Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Someone tell this machine I'm not a machine

I realized I haven't posted anything on this blog in a while. Been busy with work and personal stuff. Also the "i" part of my iPhone touchscreen wasn't working for a long time so writing a blog post was not all that easy. I usually do rough drafts on the iPhone in my spare time and edit them later. Without the rough drafts I can't be motivated to do it. Anyway:


After the vicious never ending election cycle I always like to check out between election day and inauguration day. Fatigue becomes a factor. So far the transition seems to be going very well. It seems both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives are upset at Obama right now so we must be getting this thing just about perfect. Neither one of those groups has much business setting policy in this country anymore. I consider myself a liberal but the extreme left is just as dangerous and disgusting as the extreme right in most cases.

Clinton at State is obviously a good move. She knows how to play hardball. She proved in the general she was willing to be loyal to Obama and be a good solider. Since there was enough disagreement between Obama & Clinton on health policy I think it probably makes a lot of sense to keep her away from that business.

Keeping Gates on is a brilliant move. It's dangerous to replace a guy who has actually managed some level of success in Iraq with someone (anyone) who might be wanting to shake things up. We can't really just wash our hands of Iraq at this point. We're involved, the exit strategy has to work. The most important thing is we have a President elect who actually wants to leave. Gates can figure out the details.

I'm a big fan of Richardson so I'm happy to see he's on board. We've got the Democratic all-star team going here.

I wanted to see Kerry involved in this administration but we've got a lot of battles to fight in the Senate and we definitely need him there right now. His experience in actually getting laws pasted is going to be hugely helpful.


On the auto bail out: Pretty much gotta do it. We've bailed out other economies before (Mexico, Japan) and it worked out in the long run. We just can't lose all those jobs. I intensely dislike American cars so I have no interest in seeing the US auto industry continue to exist from a sentimental standpoint. I just think at this time we can't afford to see them go under. If we really push modern designs, electric, hybrid, hydro, etc we might even be able to see the US auto industry really rebound in the next decade. This deal could actually end up making the country some good money. The alternative is to print a fucking ton of unemployment checks and, eventually, welfare checks for all these people who lose their jobs. If we're going to be spending the money anyway I would rather see them stay at work and at least try to get the US auto industry back on track.


Not much happening in the world of technology lately. I've been reading about this interesting Google project to make x86 native code run as a browser plugin. It's still very early but it really opens a lot of doors. We don't really have anything right now that could deliver processing intensive applications locally. I'm not really sold x86 is the ultimate solution but it's a really good intermediate step. I can imagine a world where a site like YouTube might have a x86 VM plugin that boots a minimal Linux install and does all your video encoding locally using ffmpeg with absolutely no porting required by developers. The options are really endless. Security is a concern but hypervisors are fundamentally sound in terms of security. I think if they're doing it right the security concerns are probably not a huge factor. No matter what it can hardly be any more destructive than Active X or even malicious JavaScript.

Message to RIM: Stick with what you do best. The iPhone has you guys beat. The BBOS is ancient. Your core customers are happy with the product you're offering. What are you really going to gain making all these lame iPhone like devices? Either do it right or don't do it at all. There's a huge market of people happy with traditional BBs. Don't under estimate their loyalty.


That is all.

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