Politics and policy in the age of Trump
The United States presidency was recently assumed by an Orwellian lunatic.* Sadly, this is not an exaggeration. The dangers — both of authoritarianism and of general mis-governance — are massive. Everybody needs in some way to respond.
*”Orwellian lunatic” is by no means an oxymoron. Indeed, many of the most successful tyrants in modern history have been delusional; notable examples include Hitler, Stalin, Mao and, more recently, Erdogan. (By way of contrast, I view most other Soviet/Russian leaders and most jumped-up-colonel coup leaders as having been basically sane.)
There are many candidates for what to focus on, including:
- Technology-specific issues — e.g. privacy/surveillance, network neutrality, etc.
- Issues in which technology plays a large role — e.g. economic changes that affect many people’s employment possibilities.
- Subjects that may not be tech-specific, but are certainly of great importance. The list of candidates here is almost endless, such as health care, denigration of women, maltreatment of immigrants, or the possible breakdown of the whole international order.
But please don’t just go on with your life and leave the politics to others. Those “others” you’d like to rely on haven’t been doing a very good job.
What I’ve chosen to do personally includes: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Public policy, Surveillance and privacy | 9 Comments |
Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016
For starters:
- I spent three weeks in California on a hybrid personal/business trip. I had a bunch of meetings, but not three weeks’ worth.
- The timing was awkward for most companies I wanted to see. No blame accrues to those who didn’t make themselves available.
- I came back with a nasty cough. Follow-up phone calls aren’t an option until next week.
- I’m impatient to start writing. Hence tonight’s posts. But it’s difficult for a man and his cough to be productive at the same time.
A running list of recent posts is:
- As a companion to this post, I’m publishing a very long one on vendor lock-in.
- Spark and Databricks are both prospering, and of course enhancing their technology as well.
- Ditto DataStax.
- Flink is interesting as the streaming technology it’s now positioned to be, rather than the overall Spark alternative it used to be positioned as but which the world didn’t need.
Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:
- MemSQL, Zoomdata, and Neo Technology (also prospering).
- Cloudera (multiple topics, as usual).
- Analytic SQL engines (“traditional” analytic RDBMS aren’t doing well).
- Microsoft’s reinvention (it feels real).
- Metadata (it’s ever more of a thing).
- Machine learning (it’s going to be a big portion of my research going forward).
- Transitions to the cloud — this subject affects almost everything else.
I’m having issues with comment spam
My blogs are having a bad time with comment spam. While Akismet and other safeguards are intercepting almost all of the ~5000 attempted spam comments per day, the small fraction that get through are still a large absolute number to deal with.
There’s some danger I’ll need to restrict comments here to combat it. (At the moment they’ve been turned off almost entirely on Text Technologies, which may be awkward if I want to put a post up there rather than here.) If I do, I’ll say so in a separate post. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience.
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Some stuff on my mind, March 10, 2015
I found yesterday’s news quite unpleasant.
- A guy I knew and had a brief rivalry with in high school died of colon cancer, a disease that I’m at high risk for myself.
- GigaOm, in my opinion the best tech publication — at least for my interests — shut down.
- The sex discrimination trial around Kleiner Perkins is undermining some people I thought well of.
And by the way, a guy died a few day ago snorkeling at the same resort I like to go to, evidently doing less risky things than I on occasion have.
So I want to unclutter my mind a bit. Here goes.
1. There are a couple of stories involving Sam Simon and me that are too juvenile to tell on myself, even now. But I’ll say that I ran for senior class president, in a high school where the main way to campaign was via a single large poster, against a guy with enough cartoon-drawing talent to be one of the creators of the Simpsons. Oops.
2. If one suffers from ulcerative colitis as my mother did, one is at high risk of getting colon cancer, as she also did. Mine isn’t as bad as hers was, due to better tolerance for medication controlling the disease. Still, I’ve already had a double-digit number of colonoscopies in my life. They’re not fun. I need another one soon; in fact, I canceled one due to the blizzards.
Pro-tip — never, ever have a colonoscopy without some kind of anesthesia or sedation. Besides the unpleasantness, the lack of meds increases the risk that the colonoscopy will tear you open and make things worse. I learned that the hard way in New York in the early 1980s.
