Usually I’m pretty “anti-law”. That is, more laws are not good – especially around software. However, with more and more scams coming online, there ought to be a law which is quite simple. If you allow someone to signup for a recurring-billing product online, you must also provide a simple way for that user to cancel the service online. Like most of us, I accidentally got sucked into one; and now I can’t get out. I knew I was treading on thin ice when I signed up, and now I am really regretting it.
Category: Editorial
Windows XP and the 1GB limit
Every morning, when I come into work and login to my machine with 3GB of RAM running windows XP, I start waiting. Each application takes 30-40 seconds (literally!) to “come back to life” as I try to use it. Each one slowly swaps in.
What is going on? I’m only using 1GB of ram in my applications, with 2GB of free memory. I left the computer on, and idle. There are no background file scanners, background indexers, or other software running on the machine.
The answer is the Windows XP 1GB limit. It’s not in the documentation from Microsoft, but XP has a fundamental limit that it can’t use more than 1GB of RAM without swapping. It was designed in 1998 when the average computer had about 128MB of RAM. So, when memory use goes above 256MB of RAM, it automatically starts paging out, assuming you will soon run out of memory. Unfortunately, it does this without checking how much free RAM you have, which is the cause of this slowness.
A second issue is the IBM large-memory DRAM patent. The patent has a claim on software algorithms that concurrently access more than 1GB of data within any 24 hour period. To avoid paying royalties on this patent, Windows intentionally tries to not use the additional RAM in your system.
A 3rd reason my machine is slow in the morning is because of Microsoft’s energy-saving memory technology. It turns out that using fewer RAM slots in your system will significantly reduce the power consumption inside your PC. So the software is optimized to try to contain all the in-use memory to the first RAM slot. Unfortunately this leads to a fragmentation issue much like a disk that needs defragmenting; because it takes longer for the machine to lookup the larger RAM addresses than the lower ones.
Lastly, Microsoft tries to keep a significant amount of RAM free in case you try to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. Flight Simulator, being an early app to consume large amounts of memory, acquired an early license from IBM on the RAM patent when it was cheap, and also is a showcase of Microsoft Technology. So, it turns out that if you run Flight Simulator, it will startup extremely fast, and use the remaining RAM in my system. Unfortunately, I don’t play flight simulator, so I can’t access that memory.
There are probably other causes of the Windows XP 1GB limit. Anyone want to share?
The DMCA is Good. Mark Cuban is Wrong.
Marc continues his anti-Google/Youtube arguments (see also, and also, and also). He is so upset that his earlier predictions were wrong, that he can’t admit his error. Overall, Mark claims that what Youtube is doing is illegal. But, he’s talking through both sides of his mouth.
The fact is that Youtube is not breaking the law. There is a law, called the DMCA, which specifically says that online service providers are not liable if their users upload copyrighted materials as long as the service provider promptly removes content when requested by the copyright holder. This is exactly what Youtube does, and it is legal. It’s the law.
You may not like the DMCA, but that is the law. It’s legal, and there is no debate about it.
Marc says that Youtube ought to be able to recognize which material is copyrighted as it is posted, and not allow the post to occur in the first place. That might be doable, or that might not, (I don’t think it is realistic, and Marc has yet to propose an answer to that) but that is not relevant anyway. The law has very clearly specified how service providers must deal with copyrighted content, and YouTube obeys the law.
Marc knows this, stating that Youtube is “invoking Safe Harbor”. There is no “invoking” here. The law is clear about what service providers should do. So how can he claim that this is illegal? He obviously knows it is not. He is just jealous or irrational or something.
Marc – if you don’t like the law, go write to your congressman. Or better yet, get him a hooker and season tickets to the Mavs, and get him to change the law. Keep in mind, however, that if you eliminate DMCA, you’ll not only take down YouTube, but you’ll take down MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and hundreds of other sites. The DMCA exists for a reason – and the DMCA allows most of us that don’t download or upload copyrighted content still be able to benefit from a host of online services that otherwise couldn’t exist because they’d get sued to smithereens.
John Chow’s AGLOCO
John Chow is aggressively promoting Agloco. John is a smart guy. But should you get in on Agloco too? Should you use their viewbar? Probably not. The only thing you’ll accomplish by using the viewbar is to help John Chow get rich!
Agloco seems like a neat idea. Agloco aggregates of advertising, referral and affiliate fees generated by their “Viewbar” (yet unreleased), and then shares back 90% of that to their users.
But what is in it for you? Well, if you are John Chow and have the ability to build a large network of referred users, you might be able to bring in some decent cash. But if you are an individual, why would you use this Viewbar? Maybe you have a secret crush on John Chow and you just want to help him get rich. That’s fair. Or maybe you’ll like the viewbar and don’t care (I doubt it, people generally don’t like more advertisements – but it isn’t released yet and maybe they have a really cool product). But what will your cut of their profits be? Let’s estimate.
