Autopsis

IBM and Creative Destruction

January 14, 2010 – 01:10

One of the fundamental aspects of successful capitalism is the principal of creative destruction. In a capitalist system, businesses that are hampered with flawed business models, substandard management, unproductive labor or changing markets, among other things, pass away in a sometimes agonizing fit of destruction. New businesses, with a better take on what the market is willing to buy on an ongoing basis and how to produce that profitably, spring up and thrive. It’s the business version of earth to earth, dust to dust and the circle of life.

Even though we all know this story and can intellectually recognize that it is a required component to make a capitalistic economic system work, when push comes to shove, or more realistically, padlocks come to factory gates, things get a lot tougher. When long-standing, treasured companies die, such as Maytag, it is traumatic, especially for the local communities.

If they are big enough or politically well connected, governments sometimes step in and prop up dying businesses. In the last year we’ve seen multiple examples of this in vehicle manufacturing, insurance, financial services and banking. But even while entire economies are distorted by artificial means, the market keeps changing and creative destruction keeps happening.

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Tags: IBM, innovation, invention, Media, patents, technology, telecoms

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Doing It For Free

January 10, 2010 – 19:27

 

“If they didn’t pay me, I’d do this for free.” – Harry Cabluck

Have you ever had a job in your life where you felt like that? Have you ever invested your time and energy into a career where you literally couldn’t wait to get up in the morning?

Few people have that opportunity. I feel very fortunate that I’ve had more than one.

Many people get exposed to a job early in life and do some variation of that same job the rest of their lives, especially in the trades. Others pick a college major at age 18 or 19 for reasons that often have little to do with their interests, skills or abilities and more to do with factors related to friends or romantic pursuits. They end up with a degree unrelated to their interests or stuck in that career track for the rest of their lives. Others, especially in times like these, take any job that’s available, and as long as the paychecks clear the bank, they stick to it. Others get on a job or career track they don’t intend to pursue for a lifetime but are subsequently locked in by responsibilities such as loans, marriage, mortgages, and children.

In all these cases, it is not unusual for people to wake up one day and realize they are unhappy in their jobs and careers, but feel trapped there due to age, education or skills, unable to seek any alternatives because the barriers to change are too high.

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Tags: careers, jobs, life choices, life priorities

Posted in Business, Photography | 6 Comments »

Intro to Geopolitics – Buffer States

January 5, 2010 – 21:16

For those who consider most of my posts relating to geopolitics too arcane, I offer the following:

Source: comics.com

Strip: Pearls Before Swine by by Stephan Pastis

Tags: buffer state, Geopolitics

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They Still Can’t

December 30, 2009 – 22:25

This post is available as a PDF file here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/theystillcant.pdf

30 December 2009

In August of 2002 I endured a personal challenge. At the time, I was sitting on a bar stool at a friend’s house in my Iowa home town listening to a classmate prattle on about 9/11 and all of America’s associated failings and shortcomings. He was a friend of mine, and we’d spent time with him, his wife and kids, but that didn’t change the fact that he knew just about zero regarding the subjects he was sanctimoniously preaching about. My challenge was that I did—in detail. But I couldn’t talk about it.

Consequently, I had to sit there until I couldn’t take it any longer. Wallowing in my lack of available candor, I resorted to an alcohol fueled, not-so-brilliant rejoinder along the lines of “You’re full it.” Only I didn’t say “it.”

We are likely to see a similar blast of ill-informed, half-informed and outright ignorant rants about America’s failings and shortcomings related to this year’s Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a U.S. bound passenger jet. Just as with my classmate’s ill-informed passion without supporting knowledge and understanding, these rants, attacks and assertions will likely do more harm than good and simply degenerate into yet more useless partisan sewage.

The rants will center on the processes that allowed a man whose own father had reported as a radicalized Islamist to buy a ticket with cash and check in with only a backpack and yet not receive secondary pre-boarding security screening. The assertions will center on the databases where the information about terrorists is stored and made available to all relevant U.S. security agencies and organizations. The challenge is that the failures in this case are not about process or technology, they are about humans and human behavior.

