The Week in Geek – Sept. 29, l2008
Free, Online Information Systems Textbook Goes Worldwide in a Day
A quick thanks. 24 hours after the first seven ‘beta’ modules of my forthcoming book became available online, I’d heard from faculty as far away as Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and Denmark. That first day (Google Analytics image at left), content was downloaded from every continent save Antarctica (no IS classes at the south pole, yet). Please do send a note if you use or consider the content. It’s critical for faculty involved in open curricular efforts to be able to measure the impact of their work. I very much want to hear from you and am delighted to learn how the work is being used. Feel free to forward a link to the online material to your colleagues, and expect more chapters and cases, soon!
How Cloud Computing is Changing the World
Cloud computing (software and services leveraging vast computing power delivered through the Internet) is big and growing, with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com among the publicly-traded firms with significant cloud efforts. A Merrill Lynch study suggests that within five years, the global market for cloud computing could grow to $95 billion, with 12% of the global software market migrating to the cloud. Dell’s cloud business is already worth ‘several hundred million’. This Wednesday, Dr. Jim Miller, Microsoft Sr. Director of Technology Policy, and Strategy will visit Boston College to discuss the business of cloud computing in all four of my MI021 sections (Fulton 250, 9am, 10am, 2pm, and 3pm). This will be a real treat and we’re honored Jim can share the outlook for cloud computing at BC. Students & faculty in other classes are welcome to attend.
Google Introduces iPhone Rival Open to Whims
The 2008 TechDay keynote was a particular treat this year. Android co-founder Rich Miner offered us the first overview of Google’s mobile platform where he could actually show the G1, the first Android-powered device, to be available from T-Mobile on Oct. 22. The super-open and completely free Android is not a stealthy ad-laden OS, as some have suggested (indeed, G1 users see no ad-centric apps – none at all). Android is an elegant, robust, secure platform that will doubtless have a huge impact as it spreads to more carriers and handset manufacturers worldwide. Android represents the largest, all-at-once open-source software launch, ever. On the inevitable day when the billionth Android-powered device ships, Eagles will be able to look back and say ‘I was there to see it during week 1’. Thanks to Rich for spending time with us! BTW: Those that haven’t seen it already may want to check out the very fun Google Timeline – part of the firm’s 10th birthday celebration.
NBC Sites Grow Leaps & Bounds
TechCrunch is among the many press outlets covering the blowout success of NBC Universal’s digital media efforts. In the digital realm, GE’s media group is the most innovative and successful of the Big Four networks. The Olympics crushed all prior digital media events, CNBC’s online traffic has ballooned thanks to the Wall Street blowup, the firm pulled out of iTunes to re-emerge on its own pricing terms, and Hulu is huge (see below). TechDay 2008 was delighted to host a morning keynote from BC alum Jeff Chiumiento, VP and CFO of NBC Universal Digital Media, who inspired all (and encouraged IS majors to follow his footsteps and apply to the GE IMLP program). Go Eagles!
Free, Legal, and Online
Wired provides a fascinating recap of the rise of Hulu. The joint venture between NewsCorp and NBC Universal, launched to ridicule. Most thought it was yet another example of old media arriving too late. Fast forward a little over a year and the site is uniformly praised as a customer experience, content, and traffic success. Hulu has become a top Internet video destination, the leading site for professional content, and initial numbers have vastly exceeded expectations. Lionsgate, Warner, and Viacom have all brought along content to the NBC & Fox Hulu party. The site’s traffic is still less than what network TV receives (Wired says ‘millions of streams a month’ for its best shows, vs. 16 million for, say, a single CSI episode). But these #s are amazingly strong considering there’s not an easy way to get Hulu in a living room TV or portable device. It seems that content is still king.
How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers
Here’s the problem with computer-driven investment models: models built by examining past trends, are blind when the “100 year flood” comes along – an anomaly or condition so extreme and unusual that a similar, predictable event is not evident in any earlier data. We saw this in the late 90s around the time Long Term Capital Management failed (BusinessWeek even did a cover story on the failure of Wall Street quant models – image at left). But the failure of firms to catch risks associated with the current subprime mess seems even more nefarious. According to the NY Times’ Saul Hansell “The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.” Hansell contends that execs deliberately deceived risk management systems in order to skew capital-on-hand requirements so firms could hold more debt with less cash needed to back the effort. I wonder if JP Morgan Chase had better models through superior computing, helping it avoid the crisis? In our Moore’s Law reading we point to the firm’s grid efforts for sophisticated risk modeling. Could tech be a key reason the firm has been an acquirer rather than a casualty these past few weeks?