Let’s say the average Agloco user spends $250 per year online. And lets assume that Agloco is somehow able to tap into half of it. And, lets assume that Agloco manages to negotiate a very generous 10% commission on those sales. That means that on average, a user will be worth about $11.25. If you trust Agloco, you believe them when they say they’ll pay out 90% of revenues. That means each user should get a monthly check for $0.84 ($250*.5*.1/12)! Not bad! But, don’t forget that your contribution will be shared with up to 4 people that referred you (like John Chow). After splitting it 5 ways, your check is now reduced to $0.17 per month.
Next, lets look at advertising based models. Let’s say the average user views 10 pages per day, and that Agloco gets $10CPM for it’s page views. That means that each user generates about $0.10 per day. By the time you take out overhead and divide it through, you might generate $0.54 per month.
The Agloco fanatics will probably try to convince you that they’ll somehow generate more per user. Maybe they will. Say they magically double, triple, or heck, even get 10 times more than what I estimated. That means you’ll get $1.70 per month or $5.40. But that’s only if they do 10x better than what we seems to be a realistic estimate.
For Agloco, of course, this is a great business. They make 10% of the whole deal. If they amass a sizeable user base, they’ll generate solid cash.
And even for John Chow, this is still a good deal. John has the ability to sign up 5000 or more users. 5000 * $0.17 = $800/mo, which is decent money.
But for you – is the extra advertising and junk on your desktop really worth John Chow getting rich and your $0.17?
No thanks!
Note: John references this completely bogus report that looks well done, but provides zero facts to support it’s hopelessly optimistic and unsubstantiated claims. (He estimates Agloco could generate $30 or more per user, but it is completely made up!)
No Single Drop
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
No single driver believes he is to blame for the traffic.
No single polluter believes she is to blame for global warming.
No single spammer believes he is to blame for ruining e-mail.
No single politician believes she is to blame for our tax system.
No single litterbug believes he is to blame for the mess.
No single lawyer believes she is to blame for frivolous lawsuits.
No single employee believes he is to blame for the quarterly loss.
No single American believes she is to blame for child labor in China.
Correlation between Race and South Bay API Scores
If you’ve shopped for houses in the South Bay, and area schools have been an important factor, then you’ve probably noticed an interesting trend. Areas with good schools have lots of Asians (Cupertino). Areas with bad schools have lots of Hispanics (San Jose). And, even within a single city, you’ll find one side of the city with poor schools and a high concentration of Hispanics, while the other side of the city will have top-rated schools and few Hispanics (Sunnyvale).
Let’s look at the data.
I used API scores and enrollment figures from the CA Department of Education for my data. I didn’t use all schools – I just used some schools where I was interested in – Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Campbell, and San Jose. There are 85 schools in my data, and the exact details can be found in this spreadsheet.
If we look at the API score trend for Hispanics (figure 1). The line shows that as the % of Hispanic students goes down, the API scores generally go up. The linear trend line for this data has a R-squared value of .7047. I’m an amateur statistician, but I do know that R-squared represents the correlation coefficient; a linear line, for example, should have a R-squared value of 1. So plot does seem to demonstrate a correlation.
Keep in mind what statisticians know very well – a proof of correlation is absolutely not a proof of causation.
So perhaps the API score trends are not related too poorly performing Hispanics, but rather because of the percentage of higher performing Asian students. The second graph shows the effect of Asians as a percentage for a school’s API score. Here, we see a mirror image of the Hispanic line, where a larger Asian population does seem to indicate a higher API score. The R-squared value is .6461, so there is slightly less correlation of Asians to API score than there is for Hispanics to API score.
Lastly, we must consider the possible correlation of Whites to API scores, and here we see a very messy plot (Figure 3). The R-squared value for Whites is 0.0204. This is a very low value and shows that for this set of data, there is basically no correlation between the % of white students and API score. Interesting!
Draw your own conclusions. I’m certain that better mathematicians than me can make Swiss cheese of my analysis.
Google and You
If you live in the bay area, and you are a software engineer, there are only two good choices about where to work.
Either you:
1) Start your own company and work for yourself
2) Work at Google
Google is a phenominal place to work. The founders are engineers, and they care about engineers. More importantly, they care about our users. And despite their successes, they are not changing. These guys want to make great software that delights users. It’s so simple, and makes so much sense, and yet it is for some reason very unheard of. Usually, after companies are successful, they move into “market domination”, sales and marketing mode. Google hasn’t done that. It just wants to keep doing simple stuff that delights users. Is Google fast enough? Nope. Is it relevant enough? Nope.
I’ve worked for lots of other companies. Aside from HP and Microsoft, my past 10 years have been spent working at startups. And, I’ve never been at a startup that failed (4-for-4, yeah!) But, despite success at startups, there is no doubt in my mind that Google is better than all of them – combined.
Here is why you should work at Google.
1) Google trusts You. Google hires smart people. Smart people define their own jobs because smart people are smart enough to know what matters and what doesn’t.
