• Everything Else

    The Cloud is dead: long live the Swarm!

    by  • April 28, 2013 • Everything Else • 1 Comment

    Here’s my prediction: space in data centers is going to become almost free. A convergence of trends is going to crash the price, and business model, of many Cloud providers in the next two years. Those trends are four. 1> Smart dotcoms are rewriting their backends in fast, compiled languages like golang. One example went [...]

    Read more →

    i hate energy policy

    by  • April 22, 2013 • Everything Else • 1 Comment

    Draft of an introduction to an energy policy doc. Could use some feedback – comments welcomed! ==== Nothing stands still. The continued addition of complexity to the basic systems of our society has run for hundreds of years, mainly on fossil fuels. The continued injection of energy into our societies has produced a boom in [...]

    Read more →

    Bitcoin, the 1960s, and the great LSD conspiracy

    by  • April 16, 2013 • Everything Else • 4 Comments

      Three lightly edited excerpts from a conversation about bitcoin with some Californians. ===== I actually worked for the NSA. I did a genocide-resistant biometric ID project for them. http://guptaoption.com/cheapid/ (note that it is fully public and in the public domain – those are the only conditions I work for spookland under.) What we know, for sure, [...]

    Read more →

    The People’s Cloud #peoplescloud

    by  • April 7, 2013 • Everything Else • 1 Comment

    A quick summary. Data centers are inherently centralized, and bloody expensive. Once you have all that data in one place, doing large scale monitoring is very easy. Sutherland’s Wheel predicts that centralization and decentralization take turns as “progress.” We are turning forwards to decentralization again: bitcoin, bittorrent and so on. The People’s Cloud is the [...]

    Read more →

    Petascale Urban Computing

    by  • March 31, 2013 • Everything Else • 4 Comments

    Simple concept (!) I wanted to give a URL to. One thousand or more nodes in a mesh or other network Each node has: One terabyte or more of disk One gigabyte or more of ram On gigahertz or more of processor Nodes are scattered through a contiguous geography like a city Conceptually, Petascale Urban [...]

    Read more →

    Not Capitalism, not Communism

    by  • March 28, 2013 • Everything Else • 6 Comments

    I got an interesting write up on the unemployment / mechanization / income angle from my friend Nathan Koren (he does collaborative futures with Noah Raford at Futurescaper). Nathan’s basic argument is that Ford’s innovation of “make a car your workers can afford” has now been displaced with “race to the bottom” feedback loops in manufacturing, [...]

    Read more →