Technology Trends

Someone decided he didn’t like the last item I posted yesterday, “Can Cell Phones Damage Our Eyes?” — or didn’t like me at all. It was probably because this item was picked by Slashdot, and because this person was jealous of the — maybe — five additional dollars I made through AdSense. So he has posted more than 500 comments by 7 AM this morning here in France. [Read more to know why I'm disabling comments.]

As all these comments were racist or injurious, but more or less random, I decided to eliminate them. But with Radio, from Userland Software, I have to individually check all the comments in order to delete them. Obviously, a “Delete all” or a “Check all” button would be welcome. Is there one in the works?

And of course, you know Murphy’s law: when things can go worse, they do! Since yesterday, and for the next two days, my ISP is having a problem in the 15th district of Paris, which means I’m only connected half of the time at best, with several interruptions per day — I’ve currently no connection as I’m typing this.

Then, as the attack continued, I opened Radio, and modified the parameters for comments, disabling them and automatic e-mail notifications — because this attack was also filling my inbox. I published again yesterday’s item, and now, there is no longer a link to a “Comments” field.

But the attack was still going on, and I continued to receive an e-mail every minute. I guess that the attack was done through a script which ignored that my preferences regarding comments had changed.

Right now, I’m no longer receiving e-mails because I’ve excluded the domain name where they came from — the only thing which was not forged in these e-mails.

But all of this took me time and efforts, which was probably the intention of the attacker.

Several other blogging platforms ask that people register before posting a comment, but this is not possible with Radio, which has only two options: enabling comments or disabling them.

It’s for that reason that I’m taking an extreme measure: I’m disabling comments on this blog. I simply can’t afford to have a thousand of racist comments on this blog.

If you want to tell me something about the subjects I’m writing about, please send me an e-mail (look at the bottom right of every page of this blog to send me a message).

I know this is a drastic measure, but today it’s necessary. If you think you have another solution, please let me know — but not with a comment here

PS #1: The Radio software is maybe not the best one for handling comments, but I’ve started my fourth year using it for this blog and it’s intentional: I’m still happy to pay $40 per year to use this software. I’m using other blogging tools for other purposes, and they still have to learn from Radio in many areas.

PS #2: And guess why Robert Scoble, from Microsoft, is still using Radio for his “Scobleizer” blog? Just because it’s a very good piece of software.

PS#3: It seems that the attacker has switched strategy by now — 10:30 PM in France — and that his script is focusing on trackback links — more than 5,000 as I’m posting this.

Update (July 29,2005): The nice folks at UserLand Software have removed the 5,500 comments and trackback links posted yesterday. Thanks Lawrence!

Now, it remains to be seen if I have also to disable the usage of trackback links.

Update #2 (August 1, 2005): my yesterday’s post, “Software Agents Can Help Time-Stressed Teams” was picked by Slashdot. Less than an hour after appearing there, the vandal who attacked me on July 27 was again at work. This time, he targeted the trackback links. Trackback links are now disabled, and Lawrence Lee cleaned the mess left by the pirate.

But until Radio provides a way to selectively approve comments or trackback links, these features will remain disabled.

Source: Roland Piquepaille, July 28, 2005

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Today, it’s time for a pause on our technological agenda here. Henry Copeland, from Blogads, is starting a new survey to know who read blogs, and also why and how they’re looking at them. Last year, more than 17,000 people answered the survey, which should not take you more than five minutes to fill. But the number of respondents has to be bigger in 2005 than in 2004, so I’m inviting you to fill this new survey. And don’t forget to mention my blog (www.primidi.com/) as the answer to question #16 — if you enjoy reading it of course. I’ll update you about results when they become available. Read more…

Here is what Copeland wrote in an email yesterday.

Though the survey is unabashadly unscientific, the results will help us better excite advertisers, journalists and the public about the huge and unique audiences blogs serve. I hope some interesting year-over-year trends will emerge, since most of these questions are identical to last year’s.

As was the case last year, the aggregate question-by-question results will be released under the Creative Commons “attribution license.”

This means that the results from this survey will be available to all of you in a few weeks. Let’s look at some key numbers from last year’s survey.

