Archives for May 2008

Global Pools of Money and Sub-Prime Crisis

May 10, 2008 1 Comment

I heard a great story yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. It was a story that analyzed the sub-prime mortgage crisis from the aspect of “why did this happen, how could bankers ignore their core tenants when giving out loans”. Global Pool of Money Got Too Hungry was created by in conjunction with This American Life, so they take an interesting view on the entire situation. Well worth the 13 minutes to listen to this report.

Update 20080520: The original story, which is much more expanded, was aired this weekend on This American Life. In my opinion, the story The Giant Pool of Money is something that every American should listen to if they want to understand why banker’s forgot their principal rules of loaning money: make sure the borrower can pay the loan back.

Crossing The Streams

May 8, 2008 3 Comments

“Venkman, don’t cross the streams…”

“Why, what happens if we cross the streams?”

Let’s find out…I finally jumped on the Twitter wagon. But this created a quandary for me. Everyone has multiple interests. For me, there is my day job of technology, business interests, entrepreneurial interests, and my passion of photography. Should I create two twitter accounts and keep these two streams separate? I decided that was too much work. So, I’ll be crossing the streams with my tweets. After all, both streams come from the same source…

You can find my recent tweets on the right hand side. I’m experimenting with TwitterFeed to automatically tweet my blog posts, both technology/business as well as photography. Technology and business blog postings will start with a latoga labs while photography blog postings will start with latoga photography.

Those who wish to follow can do so from my Twitter page or from my FriendFeed page (which includes my tweets, blog postings, and photography feeds).

Virtualization Maybe Key to Apple’s Success with Businesses

May 8, 2008 Leave a Comment

Yesterday I had dinner with a colleague from VMware. During our discussions he made a comment that surprised me and struck a realization for me. He was commenting on how the Macintosh laptops make ideal systems for running virtualization. The reason being that all the hardware on the MacBooks are standardized.

The key to virtualization is the ability to abstract the physical hardware to the operating system. This is the hardest part of any vituralization technology. Not only because of the complexity of that software, but because of the Quality Assurance testing that must be done. Every combination of possible hardware must be tested to ensure reliability. When you think about the combination of hardware possible with PC laptops, the QA test matrix becomes quite large. But, with the Apple laptops, you have a much smaller matrix to test.

We are starting to see serious projects around desktop virtualization (see recent articles How Merrill Lynch Plans To Virtualize Half Its Desktops and Desktop Virtualization Drives Security, Not Just Dollar Savings). When you consider the cost benefits for medium to large enterprises, I think it is clear that we are seeing the start of a wave for desktop virtualization in the IT industry. And that is ontop of just the start of data center virtualization.

Now look at all the variables in PC based business laptops and the complexity of testing all these variations with the virtualization technology, and there is an opening for MacBooks. Of course, this would also require a major change with Apple, they would need to start building an organization that could support enterprises. This means working with them a bit more instead of taking the consumer approach of “here are the options, take it or leave it”.

And then there is Microsoft and their upcoming virtualization technology, don’t expect them to just let such a invasion of MacBooks in the enterprise to happen.