Sunday, September 28, 2008

Some songs should not be used for ads.

I just saw an ad for Lincoln automobiles, which had a cover of Space Oddity emasculated by some random girl singer, the way Target has done with the Beatles' Hello Goodbye. This is different because Bowie still owns the songwriting for his songs, unlike the Beatles' publishing, which are owned by Sony.

So, while I respect the artists' right to do anything they want with their songs, and Bowie is certainly commercially aware, I have to say that it cheapens them to be used in this way.

Anyway, this is the original video & recording of Space Oddity, pre-Angie. And it doesn't have Rick Wakeman's classic mellotron.

Friday, September 26, 2008

The man from Berkshire Hathaway.. he say yes.

When Warren Buffett says it's time for government intervention, we really ough't to pay attention.

I don't usually pay much attention to what Wall St asks for, since I think they're a bunch of overpaid prissy primadonnas. But Berkshire Hathaway is the epitome of a conservative, risk averse company, and Buffett is well known for being prudent and farsighted, and not being greedy.

I think he's really worried about what could happen, and that's enough for me.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Thursday Night Doors

My 2nd favorite Doors song, after Riders.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

No tech for you..

I'm sick & tired of the Rollers.

Listen, if you don't believe in Science or Reason, and think that the truth is contained in a black book about the continuing adventures of an insecure invisible Sky Wizard, his kid, and their sidekicks, then you're not allowed to use the stuff we discovered and invented. That's right.. no more tv or radio, no more cell-phones, computers or internet, no more medicine, automobiles, and definitely no more guns for you.

You want a weapon? Jawbone of an ass.
You want transport? Horse & buggy works just fine for the Amish.

Don't like it. Then apologize.

A silver lining to the financial crisis

Now, I understand that structurally what the government did was essentially extend a bridge loan to AIG, but even so there is a big upside to this thing: if Barack Obama becomes President, he will have an enormous opportunity and now the means to implement universal health insurance, given that the government now controls the worlds' largest insurance company. And probably do it far more cheaply than before this event.

Because of its size, AIG will be able to directly set pricing for the entire industry. We should have a health care system that is comparable is scope to what the French have, and be able to take advantage of cost savings due to scale, and the shift away from using expensive emergency medical services to treat the uninsured to encompassing those people within the medical systems' normal framework. If we supplement that with laws to reduce the legal shenanigans of the medical insurance industry and truly reduce the cost of prescription medicine, it could be a good system.

IMHO, every company should support Universal Health Insurance as it will reduce the burden on individual companies, and provide all workers with the health care they need.

From the dept of I told you so..

As I've mentioned a number of times here, for the Rollers, Palins' gig as VP is all about the apocalypse, and nothing else matters. Here's a post, via Sullivan & Salon that corroborates my earlier contention.

Let's be clear, Sarah Palin is the kind of politician that makes you glad Dick Cheney is the VP.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Vas deference

While I'm not surprised at Big Medias' complicity with the McCain campaign, it is amazing to see that servitude in action, and the lengths to which the Media is going. As Frank Zappa once said: "There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over".

It is somewhat breathtaking to see the McCain campaign lie, deceive and bully the press and not get even a wrist slap from them. Even I'm impressed. However, the self-yielding of the press to the Republicans though, must come with a price: if the Republicans get re-elected into the White House, given the mess the country is in, the press must be held responsible for that. After all, only a sociopath would allow a pit bull unleashed on the street, after it had already bitten some people.

I'd bet, though, that if the Democrats came to power, and seeing how they treated Clinton, the press corps would find their missing cojones in a hurry.

From the dept of irony...

Apparently, the dude got this piece of junk mail in the post yesterday. I guess they do have the protection they need.

Late night Frisell

One of the most tasteful guitarists around, Bill Frisell uniquely bridges the gap between jazz and country, to produce a truly American sound, in the same spirit as Copland. In addition, he collaborates with many people, and the results are almost always intriguing.

