Eric Schmidt's Cloud Computing And My IC Vision

The Official Google Blog: Cloud computing: the latest chapter in an epic journey: It’s extraordinary how very complex platforms can produce beautifully simple solutions like Chrome and Chrome OS ...... but then there are very few genuinely new ideas in computer science. The last really new one was public key encryption back in 1975. ..... But the web is not really cloud computing—it’s an enormously important source of information, probably the most important ever invented. One major web innovation cycle happened in 1995—remember the Netscape IPO, Java and all of that—ultimately leading, in 1997, to an announcement by Oracle
Image by wicho via Flickr (and bunch of other people including myself) called “the network computer.” It was exactly what the Chrome team at Google was talking about on Tuesday. ....... Moore's law is a factor of 1,000 in 15 years—so 15 years ago versus today, we have 1,000 times faster networks, CPUs and screens. ...... Asynchronous JavaScript XML, or AJAX, came along in in 2003/04, and it enabled the first really interesting web apps like Gmail to be built. ...... LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP—and Perl, Python and various other Ps—evolved as a platform for the back-end........ Instead of building these large monolithic programs, people would take snippets of code and aggregate them together in languages like Java and JavaScript. ..... As usual, Larry and Sergey were way ahead of me on this. From my very first day at Google, they made clear that we should be in the browser business and the OS business. ...... we've gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks. Architecturally that’s a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now finally possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. ....... a small team, effectively working as a start-up within Google

I am working on a blog post called Google stole my idea. I am only half kidding, of course. I first thought of the IC concept in 2000. That was before I ever ready about Larry Ellison's network computer vision, something he had talked about apparently a few years before that.

The IC vision is what I hung on to as my straw when the dot com collapse happened.

A Mind Blowing Party

Last night I showed up at the party I thought Rachel Sklar had thrown for Fred Wilson's birthday. Ends up it was Rachel Sklar's birthday. Wait, I am confused. Fred Wilson raises money to get more young women into math and science instead of celebrating his birthday. I told you, he is a feminist! And this party was tied into that. So I can't be too off. Maybe the two share birthdays.

Going Backwards: FoodSpotting, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare
Fractals And FoodSpotting
Fractals: Mandelbrot

What do I mean by going backwards?

Microsoft started out as a software only company. Actually that was the genius of Bill Gates, otherwise his cofounder Paul Allen wanted to do both software and hardware. Microsoft could not have moved as fast if it had also done hardware. Smart. But. Down the line Microsoft has gone into hardware. The company fell comfortable enough that it felt compelled to get into hardware as well.

You Don't Need Billions To Take Care Of Your Family

Image via CrunchBaseThis news is heart warming to me. Now I wish a 200 billion dollar valuation upon Facebook. Zuck just warmed up my heart. If you think how minuscule the UN's budget is, this effort by the two mega billionaires Gates and Buffett stands out. And, believe me, money is the smaller part of the message, big as it is. The bigger part of the message is the gesture itself. This sends a loud message to the people in dire need, the people who are working to help them, and people who need to help them but are not. Poverty is truly an artificial thing. It can be made to go away. It doesn't take much. And it all starts with caring. Once you decide you care, things start to happen.

Chrome OS Taking Too Long To Show Up

Engadget: Google Chrome OS gets detailed, first laptops from Acer and Samsung coming mid-2011: it's ready to go almost right away .... Google says the limiting factor is actually how fast the user can move their hand ..... OS also supports multiple accounts with a guest account that runs in Incognito mode, and all user data is encrypted by default ..... the OS will be automatically updated every few weeks -- the goal is for it to get faster over time, not slower. ...... apps on the Chrome Web Store have to be built for HTML5 offline to work ..... Google Cloud Print, which allows you to print on your home printer from anywhere ..... new Verizon 3G plans for offline access -- you'll get 100MB of free data per month for two years ...... Intel-based machines from Acer and Samsung in mid-2011 -- and "thousands of Googlers" are using Chrome OS devices as their primary machines. ..... a modern riff on the "thin client" idea from the 90s -- an idea that Eric Schmidt himself pioneered while at Sun ..... "our instincts were right 20 years ago, but we didn't have the tools or technology."

Like a CIA guy says in The Bourne Ultimatum.

"How long?"

"An hour, Sir."

"That's too long!"

Microfinance: A Zero Trillion Dollar Industry

Eminem: Recovery