Recession busting: from anxiety to $300,000 per year

DC and IT, once the engines for moving up productivity, are on a plateau stage now. The model one-DC-per-enterprise with ten or hundreds of administrative staff and a CIO that limits himself to just putting off fires ...

We can not make every CIO or system administrator a new Steve Jobs, but the very simple invention called cloud computing, with a key ingredient called billing, offers already significant opportunities to optimize and discover new ways to produce more with the same number of people. This does not mean the employment will decrease. It means we will produce more per employee. It is pure narrow mindedness to consider any automation and new paradigm that create higher productivity will make people loose their jobs. The contrary is true.

I am looking at this recession. I see around me very capable workers, creative minds laid off their jobs. I also see scores of capable engineers and professionals who are frustrated. They feel that can contribute more, they have ideas, nevertheless, all they do they worry not to loose their jobs.

The notion of jobs is for our politicians – and some business leaders – is a vision of huge factories and construction companies offering routine, repetitive, low paying jobs We want to be given the opportunity to make more money than we do today, and have the motivation by creating with tools we never had before.

We must take off from the current DC and IT plateau, rut, and go to the next level.

The cloud computing is such a new tool for progress and wealth creation as I describe above.

Imagine all people now using a DC and IT service will have to pay per use. Then, the CIO instead of administrating a cumbersome DC or IT center budget, will administrate the pay-per-use budgets of each contributor / user. This make everyone accountable. But the forward- looking management team has tools to know precisely where the efforts must be directed. There will be a meaningful dialogue between a private contributor and management. For example, user X is not happy with his/her pay-per-use budget and asks for more. He can get this easily if he writes a justification. The same costs can be allocated per projects and per customers or any classification important for bottom line. The justification will be a very simple de-facto business plan for new initiative, although no will call this a business plan.

The pay per use ceases to be just an accounting event. It facilitates a direct dialogue between individual contributors and management. Bonuses for groups must continue to exists to facilitate team building for new ideas. And, the bonuses will be paid from future profits, from the newly created incremental wealth, not from the existing budgets.

All of the above is for larger enterprises. Clouds will make easier for new start-ups , for all kinds of business impossible to exist before .

Not everyone has the risk tolerance to start a new business. We should create corporations where we unleash the potential for all people. We must have computer enabled high productivity entrepreneurs inside a company able to make $300,000 or even more per year, why pay only the top sales people these levels of retribution?

The challenge is to transform the anxiety, fearfulness, paralysis to reinvigorated, enthused workers and entrepreneurs with hopes restored beyond the wildest dreams.

After all, this is what the myth of American success is. We and our ancestors did not come to America to be laid off and humiliated. We came here to work knowing that opportunities are nowhere else. The mere fact that this forum exists, it shows we can do it

Does it still make sense? Top 500 Supercomputing list

I am in Portland, Oregon and the new list for Top 500 supercomputing sites will be made available tomorrow November 16, 2009.

So what? Many people ask this question today. "So what?" The business model this list promotes brought the bankruptcy of SGI, Thinking Machines, Cray Research, SiCortex and many who designed supercomputers based on one criteria: to pass a LINPACK test. This was originally introduced in 1979, 30 years ago. It tests the floating point and little more. LINPACK tells nothing of how easy is to solve complex problems with a given supercomputer.

Sure Science and Defense need these supercomputers. They always did. However, once one developed such a winner, it was difficult, if not impossible to sell it to a commercial entity, who also needs these powerful computers, but they must make money from the investment.

The LINPACK test, even in its' most refined modern form - tells little or nothing of how useful the supercompter is. Yet, adding insult to injury, the Top 500 judges claim that

Any system designed specifically to solve the LINPACK benchmark problem or have as its major purpose the goal of a high Top500 ranking will be disqualified..

Then, who will use this system? It is like buying a Formula One car for personal use. I can not even drive it to buy milk without cohorts of mechanics supporting me. Never mind I can not take any passengers... and the ten million dollars price tag..

By analogy, the computers we need to make money with are the computers our customers will make money with.

Time has come to compile new lists, in addition to LINPACK. We should take actual applications used by enterprises and test the fastest supercomputers running them.

We can havefor example a TOP 500 for E-OLTP (Extreme on line transaction processing) computers designed to process more than 500,000 transactions per second, now that all banking and credit card processing and stock exchange need these types of volumes. We can havea weather simulator application top 500 and genomic TOP 500 lists, etc.

We can add a a TOP 100 supercomputing clouds lists based on specific bench-marked services delivered

We need to make the competition of TOP 500 and its winners improve in directions we can create additional wealth.

These are my thoughts as I wait, with an indifference that makes me feel guilty, the new 2009 TOP 500 LINPACK supercomputers results. This is why I voice these ideas for new TOP 500 lists, not based on abstract - and with less and less impact- LINPACK test only. We want the TOP 500 list to remain relevant and not push itself and the HPC market into insignificance.

It is time to create HPC entrepreneurs who become rich and successful and not bitter from failed ventures.

A glimpse into the new features of Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5, due in December 2009

This somewhat geekier blog, shows how Sun Grid Engine, the leading world software managing cluster resources evolves in the future 6.2 Update 5 release to optimize the new multiple core CPUs ubiquitous in modern clusters. This step is necessary before the irreversible transition to cloud computing is fully completed. The complexities will be hidden from the end user, but they can explain how this software will work behind the scenes to assure the magic of an HPC cloud.

All features subject to change...

Features in both Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 and Open Source Grid Engine

F. Slot-wise preemption

D. More efficient and effective preemption

B. Preemption makes users unhappy. Therefore, it must be enforced only when absolutely necessary. The concept of the subordinate queue comes from the times when only one core CPU's were used in clusters. Rather then preempting the entire subordinated queue (Queue-wise subordination), Slot-wise subordination allows preempting individually jobs from a subordinated queue, minimizing the disruption of users work. The ability to more finely enforce subordination policies, results in a more efficient use of resources. It works well in conjunction with Topological Scheduling (see below) and thus contributes to higher throughputs.

