or perhaps competitor brands are stronger. Or perhaps by lowering the price floor shifted the competitor marketplace to one already dominated by other established brands (eg JBoss, Apache, Linux et al). Or perhaps everything else is not really equal -like organizational inability to tie and cross-sell product offerings in a unified portfolio. Or perhaps the very premise of using a loss leader to drive revenue in an Enterprise environment is fundamentally flawed. It may work for shaving blades and video games, but it doesn't work for servers and middleware in the long run.
The recent "It is what it is" Dilbert stip echo'ed what I often hear . What does it mean ? Urban dictionary to the rescue one again ...
This sub-prime primer explains the sub-prime mortgage situation. Funny and to to the point. Perhaps someone should post another preso on why mortgage rates are rising amidst Fed cuts.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. A contact lens that will project images to signal a phone call, email and maps. Businessweek says researchers at University of Washington are testing the lens on rabbits. Two questions - How do rabbits read the optometrists chart and when can I expect to drive with these on ?
"A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows". Now I know why I'm constantly thirsty.
The local Stop&Shop has introduced an interesting twist to the self check-out line. Handheld scanners for customers. You pick up the items, scan them, hit done on the way out and scan your credit card. Nifty ! The Motorola scanners run Windows mobile (specs here) and are hooked up to the checkout kiosk via a wireless network. Would be cool if was also hooked upto their Peapod system . That would allow customers to go in, scan items and have them automatically home delivered. A lot more palpable business process optimization than Webvan of yesteryear's.
In this semi-autobiographical book Tom Perkins talks about his boardroom experiences (some controversial momemts) and parts of his personal life. Its a really slow read at times. If you're someone like me who wanted to know more about his experiences and his part in the HP story then its worth the read, otherwise its really just another paper weight.
"Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday"..."Her study pitted the ape math team of Boxer and Feinstein .....with 14 Duke University students." I m not sure what this means for my friends who are about to graduate from Duke :)
Rob Gifford's presents a unique perspective on life in modern day China with China Road. The book is not about the usual economic propaganda, but it takes a deeply humanist and compelling look at the realities on the ground, from entrepreneurs to the AIDS epidemic and spawning churches. Its one of those rare non-fictional books where the writing and vivid descriptions transport the reader there, with the author, on the six week, 3000 mile journey from Shanghai to Kazakhstan across Route 312. The analysis of the interplay between the political system and economic growth seems spot on as well. I really liked the last few lines which represented the tone of the book "Hope cannot be said to exist,nor can it be said not to exist.It is just like the roads across the earth.For actually there were no roads to begin with,but when many people pass one way a road is made" (Lu Hsun, 1921).
What We Know About Climate Change is the pocketbook version of a history/science lesson in non-scientific terms and simple language. I found a copy in WBUR's studios and this is going to be my holiday gift for a few friends who still dont seem to get it.
I first encountred the term "Fed" in a conversation with James and Don back in '98 and didn’t really understand or particularly care about rate fluctuations.
The Nov issue of the SOA jounal includes my paper on Versioning web services in the enterprise.
Its a sad fact that child labor is prevalent in India. When you're surviving on less than $1/day with a corrupt and apathetic government, then you're naturally susceptible to exploitation. But US corporations should know better. They talk of social morality and corporate responsibility, but will cut corners or turn a blind eye to make a quick buck or boost quarterly numbers, and respond with "plausible deniability" when caught. This time, its Gap: they got busted using child labor in Delhi, ironically, to manufacture clothing for sale in "Baby Gap". The clip on the left is from Boston Globe's 10/30/07 report. Heres the original post from Observer. Gap has an official response on their website here.
Sameer समीर... Noun(1)
Everyone knows Gandhi, but not everyone knows that he had four sons and what would be considered a dysfunctional relationship by modern standards with them, especially the eldest. Heres some information from Peter Ruhe about his them and a book about his first son (Harilal Gandhi-A life) and another book by his second son Manilal (Gandhi's prisoner). RecentlyHarilal rather sad life has been explored in this (artistically embellished) movie.
My respected friend and past colleague John, has written about SOA and mashups in "Implementing SOA Without Enterprise Mashups? You Might As Well Kiss Your Job Goodbye!". I m not sure I agree with him because first, this seems like the IT version of Fox News fear mongering to subliminally push a product, and second, theres no baseline definition of "mashup".
Picked this up at NPR's fund raiser last month. The book does a decent job of getting the reader to be more introspective. The diccussion about inner and outter economy made sense, but I tuned out somewhere in the middle. I couldnt identify with his approach (eg the way he encourages clients to cold-call peers etc). His other book "We Are All Self-Employed ", was referenced multiple times and seemed worth scanning through.
Some friends didnt believe me when I told them that their iPod was based on a chip designed in India. So here is the link to the original story and another one. The company was Pinexe Systems India, outsourced from PortalPlayer, which was later acquired by Nvidia. Here are the technical details on the inside of the first iPod line. Before you decide to open yours up -the newer(?) Nano internals are here. Same design, different company and lower cost. Thomas Friedman also talks about this in his book
Stanford professor Robert Sutton provides insight into the corporate jungle in this humourous and thoughtful book -No Asshole Rule. He differentiates between temperory and “chronic” or “certified,”a-holes, provides identifying traits, strategies for dealing with them and ways of not turning into one yourself. Excerpts can be found on this blog. The book mentioned the MIT's Jerk-O-Meter - wish they sold this gizmo at Circuit City!
I recently purchased a tin of cookies from a local RiteAid, the item was marked as $3.00 off. Come to find out at the register that its a mail in rebate and I have to go online to get the $3 discount. Fine, so I go here and find out that a) you need to register b) enter your information and c) enter information from the receipt which includes the location,transaction number,and time of purchase. Right before I hit send I realize that for a mere $3.00, RiteAid now knows who I am, where I live (and of course has my email), and has my credit card number. In computer security lingo - has formed an identity by associating a principal to a subject via a transaction. Interesting.
This new extension allows you to define a binding annotation on the implementation, which generates something that resembles a JavaScript webservice proxy. The service can be accessed via url?js like the usual url?wsdl. The data type marshalling seems to plug in directly into the jax-ws marshalling layer with Jettison and the switch occurs via a content-type=application/json header. 
Flex example since Flex has support for JSON via an add-on corelib. It worked after some hit-n-trial but occasionally there were runtime exceptions possibly due to bugs somewhere in the Flex<->JSON<->Java marshalling chain. Still, this should be of interest to those looking for techniques to integrate services directly with UI's.
Was reading up on value congruence recently. Its an interesting theory that looks at what impacts an individuals level of job sastification. The basis is the notion of P-E alignment - ie how well does the Person and individual values/goals/path mesh with those of the Enviornments. Derivaties are PP (Person-Peer), PJ (Person-Job fit), PO (Person-Organization) and PV (Person to Vocation). "Making Vocational Choices" looks at this and other factors in detail.
t individuals go through an explicit or implicit loop in early in their career until they find the right fit and a level of comfort. I would argue that is this isnt as static as proposed,but instead, for some individuals the loop shown below is continuous, though tapering with time. For others, there is no loop ~! There is also the notion of individuality as pointed out here and why some seek out heriarchy enhancing (HE) while others are attached too herarchy attenuating (HA) organizations. Other interesting perspectives can be found here
On Truth is Harry Frankfurts sequel to Bullshit. His essay examines the value and importance of truth as well as the objective reality of truth vs opinions - one way of essentially bs'ing by falsely interpreting facts. The two parts that struck me were his discussion of Spinoza and that of lying. How people who lie disassociate from reality because they conrstrue one that is invisble to others. "Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended,in a very real way, to make us crazy". An interview with the author on NPR can be found here.
Phil Hansen has a unique style. If this isnt creative genius, then I'm not sure what is. This guy needs to go in a gallery or a road show so that more people can experience it in person. What's interesting is not just the art, but the time elapsed videos and description of how the pieces are created with the macro-micro contrast. My favourite is "Daudi", the rest of his collection, as well as live studio cam is here. This isnt some photoshop generated print, this is real art.
Hilarious stuff from Hugh's back of the businesscard & Microsofts blue monster series.
