Where Motorola Blew It – BusinessWeek
This is straightforward and revealing article about how a company, no matter how dominant at one point, can be quickly left behind as the market changes. Part of being a market leader is that one is exposed to attack from others, especially from the market itself if the whims of customers change.
I walked by someone that was listening to music, publicly, while on his way somewhere. This, unto itself – playing music out loud while walking for all others to hear, in an almost exhibitionist kind of way – is nothing unto itself.
But this time it was via a laptop.
Now, I have listened to music via laptop. I have watched movies via laptop. But I don’t think I’ve seen very often someone listening to music via laptop while walking, with the speakers blaring.
Quick thoughts on my new drobo:
This last bit is extremely frustrating. To find this information, you have to really dig around on the drobo site. I would link to the knowledge base article except that their site is not designed that way – for direct linking. I had to dig around as it was to find a Firewire 800 card that even worked in Vista 64, but now I find out that it won’t achieve those speeds.
USB 2.0 is so far doing okay as my primary drive connection. But I feel that I have been misled by Drobo, to be honest. The quasi-RAID 5/JBOD config is very nice.
More of a review forthcoming…
February 2, 2009 General reviews, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, photography 0 Read more >
Law school study links laptop computer use, student engagement: IU News Room: Indiana University
There is this funny and extremely pervasive impression of laptop usage in law schools. It’s not all faculty, but many consider them to be almost inherently evil and counter productive. Any student using a laptop must be on Facebook, must be surfing the web, etc. And that any student who does any of those things at all is not getting as much out of class as he or she could without a laptop.
Now, in no way do I dispute the possibility – the extreme likelihood, in fact – that students with a laptop in front of them will surf the web, go on facebook, etc. At some point during class. I do maybe once or twice out of my two classes per night (so that’s about 3 hours, FWIW, with 3-4 visits total or so to non-course-related sites…honestly). But just because a student may do that doesn’t mean that all students do it, or that they all do it all the time. In other words, it doesn’t mean that laptops are evil and counter-productive unto themselves.
For only the second time and only in the last few months, here’s a research article indicating that laptops might actually be helpful, specifically in a law school setting. This is a pretty big deal.
The last stop on our cruise to Alaska was to look at the giant Hubbard Glacier, which is easy to access even by large ships. It’s not so big that giant iceberg-sized chunks calve off of it, of course, but it’s still quite impressive.
Ice of course reflects the wavelength of light that hits it, so in color the glacier looks like this mess of black and very bright blue (the sky). The black is the moraine, which is all the little bits of rock that the glacier picks up as it grinds its way towards its end point. Actually, some of those bits are huge – Central Park in NYC was created by a glacier, and there are some serious boulders there.
It was a cold day and no, I didn’t get any especially impressive photos of ice calving, but it was still pretty neat to be that close to the edge of a glacier, after having actually hiked on one by Juneau a few days previous.
Between the reflections on the water and the ice itself, plus the layered look of the mountains behind, I thought converting this one to black and white worked well.
Yesterday, I blogged about how the economic crisis affects universities in a weird way. One of the key differences is that they don’t operate on debt, as far as I know, so the credit freeze hasn’t killed it the way it has companies. Other than hits on endowments, I’m not aware of problems in general. “Just” general liquidity issues. (Then again, universities are all about liquidity, so that is a HUGE problem).
Just recently, Pfizer pulled off a gigantic purchase of its competitor Wyeth, $40 billion or so of which was financed through loans from a number of banks. This was a huge deal because it indicated that banks will loan, it just depends on the recipient. They have confidence in Pfizer, so they went for it.
Well, universities have pretty good tax ratings and most have solid and consistent revenue streams from tuition.
So…why not take out a loan to even out the issues for the next couple of years? Especially for small universities, where the endowment isn’t that big, why not take out $100 million in debt? Or even $500 million?
I’m sure there are lots of reasons why a school would be reluctant and possibly even not allowed. But I’m just wondering…
January 31, 2009 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 2 Read more >
As with just about any financial entity in the country and possibly the world, Santa Clara University has been dealing with the ramifications of the economic crisis that the entire nation is facing right now. Frozen credit markets, liquidity concerns, dissolution of various funds which were the basis of our wealth – they are all on our minds whether we work at a university or a for-profit corporation.
However, something struck me while walking into work today. While there is a liquidity concern here and probably at most universities (all are at least mostly tuition-based, though the percentages vary), the fact is that we don’t utilize debt to fund our operations. A university uses cash assets in the form of tuition income, then a percentage of the return from the endowment. Now, if the endowment loses money – as almost all have in the last several months (Harvard’s endowment was nailed for $8 billion as of early December) – a major problem is a-brewing. But the credit freeze itself, which has massively hit corporations doesn’t, it seem, have much of an impact on schools themselves. We just don’t rely on debt to finance things.