F Array job throttling

D. Allow users to prevent large jobs from monopolizing a cluster

B. An SGE Array Job is a task that is to be run multiple times with a single command. This means EXACTLY the same task is going to be run multiple times, usually processing different data segments. The same task processing gets applied on different aspects of a problem. Array Job Throttling allows users to set a self-imposed limit with the maximum number of concurrent running job tasks. The array job may take some tolerable longer time to conclude, but this blocks out less resources for the array jobs and allows other jobs from the same user or other users to run sooner.

F. Topological scheduling

D. Performance optimization for multi-core processors, specifically on Nehalem

B. In the modern multi-core processing, each socket CPU and each core has execution units, cache, memory channels, I/O channels. Under NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors. Topological Scheduling allows to schedule jobs at core level or CPU level according to its unique needs. The use of Topological Scheduling has resulted in dramatic performance increases when tested at leading EDA customers.

Unique Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 Features

F. Data-aware job scheduling

D. Send work to the data rather than vice versa, because the application performance is tied to data locality Update 5 allows Hadoop (also known as MapReduce) jobs to be run efficiently in an SGE cluster. Update 5 offers the groundwork for a future Oracle Coherence integration.

B. Sun Grid Engine will be making a best effort to schedule jobs to servers with fast data access. It will be made aware of data locality and of data needs of jobs and will place data dependent jobs correspondingly. The rest is then done by the data grid technology being used (Hadoop in Update 5, Oracle Coherence in a future release). These data grid technology usually are able to migrate data where needed. Data-aware scheduling will minimize the need for data migration thus resulting in dramatic throughput improvements.

F. Service Domain Manager Cloud Adapter

D. SDM Cloud adapter will support more use cases, especially if multiple OS versions are needed and thus multiple AMIs need to be managed.

B Increases the number of users who can take advantage of SGE connectivity with AWS EC2.

F. Power Saving

D. A Cloud Service adapter can be configured for power savings, based on SLOs for power savings. New commands such as "showCloudHosts", "startupCloudHosts" and "shutdownCloudHost" can used to create new power saving scripts.

B. Substantial savings in reducing the costs of the utilities bills and the ability of having a Green Data Center.

F. SGE Inspect improvements

D. Will support configuration of Sun Grid Engine Parallel Environments

B. More ease of use when managing parallel processing workloads with Sun Grid Engine.

Open Letter to Mr. Obama. An idea to create jobs

Mr Obama, please read this post!

This is applicable for Silicon Valley within 200 miles radius, later to be extended in the rest of the country

Two of more engineers, consultants, students, new graduates get together. They are all excellent professionals most probably laid off, or worried how to get a job in the high-tech today. They come from top notch companies like Ebay, HP, Google (yes, the mighty Google laid off 10,000 in 2008), Sun, SGI and so on. The students come from U.C. Berkeley or Stanford University, until now considered a sure passport to get a job, and now trying to get into the work market

They present a slide show and a brief summary for their ideas. Then they receive from the federal government program at least $ 250,000 to make their early start idea suitable for investment by the famous and now relatively inactive early stage venture capital industry of Silicon Valley. The rate of the award should be 50%, it means from two applicant teams, one gets approved. The goal is to have a prototype, a customer trial and to show interest from about 20 companies. Then, early stage Silicon Valley VC community will become alive and the most important portion of the risk has been removed by a Government program

The idea comes from Israel, where a similar program has generated 100 Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ and 75% of Israel's $70 Billions in exports to come from high tech products.

With hundreds of thousands of technical experts laid off by larger companies, such a law will capture the brain and create jobs.

Let's assume 20,000 requests are handled by this early stage federal government program. 10,000 starts receive the $250K funding. This is $2.5 Billion plus 10% administration costs, this is $2.8B. This amount is peanuts (0.3%) compared to $1 Trillion for health care reform.

What this can pay off? Assume only 10% of the companies funded are successful. That is 1,000 new companies are created. Let's assume 9% (900 companies) will have an average of 200 employees each and 1% (100) will have an average 1,000 employees each.

The total number these companies will employ in high quality, well paid jobs (not farm workers, not bricklayers, not shopping mall cleaners) is 280,000. This is larger than number of people laid off. Thousands of ideas stagnant in a large bureaucracy like Silicon Valley giants, will come to life and make money magically , from ideas, from apparently nothing but brain.

The brains are here. We need to money to make it happen. Other countries have oil, we have the educated brain, here on Silicon Valley.

The valuation of the 1,000 operational start-ups, let's assume can be $50M. Some companies may reach 5 Billion in value, some almost nothing. This means the value created in stocks is $50B, If the Government keeps 15% equity in each of those start up, the total value owned by feds is 7.5B.

This will nearly triple the $2.8B initial investment.

Mr Obama, please read this post!

Miha

PS: If you support the idea - I hope you do - please as a minimum leave a comment saying "YES". Surely, you add your opinions as well. The more YES we have, the more chances we have to be heard.

Who will dominate the cloud in the future?

Who will be the winner of the cloud computing technology? My answer is ONE of the the system vendors, maybe two of them. They will create virtual monopolies via cloud computing.

In analogy to a chess game, the pawns to advance in the field will be the private clouds. Thus we will have

X + X customers' private clouds = X ecosystem cloud

where X= SUN (Or whatever SUN will be called in the future) , or IBM, or Dell, or HP.

X can not be Microsoft, or SAP and it is paramount to have the ability to sell hardware as part of a turnkey private cloud .

X assumes also that X will create an AWS EC2 me-too service. There is no reason IBM, SUN, Dell or HP not being able to build an Amazon alike service.

Why would X customers buy private clouds? To offer their service to their users as fast as possible after taking delivery.

