Month: May 2007

Overzealous Google Hiring

At more senior levels, I think a company ought to be suspicious of anyone who doesn’t have some kind of online trail. I’m not talking about a blog. But when you search on someone who’s claiming to have a track record in business, that record ought to be peeking through at least a little.

we indeed have some morons doing hiring. i got pinged recently too. the first hit on google for me mentions that i work there.. lame.

Roving Mars

Odds are, you’re not going to walk on Mars. That’s not meant to be a deliberately cruel statement, but rather a reflection of the realities of space exploration. Barring a dramatic acceleration and change in focus of NASA’s exploration programs—which may only be possible if Robert Zubrin was somehow elected president—the first human expedition to Mars is unlikely to occur before 2030. (NASA officials and others are fond of saying that the first people to walk on Mars are in grade school today—a sobering thought for those of us who long since left college.) Even if you’re still alive in 2030 or so, the people on those first expeditions are going to be from a small handpicked group of the country’s, if not the world’s, elite scientists and engineers. You have a much better chance of being a successful athlete in professional baseball and football than you have of traveling to Mars, at least through the next several decades.

trying to go see this one

Hosted lifebits

Although this notion of a hosted lifebits service seems inevitable in the long run, it’s not at all clear how we’ll get there. The need is not yet apparent to most people, though it will increasingly become apparent. The technical aspects are somewhat challenging, but the social and business aspects are even more challenging. In social terms, I think it’ll be hard to get people to decouple the idea of storage as a service from the idea of value-added services wrapped around storage.

articulate as always, this time on scenarios for owning your digital identity via reasonably guaranteed hosting of your lifebits (under your control)

Dead Networking

the social networking website’s administration decided that these students’ profiles will not be taken down; instead, they will be remain frozen in their last updated state. This decision goes against Facebook’s policy of removing profiles of the recently deceased out of respect for their privacy, but this is not a new phenomenon. There is simply no way for these websites to keep track of which of their users are dead or alive – the dead are all online now; they “live” on websites like Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, or Flickr, and they’re not going anywhere.

throw in a OMG LOL comment script, and appearances can be maintained indefinitely