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Project 2501 by Andy Patrizio (bio)

Making sense of an overwhelming sea of information

July 22, 2008, 2:01 PM

It's The Dating Game, Silicon Valley Edition

 Greetings and welcome, I am your host, Andy "Wink Martindale" Patrizio, welcome to this round of the Dating Game, Silicon Valley Edition. Now this is not a show dedicated to finding a date for more than an hour for overpaid Java programmers with a whole lot of options. Nosiree, this is finding the idea luuuuv match for their company.

See, it seems to me if we leave it up to the firms to make their own decisions, they do it badly. I mean really, would you pay $1 billion for a company that did $50 million in business? Or buy a company with which you have absolutely no synergy whatsoever?

Since we can't leave this up to the MBAs, we're going to put it in the more capable hands of a guy who took six years to get a four-year degree. And now, let's meet our first two contestants. (more) |

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 2:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 16, 2008, 3:32 PM

Introducing the blank keyboard

If you find yourself constantly looking down at the keyboard, then you may want to avoid the Das Keyboard Ultimate. Or you may want to get one.

The German company Das Keyboard (German for "The Keyboard." Very original) has two ruggedly designed keyboards, one with the lettering on the keys (Professional) and one without (Ultimate). The textless version is specifically for people trying to improve their typing skills by taking away the main speed bump, constantly looking down at the keys.

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Instead, the keyboard forces people to learn to type by tactile feel and learning to position their hands properly. No more two finger typing by looking down and pecking out words one index finger at a time.

Just like the Shamwow being hyped on basic cable channels, Das Keyboard touts its German-designed, complete with gold-plated mechanical key switches (on the keyboard, not the Shamwow) to create a "distinct click" with each keystroke. It also has two USB 2.0 ports, a black surface with blue LEDs, and a two meter (about six and a half feet) USB cable.

The Das Keyboard (is it redundant when you use a definite article in two languages?) sells for $129, with or without the lettering.

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 3:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 14, 2008, 1:35 PM

'One moment, let me get your iPhone.'

att_logo.gifFunny how things can change so quickly. As I'd mentioned in my previous posting, the local AT&T store was all out of iPhones and put me on a waiting list for new arrivals. Wouldn't you know it, but around 4 pm on Friday I get a call from the store. Seems some more phones have arrived, would I like to come and get it?

Silly question.

After assuring my boss I'd be home in time for final editing of late stories, I headed off. It was all so cloak and dagger. I had to ask for certain people in the stores. By telling the floor staffers I was looking for these certain people, they would know I was there for a wait-listed iPhone. I got the phone a minute after walking in, but walking out with it wouldn't be so easy.

After one interminable wait while the customer in front of me was activated, we started on mine. Wouldn't you know it, there was a snag. I had left Verizon earlier than planned due to their unwillingness to fix a serious problem. My phone kept losing audio. In mid-conversation, I suddenly could not hear the other person. They could hear me fine but I could not hear them. The call never terminated, and eventually audio came back.

Despite giving me two replacement phones, the problem persisted. When it finally started to affect business calls and my work, I demanded a new model phone because it was clear the problem was with the LG phone. Verizon refused. They were going to give me a fourth phone of the same model that had failed three times already. So I told them where to stick their defective phones and their termination fee and left for AT&T a little early. (Can you hear me now? Goodbye!)

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This, as it turned out, proved problematic for AT&T. The iPhone price is contingent on being a new activation. But I was already an existing customer. As my 30-minute run to the store rounded the bend on 90 minutes, things started getting a little unsettling. I ended up needing a new phone number, but in the end, I owe a big thank you to the crew at the San Bruno AT&T store for my new gadget.

Overall it's a great phone but it has some shortcomings. The Wi-Fi is not very good. I sit 12 feet from the office access point and I'm getting e-mail retrieval errors. Even with 3G, the network quality isn't as good as Verizon's. The curved back of the phone means if you lie it flat and type, it wobbles back and forth. The first gen phone didn't do that because it was flat. Still, it's an amazing piece of equipment. Hat's off to Apple for one million units shipped and 10 million apps downloaded over the weekend.