2) Google puts users first. Users are first priority. It’s not “winning”, it’s not making money, and it’s not ego that is top priority. Just make users happy, and everything else will follow. It’s absolutely true.
3) Innovation counts. There has never been a company optimized to sustain innovation over the long haul. This is what Google is doing, and it’s never been done before. Do you like to come up with new ways of doing things? Is it always possible to do something smarter? Yes, while it is true that we stand on the shoulders of Giants – those who have paved the way for us – we can still do better. That is the goal. Better.
4) The people really are top notch. No matter how good you are, prepare to be humbled. The people at Google (not including me) are smarter than you. I didn’t believe it either – but when you join, you’ll see it too. On top of that, they probably work harder, and have more passion than you do too. Think you can compete? Maybe so. Prepare for a challenge.
5) There is a lot of room for growth in this company. Google has had tremendous success, but there is a lot more coming. I can’t say more than that, but I have faith. Maybe I’ve had too much kool-aid, I don’t know, but I am a believer.
6) Google will continue to change the world. The projects Google is tackling are unbelievable. You think the environment doesn’t matter? Our competitors may think so, but we don’t. You think society can’t be better? Our competitors are too focused on making money, but we aren’t. You think technology is good enough? We don’t, we think it can be a lot better. If you believe that computers have a lot of room for improvement, you’re thinking like Google does. We’re not satisfied with the way things are – we’re hope to make it just a little bit better. We can’t do it alone. We need help. We need people that “think different” (to steal from IBM), and we need people that don’t like the status quo. Microsoft isn’t worried about Google because of what it has done. Microsoft is worried about Google because of what it is about to do. But, we’re not interested in displacing Microsoft. Microsoft is great. We just want to build the stuff Microsoft can’t and that users love.
7) The benefits are to die for. Nobody has benefits better than Google. Whether it’s your salary, your bonus, your free food, they gym, the shuttle, or the people that want you to work on what you enjoy most, Google has the best benefits. If you don’t believe me, ask Fortune magazine.
I’ve gone on long enough now that if you aren’t submitting your resume to Google right now, you must either not think much of your own skills or you must not think much of me. That’s fine. Please don’t interpret this as being arrogant. Google is not about arrogance at all – it’s about humility, respect, and making great products. So, if you are an engineer, come work at Google. My endorsement won’t get stronger than this.
Patent Office is Under-Performing
Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why US Manufacturing Firms Patent (or not)I read this paper by W Cohen, R Nelson, and J Walsh. It was published in 2000. It confirms a lot of things that we all know. They present evidence that patents are used primarily for reasons other than what the Patent Office was created for, and that the Patent Office is probably not achieving it’s goals.
Patents are currently filed for two primary reasons:
1) To block a competitor from getting the patent and suing you.
2) So that if you get sued over a different, unrelated patent, you can counter-sue with an arsenal of equally unrelated patents.
According to the USPTO, their purpose is to
“promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries (Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution)”
However, Cohen, Nelson &Walsh present compelling evidence that these days, companies rely heavily on secrecy and time-to-market as their primary competitive differentiation to advance science, and that patents offer little, if any additional “progress of science”. Although the paper doesn’t show it, I postulate that patents actually hinder progress of science due to all the wasted resources that go to lawyers instead of R&D. (e.g. Blackberry builds a phenomenal, billion dollar business, and lawyers, who produce & invent nothing, steal $600M).
The fact is that the patent office is no longer necessary. Businesses don’t even value it. While there may be some isolated cases where it helps individual inventors, by-and-large it is excessive and wasteful. As a society, we would all benefit from more scientific progress if we just left inventions laissez-faire.
GPAs as Interviews
The New York Times recently reported about some changes to Google’s hiring and screening processes. It’s interesting to think about ‘how do I find the best employees’. But what what do you think about using the GPA as a screener?
Fortunately for me, I had a pretty high GPA, so I probably qualified even under Google’s strict policies. But, I have to admit it was strange to put my never-referenced GPA onto my Google application. It has been so long since I used it that I had actually forgotten what it was.
The Times article claims:
“Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people.”
I think the Times is wrong. I don’t think there is academic research which supports this at all. I have yet to meet a person that was a successful student that didn’t become the same type of employee. These people are smart, work hard, and love to work. It’s in their DNA, they are often “Type A”, and they are always successful. As much as we all hate to think that our college DNA could brand us for the rest of our lives, it actually may be one of the better metrics.
The Times could have said that “just because you didn’t have a high GPA doesn’t mean that you won’t be a good employee.” This is certainly true as well. There are plenty of great people out there that didn’t find school interesting enough to do well, yet are perfectly qualified. I think that Google’s change in policy is really about finding these people. You always need to find new ways to screen candidates. Maybe the people that didn’t pass the easy screening before would actually be great employees. Is there another metric, however? Of that I’m skeptical.
Immigration by the Numbers
Immigration is an issue that I care about a lot. If you read this blog, take a few minutes to watch this well done presentation. This is serious stuff!
