Bolden to be new NASA Chief.

According to the Wall St Journal, Charles Bolden is likely to be the new head of NASA. Bolden is an ex-Marine, who flew shuttle missions in the 80s.

This is a good move, in that it puts an ex astronaut at the helm, and will do much to bolster morale after the mess with Griffin. In theory, it reinforces a commitment to manned exploration, which is the glamor activity within NASA and is something that drives the people within the agency.

As defense expenditures decrease in the face of a diminishing desire to police the world, NASA will be there to pick up the slack wrt high value jobs and projects. Our aerospace industry needs NASA in order to evolve. So Bolden will certainly have his hands full. But, it's not entirely clear to me that he has the capacity to cultivate a "grand strategy" for moving the agency forward, and Ares I & II will certainly give him much grief.

New Guitar Magazine...

Future US, has just published a new guitar magazine, called Guitar Aficionado, that's targeted at the 35-54 year old male reader with significant disposable income. While I'm a little skeptical of the timing of publishing such a rag, given the economy and the fact that I thought such an audience was dead, that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is it's perspective.

Don't get me wrong.. the magazine is elegant, with beautiful photographs, and somewhat interesting people as interviewees, and is as fine a piece of guitar porn as you'll find anywhere, without actually touching a guitar. But it's focus is on guitars as objects, things whose worth is measured solely by their financial value, or their rarity as collectible objects. And given it's predisposition towards the solid-body era, and Rock music, it misses the point entirely.

There's an interview with Joe Perry, in the magazine, that talks about his horses, his houses, his cars and his guitar collection, without once referencing the fact that he was the man who wrote the riff to "Walk this way". There's no mention of the music or the makers, or the players as musicians rather than as squires of country estates.

And that's ultimately a jejune perspective. Rock and Roll isn't a lifestyle.. it's a way of life. It's Iggy Pop and Lemmy, not Richard Gere or Johnny Depp. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant didn't get all that tail by showing off how big their cars were. They did it by playing "A whole lotta love" on stage, and meaning it. John Lee Hooker was still getting young pussy at the age of 80 because he could still play the blues with true soul.

I'm loathe to criticize a magazine's first issue, and I get the idea that this is a publication designed to ease affluent men through their midlife crises, and that through the possession of symbols of rebellion, some youth may be recaptured. You know, the guitar magazine Playboy would publish. But I'm a little angry about it, because of the cynicism. This is the same mentality that turned the Rock fan into a demographic, took Rock and Roll away from it's real audience, sanitized it, and caused the Eagles to charge $250 for concert tickets. By embracing the arrogance of wealth, the idea that being rich in of itself makes you a better person than someone who's poor, it encourages the delusion that if you buy an expensive enough guitar, you'll magically be good.

What this magazine lacks is soul. The publishers and editors seem to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. The Bible says it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And the same is true of rock and roll, which is about rebellion, anger and hope, and desperate animal sex with a skanky chick up against a side-alley wall. Rock and Roll isn't the sanitized airbrushed Playboy, it's the down and dirty Hustler.

Still, I'll probably end up buying more issues of this thing. You know, for the bathroom.

Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo.

Thanks for *everything*.
You will be missed.

The Lawyers and Youtube

I noticed, going back to old posts, that many youtube links of music videos I had posted are no longer valid, due to copyright restrictions.

Now, I don't dispute the right of the respective record companies to ask for those videos to be removed from youtube, but I do find it puzzling. Why? Because almost all of those videos were created as promotional material designed to help sell records, and because the record companies allowed (and still allows) MTV to use them free of charge (i.e MTV doesn't have to pay residuals, etc...). The cost of making the videos has been amortized a long time ago.

You'd think that keeping a 20 year old video alive (eg B52's Deadbeat Club, for instance) would continue to keep the songs in peoples minds, resulting in record sales. They don't seem to get that this is free money and advertising for the record companies, because the records are essentially out of print, to use a publishing industry term.

Oracle buys Sun...

I used to work at Sun, and while it has many of the qualities of a large company, a soft spot for that company remains in my heart. When I was growing up, Sun, DEC & Cray were the 3 companies I wanted to work for, since they all built products that put technology into the hands of the people who could use them, rather than the approach taken by IBM. And of the 3, Sun is the last to go.

The Oracle/Sun merger is probably the best fit available, although Oracle is a lot more like IBM, culturally, than people would like to admit. Still, over the last 10 years, Oracle has managed to survive the onslaught of open source and Microsoft with it's profits and pricing model intact, which is an amazing feat.

What the merger means is this: Oracle, like IBM, has over the last few years been moving more and more towards a model of selling turnkey Database systems, that includes the hardware and software, specifically using Linux clusters.

What the Sun acquisition does for them is give them a much broader and stronger systems base upon which to build that strategy. People forget that Sun used to be Oracle's main business partner before and during the dot-com boom, and Sun made billions of dollars selling large Sunfire boxes running Solaris/Oracle as back-ends to websites like Amazon. Moreover, having direct control of Solaris, ZFS and Java can only benefit Oracle.

For the Sun people, knowing that you're building systems primarily for Oracle will help bring a focus and purpose to systems design that I think has been lacking. If Sun innovates, and implements new features on their systems specifically designed to make Oracle installations easier to build, that in turn could spur external demand for their products.

There are a few questions that remain:

1. Will Sun operate as a semi autonomous entity outside of databases ?
2. Will Oracle/Sun continue to service the general IT market
3. Will Oracle/Sun continue their presence in HPC ?
4. How much of the staff, specifically engineering, will Oracle retain ?
5. Will the engineering direction at Sun change dramatically ?
   

Easter Genesis

The song, and the guitarist that compelled me to start to play guitar.

Easter U2.