So Scarlett, will it be The Cliff House or Castagnola's?


Posted by Andy Patrizio at 1:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 11, 2008, 2:00 PM

iPocalypse Now - No iPhone for you

 After an impatient wait on my part, I was up earlier than usual to hit the San Bruno AT&T store for my new iPhone. Friday traffic was typical. All the way there, all I could do was hope there were enough stores to diffuse demand and keep the lines short. Maybe there's a chance.


Yeah right, and I've got a chance for a date with Scarlett Johansson this weekend, too.

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If the line had been reasonable, I was more than willing to wait a bit. After all, it was 8 am. But no, this line was about 40 feet long and was barely moving, and as Dave reminded me yesterday, Jupiter does not pay me to stand in line shopping. The office called.


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I didn't have a chance to talk to the store's staffers, but it seems the mad rush for the phone is the reason for lines. The overload of people trying to register the phone, activate it and download iTunes 7.7 is taking its toll, causing severe problems on both Apple and AT&T's ends. All of this is being documented on MacRumors.com and Gizmodo, and likely elsewhere.

A few people in line joked about being very late for work, while others said they took the day off. A few even camped out overnight. As a teen, I did that sort of thing for concert tickets. It was the kind of thing you do when you're 18-19, hanging out with people whom you share a mutual interest. It wasn't the concert so much as it was the experience. Of course I took grief for it at home, but I didn't care.

At my age now, this sort of thing looks ridiculous. It's just a phone.

Great, I'm finally seeing things from my father's perspective.

I'll get my phone another time.

Update: I went by the story during lunch and the line was gone. That's because so were the phones. They were all sold out, and taking waiting list orders.

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 10, 2008, 3:39 PM

IBM gets Navy Blue

 The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC), an office in the Department of Defense, is the latest government agency to install an IBM supercomputer, a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster.

The Power 575 Hydro-Cluster consists of 149 nodes with 32 Power6 processors per cluster running AIX and uses IBM's water cooling system, rather than air cooling. When it's finally up and running, it will offer 90 teraflops of computing power, 4.5 times more powerful than what NAVO has now, according to Mike Hensley, vice president of deep computing product management at IBM.

At 90 teraflops, that would put the new cluster at number 15 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, which will undoubtedly change by November, when it will be reissued. The cluster will be used to do ocean modeling to provide operational weather forecasts for the U.S. Naval fleet, but the data is also shared with the public as well.

"They have, over the years, run a supercomputer center in operational mode 24/7 providing data and actionable weather forecasting information to fleet commanders to stay out of harm's way and to optimize their operating conditions," Hensley told InternetNews.com. "With this new cluster, they can refine the fidelity of ocean and weather forecasting models. With each generation of computing you can improve your accuracy for the fleet."

The new cluster is being installed now and will be operational some time in early fall. The older system, running older Power5 and even Power4 servers, will eventually be retired.

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 3:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 24, 2008, 8:10 PM

More Star Trek tech comes to life

 In a bit of news that sounds right out of Star Trek, scientists at Oregon State University and University College London have devised an ultraviolet scanner that can identify organic matter in soils.

The ultraviolet light reacts with chemical compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are considered candidates for being one of the earliest forms of organic matter in the universe. PAHs are found on comets and meteorites, which has long fueled the theory that life on Earth actually came from space.

The researchers suggested using such an instrument on a Mars lander or rover to search for life. There are scheduled missions in 2009 and 2013, both of which are intended to search for life and habitability.

In their experiment, the scientists created a fine, dusty soil similar to the Martian surface, infused some PAHs in microscopic amounts, and scanned it with different color filters from a panoramic camera. The devices were able to identify as little as 1.5 micrograms of the organic material and pinpoint different PAHs by variations in their fluorescent response.

