Inflection Point
18 Jul 2008 7:23pm GMT Futurists, especially those who claim to have a methodology beyond psychic prediction, tend to rely primarily on Moore's Law for figuring out what technology will be like 5, 10, or 20 years from now. But Moore's Law, which predicts that computing power will drop in cost by 50 percent every 18 months, isn't some absolute speed limit and some measures of technical achievement are actually moving faster than Moore's Law predicts. It's not that they violate the law (if it even IS a law) but that...
Acting Squirrelly
11 Jul 2008 7:26pm GMT I have this theory about the behavior of squirrels and how they are like certain large software companies, especially SAP, the giant Enterprise Resource Management vendor headquartered in Germany. But obviously the most interesting part is the squirrels, so let's start there. You are driving down a street in your car and up ahead there is a squirrel at the side of the road eating a nut. You aren't on an intercept course, there is no way you are going to hit that squirrel. So what does the...
Independence Day
4 Jul 2008 6:59pm GMT My young and lovely wife, showing what might be overoptimism or maybe artful timing given the economy but more likely just general disappointment with me, has decided to embark on a career in real estate sales. She has taken classes and passed tests, joined one of the very best local firms, and hurled herself into the business of selling historic Charleston homes while they still have some value and the termites haven't finished their work. And along the way, while mastering the Multiple...
Go Home, Bill
27 Jun 2008 6:21pm GMT This is the last week of full-time work at Microsoft for Bill Gates and given that I have written more than 40 columns about Microsoft over the years, it wouldn't make much sense for me to ignore this event. Yet that is almost what I did, which I believe is telling. It frankly didn't matter much to me that Bill was retiring. But then I figured longtime readers would expect a comment and perhaps there is some underlying theme here that IS worth 1,500 words. So rather than a fond or relieved...
What a Difference a Day Makes
21 Jun 2008 1:52am GMT There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in the film to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed for time travel. Yet as we in 2008 look at...