The winners will be the X ecosystem who places most “pawns”, i.e. private clouds in the field. The prize is huge:

$ from selling private clouds solutions
$ from selling virtual resources on demand (CPU, Memory, Storage)
$ from selling software licenses on demand
$ from new subscription services, yet to be creatively discovered

The project RESERVOIR has the noble and altruistic goal of offering a grand solution for the interoperability of all clouds infrastructures via open source. But what is the motivation? Everyone in Cloud Computing is after the money that can be made or the money that can be saved. So the RESERVOIR project, if successful, will be customized by various players, and particularly by the system vendors. The cloud ecosystems they will create will have some proprietary features to protect the X ecosystem.

According McKinsey report, clouds are nothing but virtualized software packages. They must have something more: an accounting system to handle the billings from the users and accept bills from X system cloud who supplied the private cloud.

Once the System seller has a dominant ecosystem cloud with its customers, Alea Jacta Est (The Die Is Cast)

The Golden Orgasmatron: Money beyond imagination

Dave Corley - on Cloud Computing Google group - defines the Orgasmatron

Every ISV on the planet is moving to this service model.

Having lived half my civilian life as a product manager and the other half as an engineering manager, Ive observed that most market transitions are driven by the likes of "techies" like Sergei Brin and Mark Andreesen....folks who realize the market value of the orgasmatrons they create.

So, when that red-eyed "techie" comes out of a dark, dank lab/cube at 3 a.m. , with the shiny new orgasmatron, trash the condescending attitude and know that, as a marketeer/sales guy you have a golden, orgasmatronic opportunity at your fingertips.

Re-creating America

We have the books of Paulo Coelho, like "The Alchemist", where every person should have a "Personal Legend" a deep desire since we were born and we try to achieve it against all odds.

The Personal Legend is best achieved by following not only the science of engineering, but also the science of product management. It is the right combination of dreams and pragmatic business sense that made America, America.

US may have a recession, California appears in disarray because of a budget crisis and Silicon Valley may lose it luster to the outside world. But US is still the country where dreams (Dreams are the language of God, says Coelho) are manufactured.

Larry Ellison is right

This is what Larry Ellison was quoted as saying about cloud computing in September 2008. Everyone was amused, but the impact of his words is not a coincidence. He resonated what we all knew deep in our hearts.

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

This is what I wrote on Cloud Computing Google discussion group on January 25, 2009

From all the lively debates on this group, this is the one definition that makes sense. Almost everything we have today in IT, is a proto- cloud, and can be transformed into a cloud if we meet the end users expectations. As Nati Shalom pointed out, a person attracted to the cloud after reading all the buzz, has two key expectations:

1. The ability to get a quality service any time (how the provider will get in minutes the resources to provide this quality is not his/her business)

2. The ability to pay only for what s/he uses when s/he needs it.

The rest is an implementation details. Users want to be totally free away from any technical complexity other than the service itself.

Every current grid, data center, individual lab network, can become a cloud if it meets the above two simple requirements.

This reminds me of quote from Moliere

Monsieur Jourdain: And this, the way I speak. What name would be applied to...?
Philosophy Master: The way you speak?
Monsieur Jourdain: Yes.
Philosophy Master: Prose
Monsieur Jourdain: It’s prose. Well, what do you know about that! … These forty years now, I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it.

(Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman)

We did try to make clouds all our lives, and we didn't know about it. We are now getting there.

Oracle has a rich offering of on demand cloud delivered as SaaS. Very few people quoted Larry's final words:

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing.

Larry promised in 2005 to make Oracle a $30B company We all know this figure will be exceeded soon.

Sun Grid Engine and fulfilling the promise of cloud computing

Watch the flash video from Sun. Through this narrated demonstration, learn how Sun Grid Engine fulfills the promise of cloud computing in High Performance Computing.

Billing. The cloud computing revolution

> 1. A user will always have all resources s/he needs
> 2. A user will pay only for what it uses
> 3. The applications are delivered as an easy to use service
> 4. The users do not want to know what is going inside the cloud

The corollary of the above is that Data Center, outsourced or not, is transforming - for its owners - from a cost center, into a profit center, once it becomes a cloud.

This is major shift that started with Amazon Web Services sending an INVOICE. This is a natural consequence of having resources available outside the organization - like electricity,virtual nodes, storage and so on - is that the IT Director receives an invoice, and s/ he does not know who should pay for it.

Why? Because the IT department, does not invoice traditionally the employees and the company affiliated users. The major resource management software tools today simply don't have a billing module. The only possibility is the IT department pays for this invoice from AWS and adds it up to budget they should request next year.

What will happen short term is we will add internal billing modules inside the corporate ITs , able to interface to external billing systems (like AWS) and -as an option - assign charges to the internal project that generated the need for this external resources.

The idea of billing internal users is not as heretical as it sounds. The users will not pay in cash the invoice. But the IT will know for sure who consumes what and will be able to report back how much it cost the to offer services to the users.

If one event will declare victory in the cloud computing revolution, is the introduction of an internal billing in every IT department, which, from that moment onwards will operate a cloud, not a data center.

This is a huge qualitative jump: the cloud ecosystem will evolve with private, hybrid, public clouds using many wholesale resource providers (like AWS) to offer lower and lower cost services with increasing quality of service through competition and benefit ultimately the users of the clouds worldwide.

This is not a vision, but a real, achievable state. Here are some idea for business start-up

- Internal Billing System Modules
- Professional services to restructure organizations budgets for IT billing
- Remote billing services for internal IT
- Resource Optimization in a cloud eco-system
- job scheduling using pricing as one more criteria
- Porting applications to clouds
- become billing aware
- create AMI (Amazon Machine Images) and AMI-like for others
- ... more

What is not cloud computing

Someone asked this question: "I would like to see... what is not cloud computing"

Here is my answer:

o Anything you don't bill and users work as they please.
Anything that you don't know who pays for what in a Data Center

o Anything that you have to reserve resources or have resource quota assigned to you, directly and indirectly
Anything that does not have elastic resources matching demand

o Anything that you have to load your apps and have headache to make them work.
Anything that does not have your application ready to be used as service

HPC-Clouds will make money

One colleague asked. What makes you think that an HPC cloud will be in demand with commercial customers?