The trick now is to make the cameras light and tough enough to survive a trip through space and landing on the surface, not to mention survive for any length of time on Mars. Then maybe something handheld, like the old Star Trek tricorders.

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The Phoenix lander, which recently arrived on the Red Planet, has already located ice, and ice is considered an ideal indicator that there could be such PAH microbes. If there was previously running water on Mars, then areas with water would be likely to hold some microbial life forms.

However, it will likely be at least five years before this bio-scanner is ready for a trip into space, according to one of the scientists on the project.

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 8:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 17, 2008, 2:14 PM

Dear Jerry

 Dear Jerry Yang,

You probably don't remember me, since it's been 13 years. Let me refresh your memory.

It was the spring 1995 Internet World conference (ironically, run by my current employer) in the San Jose Convention Center. The middle of the floor was dominated by the likes of CompuServe and AOL and Netcom. Off to the fringes were the small firms, the startups, who had just a high table to stand behind and just enough room for one computer and monitor.

There you were with David Filo and two other guys, all dressed like typical college students. We talked for a few and I knew that you had finally moved off the Stanford address (akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo) to your own domain. Your comment to me, which I'll never forget, was "Dave and I are taking some time off from getting our masters degrees to see if we can make this work as a company." You'd just hired the other two guys and joked "Now there's four of us Yahoos."

If I'd known then what I know now I might have been tempted to break laws to become the fifth yahoo. I certainly wouldn't have gone back home to Boston.
(more) |

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 16, 2008, 7:11 PM

In the News there is no truth

 It was my vacation last week, but the first thing I did on Monday morning was search for live feeds of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference. After all, I'd heard the rumors of a $199 price tag for the iPhone for weeks in advance.

While our intrepid west coast bureau chief Dave Needle was there, pictures from the keynote began to emerge before it ended. The pictures told the story. Jobs' neck was about as thick as an iPod. His face was gaunt. The infamous black turtleneck hung on him like a drape and his jeans looked bunched, a classic sign of someone wearing pants too large for him.

"Oh no..." I mumbled.

While I run Windows machines at home (I'm a life-long gamer. Mac will never be a games platform until Microsoft ports DirectX to Mac OS, but that's for another blog), my first computer ever was an Apple IIe. Steve Jobs is as much a part of my geeky teen years as Gary Gygax, Lord British, Tom Baker and Neil Peart.

(whoda thunk the rock star would be the most successful one of the bunch in 2008, Jobs aside?)
(more) |

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 7:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

May 28, 2008, 2:07 PM

Goodbye Cable Box?

 Is the cable box about to go by way of the VCR? Sony Electronics and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association announced today that they have signed an agreement that would allow Sony to add many of the functions performed by set-top boxes to their TVs.

Most TVs have a built-in coaxial connection, allowing you to connect a cable wire directly to the set, but there are many advanced "two-way" features that require the box, like pay-per-view and on-demand.

Sony could not say when the first such televisions might be appear in stores.

The NCTA's members include the nation's six largest cable companies: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks. The six companies serve more than 82 percent of cable subscribers.

Customers will still be able to attach their own devices, like TiVo digital video recorders, according to the NCTA.

That's a good thing, because modern cable boxes have DVRs built into them. Ditching the cable box would mean losing the DVR. Of course, that's good news for TiVo, which has suffered for the addition of DVR capabilities to cable boxes, since people didn't need an add-on box any more.

I just hope Sony doesn't get the bright idea to add DVRs to its TVs. DVRs have a higher burn-out rate than TVs -- by several years -- because they use a hard drive, which is constantly running. Think about it. As long as your TV is on, that DVR hard drive is spinning as it records what you watch. The last thing anyone would want is for a dead DVR in their computer that needs repairs.

Still, it will be nice if I can dispense with one remote control and I can use the native channels in the TV rather than having to lock the TV on channel 3 and use the cable box. Now we need for more than just Sony to embrace the idea.

Posted by Andy Patrizio at 2:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Share