Microsoft Migrates from Severs to Supercomputers
Supercomputer sales are exploding. The so-called HPC (for high performance computing) market has grown 20% a year for three years and accounted for more than $10 billion in sales in ’07. Oil and gas, financial services, biotechnology, media and manufacturing R&D are among the mainstream uses of corporate HPC. Microsoft has just five machines in the Top 500 Supercomputer list (Linux has 427), but with the latest release of Windows HPC Server 2008, the firm hopes to become a major player in linking PC servers to behave as a unified high-performance supercomputer. Microsoft HPC solutions were on display at the recent High Performance on Wall Street conference.
Wall Street’s Collapse May Be Computer Science’s Gain
We’re seeing a dot-com-like whiplash where finance students are scrambling to consulting & tech jobs. A recent tech recruiter mentioned she had more resumes from finance majors than from the IS/CS cohort. Tech majors would never gloat – we’ve been victims of brutal hiring whipsaws. But the latest of these regular finance hiring shocks shows that no major is immune to the whims of the economy. And for now, all trends point to increased tech hiring for the next decade or more. Computerworld blurbs faculty from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and me on trends in hiring. Also, while IS enrollments are low nationally, BC seems to have bucked the trend, with the ranks of information systems majors growing four fold in four years. Faculty looking to market IS to their students are welcome to use & modify flyers we’ve posted online (let me know if you’ve found this useful & feel free to send along your own ‘study tech’ marketing materials).
The Camera-Friendly, Perfectly Pixelated, Easily Downloadable Celebrity Academic
While my podcasts and course-content have been offered online for years, I’m sure no one would mistake me – a bald-headed troll-man – as amid the pixel perfect, camera friendly celebri-profs. But the NY Times does offer interesting insight on how technology has increased the extent to which the professor has become marketing tool for the University. Are we truly entering an era where world-class universities value world-class teaching as highly as world-class research? The Times offers suggestions on great lectures for your playlist rotation.
BC Course Follows Spate of Corporate Scandals
Portico, BC’s new freshmen course, which will replace the one-credit ethics introduction with an integrated approach to management, is garnering rave reviews. The innovative effort has students doing field work, hands-on projects, brings in managers to engage students, and has them deeply exploring the impact of managerial decision making. The Boston Herald recently ran a profile of the pioneering work of our Deans and faculty.
Google Founder’s Blog Delves into Personal Health
Sergey Brin’s wife is a founder of 23andMe, a firm that provides a personal gene analysis for $399. Spit into a tube and 23andMe will send back an analysis of your genes and a detailed overview of your propensity or unlikelihood of developing certain conditions. Sergey did this and discovered that he has a significantly increased likelihood of developing Parkinson’s, a horrible, incurable disease that his mother curently suffers from (and that is currently crippling my own father). Now one of the world’s richest men has a heightened focus on the menace. Brin’s wealth may be good for Parkinson’s research, but services like 23andMe also raise fascinating ethical, legal, social, and economic issues. What needs to be considered in a world where these tests become commonplace and even more comprehensive? What kind of responsibility do these firms have in helping patients interpret and react to their analysis? Is a new legislative regime needed to protect privacy and prevent discrimination based on news that someone now has poor odds in the genetic crap-shoot? Would a patient with a high likelihood for developing a terrible condition become a greater risk-taker? More despondent? Yet again tech outpaces society’s ability to process its impact. As a side-note, those who know Parkinson’s patients might consider referring them to the excellent community PatientsLikeMe, an effort that also brings together patients with conditions that include ALS, Depression, and MS.
Supercomputer Race
The Roadrunner supercomputer that IBM built for Los Alamos has scaled the computing equivilent of Mount Everest, becoming the first machine to pass a petaflop, or more than 1,000 trillion arithmetic calculations per second. That puts this moster on top of the “Top 500” list, the twice-annual ranking of the world’s fastest computers. But now researchers are doubting the validity of metrics used to rank systems on the list. Ranking is determined using a decades-old benchmark called Linpack written in (gasp) Fortran. Vendors seeking fame for their geek boxes are motivated to tweak designs to the benchmark. One academic claims Roadrunner’s true speed for practical tasks is only about 2 to 3% of the Linpack rating. Los Alamos expects sustained speeds of 20 to 50% for most tasks its asked to perform. But anyway you slice it, Roadrunner is a beast. The $120 million system uses 3 types of processors, including 3,250 dual-core AMD Opterons, and some 13,000 eight-core Cell processors leveraging the same technology IBM developed for the Playstation 3. What’s all this being used for? See the BusinessWeek article in last week’s WiG!
Intel Six Brain Chip Garners Good Critiques
“Bone Crushing Performance” is how one IBM VP refers to Intel’s new six-core Xeon processors. Dell will sell you a server with two chips (a dozen cores) for $5,300. Dell, HP, and Sun will build boxes with the new chip. An offering from Unisys will have 16 of these chips, or 96 cores in all, for $135,000. Pretty cheap for what would clearly have been classified as supercomputer performance at the start of this decade.