Anyway, this is his take on a classic American song:

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The laws of supercomputing

Its about time I wrote some of these down:
  1. It's all about the memory.
  2. Latency is next to Godliness
  3. Any asshole can build a fast floating point unit.
  4. Cache is King.
  5. Storage is memory
  6. Parallel programming isn't complicated, but it is hard.
  7. Data drives computation.
  8. You can hide latency, but you can't make it run.
  9. Go for capability or capacity, but not both.
  10. One process, then two, then many.
  11. Explicit parallelism beats implicit parallelism.
  12. Don't call, compile.
  13. No non-trivial application will run faster than the Linpack benchmark.
  14. Innovation in HPC in the last 10 years has consisted almost solely of the bending of sheet metal.
  15. 95% of all supercomputing is capacity oriented.
  16. All meaningful HPC programming is done in Fortran or C

Carly, Carly, Carly.

So, Carly Fiorina doesn't think Sarah Palin is qualified to run a big company like HP:



Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Has everyone forgotten Carlys' less than dignified forced exit from HP ?? There is no person in the valley who has more experience being under-qualified to run a large tech company than Carly herself.

It's directly because of people like Carly Fiorina, and their greedy grasping for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment that we find ourselves in the economic mess we're in. When she was kicked out of HP, she had a $42M golden parachute. That says it all.

From the dept of oxymorons: Low cost Cray

Cray has finally announced a low-cost HPC system.

This might have been a good idea for them, 6 years ago, when I first proposed it as a member of Cray's ill-fated cluster group. However, this is nothing more than a minor play, rebadging OEM blade boxes with Cray livery, and represents an expensive implementation of something that is already available for far below what Cray is charging. It's an exercise in branding, in an industry where branding takes second place to word of mouth and reputation, and from the press release, Cray isn't adding any significant value, using Infiniband instead of their own interconnect, and using off the shelf software. Ciara and Tyan make boxes just like this, only much cheaper.

The problem for Cray is that most of their stellar talent, with the exception of Steve Scott, have left for greener pastures. What's left is basically a bunch of mostly ex-IBMers running the joint, people who really don't understand this business from a user point of view. OTOH, this is a tacit acknowledgment that the future of HPC is not in Big Iron (although that will always be there), but in smaller, more easily deployable chunks, and that's a good thing for Cray, even if it took them 6 years to get there.

If Cray can innovate in the software side, add their own personality to the box, and use it as a stepping stone to their larger systems, they might have a shot. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

Monday, September 15, 2008

2/3 HBS = BS

When I first came to the US in 1991, the valley was still a place where people made things. Cool things, like SGI workstations and satellites, and the corporate ethos was dominated by engineers. The competition was simple: the companies that built the best products, won. And it was a straightforward activity, because the guys who designed and built the products also used them.

In that rarefied time, those innovative tech companies did well: well qualified engineers did the work, and were paid well. Management saw its role as that of being an enabler or facilitator, in a collective context. The only people who did spectacularly better, financially, were the founders of these companies, and that's as it should be given they were the ones with the cojones to walk the walk.

But that all changed. Silicon Valley became infused with Business School graduates and people with marketing degrees, and the focus changed from the team/collective journey to the deification of individual accomplishment, reinforced by a trend to spreadsheet driven management. Individuals in a company were being judged, and compensated, by the completion of their individual goals and how much they had individually contributed. If you saved the company $500K this quarter, that was good for you, no matter what the consequence of that 1 year down the line. From a corporate culture, point of view, we had given ourselves an acute case of ADD.

In addition, the focus at the top end of the company centered around two concepts: shareholder value and corporate leadership/vision. Companies were now being run to maximize shareholder return, rather than to increase market share and customer satisfaction. In fact, as the MBAs figured out they could outsource many essential functions, and hide the true cost in the balance sheet while taking credit for payroll and other savings, customers became less and less satisfied. Meanwhile, those savings didn't go to the customer, but ended up in the pockets of executive management. And as executive leadership metamorphosed into a cult of personality, more and more of a company's' revenue and value was diverted to satisfy those compensation needs.