3. Five years ago I wrote optimistically about the evolution of the information ecosystem, specifically using the example of the IT sector. One could argue that I was right. After all: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Business intelligence, NoSQL | 1 Comment |
Thoughts and notes, Thanksgiving weekend 2014
I’m taking a few weeks defocused from work, as a kind of grandpaternity leave. That said, the venue for my Dances of Infant Calming is a small-but-nice apartment in San Francisco, so a certain amount of thinking about tech industries is inevitable. I even found time last Tuesday to meet or speak with my clients at WibiData, MemSQL, Cloudera, Citus Data, and MongoDB. And thus:
1. I’ve been sloppy in my terminology around “geo-distribution”, in that I don’t always make it easy to distinguish between:
- Storing different parts of a database in different geographies, often for reasons of data privacy regulatory compliance.
- Replicating an entire database into different geographies, often for reasons of latency and/or availability/ disaster recovery,
The latter case can be subdivided further depending on whether multiple copies of the data can accept first writes (aka active-active, multi-master, or multi-active), or whether there’s a clear single master for each part of the database.
What made me think of this was a phone call with MongoDB in which I learned that the limit on number of replicas had been raised from 12 to 50, to support the full-replication/latency-reduction use case.
2. Three years ago I posted about agile (predictive) analytics. One of the points was:
… if you change your offers, prices, ad placement, ad text, ad appearance, call center scripts, or anything else, you immediately gain new information that isn’t well-reflected in your previous models.
Subsequently I’ve been hearing more about predictive experimentation such as bandit testing. WibiData, whose views are influenced by a couple of Very Famous Department Store clients (one of which is Macy’s), thinks experimentation is quite important. And it could be argued that experimentation is one of the simplest and most direct ways to increase the value of your data.
3. I’d further say that a number of developments, trends or possibilities I’m seeing are or could be connected. These include agile and experimental predictive analytics in general, as noted in the previous point, along with: Read more
DBMS2 revisited
The name of this blog comes from an August, 2005 column. 8 1/2 years later, that analysis holds up pretty well. Indeed, I’d keep the first two precepts exactly as I proposed back then:
- Task-appropriate data managers. Much of this blog is about task-appropriate data stores, so I won’t say more about them in this post.
- Drastic limitations on relational schema complexity. I think I’ve been vindicated on that one by, for example:
- NoSQL and dynamic schemas.
- Schema-on-read, and its smarter younger brother schema-on-need.
- Limitations on the performance and/or allowed functionality of joins in scale-out short-request RDBMS, and the relative lack of complaints about same.
- Funky database design from major Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors such as Workday and Salesforce.com.
- A whole lot of logs.
I’d also keep the general sense of the third precept, namely appropriately-capable data integration, but for that one the specifics do need some serious rework.
For starters, let me say: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Business intelligence, Database diversity, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Investment research and trading, NoSQL, Schema on need | 2 Comments |
Notes and comments, July 2, 2013
I’m not having a productive week, part of the reason being a hard drive crash that took out early drafts of what were to be last weekend’s blog posts. Now I’m operating from a laptop, rather than my preferred dual-monitor set-up. So please pardon me if I’m concise even by comparison to my usual standards.
- My recent posts based on surveillance news have been partly superseded by – well, by more news. Some of that news, along with some good discussion, may be found in the comment threads.
- The same goes for my recent Hadoop posts.
- The replay for my recent webinar on real-time analytics is now available. My part ran <25 minutes.
- One of my numerous clients using or considering a “real-time analytics” positioning is Sqrrl, the company behind the NoSQL DBMS Accumulo. Last month, Derrick Harris reported on a remarkable Accumulo success story – multiple US intelligence instances managing 10s of petabytes each, and supporting a variety of analytic (I think mainly query/visualization) approaches.
- Several sources have told me that MemSQL’s Zynga sale is (in part) for Membase replacement. This is noteworthy because Zynga was the original pay-for-some-of-the-development Membase customer.
- More generally, the buzz out of Couchbase is distressing. Ex-employees berate the place; job-seekers check around and then decide not to go there; rivals tell me of resumes coming out in droves. Yes, there’s always some of that, even at obviously prospering companies, but this feels like more than the inevitable low-level buzz one hears anywhere.
- I think the predictive modeling state of the art has become:
- Cluster in some way.
- Model separately on each cluster.
- And if you still want to do something that looks like a regression – linear or otherwise – then you might want to use a tool that lets you shovel training data in WITHOUT a whole lot of preparation* and receive a model back out. Even if you don’t accept that as your final model, it can at least be a great guide to feature selection (in the statistical sense of the phrase) and the like.