A month after 9/11, I wrote in my industry magazine column a call to action to create the information systems that can (and, when properly implemented, do) identify terrorists within the available data sets in our society. That column, “We Can,” became a rallying cry in the data management industry, and was used as a template and an inspiration for many systems that followed, including some involved in this situation.

A year later I wrote a follow-up column titled “They Can’t,” which mourned the year lost to U.S. agency bureaucratic infighting, turf wars and the agencies and departments willful ignoring of simple, basic lessons that the data professionals in my industry had learned long before. Sadly, some of those basic lessons cited in that 2003 column are still at work today, six years later, in this attempted bombing.

In particular, two examples still ring true today. First, as in John Poindexter’s disastrous Total Information Access (TIA) initiative, there is very little demonstrated understanding of how the world works in the way today’s systems are implemented. Second, as in Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s comment, “It’s about protecting their turf and their jobs. That runs 180 degrees counter to what this nation needs at this moment.”

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Tags: Department of State, DHS, FBI, Islamists, National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Nigeria, terrorism, Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), terrorists

Posted in Geopolitics, Sci / Tech, US Politics | 10 Comments »

The Seekers – 2009

December 21, 2009 – 23:24

Back in 2004 I wrote a holiday message about our Christmas tree titled The Seekers.

It turned out to be one of the most popular essays of that era. 

We put up a Christmas tree last week for the first time since then. It was amazing to realize it had been five years since we’d either been in town or had a home to place a tree in.

This year’s Christmas tree resembles the tree in The Seekers. The only difference is that we’ve since collected so many objects from additional places around the world, there is no longer room for any balls, only lights and ornaments.

Otherwise, the story remains the same. You can read it here: http://www.hackneys.com/travel/seekers-12.pdf

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Tags: Christmas, Christmas tree, ornaments, The Seekers

Posted in Cultures, Religion, Travel | 1 Comment »

My World View

December 21, 2009 – 23:12

This essay is available in PDF form here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/myworldview.pdf

 

“Your world view is, well, wrong.”

Those were the last words I ever heard from a guy I’d been friends with for more than 30 years.

That was back in late 2004. At the time, I was sitting in Beijing, China, and had recently posted an essay about China and its rise to world prominence, if not domination.

My erstwhile friend was on the opposite side of the world, and as far as I knew, had never even been to China. But even though he’d never been there, and his chief claim to a world view was that he occasionally read both the USA Today and the New York Times, he was absolutely certain of one thing: my world view, formed by spending weeks to months in the places I wrote about, was, well, wrong. He was very, very sure of that fact.

This month, almost exactly five years later, a poll was released by the Wall Street Journal and NBC. The poll showed that for the first time, a sample of the American people believed a nation other than the United States would be the world’s leading nation. That nation is China.

Is this my opportunity to smugly gloat, in sanctimonious vindication, that I was right? While I admit that there have been times in the last six years I’ve been convinced that absolutely no one was listening, even to the point of threatening to name our sailboat the Cassandra, I don’t think that’s a healthy approach. 

Instead, I think this is an opportunity to recognize that the American public is starting to wake up to the fact that the future that lies ahead, along with its opportunities and challenges, is in a vastly different geopolitical and economic context than they were for our parents’ generation or for ours.

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Tags: foreign debt, foreign oil, Geopolitics, ranking, US Politics, US ranking

Posted in Cultures, Geopolitics, Outside the Fishbowl, US Politics | No Comments »

Smartphones: The Decision

December 15, 2009 – 04:52

Seven months and seven days ago, I asked some friends and relatives for input on smartphones, specifically iPhone vs. Blackberry.

Not seeing any need to rush into this, I took my time before committing. I especially felt there was no need to rush into this since when you’ve been away for a while and you come back here, everyone looks very, ummm, tethered to their smartphones.

