Cubegeek

The Little PC That Could

I had a dream that the wee Compaq PC that we're going to get for 300 bucks came in about the size of a Day Runner. In fact, it was embedded in a Day Runner and had an orange plastic cover with a velcro strap that kept it closed. The whole thing made perfect sense, because it was not a PC that was downsized, it was a Day Runner that was upgraded.

The first thing I noticed was that it was soft. Its softness made me like it. I held it in my hand and I squeezed it. Then I opened it up, and instead of the cheezy solar powered calculator you usually get in these things, it had a color screen, and it had pages. They were thick plastic pages...

The Cloud Money Quote

The cloud is nothing but the industrialization of any IT supported services.
-- Erich Clementi, General Manager, Enterprise Initiatives @ IBM

I just wanted to say that I see it the way that Clementi sees it. There are new database and messaging technologies that are cheap enough for masses to play in (read social software), but the mainstream of computing is now working towards commodity industrialization. This is rather like the mass production revolution, and the consequences for programmers are very much like they were for craftsmen.

Tradeoff Dimensions

I have encountered an odd and interesting model in my travels. It uses what I call 'tradeoff' dimensions. Imagine a case in which you have a full P&L and BS in your accounts dimensions. Additionally, you have statistical accounts that number in the hundreds. It is possible to configure a model which splits all of the metrics in half - instead of integrating them into a single accounts dimension, you can split them into tradeoff dimensions. You select "none" in one in order to get data from the other.

I am not aware of the particular circumstances under which this design was put together and accepted, but there it is.

Blockbuster vs Netflix

I didn't realize that over the past five years, Netflix has buried Blockbuster. You can now buy Blockbuster for 35 cents a share. Wowl