Because, I said, you own a computer site where you know what resources are used in the cloud, and how they are automatically re-allocated . You know when you have to go outside and “borrow” temporarily virtual resources. Thus you know how much your system costs. You also know who your users are and you bill them. If some users do not pay by definition, you have the tools to show your CIO how much the benevolence costs. And finally , you know whether the HPC Cloud or Private Cloud or Enterprise Cloud makes a profit, or looses money, and you can say exactly what this amount is in real time. Also by being easy to use, more people can have access to HPC and the profits will soars while the fees will go down.

If I tell now to a private customer to buy a Big Blue computer of IBM for $100M , he would look at the sales team bewildered. A $100M for what?

The customer says; “This is my business, this is not the Government and Department of Defense business, they spend money based on Visions, pure Science, Politics and Fear of Enemies. I have a business, and I have to make a living. This is why I am called - by you - a commercial account.”

The HPC Grid answers the idea of value perception from the commercial customer for HPC. Sure all Financial Traders and all risk takers need high powered HPC. They thought they could not afford it.

To make a sale, we need the customer to see the value of what they buy. For the first time, HPC can make money, in the hands of right people.

We are getting there for the HPC, via HPC-clouds. Big profits are about to be made. In HPC? Yes, in High Performance Computing, aka HPC. Click here for the TC Health cloud coverage on CNN.money

The HPC Cloud

What is HPC (High Performance Computing)? It is something big and expensive, hard to use and administrate, that consumes a lot of power, can be used only by an elite group of HPC specialists. No two HPC sites are similar, and mostly governments, non-profit agencies and the like are giving money. Traditionally - there is NO expectation of $ profits. HPC is sort of sacrificial price society pays to advance science in a political sense. The only measurable attribute to define success was the participation in the TOP-500 list. Using a 25-year old performance test, called LINPACK, the biggest goal is to rank any new HPC site among the top 500 according to some metrics called Rmax and Rpeak that mean absolutely nothing to the 99.99% of the population.

An HPC site is a cost center. It gobbles and gobbles money, in return for a favorable Rmax ranking

A large IT site uses 150 MW of energy and costs about $60 million to built. (see Horst Simon, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, slide 20)

The electrical utility in California, - where I live - is named PG&E. Last month, quietly, they increased the rate for residential power to 24 cents per KW from 22 cents. At this rate, the HPC site will have to pay $36,000 per hour or, for full 365 days. As far as I know each day has 24 active computing hours, we land at $315M per year in energy costs alone. Even assuming a 90% discounted industrial electricity rate versus residential rates, this is still whooping $2.5 millions per month or $30M per year.

This is equivalent to employing 200 highly skilled engineers

Sure we can not have HPC installations like this in NYC, Sacramento or San Francisco itself. PG&E is an HPC show stopper in California, which ironically is the state where Silicon Valley is and where the great innovator companies have head offices.


Here is how HPC will be saved and becomes main stream: we will build a cloud named HPC-cloud that meets what the users seek. I mean any user, the type of user who uses Google today, will be able access a directly or indirectly an HPC-cloud. That significantly much larger number of HPC users (in comparison to the HPC elite today)

- will always have all resources s/he needs
- will pay only for what it uses
- will use the HPC applications as a service

The users will have no idea where the HPC-cloud is located and what's inside the HPC cloud. They are shielded from all complexity. Power Optimization software will turn off the power on all unused resources when demand is low. Turning the power on means that there are enough paying users to cover the cost of the additional power from the billings sent to users.

An HPC-cloud will not be a cost center. It will be a Profit Center. This means it can be sold to the commercial enterprises. The sale is much simple. Companies that need HPC (and today with all risk analysis and security concerns most companies do need HPC), will loose money every single day that did not buy an HPC cloud for their employees and and their customers.

I believe in the Adam Smith principle promulgated in 1776: "Individuals trading freely with one another, following their self-interest leads to a growing and stable economy." It is time to free the HPC from eternal subsidies from governments and military, or iron-fist bureaucratic regulators.

It is the time to democratize the HPC, by making it a business that meets real needs for all the people engaged in producing wealth - in USA and elsewhere in the world.

The Personal Super-Computing idea

After making the computing “Personal”, what is the next stage for the largest computer companies to grow their business?

According to Microsoft, we need to create the Personal Super-Computing. Jeff Wierer, senior product manager for Microsoft Windows HPC said, "It seems the High Performance Computing, (HPC 's) definition is evolving and is being associated with a high level of productivity. We've seen sales across the board and been surprised. There has been a lot of progress in the area of personal super-computing."

An executive from Lloyds in London adopting Micrososft HPCS 2008 server said: "If I were to use Linux, I would need a different skill set and it would add to the number of tools we have, therefore increasing costs rather than decreasing them," (Lloyds success story from HPCS 2008 Server web site).

The “personal super-computing”, as my homologous in Microsoft defined, can exist only as a service delivered from huge computer power stations, part of the cloud. We don't care what's inside (what OS, what applications, what platforms). we know we can ask the HPC cloud and the HPC cloud will respond. Always.

Imagine making a search among hundreds of millions of photographs across huge databases, to find a look alike person with me, and find the response within a few seconds, This is personal super-computing.

Two companies should, in my opinion, put their forces together to create the Personal Super-Computing. These companies are Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Sun Microsystem.owns HPC IP and know how with the most scalable grid computing software in the world so far, Sun Grid Engine. The, Services Domain Manager, part of Sun Grid Engine can supply servers and hosts or remove them according to demand LUSTRE data base, the fastest there is today in HPC .

Sun's HPC know-how among the best in the industry.

Sun announced January 7, 2009 the acquisition of Q-layer. This is a working engineering and business solution to create elastic virtual data centers, very easy to set up. See the flash demo here:

http://www.qlayer.com/Qlayer_webversion/index.html

It is a question of creating an HPC Cloud Computing Environment, where we mesh the ability of Sun to run parallel applications on – soon - hundred of thousands of processors using operating systems, network elements and storage as drag and drop Cloud computing elements.

