Freeman Dyson is an incredible scientist. I imagine he, Terrance Tao, Paul Erdos and a number of others are all woven from the same cloth. Dyson has done some amazing work, and probably will do some more amazing work. The interview is here. One of the comments he made really struck me as being dead on correct … I’ve used similar language, describing a Ph.D. as a union card. And I agree it takes far too long in physics.

There’s a much publicized (in SV) trial going on over an oligarchic wage suppression scheme that was in force between a number of big players in SV. Apart from Facebook that is. Techcrunch has the details. What transpires when free market forces are allowed to work with their invisible hands unconstrained? Simple. Kudos to facebook for doing the right thing, though in all honesty, I don’t attribute this to being altruistic on their part.

I had mentioned this in my write up about our 10 year anniversary. And this post yesterday from Scott Weiss at Andreessen Horowitz Its in that staring deep and hard into the yawning void that one gets their inspiration. Call it sheer abject terror, or motivation. Whatever. It juices your processors into overdrive if you are an entrepreneur. You are at your most creative when you are at your most fearful.

Oddly enough at the New Republic. Article is here. I was somewhat amused by the read, but some of it rung quite true. Its nice to hear of more of the signals one needs to read VC tea leaves. They never say no, but they do move goal posts, always outward, always away from you. The article implies they get hung up on TAM, as a proxy for what they really think.

[Update] I gave up on 2.7.x. Nothing I did made it work. I removed all the options apart from prefix for compilation of 3.4.0. That worked. Now onto building ipython, ijulia and other good things (SciPy stack). We will use 3.x going forward rather than try to remain compatible with 2.x. Updating our tool chain to include a modern python which will be outside of the distro version. Long … long experience dealing with distro based tools are that they are usually … badly … out of date.

Ok, I am taking the leap. I’ve started working on the SIOS Inst system. Basically, after reviewing everything thats broken (and for that matter unfixable) in the anaconda, debian-installer, and other installation mechanisms, I’ve decided that for our purposes, the only way that we are going to get correct and reliable builds for stateful systems is to forgo these systems advanced installation mechanisms. If we can skip the code entirely, we will.

Not only do we have a booth, but we are sponsoring a session on Low Latency Cloud and Big Data. Roosevelt Hotel in NYC on 7-April. See the site for more details. If you’d like to attend and need a pass, please contact me at the day job. Our partners Lucera, Inktank, and Pluribus Networks will be there with us. Possible more.

Well, after nearly a decade of hooplah over a realization of a quantum computer, an interesting study found that it was There are a few important elements of this … it uses 1/5th the number of qubits that the newer generation machine used. But it wasn’t, as earlier reported, thousands of times faster. Way back in the day, when working on benchmarking big machines, and comparing performance, one of the major criteria was using identical (or as near to identical) algorithms as possible to assess machine speed, compiler quality, etc.

Ok, I have as one of my professional goals, to learn a new computer language. I am at master level in several, proficient in others, and have working knowledge of a fair number. I’ve forgotten more than I care to admit about some (Fortran, Basic, C/C++, APL, x86 Assembler). The contenders for me should be useful languages. These are not things that should be learned for the sake of learning, but for real useful purposes.

Ok, this one is sad. Saw this linked off of hacker news. I am not sure if this is satirical, humorous, or real. It doesn’t quite matter though. We’ve used AirBnB twice now. And we have a firm policy, as a direct result of those very negative experiences, of never … ever … using it again. To be fair, AirBnB is effectively a market maker dealing with the commodity of unused space which could be turned into a profitable asset.