Category: Four pillars

David Eastman asked “What happened to Quaero?” in a recent comment on a post I’d written on search. Last I heard, which was early this year, France and Germany had decided to part ways on the project, but France was determined to continue. I remember reading this article while recuperating from my heart attack.

Other than what I can glean from Wikipedia (which you can read here) there isn’t much out there on the web. An article in the Daily Telegraph in early August suggests that the entire project has been “quietly shelved”. Prior to that, I’m sure I’d seen reports that Germany was funding Theseus and France were continuing to fund Quaero. But I haven’t seen anything concrete.

There’s something vaguely amusing in having to search for information on Quaero. Says it all, I guess. Unless someone else knows better, in which case please comment.

Whenever I heard the phrase Thundering Herd I used to think of Merrill Lynch, not surprising for anyone who’s worked in investment banking.

Never again. Not after seeing this video. Unbelievable.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.

We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.

The paragraphs above are taken from Freeman Dyson’s latest book, A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.

I haven’t read through it yet, in fact I’ve only just ordered the book. What you see above is courtesy of edge.org, a place I visit frequently.

Not everyone agrees with “heretics”, particularly the kind of heretic referred to by Freeman. I had the privilege of meeting him at the inaugural Flight School some years ago, where he spoke prior to dinner. Hearing him speak about how scientists like him perceived atomic energy and its use in space travel in the 1940s was very instructive. What he brought alive was the pioneering spirit that keeps any scientist going, a spirit that is sadly lacking in much that we do today. Neither heretics nor pioneering spirits do well in risk-averse cultures.

By now people must be publishing doctoral theses on the meaning and ambience and culture of Web 2.0; so much has been said and written about it that I hesitate to add anything at all. What I will say is that Web 2.0 is about young heretics, and about a pioneering spirit. Which is why an old fogey like me finds it all so very interesting.

I look forward to reading the book.

…that’s a quote from a delicious article by John Siracusa available on Ars Technica. Headlined Stuck On The Enterprise, it looks at a number of reasons why Apple doesn’t seem to do well in the enterprise space. [I must confess a very personal interest in this topic, having more than once tried to introduce Apple into the enterprise and, shall we say, not succeeded…).

Here’s a morsel to get your taste buds going:

The “dream phone” for the enterprise looks quite different than the iPhone. It works with the corporate VPN. It does Exchange. It supports device-wide encryption and remote deletion of data on lost devices. It’s available in several compatible forms from multiple manufacturers. It has a well-defined public roadmap for hardware and software. It can be backed up and restored en masse, preferably over the network. If it has a camera, it can be disabled. The battery can be removed and replaced. And on and on.

Maybe around item two hundred in this list there might be a bit about the people who will actually use these enterprise dream phones tolerating the things. Really, as long as they don’t openly revolt, it’s fine. The people you have to please in the enterprise market are the ones purchasing and supporting the products, not the poor schmucks who actually have to use them.

And if that doesn’t get you salivating, here’s another taste:

Listen again to Steve’s final words on the subject. “We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and say, what do we want?”

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Go on, read the whole article, traverse the links, it’s worth it. It makes me think again about the sheer importance of Doc’s VRM.

As enterprise people, we have to stop building things designed explicitly to get past IT governance and procurement processes, and start making things that customers want. Maybe VRM can play a role in that.

My thanks to Bill Barnett for bringing this to my attention.

Some of you have asked me to share my reading habits with you, so here’s my current ten-in-parallel:

The Black Swan: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fascinating, eminently readable, gentle and easy and unusual. Second pass.

Science, Faith and Society: Michael Polanyi: My regular Polanyi “fix”. Not for the faint-hearted. Third pass.

Comedy by the Numbers: Hoffman and Rudoren. A little bit of McSweeney’s goes a long way. Oddball but fun. First time.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Elizabeth Eisenstein. A giant of a book, my third read through. A must.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Jonathan Knee.  I like accidents. Not yet started it.

Blood Thirsty: Marshall Karp. I loved The Rabbit Factory, so I thought I’d try Karp again. Unread.

What’s So Funny? Donald E Westlake. I’m fanatical about Westlake, particularly the Dortmunder series. Unmissable.

Crooked Little Vein: Warren Ellis. Trying him out, just because William Gibson said it was worth it. Unread.

Silence: Thomas Perry. I’d walk a mile for a new Thomas Perry. Ten miles. As with Westlake, I’ve been a fan for decades.

Bad Monkeys: Matt Ruff.  I judged this book by its cover. Never heard of him, but liked Christopher Moore’s comments.