We could be there soon. Watch this demo from Daniel Templeton blog;

http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/connecting_all_the_dots

We just released Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 beta, that fully supports 32 bit and 64 Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise, HPCS Server R2 2003 and HPCS Server 2008. This in addition to the solid support for Solaris, Linux, MacOS.

You can download it and try it from here.

A Windows HPC Server 2008 node - or a cluster of HPCS 2008 server nodes – can be a virtual node in a Sun Grid Engine cluster.

“Some day soon, you may use a search engine to locate every frame of home movie in which your Grandmother appears. Soldiers may be able to recognize buried bombs from a distance and doctors may detect early tumors automatically.” (Texas Advanced Computing Center publication, a Sun customer).

This will be the the Personal Super-Computing. It will transform what we call today Super-Computing - which few people in the street understand - into a commodity. We will get it faster if two important players, the most relevant players, develop together the potential I described here. A single start up can not do it alone, as it requires both high capital investments and the reputation of a world wide player in IT.

If the Personal Super Computing would have had existed, the potential of failures of AIG and the other financial institutions would not have had happened. Both the US regulatory agencies, and the businesses involved, did not have the tools to audit and assess risks. We accused Wall Street of greed. This is an unfair accusation, as all businesses are aiming to maximize profits.

For years the HPC community, one the nicest group of dreamers and doers I know, strives to find the magic stone that transforms the quite amazing HPC technology in gold. The Super Computing show is a place to see them all. I am one of them. I believe the transformation to Cloud Computing, and the emergence of Personal Super-Computing will make HPC into the magic stone we always hoped for.

Comments?

Miha Ahronovitz

The movie Das Leben der Anderen and Silicon Valley

There is a similarity between the Silicon Valley today, in times of economic stress, and communist Germany,

This movie, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, it's about 1984 German Democratic Republic's Stassi (their KGB), and freedom.

Lenin said he could listen totally immersed to the music Apassionata of Beethoven, but then he could not finish the revolution and kill people as necessary.

Germany has the double experience of national socialism and followed by communism in GDR. The later I share. The Stassi interrogations could have had been filmed in Romania or Russia .

The movie director eliminated the colors red and green from the photography. Indeed, what is left is the color of communism, and if you want, it has also nostalgic aura to it.

I stayed at home, in the middle of the day, absorbing this almost 3 hour movie, and postponing whatever I planned to do Saturday. The last scene, I had some tears in my eyes.

The system - any system, religious, state, corporation - by its nature is concerned with authority, power and defensive measures to protect. This leads to Bureaucracy, - which makes life very difficult for individuals. It commands total obedience. The human being live in an un-natural state.

There is no way one can live by rules in Communism, yet many people do, whether oppressors or victims. We all have bad or good inside, and it is up to the system to bring out the good or bad, to create opportunities, or to smash creativity in the name of something, be it communism, tradition, religion or company policy.

Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) is a woman not young and not pretty, yet both the actress and the character have an enormous sex-appeal and feminine presence. She is destroyed for all her vulnerabilities, rather than being protected for having them. These vulnerabilities are used in the movie to humiliate and kill her, and not for making her a great actress, which is her inner talent and destiny . She was a potential great actress, but no one cares, except her lover/husband Georg Dreyman, a writer (Sebastian Koch).

The member of the Political Buro and minister Demf, wants to have Christa-Maria as her lover, because of the power entitles him to have any women he wants, in the name of the Party. Agent Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, who is a professional Stassi interogator, spends his life writing every word he hears from a wired residence of Dreyman. He realizes that what he does, really helps a libidinous person in a position of power to satisfy his whims.

I once saw a play , in Romanian in Toronto . I even wrote an article about it in Romanian. It was about someone who, after the communists fell, enter the office of a mildly known journalist and tells him ; "I am you". The man was the secret agent assigned to follow the journalist under communists, and who knew details, embarrassing or not, that no one else even guessed the journalist had.

This is a scary thought. Imagine having someone assigned to spy on me, all my life, without me knowing. Simply knowing most intimately what I have done and thought, makes me vulnerable and insignificant.

If he is my friend and believes in me, he makes me a star. If he is my enemy, he destroys me. Because I have in me all the banality, occasional brilliance, talent or weaknesses that can make me a hero or a villain, a saint or a damned human being destined to be forgotten and spit upon in history.

Human values triumph only we as a people fight for them, sometimes in vain, but the next generations benefit. And any thing - regime, corporation, religion - that goes against human being natural state, is doomed to fall.

This movie is not only about Stassi. It is about us, the way we live, the way we work, the way we submit or rebel to authority, the way we fell and way we rise. As Florian Henckel says, for 160 minutes, the movie is our psychoanalyst. This is why this is no ordinary movie. It is experience that reveals and bring light to my life and our loves, I hope.

Silicon Valley is no longer a start up Mecca. The crisis , the economic crisis, , makes us all as vulnerable as Christa-Maria Sieland, ready to make shameful compromises, for the illusions we have and don't want to give them up. We loose self esteem. We are unable to listen, like Lenin, to Beethoven Appasionata, because this will make us weak in fight for survival.

Obama won

Ecstasy following an election. He has a come a long way.

Obama will win?

We think we know. Obama will win, McCain will loose. The financial core melt-down will go away as world government protect us. We know President Bush is bad and must be replaced by democrats. We claim we understand what is going on. We claim a change of President will solve it all. A pool from Newsweek October 20, 2008 reports 90% of the Americans are unhappy.

What happens with the other 10%, 22 million Americans? They are happy! Investors don't trust banks, banks don't trust borrowers, and mortgage companies don't trust home buyers. Why shall we trust 1 in 10 in Americans who claim they are happy?

What should happen is a big surprise and we must see McCain win the election. Obama has another chance in 2012. He will be 50 year old, McCain 76. Obama will be wiser and will have more reasons to compete again. Maybe yes, maybe know

Sarah Palin

If one and seeks prominence, prominence flees from her; but if one flees from prominence, prominence seeks her.

Talmud, Eruvin 13b

Men who fall in love with beautiful women lack imagination

The above is a much celebrated quote from Marcel Proust.

