Is this a good or bad thing?

I was washing my hands just now and something struck me.

How does a submarine achieve negative buoyancy by flooding tanks with water when it is still filled with oxygen?

If this had struck me 20 years ago, I would have probably tried to reason it out. Given how little I know about submarines, I may have come up with an elaborate, creative, and definitely incorrect solution. This would have tided me over until I went down to the basement to look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica or went to the library to get a book on submarines. My answer may have even satisfied me completely.

Today, I go to google, and I type “submarine buoyancy”, the first article is “How Submarines Work” on howstuffworks.com, and I’m done. My intellectual curiosity is satisfied. Maybe I’ll read more about submarines, maybe I won’t. I definitely won’t spend too much time trying to figure it out myself when the answer is so close to hand.

Am I richer or poorer for the instant access to all knowledge? I don’t know, at least in this case.

What I want from data portability

I want to rate my books, music and DVDs once on netflix, Amazon, Facebook visual bookshelf, iTunes and I want the data shared across all of them.

However, I want complete control over how each of them uses every bit of that data and I want to approve who gets to see it, even among my friends. I don’t want to have to give any service my login for any other service in order to share that data.

I want to eliminate all my current log ins for each service so that I can use the OpenID service I created for myself.

However, I don’t necessarily want anyone to be able to track me around the net using that single sign-on.

I only want to map my social graph once, and I want it to be available for any service that I use.

However, I want to control who in my social graph has access to what information on each website that I use.

Until the privacy aspects of the different data portability are really well thought out, I can’t support any of them. I haven’t seen a single proposal yet that adequately balances utility with privacy. I honestly don’t know if there would a proposal that would offer users decent privacy since that would come at the expense of companies’ ability to market to them.

speaking of resumes

I talk about resumes a lot. That is because I see many of them. A zillion years ago, when I first had to write a resume, all I had was a crummy pamphlet from the career center that was completely unhelpful. So, I like to help out when I can so that I don’t have to look at lame resumes.

I thought that this article was actually pretty decent on the subject of spiffing up your resumes’ design. Although, if you aren’t French, I would avoid calling it a résumé.

Give your résumé a face lift (LifeClever)

P.S. unless you are from Europe, don’t call your resume a Curriculum Vitae either, that comes off really twee.
P.P.S. ignore the résumé and c.v. rules if you are actually applying for a job in Europe.

Great Clay Shirky speech

I just read this really excellent talk that Clay Shirky gave at Web 2.0 about how we are (and should) switch from a content consuming society into a production society (content or otherwise). At its simplest, it is a call to spend less time watching TV, but it is quite elegant. A short read, highly recommended: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[via @jeffjarvis]

Why Live Mesh will fail

When I first heard about Live Mesh, I was underwhelmed. I kept hearing that this was a game-changer, but I really didn’t see why. Today, I decided to figure out what the fuss was about, so I went to TechMeme to track down some of the better resources to start from. I read Ray Ozzie’s memo, I read the LiveMesh blog, and about a dozen other articles. I’m still having a hard time seeing this as revolutionary. Other services exist which have most of the same pieces. Where Mesh is different is the possible reach that Microsoft could give it. It is that reach that which is required to make it successful where others have failed. However, that reach coming from Microsoft is the Achilles heel for the technology. The Forbes article covers this aspect:

In the past, Microsoft has “literally tried to own the platform and standard, and so forced the industry to adopt [its technologies],” says Alex Barnett, vice president of community at Web application-development platform host Bungee Labs. “Ray Ozzie’s been working with community in a non-commercial, open-standards way to solve this problem at the industry level.”

It will take weeks–maybe months–for developers to grasp all that Mesh is capable of, predicts Barnett. And for it to be successful, Microsoft has to continue to engage with the community. If the program morphs into a Microsoft standard–instead of a Web standard–support will fall away, he adds.

