Steve Jobs knew about these cycles, and said during his famous Stanford University commencement address of 2005 [7:22 into the video, which you can find on NPR]

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”

These cycles have nothing to do with whether you get rich or become a bum. They have to do with how you decide to use your precious years. He put the exclamation point on it [12:40 into the same video] by adding

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

The post The Beauty of Starting Over Again appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.)

Reich quotes Ben Bernanke:

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke … listed the choices. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, “the nation must choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

And then:

Bernanke is almost certainly right about “some combination,” but he leaves out one other possible remedy that should be included in that combination: Immigration.

Reich reminds us that immigrants are younger, want to work and to “succeed” and given a chance can make a difference in the economics of the US.

I think there’s a gem of truth here—but Reich is limiting this discussion to the US economy and not looking at global solutions. Yes, physical immigration and local (read “US”) taxation of income could make a big difference locally. But we’re in our current employment crisis in large measure because we have become global economically while not becoming global in terms of social policy. And maybe we just can’t do that.

And also implicit in Reich’s rhetoric is that we as old timers will need to be taken care of. Certainly we’re all playing the lottery of life, but we’re far less decrepit than people were at our age even 50 years ago.

When I began programming computers at the age of 16 (super-computers, of course, not PCs)^[1], I thought the age of software was upon us and there would be a never-ending stream of challenges and problems that I’d be able to throw my intellect at. Basically forever.

But, in the last couple of decades a lot has changed. First, beginning at most 20 years ago, software has been written by smaller and smaller groups—a few hundred engineers at Microsoft could develop software to be used by many millions of people.^[2] And then, more recently, software engineering has spread around the world with teams in Russia, India, China and many other places, now taking on development tasks. The economic and personnel growth in those parts of the world has stayed localized, reducing the employment chances is the US and therefore the tax base for care of soon-to-be-late-life boomers. It’s clear that the standard of living has to “level out.”

I think that the boomers will face the challenge by continuing to be productive long past the time when our forebears would have retired. And that our productivity will be in the intellectual sector, not the “sweat” sector. Boomers can “give back” in terms of wisdom, stories and experience. And maybe it’s not a case of giving back, but of forward-looking contribution to the active life of the present day. If the Internet survives (I have definite opinions on the fragility of the Internet!), and since online nobody cares if you’re a dog, nobody cares if you have gray hair, or none for that matter. If you’re smart, you can still make it. But, be prepared for living a simpler life.^[3] And your competitors will be all over the globe – as will be your customers.

[1] The photo is the CDC 6400 at Northwestern University in 1968 – I used to be a spin-doctor for political candidates, and that’s one of them in the photo. In those days you were “modern” if you were looking at a computer printout. And we all wore those narrow ties. And blue jeans.

[2] For the moment I’m ignoring free and open source developments like Linux, Gnu and many others. But they can’t really be ignored, so suspend disbelief for a moment if you will and ride with the current argument.

[3] More about the simpler life later on. It means less moving your body around the globe on airplanes, and more audio and video conferencing.

The post Boomers gotta answer their own questions appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The thread of his post struck me smack in the face:

Economy has become so powerful because, in the absence of the political ideas to reform government to deal with the real issues of the world, economy emerges as a way to cope with 6 billion people…

Economy has become a form of governance…

The result is a way of life based on dollars and what dollars can buy, which is not so much meaningful goods but stuff…

The result is that we do not really have a governance of society. We have a governance of the society via economy and a governance of economics through the narrow interests of its major participants…

The well being of the people has been replaced by the well being of the economy, which, to make the rich yet richer, has chosen to eliminate people as a cost to the economic engine.

—Douglass Carmichael [excerpted by Sky from Governance and economy]

For 10 years now I have wondered how we expect to both 1) reduce jobs in the US and 2) maintain a functioning economy. I so much want to see people everywhere in the world achieve a good standard of living, and I know that we in the US need to reduce the way we squander our resources, but I don’t see how we can keep eliminating people from the economic engine and expect to have a sustainable economy, let alone a sustainable world. The gears of economy need to function differently—and I firmly believe that the turmoil we see in economic systems right now signals that we will never return to “normal” but instead will have to wrestle with these kinds of questions, and solve these kinds of problems, in order to stabilize our economic and social systems.

Read

The post To… eliminate people as a cost to the economic engine appeared first on Sky's Blog.

We see these in the Sierras (the mountains) as well, in some high-traffic publicly-accessible areas of the wilderness. Usually the solar cells in the mountains are powering fans that circulate air into a composting toilet (one that composts the deposits rather than requiring removal to another location). And they’re generally so far from civilization that running a power line would be ludicrous.

But it always seems funny to me.

The post The Solar Outhouse appeared first on Sky's Blog.

However, cloud computing allows us to scale our servers up and up in order to service greater numbers of requests for service. This opens a new avenue of approach for attackers, which originally was labeled an Economic Denial of Sustainability attack by Christofer Hoff (November 2008), with a follow-up just recently. (I was introduced to the concept by Reuven Cohen’s description published just today.)

In short, if your cloud-based service is designed to scale up automatically (which some like Amazon EC2 are), then an attacker can grief you economically by sending a huge number of (automated) requests that appear on the surface to be legitimate, but are actually fake. Your costs will rise as you scale up, using more and/or larger servers (automatically) to service those fake requests. Ultimately you will reach a point where your costs overtake your ability to pay – a point at which your economic sustainability becomes questionable.

Ouch!

[The EDoS concept applies primarily to cloud-based services and not to people who own their own servers, because if you own your own servers and are the target of a DoS attack, you don’t immediately and automatically scale your operation up to a larger size, so the attack doesn’t immediately cost you money. It’s only when the scaling-up is automated and there’s no ceiling that you run the risk of economic damage.]

The post EDoS [Economic Denial of Sustainability] attacks appeared first on Sky's Blog.

And let’s not ignore other efforts to create inexpensive computers, like Simputer and the recent announcement that India seeks to create a $10 laptop computer. (That’s, of course, going to be extremely difficult, but it does show that $100 may still be too high a price to achieve “everywhere” penetration.)

On CBS News, Lesley Stahl interviewed Nick Negroponte about the computer. There’s video there to be viewed. This is the CBS-OLPC institutional view, of course, but the discussion about OLPC in the blogosphere has gotten so negative lately that some positivity is welcome!

One Laptop Per Child

• OLPC main site
• “OLPC News“
• The CBS News report on OLPC

The Intel Classmate

• Google video of the first prototype of the Intel Eduwise computer (later the Classmate) at trade show (May 2006)
• C|Net article on Intel’s Classmate
• Brazil to test…Classmate
• A technical comparison of the OLPC “XO” and the Intel Classmate
• Wikipedia entry on the Intel Classmate

The Simputer (Simple Computer)

• Wikipedia entry on the Simputer
• Simputer web site

-posted using Ecto

The post “The Other” $100 Laptops appeared first on Sky's Blog.

And here’s their continuing call to action – Green my Apple, to the Core.

For a broader overview of greenness in computers, here’s Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics.

The post Tracking how Green Your Computer is appeared first on Sky's Blog.

This is good news and a good move toward environmental transparency. It would be hypocritical of us to push the Internet, and computers as substitutes for polluting technologies (especially air travel) and then be contributing repeatedly to the poisoning of the earth!

The post A Greener Apple appeared first on Sky's Blog.