We went to a Greek festival in Sacramento Convention Center.

It was organized by a the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of Sacramento, for some years an event. What it gets me is the success in public attendance. Some tall healthy Americans with kids, some young girls looking for boys and who knows what other miracle. Some older people, family type, east Europeans fat and no athletic contrasting the new breed of sporty well build Americans with Greek wives and sisters in law ...

The food disappointed me and watching the crowd was a better entertainment. I saw two girls, maximum twenty year old. One was looking typical Mediterranean, the other was white with long hair, thick legs, a long imperfect nose and pure , serious face, but attractive, in a long skirt. She is not beautiful by general standard but had a subdued sexiness,- in spite or maybe because of the apparent imperfections. She is type of woman that men without imagination ignore, because they don’t know to read inside. She is a woman that could make men wildly happy and destroy them when she might leave them for a man often superior to their husbands. I had an impulse to go to her and ask her, if she would like to meet some interesting man from Boston,a good friend of mine. In spite of it's absurdity, the thought persisted in my mind, even after we finished eating a colorless chicken with not completely cooked rice. We went around to see a Greek bookstore with religious orthodox books, some very interesting (Marriage of Orthodox with non-Orthodox people). Across they had a little exhibition of national costumes - absolutely beautiful. Jennifer Aniston is descendant from a Greek father. Same is Brad Pitt

I saw again the two girls and wanted to stop them and again I didn't.

We went outside and saw even more people . Lexuses and Acuras and Mercedes driven by black ladies with children. I thought in terms and engine power it would be difficult to match the Chevy Tahoe's ride today.. It is the American way , to take a V8, not a 4 cylinders, and make a hybrid, because life is short and we need to live it. Prius is antidote of the American spirit. We came to America to afford things others don’t, and this is our illusions still. We may say we need to save gas and buy those Priuses, but we lie, trying to be politically correct against our hearts

Yesterday I went to Walmart. I needed to go the bathroom. Once inside, I hear a man panting and puffing trying to defecate with difficulty in first cubicle. Next to the door, a boy 7 year old was saying "Daddy Daddy, did you finish?" I could see Daddy's legs: effeminate and fat, with sandals. A hard effort and defecating is sometime close to dying. The men room was not clean. I wash my hand and smell shit all over, and dirty paper bulging over full baskets. "Daddy, Daddy did you finish?".

I go out and inside store is clean and beautiful. There is life and background music, and I just came out from a different world where there are latrines, hospitals, people in pain, or dying, morgues, armies and war, torture rooms The people who work there are trained not to talk about it.

Earlier this afternoon, I went to see a gun and pistol. A good shotgun is $300. A Pistol is 600. I drove to the Lincoln Rifle Range, a club with nice people. Old and young civilized people shooting. All drove SUVs and trucks and I saw a Honda minivan, as taking kids to school. I am told the only way to shoot is to buy a gun and ammunition. I can even take some classes of self defense. Not martial arts. Gun self-defense, where a mistake can cost your life.

So what all these stories have in common? That we have a parallel ugly world, ready to suck us in, any moment. We may go from this world to another world any moment any time. Do we appreciate, what it means if Gd abandons us, we are not here, in the alive room anymore? No new cars, no Hamlin grandfather clocks. No job and besides death , there is humiliation, sickness, desperation. Whether those beautiful things we call life will continue, is in faith and in Divine powers, in fear for Him and love form him.

No I don't talk like a monk or Rabbi. As I turn an age I would have never thought to happen to me, at a time I thought I was infinite There will be an end How to make most of my life?

I am now sorry, I did not stop that girl still persisting in my mind. Maximum, she would have looked at me like a fool. But I know, deep inside my soul, she is seeking someone just as hard as the lonely friend in Boston does. They simply don't know each other. I don't know whether is this girl will reappear in my or his life again. Her only mission was to communicate with my inner voice to tell me the potential of good things is always here, the potential for disheartening is also here.

I tell my friend : If you see a nice girl, stop her. She might just want to be stopped. It will be the answer to your prayers

The recession and the hope

What is a recession? The price of gas? The foreclosures? It's the international terrorism ? Or it's me, it's us? It is our fear? It is our instinct of survival? We are much better off than Senator John McCain was once:

"I spent 5 1/2 years in a prison cell without -- I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair," he said.

We have a NASDAQ, we have hope, we have faith. No human can assure the future, he is in the hands of Divinity as all of us. But Mr. McCain is a remarkable human being, who defied desperation over years in the most cruel conditions one can imagine. If any political figures can gives us hope, Senator McCain must be one of them, the most credible, for me at least, of all.

Sun Grid Engine 6.2 is here

The new Sun Grid Engine (SGE) 6.2 will be released on August 5, 2008. If you want to learn the technical strengths, read Daniel Templeton's blog. But what these technical refinements mean to us as humans? Let's go through the bullets from "Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror", by Stuart Robbins, originally featured in my blog of December 25, 2007

• Systems don't talk to each other, if people don't talk to each other

Sun Grid Engine 6.2 is more useful if the people who use it and the people who made it talk to each other. See our Sun Grid Engine 6.2 documentation wiki. Users read the documentation, usually when facing a challenge. They can improve the documentation with us. The same dialogue happens on the Grid Engine Open Source Project and on the independent fabulous site http://gridengine.info managed by Chris Dagdigian.

• Relations between grids reflect the relationship between the people who build and operate them

Why did we add the Advance Reservation and the Multi-cluster features to Sun Grid Engine 6.2 ? To create a civilized grid community. No need to fight other users with higher priority than mine, because I am an astronomer, or a derivatives trader, expecting a cloud of asteroids in the Earth vicinity, or some heavy volume derivative trading tomorrow. As citizens of the grid community can get those resources for sure when needed, via a civilized reservations in advance system . We can even pay for the privilege, is that's part of the rules we agree. We can take this resources from our grid and from other grids too. We were not able to do that before 6.2.