What is happening in Wall St, is just the chickens coming home to roost. It is the direct consequence of letting people with paper qualifications, but no real world experience, make corporate decisions that primarily benefit themselves, in the short term. Letting newly minted MBAs run around proclaiming that the world had moved on, and the rest of us didn't get it.

And this isn't going to be easy to fix. The country owes more money than it can pay back, and we still have a corporate class that insists on pursuing the trust-fund economics that this administration and those since Reagan have foisted upon us. But there is a solution, and it does have a simple overall structure:
  1. End the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  2. Cut all corporate subsidies to large corporations including Oil & Gas, and large Agriculture.
  3. Eliminate tax loopholes and other evasion/avoidance schemes.
  4. Force entities who issue credit to be able to back those loans.
  5. Treat dividends as income.
  6. Reduce outsourcing: penalize companies that do outsource abroad and VCs that encourage it.
  7. Vigorously prosecute corporate malfeasance.
  8. Fix and regulate stock option and other compensation for management and executives.
  9. Redact laws that force companies to put shareholder concerns above others: customers first, employees next, and *then* shareholders.
  10. Raise taxes if necessary, but do it at the high end first.
  11. Invest in new energy: power and transport
  12. Invest in infrastructure: transport and energy distribution and storage.
  13. Reduce dependence on foreign energy: this one act will alter our balance of payments in a favorable way.
  14. Universal health insurance: remove this burden from companies.
  15. Universal access to all levels of education.
The key here is to try and revitalize spending at the consumer & corporate level, by freeing more money at the lower end of the income scale, and stimulate the economy by spending money at home, specifically with infrastructure projects such as construction. Bubble up economics, if you like.

However, part of the problem is that we have become decadent and corrupt, and have lost the creative spirit and can-do attitude of the 50s. Our new President, needs to show us the way back to a more honest way of life.

Rick Wright, RIP

Rick Wright, the keyboard player with Pink Floyd just died.

To me, he was the George Harrison of the Floyd, and vastly underrated, while at the same time hugely influential. People raved about Waters' songwriting, and Dave Gilmours' guitar playing, but Rick Wrights' atmospheric space-rock keyboards where the heart and soul of that band, especially on "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here". When he did contribute, compositionally, the results were often classic songs.

I was never a huge Floyd fan, certain songs notwithstanding, but I loved his tasteful and understated playing and textures, and the fact that he rejected the muscular pyrotechnics of a Jobson, Wakeman or Emerson, even though he was abundantly capable of doing that. His sound was unique, and continues, to this day, to be copied and borrowed, and the Floyd would not have been anywhere close to the band it became without him.

This song was one of his:

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

A few 9/11 anniversary thoughts.

I grew up in England, near London, during the height of the IRA's and UDF's reign of terror on the UK. In my life, there are 5 or 6 places I have frequented or visited that were bombed by the IRA, and where people died, including some people I knew. But life carried on.

And when 7/7 happened in London, I couldn't have been prouder of my fellow countrymen, for telling the terrorists, in no uncertain terms, that they wouldn't be cowed or browbeaten into submission, by just going down to the pub and drinking a defiant pint or two. After all, if Hitler and the IRA couldn't intimidate Londoners, then a bunch of low-rent Muslim terrorists really don't stand much of a chance.

However, one thing is certain: in the UK, no politician, not Thatcher, Blair or even Boris Johnson would ever dare contemplate the use of any such tragedy for direct political advantage. Ever.

