..more Led Zeppelin.

I imagine Eric Belsey and Destry Woozley know what I’m talking about.

There is a good piece over on Talking Points Memo about how Iran isn’t like Nazi Germany, circa 1938 (as the persistantly dishonest and incompetent Donald Rumsfield would like us believe)

For example, if Iran is preparing to mount a Hitler-style bid for world domination they must be engaged in a big military build-up, right? But there is no such build up. Maybe there’s no need for a build-up because the Iranian military is already so vast and mighty? Well, no. Iran has a defense budget of about $6 billion a year.

The United States spends over 50 times more than that. But perhaps comparisons to the USA are misleading. Lets compare our would-be regional hegemon to its neighbors. Well, Israel spends $9.6 billion and Saudi Arabia spends $25.2 billion. Pakistan, immediately adjacent to Iran and nuclear armed, actually has engaged in a recent defense buildup.

If George Bush were a Christian leader, as he seems to fashion himself, he’d be down on his knees, in front of God and man, begging for forgiveness for himself and his nation for abandoning its poor and sick to the devastation that hit New Orleans.

Instead, he’s up there, smug and proud, trying to act like he’s on top of something that is so much bigger than himself.

more at George Bush, Christian leader?

He still sickens me

Nicholas Carr “comments on the coverage”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_googlemicro.php of Google’s “newly introduced suite of Office-style applications”:http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gafyd.html noting that the focus on the “Google vs Microsoft” theme that runs through most of the discussion overshadows the more interesting story:

bq. the biggest threat is to neither Google nor Microsoft but to every other company hoping to get a foothold in the broad market for personal productivity applications

It’s an important point to make, but I don’t necessarily agree. This battle between giants isn’t good for any startup who wants to be the Microsoft of the personal productivity applications space, but it could be a great thing for startups who would be happy to be acquired by Google or Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Google ordinarily have a strong Not Invented Here streak that bias them against outside acquisitions, but in this battle both of them have strong incentives to be pragmatic.

For Microsoft, defending the Office cash-cow is important, moreso because it provides an important foundation for their their “Live” strategy. They need to move quickly, so they’ll be inclined to buy companies that will give them a head start. They also need to be defensive, by denying Google access to companies that would help them either close a gap with Microsoft, or open up an existing lead even further.

Similarly, Google, having entered this fight of its own will, will be disinclined to loose, so they’ll be looking for acquisitions (like Writely) that will help them both defensively and offensively.

As long as Google and Microsoft are battling over this space, there will be an opportunity for appropriately focused startups to acheive quick ROI via acquistion, but the founders should fully expect their personal vision to be sacrified to the strategy of their acquirer.

Computing on demand. You can rent one or more virtual machines, each equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xenon with 1.7GB of memory, by the hour for $0.10/hour. That’s about $70/month (plus $0.15/month per GB of storage), which isn’t bad on its own. It’s even better because you can ramp capacity up and down by bringing additional instances on line.

If it works as promised, I think lots and lots of smart, hungry, low capital-outlay startups are going to build using Amazon’s infrastructure. It looks like a no brainer. If you architect your application intelligently, the cost of scaling is going to be rougly linear with load and the lock-in is minimal. From what I understand, the computational environment looks like a linux box, complete with root level access, so the cost of moving to dedicated hardware at some point is very doable. Of course, if Amazon does things right, people won’t ever want to leave, but as a potential customer, it’s nice to know that there is an obvious route to independence if things don’t work out.

Would be interesting to experiment with this for scientific computing. Ideally you’d want an instance manager that could be tuned to the fact that instances are billed on an hourly basis.

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

One reason to wonder about Generation Y & their Baby Boomer parents:
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