• Fixing problem of grid computing requires first fixing relationships between people

People feel comfortable in an environment they understand and where each one is treated with respect. What is an Array Task Dependency? Why is this different from an Array Dependency? Many are afraid to ask. Instinctively, we don't like to look uninformed in front of our peers. But if we ask Array Task Dependency allows the production of blockbuster movies with resource intensive special effects -Charlotte Web, to name one - in a much, much shorter time. A special effects company from Australia taught us how to do it. We now offer the Array Task Dependency as part of our Sun Grid Engine 6.2 product to every user in the world

• If we want to transform a Grid, we must transform ourselves too

This what a student from Singapore wrote in her blog (see "Grid Engine is hip" entry from July 10, 2007)

... so, supposed to be installing sun grid engine, but he told us to read up on the installation guide first..which is a whooping 130 pages..just reading the first few pages made me go @_@..and im so not motivated to continue..why am i not falling sick??

One large oil exploration working with our engineers, managed to increase their productivity up to ten times. They were using the default parameters. from the Open Source courtesy binaries We were amazed to see 90% of our down loaders using the default parameters. We offer for the first time annual subscriptions. One can download for free the Grid Engine open source, or for free, the Sun Grid Engine production strength version. Both are eligible for annual subscriptions.

No need for falling sick. No need to read 130 pages (we learn our lesson). No need to go @_@

Who should first make money with Sun Grid Engine 6.2? The user! All potential customers do loose big money in their business each day, by not having the best grid possible.

We have Advance Reservations, scalability unmatched yet, a new module called Service Domain Manager that makes the most elegant MultiCluster solution possible, but a little parrot on the customer shoulder says: "So What?"

Stuart Robbins describes a nearly universal inability of technologists to explain themselves. :-( We need to make our customers in love with Sun Grid Engine 6.2, as much as we are. The only way to do it is to learn our customers' business and translate all these new fabulous features into quantified money making opportunities for them.

The fear of dreaming

Here is a poem of Louise Gluck, an American poet:

CONFESSION

To say I'm without fear—
it wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I've learned to hide them,
to protect myself
from fulfillment: all happiness
attracts the Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages—
in the end, they have
no emotion but envy.

Who knows how many entrepreneurs are afraid of happiness? Better not to feel it, than feeling the envy, better to hide the dreams, instead of fulfillment.

Better to make the same lame products, versions 4 and 5 and 6 and so on for ever and not to face the Fates' anger?

Carl Jung: The way we are

We think we know ourselves, but we don't. We replace - in most of us - our individual life (which is the only real life) with what our society wants us to be and we are deprived of moral decisions.

The biggest challenge is how to differentiate ourselves from the society doctrine. But when we do this, we become the slaves of our own fictions, Because we think we know ourselves, but we don't.

He said this in 1950, Too European for America? The Meyer Briggs test originates from Carl Jung teachings. We take the tests and discover what we like to be. We are surprised how well the test works. Because we do not know ourselves and we think we do.

Entrepreneur-ese versus MBA-ese

There are four phases in developing a new business, looking at the cash.

Stage 1: Company looses money, increasing negative cash flow
Stage 2: Company starts making money, decreasing negative cash flow
Stage 3. Company makes money fast and has increasing positive cash flow
Stage 4: Company is mature and grows at slower rate, but generates tons of steady positive cash

The Stages 1 and 2 require an Entrepreneurs mind and skill
The stages 3 and 4 require the classical MBA skills, like the readers of Harvard Business review.

The stage 1 and 2 talk Entrepreneur-ese. They play poker. They pay to see information
The stages 3 and 4 talk MBA-ese . They play chess.

This is why being an entrepreneur inside a corporation is hard. Entrepreneurs go outside to specialized investors, like venture capital entrepreneurs

Elections: Getting broke or getting rich?

Surprise, surprise, my seventeen year old daughter backs Obama from all her might, as most California young liberals. According to her circle of friends, Hillary will put up with everything, including an adulterous marriage to get the power

I asked her how about Sarkozy in France is not tainted because of personal life? Michelle said: We are in US here. ( I suppose she says; here this is an electoral weapon, not in France).

Sure , I sort of forgot that I live an in 3rd world, almost broke state called California, where – one Canadian friend reminds me - I will have anyway problems to sell my house and “is a better climate at least six months a year" and I am stuck here for the rest of my life. I will have to put us with Obama, that other Canadian friend says we will eat our hands off if he gets into power. The entire world sees how entrepreneurship and risks , in a recession, impoverished this annoying, impertinent risk-takers from Silicon Valley and proved anyone cautious and with a safe job, they were right: there is NO El Dorado, as those stupid dreamers who rushed to California believed, and who, instead of getting rich, got broke.

Not only we are broke, but also we are voting Obama into power, to become another Venezuela.:-(, they say

Next week I am off to Haas Business School in UC Berkeley. I am probably the oldest student and stubborn dreamer in an entrepreneurship seminar called Creating New Businesses Based on Open Innovation, and for a week I will immerse in a room with other dreamers from Russia, Brasil, Germany, Scandinavia. I was totally taken aback as I could not convince any of my colleagues to attend! Some genuinely had conflicting events, but most expect others to create something for sure before jumping in.

And California is deja vu: We export the idea of bright entrepreneurship, because we have a surplus here. No one needs this blah-blah anymore on Silicon Valley, full of have-been venture capitalists who either became bourgeois or broke. The survivors are more cautious than suburban bank branch office junior loan officers

While I will be there, I don't give a damn who wins. Not even Obama. It simply won't affect Stanford and Berkeley. It won't affect the authority of our Governor Schwatzenegger, who is the real administrative power in California, and who is even able to declare independence, like Kosovo :-) , if Obama becomes another Chavez... And it won't affect my Canadian friends, as they comfortable live safely paying double taxes in Canada with plenty of fine delicatessen and kosher stores around Toronto. They sleep well at night and our elections are just a show too exciting not to watch.

Empathy and Product Hits

Question: I have spoken to a number of parents who say: "My autistic child has too much empathy."

