Negative Approach

Why is Safari using 97 percent of my CPU?

The last few days of my MacBook Air have been a little wonky. I couldn't figure it out until today when I noticed that Safari was using anywhere from 90-97 percent of my CPU. I also noticed a few times when the CPU was running over 100 percent.

Please note that I was using Microsoft Office, but I didn't feel good about it. We have a board meeting tomorrow and I needed to review some stuff. I still can't figure out how to get the formula bar where I want it in Excel 2008 and it makes … Read more

JBoss + iWay PR disappearing act--whither Open Source SOA at Red Hat?

A month or so ago I saw a press release that discussed how JBoss was working with iWay to "bring a full range of information management capabilities to global organizations" and didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought so little that I just ignored it until today someone mentioned that they couldn't find that release on the RedHat website. After a bit of digging we figured out that it must have been an iWay release and that RH decided to lump it into a bigger press release about their SOA (service oriented architecture) platform.

In the Red Hat release there are a number of new JBoss partners, only one of whom has any open source products. The real IT world has both open source and proprietary products and they all need to work together. And lots of companies use the JBoss app server very successfully with all kinds of applications.

But the SOA products have been a bit slow out of the gate and so it's the iWay partnership that I find interesting as it begs a few important questions. … Read more

Viral growth models for social media and open source

Metrics tend to play a middling role after a social-media company is established. With a few notable exceptions, most sites hit a peak then flatten out. The same can be said for open-source projects. There are peaks, but really what you want is consistency in the numbers. Hyper-growth is not sustainable and you will eventually saturate the addressable market.

One of the things open-source projects tout is their number of downloads. Download metrics are often very flawed but can help tell the story of how big the market potential is. Social-media companies talk about their number of registered users. Neither talks much about retained users unless the metrics are very impressive.

As I was reading Jeremy Liew's blog today, I realized the models of adoption of open source and social media are very similar:

… Read more

Fake Startups Compete for 'Worst Website Ever'

Once upon a time, SXSW was a music festival and then it became something else that I don't understand. So, just when I thought that SXSW was only about Sarah Lacy vs. Marc Zuckerberg I read about this great contest to come up with the worst website idea. The sad part is that I could see all 7 of these getting funded a few months back.

Based on the descriptions, my winner is: Entrepreneur: Lane Becker, co-founder of GetSatisfaction Bad idea: MMOmmerce, the future of the future of commerce The pitch: Shop for real-life items within MMOs. Frag Nazis … Read more

Top 10 trends in identity management

I read last week in some print publication (that's right, people still read magazines) about a growing "superstructure" of GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) and how it starts to address some of the shortcomings of SOA (Service-Oriented Architectures), meaning the stuff in between all the loosely coupled data flying around.

This top 10 list of Identity Management trends explores GRC and some other interesting facts. Personally I am all about trends No. 3 and 4.

Trend No. 3: Open systems and modules instead of monolithic suites… Read more

HP's new R&D direction sounds like 5 years ago

As HP Redirects Its R&D Toward Big Results one would expect to hear something new and exciting, or maybe some clarity about what the company is planning to actually do. Instead we get a fantastic array of buzzwords from the last 5 years.

1. Mobility They project that use of computing devices must seek to become seamless, so that users are transferring information and working within a familiar interface as they move beyond their offices. Information will continue to explode, so capturing and storing information will be less important than analyzing and delivering the right information at the … Read more

45 pages of billionaires that are not you or me

In case you needed a little something to drive yourself over the edge of depression, have a look at 45 pages of billionaires that are not you, over on Forbes.com.

If in fact, I am incorrect and I have a billionaire reader of this blog, please note that I would like a solid gold house.

Playing it safe in Silicon Valley--what's the point of living here then?

The WSJ reports on a (supposedly) growing trend of people looking for more stable (call them old-school) companies as opposed to start-ups.

The story cites the fact that IPOs are down and that getting to a public offering is taking much longer than it did in the 2000-era where you could basically get an office and file to go public. But that was never scalable and in fact contributed to serious economic confusion--especially here in the valley.

I believe that today's startups are much better managed than the companies that were being built in early 2000 or so. The … Read more

Ask.com--Oprah's favorite search engine

I am all for Ask.com targeting their product, but going after "married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States" seems like a death march.

I guess the power of Google really can't be beat...Microsoft should start targeting teens in the Ozarks as they realize they can't compete.