So,when I say I'm disgusted with McCain & Palin for doing just that, please understand where I'm coming from. For me terrorism is not an abstract notion, but a real and present danger, and one which tells us about ourselves by the way we respond. Nietzsche once wrote: "Those who hunt monsters, must be careful not to become monsters", and I think that's a prime and moral imperative in our fight against terrorism. We cannot let ourselves become what we despise, whatever the temptation or provocation.

For McCain to be such a fearmonger, is a reprehensible and vile act by a venal man. But it won't work. Not on me, nor on the average American or Brit.

Senator McCain and Governor Palin, let me say this on the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy: I am not frightened by our enemies, nor will I condone the efforts by you and your cronies to scare us into submission. If you want to be scared, by something you don't understand, instead of confronting it, that's fine by me, but I, for one, will not be a hostage to your fears. Not now, not ever.

And if Barack Obama wins this election, neither will the rest of us.

Monday, September 8, 2008

When the game is rigged.

As a foreigner, I am amazed at the relationship between media and the political parties in the US, especially at how blatantly the major TV and cable channels shill for the Republicans.

MSNBC have dropped Matthews and Olbermann as anchors for their election coverage, apparently on the grounds of impartiality. That might be true, insofar as Matthews and Olbermann have called the Republicans on their bullshit, and not given them a free pass. The real problem, imho, is the link with NBC, and the fact that the people at the Peacock network think of themselves as serious journalists and cable TV as some kind of broadcasting ghetto.

Of course, if this were the UK, we wouldn't have this problem. People like Jeremy Paxman make Olbermann look like a nice, shy boy from New York.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Ratings....

According to Neilson, John McCain's speech got 500,000 more viewers than Barack Obama. Combine that with Sarah Palin's ratings, and it doesn't take a blind man to see that the Republicans have a really good chance to win the election.

The Democrats have work to do. This is not going to be a cakewalk for them.

A disturbance in the farce...

John McCain's speech, last night, had the tired air of a condemned man, almost apologetic in it's tone. Contrast that with Sarah Palin's, which was defiant and full of condescension. The torch was clearly passed, and say what you will, this is now a Palin/McCain ticket.

Coincidentally, Ron Paul was on Colbert, last night, and talked about how the Republicans has basically gagged him and his supporters during the convention.

Which leads me to my point.. Regardless of whether the Republicans win or lose, this year, the Christianists are now the dominant force within the party. And while in the past, the Patrician wing of the Republican party has been willing to join forces with the Rollers, in order to get what they want, there's a clear fracture within the party. If they do lose, there's going to be a strong realignment within the party, and the Ron Paul libertarian wing of the party might be the blade that cleaves the stone, clearly dividing the Republicans into fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

Now, imho it's not that clear cut, since Ron Paul, while havng a cohesive philosophy, doesn't have a cohesive or realistic plan for governing. In particular, his audience includes many of the same Dominionist/Christanist elements that dominate the Republican party right now, drawn by his call for States Rights, and other dogwhistle issues.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Thursday night Prog

Just a reminder of how great a guitarist Steve Hackett is, even when he's not soloing but "just" providing counterpoint and textures. Along with Edge, he is probably the guitarist that best provides just the right colour, tone and sound at the right time.

He could be subtle and dominant at the same time. In 30 years, Daryl Stuermer, as great as he is, could never quite capture what made Hackett tick. Of living guitarists, only Holdsworth and Jeff Beck are greater, although Fripp is an equal.

Anyhoo, this one is dedicated to John McCain, and the song title says it all.

Fundamentalist Terminators

Sullivan has a good posting on his blog about the shift in the Republican Party towards a Theocratic state. While I think he understands the danger, I don't think he quite realizes how far down the path the country has already gone.

Let me quote from The Terminator, so you get what I'm saying:
"Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

These people are relentless, and will not stop until they've forced the rest of us to live under the yoke of their theology. Dismantling Rove vs. Wade will only be the start.. they'll force creationism and who knows what other nonsense down our throats.