Mesh may have been developed in a clean room environment, safe from the Microsoft innovation anti-bodies, but now that it is in the open, those anti-bodies will be attacking this from every direction. How excited will the Windows Mobile team be when you can sync your iPhone from LiveMesh. What will the Windows team think about the Linux client? They will all come at this team and Ray Ozzie may not be able to protect the Mesh group from the revenue engines. Every group at Microsoft will want to make sure that their user’s experience with Mesh is better than their competitors at which point the users and 3rd party developers will run away in droves.

Mesh is a service. A Microsoft service. How eager will developers be to put their eggs in Microsoft’s basket? Microsoft has a long history on screwing over developers with its technologies. Through aggressive marketing (ie: paying developers off a la Silverlight) and active hand-holding, Microsoft may get some bigger fish to swim in their pond. The little fish will be scared for the day that MS decides to eat them and they’ll be harder to get on-board.

For Microsoft to be successful with Mesh, they’ll need to get the independent web developers in their camp. This group is one of the least supportive of Microsoft. Microsoft has never made inroads with web developers outside of corporate IT departments. I’m sure that there are some great web start-ups based on Microsoft technologies, but I’m having a hard time thinking of one.

Live Mesh’s success requires Microsoft to be really good at a lot of things it has always been bad at: open standards, engaging the larger community, giving up control, having user trust, and enriching competitive platforms.

I believe that Ray Ozzie and the Mesh team may really want to do the right things for the right reason. The question will be if they can get escape velocity from a corporate culture which is against all those things. It will be a good test for us on the outside for judging Microsoft in the future. In the post-Bill era, is Microsoft Ray Ozzie’s company or is it Steve Ballmer’s company?

64 bits, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. kinda.

I find it hilarious to read some of the comments in news stories on technology companies, especially from folks who don’t write software for a living.

A lot of the evil that people accuse Microsoft of is really incompetence, short sightedness, tunnel vision or good intentions misinterpreted. People hate Microsoft, so they choose to see evil in it’s every decision. Most of the folks at Microsoft are smart, hard-working, honest people that want to make really cool software. Of course, I’ve met many MS folks who are testosterone-driven idiots without a creative bone in their body that just want to kill every other software company in existence. Too often, people mistake a move by the former folks as a scheme by the latter. This is horrible for the good folks at MS, but if that company wanted to fix its image, it wouldn’t have made a chair-throwing, hyper-aggressive salesman to be the CEO.

When John Nack posted about Adobe’s decision not to do 64-bit Photoshop for OS X in the next release, he knew he was going to get attacked for it. I thought he did an awesome job going through the reasons behind the decision without throwing blame around. I thought he gave real insight into what happened. He was open and up-front about everything and completely clear. Yet, you read the comments on the various sites and you can see that people read what they want to read and will interpret any decision within the context of what they want to believe. I’ve had more visibility into the decision-making hierarchies at Adobe than any other company I’ve ever worked for, and I can tell you that the people I work with always want to do the right thing for the people that use our software. No one is playing political games with Apple. Just because Steve Jobs says something is easy doesn’t actually make it easy. If it was always that easy, Final Cut Pro would be a 64-bit cocoa app already.

People who don’t write desktop software don’t understand why it might be harder than checking a checkbox to port from the PowerPC to Intel. People who don’t write desktop software don’t understand why it might be hard to write a new operating system from scratch or why having 100s of engineers doesn’t make it go faster. People also don’t understand that in an application where performance is paramount (like a media editing application), porting to a new operating system, hardware platform or compiler is a lot trickier than it seems because a lot of code is there doing tricky platform-specific stuff that has been hand tuned over years. People who don’t write software don’t understand what kind of effort it is to port millions of lines of code built in C++ against Carbon into Objective-C using Cocoa.

Maybe people shouldn’t care. It’s probably a bad idea to see how the sausage is made, right? This is probably true up to the point that people claim something is easy when they have no idea of the actual effort involved.

Apple isn’t evil. Apple is secretive. This is fun as a customer. This is evil as a developer. Microsoft will promise something for years, deliver betas and then pull the plug. Apple will be silent and then spring a huge change on its developers and then chastise them for not rewriting their apps from scratch again.

I don’t know if there is much of a point here except to say that before you accuse a company of screwing over their users for some political end, you might want to try and understand the real issues.