- Champion/challenger model testing is also a good idea, at least if you’re in some kind of personalization/recommendation space, and have enough traffic to test like that.**
- Most companies have significant turnover after being acquired, perhaps after a “golden handcuff” period. Vertica is no longer an exception.
- Speaking of my clients at HP Vertica – they’ve done a questionable job of communicating that they’re willing to price their product quite reasonably. (But at least they allowed me to write about $2K/terabyte for hardware/software combined.)
- I’m hearing a little more Amazon Redshift buzz than I expected to. Just a little.
- StreamBase was bought by TIBCO. The rumor says $40 million.
*Basic and unavoidable ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) of course excepted.
**I could call that ABC (Always Be Comparing) or ABT (Always Be Testing), but they each sound like – well, like The Glove and the Lions.
It’s time to change around Monash Research’s mailing lists
Email delivery of posts has been screwed up; multiple people tell me they haven’t gotten their email for months. (In the future, please tell me of such difficulties!) So it’s time for a change, and I’m asking for your advice as to what you’d suggest for our mailing list.
Yes, I’m asking via a blog post, even thought the core problem is that people who want to see my posts via e-mail aren’t getting them. Please work with me on this anyway. 🙂
My two basic questions are:
- What should be the frequency of delivery? To date, it’s been nightly (at least in theory).
- What delivery technology should be used? To date, it’s been FeedBlitz.
1. The nightly scheduling has been an artifact of an RSS-to-email link that no longer seems stable. So I’m thinking of just manually pasting each post into a list email, in which case:
- Posts could be sent without delay.
- Every post would be delivered by separate mail. (As opposed to having only one post per night be mailed, while others just get linked to.)
It’s a bit more work for me, but probably nothing dire. Does lower latency sound good to everybody? 🙂
2. The main technical options seem to be: Read more
| Categories: About this blog | 4 Comments |
Analyzing big companies is hard
Analyzing companies of any size is hard. Analyzing large ones, however, is harder yet.
- I get (much) less substance in an hour on the phone with a megacorp than I do when I talk with a smaller company.
- What large companies say is less reliable than what I hear from smaller ones.
- Large companies have policies, procedures, bureaucracy and attitudes that get in the way of communicating in the first place.
Such limitations should be borne in mind in connection with anything I write about, for example, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, or SAP.
There are many reasons for large companies to communicate less usefully with analysts than smaller ones do. Some of the biggest are:
- For reasons of internal information flow, the people I talk with just know less than their counterparts at smaller companies. Similarly, what they do “know” is more often wrong, since different parts of the same company may not hold identical views.
- That’s when we talk about real issues at all, which can get crowded out by large companies’ voluminous efforts in complex positioning, messaging, and product names.
- Huge companies have huge bureaucracies, and they hurt.
- A small company C-level executive can make smart decisions about what to say or not say. A large company minion doesn’t have the same freedom.
- Just the process of getting access to even a mid-level spokesminion at a large company is harder than reaching a senior person at a smaller outfit.
- Large firms are clearest when communicating with their existing customers and those organizations’ key influencers. They’re less effective or clear when opening themselves up to competitive comparisons.
- If a company wants to behave unethically in its analyst dealings, there are economies of scale to doing so.
| Categories: About this blog, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, SAP AG, Sybase | 6 Comments |
Oops
Please disregard any intentions I expressed of traveling in October, in particular a trip to visit 20 or so California clients. I’m under doctor’s orders not to fly for several weeks, and also don’t feel like driving (or walking) any significant distances. Any meetings I have in the very near future will either be telephonic, or else within a few minute’s drive of my home office in Acton, MA.
The story behind this is:
- Istanbul sidewalks have a lot of knee/shin-height metal poles to separate streets and driveways from sidewalks.
- I stumbled over one of the shin-height ones.
- I have some pretty dramatic bruising, and associated pain.
- Bruises + plane flights = risk of blood clot.
Fortunately, that’s all it is — no fracture, and the sprain per se is mild. But about 4 doctors and nurses have told me this is really unusual bruising. Nobody has offered a precise opinion as to how soon it will clear up, but I gather the good case is 2-4 weeks and the bad case is twice that.
I should have plenty of opportunity to blog.
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |