wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

It wasn’t me, it was my neighbor

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Keith Adams of Facebook pointed me to this paper:

Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them:
An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors

The fun part is that we have a new and exciting way to induce memory corruption. Reading memory.

The interesting part is the proposal of a probabilistic algorithm to address the issue.

This continues my enduring belief that reliance on reliable hardware to make software work is increasingly a fools errand. As we patch more and more of the cracks, eventually we will have to stare at the chasms and rethink software design.

In the meantime, the next time I get a memory corruption I am pointing my boss to this paper.

 

Looking back on “Here Comes Another Bubble”

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In 2007 the Richter Scales captured the zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley bubble atmosphere with this hysterical video:

The irony about this song was that the 2007 bubble was killed by Lehman’s. A lesson in mass hysteria.

And as I was re-watching it last night I wondered – so what happened with those scrolling startups? And was Peter Thiel right or wrong?

bubble-3

When it comes to Facebook, he was probably right. In fact, the valuation of Facebook is staggering and an amazing achievement for the folks at that company!

That got me wondering about the rest of the companies … The hype around MySpace wasn’t probably justified:

myspace

And then if you look at the scrolling startups, I tried to circle the ones I knew were still in business. Admittedly I didn’t look through every single one — there are a lot but was struck by how few of them are around:

bubble-2 bubble

Starting a company is hard. Creating investor value is hard.

And sometimes it’s worth remembering that for ever Facebook there is a scrolling morass of companies that go nowhere.

And like the song says, those folks are probably back at work looking to start another new thing…

 

 

Regulation or Encryption for Big Data

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A few weeks ago I called for a Hippocratic Oath for data scientists.

Now the New York Times is calling for regulation.

We can fight regulation all we want and we will.

But…

Customers will fight us. And they will fight us by moving to vendors that offer privacy and encryption. Where data is wholly owned by the customer.

And the customer will win. Because if we don’t act like their data is a sacred trust they will learn to distrust anything that they cannot control.

And they will control it through encryption.

And then we will have the medical industry where breakthroughs are there if only we could look at data …

What’s your employer’s security policy for your ID?

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After reading about the attack on Sony Entertainment, I am thinking that instead of worrying about hackers stealing from your bank we should be worried about hackers stealing from major corporations.

And that isn’t really surprising.

If identity is the seed of theft, then as banks and retailers get marginally better the soft squishy underbelly of HR departments becomes an inviting and easier target.

To date, a company cares about their business secrets being stolen, followed by their customer data being stolen and ending somewhere below not-at-all their employee’s private data being stolen. Employees don’t quit their job if their employer loses their data… At least not yet.

Identities are simply too valuable an asset for the bad guys to not want to steal, and unlike retailers where you can choose to not give them something that’s worth stealing your employer must have everything…

Me-thinks there is an opportunity for an innovation where companies can use tokens from some really secure system instead of the real raw data that they are just simply incapable of securing.

This Sony attack isn’t the end it’s the beginning.

 

Hardware not Software is Eating the World: Refinements…

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After I wrote my comments about hardware, a bunch of my software friends reacted …

And it got me thinking. My argument is a little bit more subtle than I thought.

Without a shadow of a doubt – A (capital A – no typo) disruptive product is the combination of software and hardware. That almost seams silly to have to write … After all is hardware with no software anything but inert rare earths?

Let me add some refinement.

1. I was really talking about as an innovator where do you go looking to go create the next disruptive product

My point was not that software is irrelevant, my point was that disruptive products emerge where new hardware is not where old hardware was. And that the new hardware creates new kinds of software systems that are very different than the old ones, and the combination of the new hardware and the new software is what displaces old software.

If you are looking to CREATE new disruptive technologies, the most important thing to be looking at is hardware not software. The hardware will create the opportunity to create new products that may have been previously imagined but impractical to build or sell.

2. It’s about utilization

When I say utilization I mean how much of the true capabilities of the hardware are being wasted versus being fully utilized. For example, the smart phone in 2007 was underutilized compared to it’s true potential leaving 100’s of billions of dollars of unrealized value in innovation.

Innovation really happens when the existing software systems are unable to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities creating an opening for a new software system to leverage the hardware differently. Typically what happens is that the old software made certain assumptions about the hardware that changed and a different software system making different assumptions is able to create new experiences that are profoundly different than the old ones.

What has happened, typically, is that the hardware vendors ability to create new hardware has exceeded the pace of innovation in software of the incumbent players creating an opening for new vendors.

3. Physics begets hardware begets software that is not math.

A lot of the new hardware that we are seeing come into existence is the result of new deeper understandings of the materials we are using.  Ultimately that science into materials is what is creating the opportunity for disruption. Hardware is the – in this vast oversimplified narrative of the world – first order derivative not software.

And yes I know some believe math begets physics, but I also know that software is not math.

