A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

Pointing fingers at the president

15 April 2004

Hear hear – BuzzMachine… by Jeff JarvisNo, when and if government employees find a threat against America, they should go and with dispatch stomp it out. The last thing we need is for them to have to go meet with the President. They are and should be empowered by the law to take action.

Not just government employees – it is the job of every citizen to fight for our rights, to build the economy, to defend our country, etc. None of us should sit back and wait for the government to fix every problem out there.

Nvidia GeForce 6800Ultra

15 April 2004

Nice roundup of reviews at gizmodo – Nvidia GeForce 6800Ultra Review Roundup – it’s time to upgrade video cards again. I continue to find it interesting that today’s apps have an unquenchable demand for GPU MIPs, while my appetite for more CPU MIPs isn’t that great. This has interesting implications in the longrun for Intel, for the balance of power in the industry, etc.

The Glass Bead Game

13 April 2004

For my first Hesse ever, I recently read The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi). I found it to be a pretty provoking read that seems still quite relevant today – certainly a valuable read for anyone considering a deep investment in higher education. And I found the structure of the book (intro to the game; biography; posthumous writings of Knecht) interesting and a break from the typical structure of most novels.

Clearly the book has some obsessive fans – just search the web for “Magister Ludi”, “Joseph Knecht”, or “Glass Bead Game” (I think these people miss the point of the book).

I had a goal earlier this year to read a new and different magazine each week – this book made me drop that goal. It was a compelling piece of writing, and made me realize that most magazines consist of a bag of ads interspersed with whatever articles were available at deadline. OK that is a little cynical but I still think I’ll use my reading time to read more substantial and provoking works.

Hugos, Nebulas

13 April 2004

[Slashdot Hugo Nominations Announced](http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/12/1717222 “Slashdot Hugo Nominations Announced”) – good pointer to hugo and nebula nominees, good source of potential reads.

SimsonG's advice to undergrads

12 April 2004

Simson’s Weblog: Looking Back at MIT – My own experience doesn’t support the “Grades really matter” point but then I generally had decent grades. But all the rest of this counsel seems very wise. Choice of major really really doesn’t matter – what matters is that you learn how to think – how to analyze and synthesize – not so much what you think about. My undergraduate years were all about analysis, I didn’t really learn much synthesis until graduate school, you need both.

WinFS pushed out

09 April 2004

More Twists and Turns on the Road to LonghornOne alleged e-mail from a senior Microsoft Windows executive, dated March 4, claims the company has decided to curtail its Windows file-storage system (WinFS) plans by allowing the file system to work on individual PCs with Longhorn client, but holding off on allowing WinFS to work over a corporate network until a later Windows release.

hmm, this seems unfortunate. it is not clear to me i want a lot of storage innovation on the client, that just seems to lead to more stateful clients, i’ve been trying to extract locked up state from my clients for years. i want more storage in the cloud, available and usable from any client machine i happen to be at.

The Apprentice -- down to 2

09 April 2004

NBC.com – The Apprentice – OK can Omarosa really be as obviously duplicitous as she seems to be? I almost have to believe that she is playing a role and that her part is scripted, no one can be this pathological. She reminds me of the old Jon Lovitz pathological liar character.

Spoofstick

08 April 2004

Jon’s Radio points towards Spoofstick which looks like a nice feature for helping to address web address spoofing – seems like this just ought to be a feature of a toolbar or the browser

Custom T-shirts

07 April 2004

p. Hey I needed a goofy t-shirt recently and found Zazzle. Very easy to create my own shirt, easy to upload graphics, and the t-shirt shipped 1 day later and arrived fast. Great service, good range of products, very easy web-based design tool. Oh and very economic to order quantity 1.

p. I also considered Designashirt and it probably had even nicer web-based design tools (flash based as i recall) but they had a minimum order of 6. But the web experience was good.

Sun Antitrust Suit

03 April 2004

Sun Settles With Microsoft, Cuts Jobs – well I am glad that this is behind everyone but a little miffed that I had to spend 3 days this week giving a deposition in the case just prior to settlement. I guess it was my riveting testimony that drove the parties to settle. I was subpoena’d by Sun to testify and was asked a bunch of questions about my job back in ‘95 thru ‘97. Mostly questions about java vms, class libs, etc. Who can remember all this crap? By my rough calculation, I spent well under 1% of time at Microsoft worrying about java, and since leaving Microsoft in ‘99 I’ve started a company, invested in close to 30 other companies, seen hundred of business plans, learned a bunch of new technologies, had a very busy personal life, etc. I can’t remember what JNI is let alone why I might have ever cared about it.