Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the
SCADA system security in the internet era
This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere. Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies
Cleantech and history of software
I’m on my way to Linz, Austria to participate in a panel at an event called Cleantech Venture Forum. We’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking at ways to save power in data centers and mini-data centers
Patent trolling and guilty knowledge
Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing
US Elections and startup/small-business economics
I’m surprised that John McCain’s proposal to make health insurance benefits taxable has not received more notice. For a startup, cash is expensive and hard to find and it is a tremendous handicap for US startups that we have toÂ
Meaning of concurrent programs and IP
Most of the new draft of the Concurrent Programs paper has to do with trying to specify problems and solutions in synchronization via an atomic “compare and swap” operation. Even these operations are surprisingly complicated once put under the microscope
clouds versus pcs
George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But,
linux kernel
From LinuxDevices Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers, working for more than 100 corporations. An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day. A new kernel is released approximately every
who should control the internets
Op-ed in the NYTimes from Damian Kulash Jr. of Ok-Go We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the
end to end design versus BOM design
Grossly simplifying, some products are Bill of Materials (BOM) products and some are Designed products. BOM products come to market via a process of generating a parts list and then integrating. In place of designers, BOM products have buyers and