Nonetheless, I could see that given we were going to be here for a while, I might as well jump in, especially considering it would help me to evaluate opportunities for a few business models I was considering.

The first trigger point was when Steph was unpacking her office stuff out of storage and found her old Palm. She was giddy, since she was looking for a way to have her calendar with her while she was out of the house. Instead of either a) installing and supporting the LG application for her laptop that would synch her ancient cell phone to Outlook, or b) installing and supporting the ancient Palm application that would synch her equally ancient Palm, I chose c) and bought her an iPhone, which, since it’s from Apple, doesn’t require any support and never fails. Ever. At least that’s what I told her.

It was all enlightened self interest. It would allow me to play around with the iPhone OS and apps, as well as have one less thing to support in her information and productivity environment. Admittedly, that would be along the lines of one less grain of sand on the beach, but every little bit helps when it comes to supporting Steph and her digital domain.

But for me, after getting her iPhone set up and working with it a bit, I was still undecided. I also played around with a few Blackberries of friends, relatives and at the Verizon store.

While doing research on the mobile market in general, it became clear that the iPhone market was stuffed with existing applications and business models. If not mature, it was certainly crowded.

The same can be said for the Blackberry market: very robust, very mature, very stable.

So both of these options looked more than viable from the smartphone standpoint, but not very exciting in the market segment upside department.

Both were great devices, enthusiastically, even fervently supported by their patrons. OK, yes, some iPhone owners do cross the line into full-on, post-Kool-Aid, cult levels of rabid to violent defensiveness. Strand Consult, in a recent analyst report, even compares fervent Apple defenders, including some of the press, to Stockholm Syndrome hostages. But that didn’t put me completely off of the iPhone because I personally know several iPhone users who do not foam at the mouth. Most of the time.

In the end, my bottom line evaluation was:

• iPhone – great UI, good to very good ease of use, more apps that you could ever wade through, ubiquitous accessories, and it includes the fruit logo guaranteed to gain you acceptance in certain quarters.
• Blackberry – rock solid OS, secure platform, badge of honor in any corporate meeting room, fledgling app store and the best physical I/O device in the business (depending on the model).

 

Touch decision. But I had to choose one or the other.

So, my decision was: neither.

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Tags: Android, droid, iPhone, LTE, mobile, WiMax

Posted in Business, Gear, Sci / Tech | No Comments »

Thoughts on Obama’s Peace Prize Speech

December 10, 2009 – 17:47

U.S. President Barack Obama presented his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, earlier today.

The headline you will read in the mass media regarding the speech will likely be some variation of “Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize.”

The press will be doing its self-anointed job of distilling the events of the day down to the lowest common denominator. In the meantime, most of what happened will be unreported or edited out in a race to the bottom, in search of something simple enough they think the great unwashed masses can understand.

In reality, U.S. President Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize is much more complex than what you will likely see reported. And while I would not lower myself to classify it as beyond the reach of many news celebrities who populate the media, I will state categorically that its various aspects, messages and subtleties are not elements that they get paid to pay attention to or promote.

While delivered in an international setting and containing many messages to that international audience, Obama’s speech was primarily domestic in nature, positioning him as a pragmatic realist, a staunch defender of freedom and America, and a true war time president in the truest sense of the phrase. The purposes of this positioning include:
• Offset his left/liberal/progressive positioning in the domestic political spectrum
• Gain favor with moderate Democrats and Republicans who are required to support his Afghanistan campaign
• Buy domestic political cover for first term Democrat representatives and others politically exposed by his domestic policies in the upcoming 2010 congressional elections

While delivering these domestic investments, the speech also included specific messages for the international audience, in this case, the Western Europeans. The Western Europeans form the core of the NATO alliance and thus are desperately needed in NATO’s first foreign war, Afghanistan. In addition, the Europeans function as gatekeepers for support in the U.N., in this case specifically related to upcoming attempts to impose additional sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

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Tags: geopolotics, Iran, NATO, Obama, peace prize, sanctions, western europe

Posted in Geopolitics, US Politics | 6 Comments »

The Stadium

December 6, 2009 – 20:21

In traveling through 43 countries across six continents, we’ve seen quite a few ancient stadiums. From Rome’s definitive Coliseum to lesser known examples scattered around the world, we’ve explored many.

