Once a ravine, now a ditch

I also discovered that Enron experimented with trading in weather and I’m not sure what they did, but its reminiscent of some ideas expressed in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” where he explored the remarkable prescience of the University of Iowa’s Electronic Markets for the prediction of political events, most obviously elections but also other political futures. I read somewhere, during the last general election, that the most effective forecast for the result was the bookmaker’s odds, this must be very disappointing to the polling organisations, but it seems a financial interest sharpens the mind.  …

A visit to the Sun Labs open day(s)

My reason for being in Ca, is to visit the Sun Labs Open House. The day was opened by Bob Sproull, the Labs Director and Greg Papadopolous, Sun’s EVP for R&D and CTO. They both spoke about the goals and accountability of Sun Labs. They look to create new technologies, improve our current technologies or occasionally improve Sun. They are beginning to look at Sun Labs with a venturer’s view and no longer measure the output of white papers, books and conference speeches. Greg Popadopolous said, “these things are better done in Universities”. After the speeches I wandered over to the main building and …

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

I returned to California again and while scrabbling to find a film I hadn’t seen, watched this documentary about the fall of Enron. (I’ve not seen it reviewed in Empire either, but that’s my fault; they gave it 5 stars. ) Well made, very informative, mixing interview with recorded material from both Enron’s corporate archives and the congressional investigating committees. The failings summed up by the ex-trader who states, the Enron tag line was “ask why?”, …

Watching the English

On my way down from Edinburgh, I finished “Watching the English” by Kate Fox. This was recommended to me by Geoff Arnold. The book is bloody funny and so true. Its written by one of Britain’s leading social anthropologists, using her science to observe the English. She has the grace to start her book with a discourse on the “Participant Observer” paradox and manages to be funny about this as well.  The book covers manners, class, the pub, queuing, language and dress, together with some other issues that I can’t remember, but always returns to our humour. …

Evangelising Opensource in Edinburgh

I was stood in for Simon Phipps at www2006 in Edinburgh, and paid Edinburgh a visit. I wrote up my notes on my sun/oracle blog. AS with other posts originally made there, I copied them to this blog in March 2016, but in this case, I have merged them into a single post.  I The conference was opened by John McConnel, Scotland’s first minister who spoke of a Scotland’s e-University, and was followed by Sir David Browne, (Chairman of Motorola) who told an interesting story about mobility and the network, from movable devices, via luggable laptops to today’s phones, although the fashion for Zoolander style tiny phones was probably on the wane by then. His story provoked the though that the critical technology for mobile computing was the development of the portable (and rechargable) battery. …

Food for Thought

I was invited to Martlesham to visit BT’s innovation Lab; there were some inspiring presentations and technologies on display which at the time of posting this article are a bit dated, since this is another post copied from the sun/oracle blog in March 2016, To see the original on Innovation see here, and on WiFI and Health see here. Other posts on the existential nature of networks, intelligent infrastructure, the analogue/digital interface, bio-feedback systems, and telematics, were posted here.  …

Open Source, friend or foe

The Register today, has an article, headlined “US in open source backlash” arguing that the US is a late, slow and distressed adopter of open source compared with Europe and Latin America. This prompted me to write up notes from a BT conference to which we had been invited. The notes were originally published on my sun/oracle blog, and I created this article on the blog as part of the exercise in unifying the blogs in March 2016. The original article looks at comments from MySQL & Google staff, and finishes with a review of Simon Phipps presentation to the meeting which I repeat here. …