Bullshit sourrounds us everday and everywhere;its almost like ambient noise . "Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted". What would happen if you got a professor of philosophy to write an essay on "Bullshit". You would land up with a detailed, funny and at times academic, analysis of the topic.
I picked this book up long time ago but never got to it. It came out in 2002/3 but the text somehow seems more relevant today.MIT professor Noam Chomsky's work is a captivating lesson in political history. At the onset it lays out the concept of two superpowers, the US (state) and the world opinon. The book puts into context an "imperial grand strategy"-in which the former has maintained "its hegemony through the threat or use of military force." He offers a cautionary look at where we may be headed as a nation and the growing threats to world peace and personal freedom. "One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that another world is possible". A review can be found here and a video of the author found here.
I remain disappointed with the Web Services support, or lack thereof, in Adobe's recent Flex 3.0 beta release. Dont let this document fool you, that GUI hasnt been available for a long time. It was there in the original Macromedia release only. If youre building a RIA thats consuming web services, and I mean real-world web services - not the hello world or getXXX services that only pull data - Document Based Web Services that send and receive requests, responses and faults based on anything beyond a very simple XML schema, then you're in for a surprise. For example, consider a simple purchase order Web Service (like this one) that send a po, gets a status or a fault, heres whats involved from a high level. If you dont understand the complexity of step 1-3 above, consider the underlying gymnastics , outlined in this link (from Flex documentation), to write MXML which generates a SOAP request like listing 15 with a variable number of LineItems. You have to write a some other client first to get capture the soap request structure, copy-paste it into the script and then code to bind request/reponses/faults to UI element and objects (theres a for-loop involved in adding the various line items)
Does that mean real-world Flex based Web Service RIA are hard ? Without significant architectual foresight, perhaps yes; Harder than the general Architects perception, mostly created by the plethora of hello-world type demos floating around and the tremendous marchitecture leading to info-management. Perhaps with Introspection wizards slated for M3 this will change. Those disagreeing should take a shot at developing an out of the box Flex client for web services based the of the UBL or STAR schemas.
Browsing around the shelves I found Henry David Thoreau's book Walden or Life in the Woods (also available online). The book is a detailed account of Thoreau's project of living in semi-seclusion, in his self build cottage at Walden pond (Concord, MA). I found it to be a hard read, like most original authors of the past century. He provides insight into what a simple life is - and makes you think about the contemporary mindset of super-materialism and status-seeking. A great review can be found on the Walden site here.
Similarminds.com has a few different personality tests online inluding the Jung and Cattell 16PF surveys. What they dont have is the Jenkins Activity Survey which has been used to identify Type-A personalities. Quite a few individuals I have consulted or worked with could clearly be put into this bucket - amped up caffeinated coronaries waiting to happen. So imagine my surprise when I came across this article titled "Personality factors underlying coronary prone behavior patterns among employees ", which is based on the JAS questionairre, in the Journal of Business & Psychology
The Nurture Assumption is another interesting and entertaining gem. Authored by Juddith Harris it provides insights into behavioral development. The theory challenges tradional beliefs that parents are the most important factor in development, by postulating that what children experience outside the home, in the company of their peers, matters more than anything else - i.e Parents don't socialize children; children socialize children.
The Lucifer Effect is Prof Philip Zimbardo's detailed account and analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment . He deconstructs the experiment and analyzes other social experiments like the Milgram & Asch studies as well as examples of human behavior like the Nazi's, Rwandan, Nanking genocides as well as Abu Ghraib to present a unique insight into the capabilities of the human mind. He reinforces the idea that situations and systems, not individuals, transform behavior and personality. Towards the end the book he provides a a discussion on how individuals can resist temptation in the form of a behavioral paradigm shift. Quite an interesting read !
Recently finished reading The World is Flat which has been in my reading pile for a few months now. It explores how business is changing because of reduced friction, boundaries and flattening of the world, and more importantly how people need to think differently in order to remain integrated in this new world. I think people who haven't been to India or exposed to the technology sector there, really do need to read this. For me the book was an affirmation of what I already knew, observed and grew up in rather than a revelation of how the world is changing. Light reading but quite captivating. Would also recommend seeing the 1-800-India documentary.