Let me put it this way, in deference to her namesake Pythonista: if she's elected, you can expect the Spanish Inquisition. Only this time around, there won't be any comfy chairs.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Darth Palin

I touched on this a couple of posts ago.

The question on everybody's lips wrt Mrs Palin is how good a president will she make if McCain fails to complete his first term. The more salient question that should be on everyone's mind is what kind of a Vice President will she make. The answer is Dick Cheney, with a vindictive streak and a Messiah complex.

Why? Well I've been trying to figure out why someone like Sarah Palin would accept the nomination, when she knows full well what her baggage looks like, and what national exposure would do to bring all that to light. After all, she's a Republican, and all she has to ask herself is what would she do if she were the press or the Democrats. From a normal perspective, there would be just too much downside if she didn't take time to prepare.

However, it's my opinion that she, and the rest of the Christian Right supporting her, feels that she's been selected, plucked out of thin air, to be an "Instrument of God" in order to perform some holy task.. Whether that's true or not, or what that holy task is (my guess is that it involves continuing to blow the shit out of a bunch of short brown people), you'd have to ask the Big Guy (who I technically don't believe in). But it is a mindset that permeates the whole right-wing end-times Christianist movement, that they are chosen, and the rest of us are damned. Remember, these are people who think that the Left Behind books are akin to a fifth gospel.

The danger comes from the fact that unlike Helen Chenowith, Mrs Palin doesn't come across as a fundamentalist nutcase when you see her on TV, but as a regular all-American gal, with 5.5 kids and a manly husband, a dog and a killer recipe for Moose stew. But make no mistake, she's someone who has already demonstrated an eager willingness to use the privileges of office to settle scores and reward supporters, and to promote her Christianist mindset, without a care as to who gets damaged in the process. She has also shown a talent for profligate spending, and the political nous to get substantial earmarks allocated to her town and state. There won't be any problem for her trying to fit in Washington, especially with the Republicans circling the wagons and protecting one of their own.

I'll say this, if John McCain gets elected, things could get bad. Sarah Palin, is Dobson's Trojan Horse, let in through the gates of Troy by McCain's Faustian deal with the Religious Right. And once you make a deal with the Devil, there's no turning back.

Say what you will about George W, but he only appropriated the language of that movement, and while he was actively sympathetic to their cause, he never let them actually drive the car. If I gave a rats ass for myself and the rest of the Human Race, this prospect would scare me, but I'm just here to watch, and roast my marshmellows in the fires. We'll get who we collectively deserve.

btw, if McCain does somehow get himself elected President, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts he won't last the first term. There's just too much temptation for the Rollers to pass up.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

There's never a vet when you need one.

I've been thinking a little more about the Palin pick, and how the McCain organization has seemingly failed to properly vet the Republican nominee for VP. It seems to me that if Dobson, Limbaugh and co. were going to impose a running mate on McCain, then they themselves should at least have properly pre-vetted that person.

I will be surprised, though, if Sarah Palin gets dropped: unlike George W Bush, who simply co-opted their line, she's the real deal, if a little low-calorie, so to speak. Belonging to the Alaskan Independence Party in the 90's, and the association with her pastors, far from being disqualifying, actually reinforce her bona fides with the Christianist/Dominionist wing of the Republican Party

This is post-invasion Iraq all over again, in the sense that these people care only about a very small set of criteria (the usual positions on abortion, etc..), and don't even care that the people they're placing in positions of responsibility should at least be moderately qualified for the job, if not actually good at their jobs. The problem with that attitude is that these people only know 2 ways to solve a problem: a prayer and a hammer (the more heavy handed, the better). We're seeing that in St Paul, this week, with the way the authorities are dealing with the protesters. It doesn't bode well.

I have have just one request. Guys, if you're going to be fascist tyrants, could you at least be competent fascist tyrants, and put a little elan into the job? What you're doing right now, well it's just amateurish and embarrassing, and not worthy of a 3rd world banana republic. Truly.