NB – I’m not sure if we make much use of the commercial paper market, but I didn’t hear anything about it (and we heard a lot about a lot of things) so I’m thinking not.
January 30, 2009 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 1 Read more >
So if Murphy’s law states that “if it can go wrong, it will,” then is his cousin the one that states “if things could possibly be incredibly frustrating, they will be?”
There are a lot of conferences every year, for all kinds of fields. In academia, there are quite a few, too, such that overlapping or back-to-back situations happen a lot. On the other hand, for the most part, I notice that conferences of the same type don’t usually happen at the same time. So technical conferences – how to manage a lab, stuff like that – are in early summer, then maybe late summer, then maybe in the fall. Management conferences – the big one in Educause – is in the fall, as well. But people who go to Educause are not usually the ones going to the technical conferences.
However, right now I am facing a situation where the Law School Admissions Council – LSAC – has started a new, senior IT-related conference called ESCON (electronic services conference) and is actually significant subsidizing attendance. It’s a big move on their part. This is law school specific, though, yet it’s also leadership/management related. Lots of admissions officers will be there, too, but part of the goal is to get the two groups together.
Now, that is from April 1-3. Of course, as Murphy’s Cousin’s Law dictates, while usually management conferences are going to be spread out, the ACM SIGUCCS Spring Management Symposium, which is designed for those aspiring to be higher-level managers/CIOs/etc, runs from March 30-April 1. I have applied for a grant to attend – again, very generous and I would be incredibly grateful if I were selected.
But…c’mon. Seriously? One ends on April 1 and the other begins the same day? And I don’t find out about the SIGUCCS grant until February but I book airfare for the ESCON now, which means I might leave SIGUCCS a day early, fly back to the San Francisco area, then basically meet my wife at the airport to change the contents of my luggage and jump on a plane to fly back to the eastern time zone for the ESCON. And obviously if I get the grant I will go to both (I also have been wanting to go to the management symposium for a while now).
And yes, both are in a the eastern time zone, so I have to factor in minor jet lag, too.
Sigh.
My wife composed this and asked me to pose while I was standing on this rock taking all these photos (1 & 2) of the sunset at Morro Bay.
I remember that the first photo she took I had my head at this weird angle that, while natural in terms of my own comfort, looked weird. So I did this somewhat exaggerated “turkey neck” pose to get myself looking like I was gazing off into the distance. The wistful, lonely photographer. Staring at the moon at sunset. Ah, so poetic.
My wife did a great shot, perhaps the favorite one of myself. Of course, I’m not sure if it’s saying something that my favorite shot of myself is a silhouette…
A little while ago, I wrote a short article on the drobo, from Digital Robotics (as compared to all those analog ones floating around), and how I was debating switching my “redundant mass storage” options.
The short story is that so far, I’ve had a server on a local gigabit network where I have a RAID 5 array (which uses 4 drives and gives me the storage equivalent of 3 of them, and any 1 of them can die and I’m okay. All drives have to be the same). Anytime I want to upgrade I have to replace all 4 of them, which is a pain. At the least, I have a lot of drives I don’t need right away (I mean, I can use an extra drive now and then but 4 all at once?).
A Drobo unit has a few advantages. First, it gives the best of JBOD (just a bunch of discs, which appears as one big disc) with RAID 5 (some form of redundancy where one drive can fail and it’s okay). Second, it connects directly to our computer (though there is a network interface unit that is available separately) so I don’t have to push over a network.
The problem was cost – it was $500 new, then I could get a $50 rebate. But for $450, with the parts I have from previous computers I’ve built, I could basically spent about $450 and have 4 hard drives, whereas I would be buying the Drobo, 4 hard drives, and a Firewire 800 card for my computer. All told about $800-900.
Eventually, though, I decided the benefits were worth it. First, I can just slap drives in there as I want. Yes, I decided to buy new 1TB drives, but I “only” bought three and over time as they become full, when the new…1.5, 2, or even 3TB drives become available I can stick one of those in there and I have a whole lot more storage. I don’t have to buy all 3TB drives and then have all these extra drives lying around. Second, even though most reports indicate that firewire 800 cards on Vista 64 bit only run at about Firewire 400 speeds, that’s still pretty fast, and fast enough for me. Afterall, people do full video editing with Firewire 400 external hard drives.
Also, it’s one less computer under my desk, and I can take my server and actually put it in someone else’s apartment and it becomes my remote backup. I could do this with a new local machine, too, but each time I run out of storage on the array I’d have to buy _2_ sets of new drives. Overtime it makes sense.
FWIW, I’m already at 1.7TB of storage for just my photos. I am well into “big storage” range.