Heres what I have personally tried between various projects.
Cocomo: While pursuing my masters at USC I attended Prof. Barry Boehms's courses in software engineering that covered COCOCMO in quite a level of detail. A mathematical model (and tool) can be used in conjunction with iterative development methodologies to come up with educated estimates (that account for things like code reuse, risk, team cohesion, process maturity etc). Check it out !
Use case based: Developed by Gustav Karner (Rational fame). It relies on four crtical inputs - Weighting of actors, use-cases, technical factors and project participants. This paper summarizes the technique quite nicely.
SoP: Ie Seat of Pants. Least accurate but most commonly used. The distilled approach involves something like this . Determine number of use cases and test cases - rate them on complexity and decompose the use case into tangible, estimatable entities.( this of course makes an immense assumption that you know what the architecture is going to look like). Start counting - anything tangible that can be decomposed and correlated to size - in tiers and layers . (Database sizes, EJB's, JSP's, Webservices, Interfaces, external actors and interactions, classes, existing code, frameworks etc... ). Refine and estimate both best case and worst case for each of the estimatable entities. Make sure you differentiate between targets and estimates. Calibrate using historical, industry, group or other data. Average the two cases, add a buffer and voila - you have a number that the boss can use !!
The problem with doing this upfront rather than during early elaboration is - you got it - where/how do you mitigate and factor in architectural risk ? Plus you've baked in some heavy architectural and project assumptions - which may not necessarily be true.
Consulting Lesson#126. Use the McKinsey MECE approach and get multiple groups to come up with estimates wherever possible. The results can be interesting at times.
Recently I was particularly interested in class invariants - assertions that must be validated when the class is instantiated and verified when the public methods are invoked (not sure what happens in multi threaded cases). Starting with Java 1.4 there's support for assertions but its rather weak and relies on developer capability to check and throw exceptions for public methods (the guideline is that assertions should not be used in public methods and can be enabled/disabled at runtime). The FAQ answers some questions about why this route was taken a few years back and some techniques on using asserstions. Java still doesn't have full blown Design by Contract support built into the vm or compiler and the age old RFE lists various valuable alternatives and opinions.
I found a nice little utility to import graphic artwork directly into mp3 tracks in iTunes using the Amazon Web Services toolkit.
Recently I ve been exploring some options for doing validation on objects (potentially JAXB classes). I ve done this a few times before over the years with custom frameworks and there are several out there in the public domain including Apache's, Vlad, JGoodies to name a few. All of these really didn't fit what I really wanted to do - which is separate out the concerns from our domain objects and do everything declaratively. After a bit of thought here is what I came up with using AspectJ 
Alain de Botton's treatise on Status Anxiety is an interesting read. Status Anxiety discusses the desire of people in many modern societies to "climb the social ladder" and the anxieties that result from a focus on how one is perceived by others.The jist of the causes and solutions presented are as follows
I recently took a shot at setting up CruiseControl . I picked this over Hudson (which I would recommend any day in place of CC) mostly because it had in built support for StarTeam and other projects were using it already. There are a few nuances though.<junit printsummary="withOutAndErr" fork="true" haltonfailure="false" errorproperty="test.failure">
.......
<fail message="Failing target as Junit tests failed" if="test.failure"/>
</junit>
<cruisecontrol:tab name="antoutput" label="Ant output">
<cruisecontrol:xsl xslfile="/xsl/ant_log.xsl"/>
</cruisecontrol:tab>
<cruisecontrol:tab name="log" label="XML Log File">
<cruisecontrol:xsl xslfile="/xsl/logfile.xsl"/>
</cruisecontrol:tab>
"Info-management" - Its a consulting term I use to describe a management technique in which a person flips through Info-World,CIO,Dr Dobbs,JDJ,a summarized analyst report,(even Cosmo mag) - usually in the restroom or while waiting to get a root canal - gets all enthused and subsequently decides to experiment on the immediate team or project with the newly parsed (mis)information.
Meno's paradox essentially questions - "How can one investigate what one does not know? Which of the things you do not know will you propose as the object of your search? Even if you stumble across it, how will you know it is the thing you did not know? "