More than 60% of blog readers were older than 30 years old, and 75% were earning at least $75K per year. Not the exact teenagers, isn’t?

Here is a link to the full results from last year’s survey.

And below is a table summarizing why respondents were reading blogs a year ago.

I read blogs for:
	Response Percent	Response Total
Faster news	65.9%	10,504
Latest trends	35%	5,587
Transparent biases	50.3%	8,023
Better perspective	77.9%	12,421
More personality	47%	7,493
More honesty	61.4%	9,788
News I can’t find elsewhere	79.7%	12,713
Other (please specify)	14%	2,241
Total Respondents		15,951
(skipped this question)		1,208

So what has changed since 2004? Fill the survey and you’ll know.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, March 3, 2005; Blogads website

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Intel President Paul Otellini, who will become CEO in May, has a blog. But it’s an internal blog, available only to Intel employees. Of course, there are always information leaks in companies the size of Intel (85,000 employees). So it’s not a surprise that the contents of Otellini’s blog are now appearing. In “Intel blog: what the boss thinks,” the Mercury News looks at this blog and also at other executives who blog directly for the public. The Mercury News also posted on its site the contents of Otellini’s blog (PDF format, 16 pages, 121 KB) for the period going from December 14, 2004 to January 19, 2005. Read more for selected excerpts.

Here is the introduction of the Mercury News article.

Like many a corporate executive, Intel President Paul Otellini rarely deviates from the company line in public. But read Otellini’s blog and you’ll see what he really thinks.

In contrast to the public online journals of most corporate executives, Otellini’s blog is strictly for Intel employees’ eyes only, published on the company’s internal Web site. But a copy of the 8-week-old blog obtained by the Mercury News shows Otellini unplugged, conversing candidly with Intel’s rank and file about the challenges facing the Santa Clara chip giant. Otellini, who becomes Intel’s next chief executive in May, even praises Advanced Micro Devices, his Sunnyvale rival whose existence company executives take pains to ignore.

If you read the Otellini’s blog as published by the Mercury News, you’ll notice that there are only four entries from Intel’s President. It’s more a weekly memo than a daily blog. Of course, I can understand this. Being Intel’s President and next CEO certainly guarantees a long weekly working time.

In his second entry, Otellini mentions that he was overwhelmed by the response to his blog, with 350 comments posted in the first 24 hours after publication. The file provided by the Mercury News lists only 16 comments to the first entry. This means that comments are certainly edited, and probably because many comments carry identical messages.

Now, here is my personal selection of Otellini’s writings, starting with his first post where he recognizes that his internal blog will eventually become public.

Why am I doing this? Well, it seemed like a good idea to be able to create an ongoing vehicle to share my thoughts and observations on Intel and our industry with our employees, and to allow you an opportunity to have a platform for your thoughts or responses. While this is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public — welcome to the Internet! As a result, please recognize that I may be a bit limited in my comments and responses to protect Intel, and that we may exercise some editorial privilege on your comments for the same reason. I want to be clear on this up front. This is the price of entry to this blog.

On December 19, Otellini wrote some comments about the Itanium family of microprocessors.

Yes, Itanium is taking longer to achieve market and financial success than we first envisioned. But we are making significant headway in the replacement of generations of RISC microprocessors with Itanium. This year, Itanium will out ship every RISC processor except Power or Sparc. Roughly 20% of the world’s supercomputers are now built on Itanium. I always felt it would take at least a decade for us to establish this architecture. It simply takes that long to establish the performance roadmap, and to develop a critical mass of software and users. We will stay the course on this product line, and we will succeed.

In his January 10 entry, he spoke about the tsunami in South Asia, but also about competition from AMD.

We have a significant competitor to our Xeon product line in the Opteron line from AMD. This is the first significant competition we have seen with the market segment for “high volume servers” that Intel invented. We identified this competitive threat over a year ago, and did a great job in 2004 by shipping record Xeon volumes, achieving a very rapid ramp of our 64 bit extension based product, and minimizing share loss. While I hate losing share, the reality is that our competitor has a very strong product offering. We did a good job in 2004, and cannot let up, as I expect 2005 to be even more competitive in this area. There is no quick fix or easy answer here.

I doubt he ever said this to a customer.

