Update at 7:00PM Saturday — It’s the speed of the PC. A dual-core 2-GHz iMac is jerky while a 2-GHz four-core I7 Mac Mini runs fine. A 2.4-GHz AMD four-core PC running Windows 7 Professional runs fine, too. But I can’t watch the Olympics on a 2 GHz iMac, a 2 GHz Mac Mini, or my mid-2010 MacBook Pro (also 2-GHz). All three computers have two cores and are at their max RAM. Yes, I can slow down the connection, but anything above 360p clearly has problems (240p is best) and this on a 25 mbps Internet connection. Understand that in each case I’m starting with the resolution setting on “auto,” so […]
YouTube might be the best place to watch the Olympics (if it doesn’t break)
The DARPA Way
Depending on who you are talking to there were several very different reasons why the Internet was created, whether it was military command and control (Curtis LeMay told me that), to create a new communication and commerce infrastructure (Al Gore), or simply to advance the science of digital communications (lots of people). But Bob Taylor says the Internet was created to save money. And since Bob Taylor was, more than anyone, the guy who caused the Internet to be created, well I’ll believe him.
Bob Taylor, probably best known for building and managing the Computer Systems Laboratory at XEROX PARC from which emerged advances including Ethernet, laser printing, and SmallTalk, was before that the DARPA program […]
Are Indian high schoolers manning your IBM help desk?
The theory of outsourcing and offshoring IT as it is practiced in the second decade of the 21st century comes down to combining two fundamental ideas: 1) that specialist firms, whether here or overseas, can provide quality IT services at lower cost by leveraging economies of scale, and; 2) that offshore labor markets can multiply that price advantage through labor arbitrage using cheaper yet just as talented foreign labor to supplant more expensive domestic workers who are in extremely short supply. While this may be true in the odd case, for the most part I believe it is a lie.
This lie is hurting both American workers and the ability of American enterprise to compete in […]
How Marissa Mayer can still save Yahoo
E-mail readers of this column don’t have an easy way to leave comments so of course they send them straight to me, which is easily done simply by hitting reply. Other bloggers are smarter than I am and don’t use their actual e-mail address for the feed. The trend this morning among my e-mailers is to see the hiring of Marissa Mayer at Yahoo as some kind of trick by Google. Ms. Mayer is Google to the core, readers say, and she’s going to Yahoo simply as a commando to pick and choose future Google acquisitions.
No, she isn’t.
But I can’t write just a two paragraph column so I’ll go on to suggest what I think Ms. […]
New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is no Sorkin hero
If Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing) was writing the story of Yahoo and he got to Marissa Mayer’s surprise entrance yesterday as Yahoo’s latest CEO, here’s how he would probably play it: the brilliant, tough, beautiful, charismatic engineer defies her Google glass ceiling and, through sheer vision and clever example, saves the pioneering Internet company. That’s how Sorkin would play it because he likes an underdog, loves smart, well-spoken people, and revels in beautiful if slightly flawed characters and happy endings. But in this case Aaron Sorkin would be playing it wrong.
To be clear, were I in the position of Yahoo’s board I would probably have hired Marissa Mayer, too. On paper […]
