"movers and shakers" entries
@TED: Best of Day 1
If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman's ace stewardship. Al Gore's talk about global warming turned…
Multitouch and Minority Report
I'm amazed at how quickly multitouch has spread into the mainsream. In 2006, Jeff Han demoed multitouch at ETech and we all thought "wow! Minority Report come true!". Just two years later, his company was powering multitouch analysis of Super Tuesday and companies like Microsoft and Apple have consumer multitouch products. PlayMotion and GestureTek have gestural interfaces companies can buy…
R.E.M., Open Source, and Staying Alive When an Industry Shifts
Over the weekend, Nat posted "Artistic License 2.0 and … REM?!" which noted that the veteran rock'n'roll band was releasing its new video under an open license (if not in an open format). It's good to see an old band learn a new trick, and it suggests what those in the music industry might do if they want to have…
I'm at Davos, but not blogging it
However, the Wall Street Journal is doing a great job of covering the World Economic Forum on their blog, The Daily Davos. (I don't know how they do it. I certainly don't have time.) Here are a couple of their posts: Soros: Free for All Fallout Requires Finance Sheriff. Legendary financier George Soros (who I'm looking forward to meeting…
Congrats to Yossi Vardi
I was tickled to read the Economist's profile of Yossi Vardi. Yossi is a Foo Camp regular and long-time O'Reilly friend, and it's great to see him recognized like this. Born in 1942 in Palestine, Mr Vardi started his career in fields that would be called low-tech today. At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development…
Message from the Web
If you haven't read Tim Bray's "Message from the Web", take a few minutes to do so now. He spoke at a conference working on an XML schema for accountants, and must have shaken things up with his brief but eloquent description of the web's sensibilities. It's already being cited by the likes of Sam Ruby, deservedly so. I need…
Nice Warren Buffet interview
I just read some great comments by Warren Buffet from a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Whatever your politics, you have to appreciate the thoughtful responses of the "Sage of Omaha," so different from the usual political blather. Some tidbits, from notes taken at the event by Nick Nejad at Rational Angle: Q: "Buffett, why are you a Democrat?" A: I…
Fortune interview with Saul Griffith
Fortune has a very nice interview with Saul Griffith (see previous Radar profile), which, for the first time, discloses a bit about what his company Makani Power, is up to: "Its plans are closely held, but anyone looking for clues should see Griffith tearing up San Francisco Bay, sailboat racing with catamarans powered by giant kites. 'We can outrun…
Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley
A tribute to honor Jim Gray will be held on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley. The general session is open to all, followed by a technical session reviewing a small fraction of Jim’s lasting contributions. Registration is required to attend the technical session. General Session Program 9:00am – 10:30am, Zellerbach Hall Opening Remarks – Joe Hellerstein A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss – Pauline Boss The Search Effort – Mike Olson Jim’s Impact on Berkeley – Mike Harrison Jim as a Mentor: Colleagues – Pat Helland Jim as a Mentor: Faculty and Students – Ed Lazowska Why Jim Got the Turing Award – Mike Stonebraker Jim’s Contributions to Industry I – David Vaskevitch Jim’s Contributions to Industry II – Rick Rashid Technical Session Program 11:00am – 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Registration is required) IBM/Transaction Processing – Bruce Lindsay Tandem/Fault Tolerance – Development & Effect of TPC/A Benchmark – David DeWitt DEC, Architecture, Memex and More – Gordon Bell Writing the Transaction Processing book: “Is There Life After Transaction Processing?”
Sun's counter-attack on NetApp and the defense of free software…
We’re left with the following: we’re unwilling to retract innovation from the free software community, and we can’t tolerate an encumbrance that limits ZFS’s value – to our customers, the community at large, or Sun’s shareholders…. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license – on which Network Appliance was started…. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform (in specific, The Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent initiative), and to the legal defense of free software innovators. We will continue to fund the aggressive reexamination of spurious patents used against the community (which we’ve been doing behind the scenes on behalf of several open source innovators).