In the latest note, dated January 19, Otellini comments the reorganization of Intel into five divisions and about how some employees read about it on the Web before being informed internally.

Even with this “beat the web” approach, some employees have mentioned that they read about in on the web before they heard about it from Intel. My apologies, but it seems that it is very hard to move faster than internet speed. In any event, we are off and running on creating what one analyst called Intel 3.0. He talked about us originally being the Memory company, then the Microprocessor company, and now the Platform company. While there is some accuracy in this statement, I think it may be a bit premature to declare this as a done.” We have much work to do before we can truly claim to have capitalized on this fundamental shift in our business. I found many of the analyst comments regarding the reorganization to be very interesting.

Just in case you forgot about Intel’s reorganization last January, please read this article from CNET News.com, “Intel launches broad reorganization.”

So, is this a real internal blog or just a weekly memo to employees? I don’t think this is important. What matters is that every Intel employee can comment on the company’s strategy.

Sources: Dean Takahashi, Mercury News, February 15, 2005; Paul Otellini’s blog; Steven Musil and Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, January 17, 2005

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It’s hard to deny that Sun Microsystems is good at communicating its messages. Its president, Jonathan Schwartz, started this year one of the most influential business blogs, Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog. And now, in a story attributed to its CEO, Scott Mc Nealy describes his Christmas dream. In this text, which was almost certainly written by the folks at the Register, Scott Mc Nealy is in line with many other kids to talk with Santa. And these other kids have names such as Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, Paul Otellini or Sam Palmisano, so you can imagine the jokes when they meet Santa — from a Sun point of view. To me, the best one is when Matthew Szulik of Red Hat wants to offer a Finnish terrier to Santa — for free. But then he asks that Santa sends him $5,000 per year to take care of the puppy. Of course, Santa is not amused. Scott sends you his very best wishes for 2005. I’m joining him to wish you a Happy 2005.

Here are some short excerpts. Let’s start with a collage.

Now, here is what Paul Otellini of Intel asks Santa.

Next up on the Big Guy’s lap is Paul Otellini of Intel. “Santa, can’t I please, please have a 64-bit processor that works?”

Santa puts on a very stern face. “Paul, last year you wished for that and I gave you Itanium. Now you can’t just throw it in the trash because you’re fed up with it. You’ve got to find a way to make it work.”

“Aw, Santa. You know it’ll never work. Our engineers know it’ll never work. Only HP believes it’ll work — and those guys believe in fairies and elves.” Paul trudges off sullenly.

Let’s now turn to Matthew Szulik of Red Hat, who wants to make a free gift to Santa. Surprised, Santa asks what is the gift. Here is the conversation.

It’s a puppy — a Finnish terrier — for you to bring back to the North Pole. It wears sandals, it likes to take saunas, and, best of all, it won’t cost you a penny… right now.”

“Right now?” Santa asks. (You don’t get to control all the presents in the world if you’re not a pretty smart cookie.)

“Er…yes. There’s one tiny catch. To pay for the proper care and maintenance of the puppy, every year you have to send me $5000.”

As Szulik speaks, Santa’s face darkens like one of those storms that blow in from Siberia. “If I have to send you $5000 a year, then the truth is that this is one expensive puppy, isn’t it Matthew?”

Matthew is looking down at his shoes and nodding. Santa pushes the naughty boy off his lap. “Go to your room, Matthew. It’s coal for you this year.”

Then arrives Sam Palmisano of IBM. As he’s too short to climb on Santa’s knee, he asks a gigantic army of “IBM Global Services” consultants to build him a chair. Of course, they fail. So Santa asks an elf to bring a perfect chair and Palmisano asks Santa where this chair comes from.

“Oh, we do a lot more up here than sit in the snow and wrap presents, Sam. We have one room where some very smart designers create some great innovations. We call it the Sun room.” Sam begs and pleads for access to this room for Christmas, but Santa replies. “Unfortunately, Sammy, this is a place where only the best and brightest can visit, so we won’t be able to let you or your friends in dark suits enter there. Make sure to come back next year with another wish!”

Well, even if it was not written by Scott McNealy, it’s really fun. Merry Christmas!

Source: Scott McNealy, CEO at Sun Microsystems, for The Register, December 23, 2004

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