In short

Clearly any novel and new disruptive product is a combination of hardware and software … My personal bias’ when looking FOR disruptive products is that they must be hiding in places where new hardware is being underutilized and the product must have software that is making trade-offs that are inherently incorrect for the old hardware. And if the new product succeeds it will do what seems impossible – kill old software.

Because hardware comes first, software later in this tale – and that the triumph of the new system is to kill the old software then my original point of view remains – new hardware is the place to go looking for when you want to create disruptions and therefore hardware not software is eating the world because it is allowing the world to be radically changed.

And I know Mr. Andreesen meant something else.

 

 

 

Towards a new application stack

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I stumbled upon this post about the bitcoin application stack.

And what got me intrigued was that the stack described is very similar to the way network database works.

A world where the database is not owned by anyone creates applications that must co-ordinate using open distributed protocols where bad-actors are expected. In the network world these kinds of protocols take years to evolve and develop and that constrains the speed with which new services can be deployed …

What could be very interesting is if the bitcoin transaction technology can be evolved to be consumed by non-experts in cryptography to be able to share and store data and the applications that are built on top of that technology don’t require up-front protocol collaboration …

I worry that I am in fuzzy brave new world thinking here… Maybe the speculation is too great. There is something here, though. Something meaningful.

It is encouraging that people are thinking about this.

 

The duality of my life

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On the one hand I read this fascinating article on AI and the implications of how we think and discuss AI.

And on the other hand I see this:

Nude programmers or smart people thinking about hard problems – one is the field I joined the other — well — not so much.

 

 

Hardware not Software is Eating the World: Len was right.

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In 1996, Len Widra, a Principal Engineer at SGI, and I got into a heated argument over the importance of software vs. hardware.

I was a kid out of school with an ego to match. Of course, I thought I knew everything. The crux of our debate was whether the software was a relevant technology or important technology.

Len’s observation was that software was irrelevant or something like that. Hardware, he observed, was the important technology.

As a software engineer, this was infuriating. As a computer scientist, this wasn’t very kind. How dare he say that a bunch of silicon was more important than my code?

It’s been almost 18 years, and I’ve learned more.

What I have learned is that new software rarely, if ever, displaces old software unless some new hardware shows up. New hardware shows up, and that new hardware makes the old software irrelevant or obsolete.

There is one interesting caveat. Some software applications are really dependent on the quality of the algorithms, and as the algorithms improve, the software gets obsoleted regardless of the underlying hardware changes. In many cases, the emergence of new algorithms creates new hardware that helps obsolete the old software.

For the vast majority of software systems, however, that’s not the case.

When you are looking for a new opportunity in the technology space, what you need to look for is where new hardware is emerging. If it is sufficiently different, that new hardware will obsolete the old software that was tied to the new hardware creating new opportunities for new software.

A mouthful.

A few examples:

(1) the emergence of x86 servers created the opening for Linux. Before x86 servers were a reality, the UNIX vendors owned the entire software and hardware stack. When x86 became good enough, a new software stack could win because the software used new hardware.

(2) Flash in the storage industry has truly created a massive disruption, enabling many different kinds of software stacks.

(3) Merchant (aka Broadcomm) Silicon is disrupting the networking space that reminds me of the x86 disruption.

(4) ARM processors made mobile computing plausible.

Maybe my favorite example is this picture from TIOBE Software that measures the popularity of programming languages. TIOBE measures popularity – not use or lines of code – and has been doing that analysis for many years:

2014-11-28_0849

You look at the chart, and you realize how slowly programming language popularity changes except for one programming language: Objective-C. The popularity of a single programming language changed dramatically not because it was good or bad but because of a single new hardware platform that enabled new software.

The hardware disrupts because it enables software that was impossible before. The carefully calibrated trade-offs that are baked into a system are tossed into the sea with new hardware. When you want to look for disruptions to your business, never look at software; software is irrelevant; look at the hardware …

 

Tablets are just lighter laptops

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In 2012 I argued with anyone who would listen that the tablet was a smaller lighter laptop and not a new computer. Because it was a lighter laptop Microsoft’s strategy of a unified OS strategy although poorly executed was the right one.

The reason this is important is if you believe tablets are a new growth platform.

The slow down in tablet sales makes my point.

Tablets are a replacement for laptops that are lighter weight. And as laptops get lighter and cell phones get bigger their advantages dissipate ….

x-platform mobile technologies

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The folks at Google wrote about their new toolkit  for their new mail app. An app, by the way, that is actually great.

I was convinced – from using the app – that they had a lot of platform specific code. Instead, being great engineers, they cracked a hard nut – how do you build a UI rich application without writing most of the code twice that I didn’t think was going to get cracked anytime soon.

The challenge with UI rich products is that they must interact with the native software interface of the device. And the native interface is very different and is written in very different programming langues.

What Google has done is very interesting. My stock recommendation for UI rich applications  is that you have a core that is in C++ and a bunch of platform specific code for each device, the approach Google has taken may indicate a new third way. The Prezi guys did this to great effect. And many of my former Zynga colleagues are doing the same.

I must dig in some more…