All share a sense of grandeur that matches the contests staged there, and as you wander about the stones, if you are open to it, you can hear the echoes of long-ago cheers and smell the musk of human striving.

I had those thoughts as I approached a coliseum last night. It too, rose above the surrounding terrain like a temple of glory.

 

(click photo to view larger image)

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Posted in Cultures, Travel | 8 Comments »

CERN and Doors to Other Dimensions

November 20, 2009 – 14:47

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is probably best known as the birthplace of the world wide web, CERN being the then employer of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, the markup language used to create web pages. Less known, at least outside Europe and physics nerd circles, is that CERN is also home to the world’s largest and most expensive (publicly known) machine, the LHC (large hadron collider).

After about a year lost due to a blowout of the superfluid liquid helium used to cool the 26.659 kilometer / 16.565 mile ring down to near absolute zero, the LHC is coming back online.

CERN is slowly building back up to full speed collisions of hadrons, typically either protons or lead ions. The 9,300 magnets and the vacuum in the ring, which CERN claims to be emptier and colder than inter-stellar space, enables two streams of particles to be accelerated to 99.9999991% of light speed and then slammed into each other.

At full speed, each of the two streams is equal to the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier underway, so you can see why a breech in containment would be worthy of concern and a lengthy shutdown to ensure all the cords are plugged and lock washers tight.

CERN is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary on the 3rd and 4th of December, and they plan to be back up to limited power 450 giga-electron-volt collisions by then, nicely coinciding with the anniversary.

The first full power stream tests are scheduled for this coming Saturday, so if your lights dim you’ll know they exceeded the LHC’s normal 120 megawatt electrical load. If you are not familiar with megawatts, that’s about equal to a stack of car batteries a few miles high, or maybe it’s enough to circle the earth, I always forget to carry the one…

Once they get it up and running, the various experiments will produce about 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) a year of data. If you are not familiar with petabytes, that’s way more data than will fit on your keychain flash drive.

CERN is an interesting mix of the near mystical and the mundane. You’ve got to love a place that is getting close to recreating conditions near the big bang and offers such diverse seminars as:

• Trends in Gaseous Detectors
• Gravitational condensate stars & dark energy
• Thermodynamics and kinetics of brownian molecular motors and pumps
• Preparing for Retirement

And the guys there are not without humor. For instance, Sergio Bertolucci, Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, said last week that the “Machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or ‘unknown unknowns’ – for instance ‘an extra dimension.’ Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.”

Dr Mike Lamont, also of CERN, confirmed this, “We’re hoping to see supersymmetry and extra dimensions.”

Dr Bertolucci later confirmed that yes indeed, there would be an “open door”, but that even with the power of the LHC at his disposal he would only be able to hold it open “a very tiny lapse of time, 10 -26 seconds (that’s 10 to the minus 26th power), [but] during that infinitesimal amount of time we would be able to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.

“Of course, after this tiny moment the door would again shut, bringing us back to our ‘normal’ four dimensional world … It would be a major leap in our vision of Nature, although of no practical use (for the time being, at least). And of course [there would be] no risk to the stability of our world.”

Ha! What a laugh. These guys are a hoot. Opening doors to other dimensions. Snort.

They are kidding, right?

Sources:
The Register
CERN

CERN public web site: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
CERN public FAQ: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Facts-en.html
CERN PDF full FAQ: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1165534…09-003-Eng.pdf

Portal into the good stuff at CERN: http://www.lhcportal.com/

The Register Physics section: http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/physics/

I swear this is the caption provided by CERN for this photo: Engineers checking the electronics of the cryogenic instrumentation under a dipole magnet.

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