SIMON BARON-COHEN: People with autism I have met are not unkind or uncaring. But it looks as though, on some of these tests, they have difficulty picking up on other people's cues. ...They may just have difficulty in recognising the emotions in other people. But people I've met with autism, when they discover they have upset someone, feel very bad about it.... If they knew they were hurting someone, they would want to change that course of action ...

P.S. The NIKE shoe in the picture has a design flaw: the top wears off much faster than sole. Is it intentional? Maybe the Product Manager wants to sell more shoes at lower cost. Maybe s/he wants to bring the joy of buying a new pair of sneakers more often. Or maybe is not even aware of any of the customers' experiences related to top developing holes too soon. This means the Product Manager has a lower Empathy Quotient. There is very little difference between a big hit product and a flop product, based on erroneous empathy signals

Autism and Empathy

Cambridge University's Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is the first cousin of Ali G. impersonator, Sacha Baron-Cohen. He is also the a world expert on Autism. He defines

..."empathy is without question an important ability. It allows us to tune into how someone else's feeling, or what they might be thinking. Empathy allows us to understand the intentions of others, predict their behavior, and experience an emotion triggered by their emotion. In short, empathy allows us to interact effectively in the social world. It is also the “glue” of the social world, drawing us to help others and stopping us from hurting others."

The word “empathy” was invented by Titchener in 1909 as a translation of the German word “Einfuhlung,” itself a term from aesthetics meaning “to project yourself into what you observe”

Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright devised an empathy quotient for adults with Asperger Syndrome, a highly functional form of autism. This empathy quotient is not static. As parent and any human with a a creative streak , a high EQ develops further and further... Here is our son revealed empathy at his Bar Mitzvah:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ULNw-XDLUGo

Cloverfield and the human product managers

Michael Stahl-David, Lizzy Caplan and Jessica Lucas in Cloverfield

In the movie Cloverfield, New York city is shown through a home video camera. Young, good , career youth, in love , with the noble character traits and winners in a just society, running from an incomprehensible disaster, that kills them . It’s unstoppable. None of virtues, goodness, intelligence, science, military arts can save them and us.

At least Cloverfield is shown in the picture: it is an irrational monster, resistant to any destruction man ever was capable to use against his enemies.

In real life, the monsters causing tragedies an disasters can not be seen. The stock crash , the sub-prime mortgage crisis, left rich entrepreneurs unable to pay for their dental treatment. They are not officially broke. They are those pauperized and thrown to live from month to month salaries, at the age when they should have had retired.

Early reports are saying that Cloverfield made an estimated $41 million week one from Friday to Sunday, not counting the holiday on Monday. A January record that some say, will change Hollywood forever.

But the movie producers are no immune either to incomprehensible disasters. They just told us the news, and became momentarily rich, they are the visionaries.

What this has to do with a Product Managers? We meditate. What are we doing is for these times? What is the value that sells today and why? What products the people need today, in the Cloverfield consciousness time? Will we buy the same perfumes, the same soft drinks as before?

We are not watching the same movies, we do not hear the same news. We act as if the humanity is finite in time. We have a global warming, yet the cold weather upsides down an entire China.
We need disaster proof products, survival products, mega insurance products. Surely, they can do nothing to stop Cloverfield coming.

Hasbro has announced that the monster from Cloverfield is now available in toy form

Lessons on Grid Computing

My review on amazon.com is here

People who design and operate Grids are part of them

"Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror", by Stuart Robbins

Here are some ideas:

• People who design and operate Grids are part of them

• Handicap; nearly universal inability of technologists to explain themselves

• The Prime Theorem:
• The Information Systems mirror the people who build and operate them

This means:

• Systems don't talk to each other, if people don't talk to each other
• Relations between grids reflect the relationship between the people who build and operate them
• Fixing problem of grid computing requires first fixing relationships between people
• If we want to transform a Grid, we must transform ourselves too.

In my own words

Kabbalah, is where thought is born. where the music comes from. Even Hemingway, the quintessence of being down to earth, titled his first book 'the Sun also Rises.'

Yes, it does.

I choose books which give me a space to inhabit. A book should be an experience.

My wife and I have a dog, two teenage children, and we live in Rocklin California. We are the same as you. We are one of you.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AT1VHQZ9RNR1T

Mr Greenspan and the Product Managers

This is what Alan Greenspan, 81 and free to talk after decades as Federal Reserve Chairman says: global economic forces, not Federal Reserve policy, kept the inflation down.

What are the global economic forces?

• free trade
• cheap labor from China and India
• benefits from IT and Internet

Wow! The Software Industry is a Global Economic Force ! It comes from the mouth of the High Priest! We have a one third contribution to keep the inflation down.

So Grid Engine, an essential tool to make in hours what it took weeks to create before. We are a software for automatic placement of computational loads, and utilizing every resource as close as possible to 100%. Without a workload management software, we utilize 10% to 20% of our computers.

(think how many hours and days your notebooks and desktops sit idle)

I think we failed , - as a Product Manager, mea culpa, - to show the industry the true value of software. The benefits from IT we see so far are just the tip of the iceberg.

As the free trade and the cost of labor tend to stabilize in the near future, the role Information Technology is growing. We have the solemn task to keep the inflation down.

Thank you Mr. Greenspan

Still Mr. Greenspan's darker prophecies ( we will get a double digit inflation, 10,000 today will be worth $6,700 in a couple of years from now) are contradictory.

How come the price of the houses will go down, if we will have an inflation?

Sun Grid Engine Workshop, Regensburg, Bavaria, 2007

Nearly 80 participants worldwide, in beautiful Regensburg. See my photos uploaded here.
The Group home page on Flickr is named sge2007

My favorite photo is an impressionist mock-up of our group.

Are the blogs honest?

How honest can one be in blog published on the company's web site where s/he is employed?

Not much.

S/he must reveal just enough to make the business close deals and gain a good public image, and keep confidential about almost everything else. Ideally, scores of people should read such a blog , while the blogger gets a pat on the back from the boss.

Blockbuster movies made in rendering farms using Grid Engine

Harry Potter and the order of Pheonix
Charlotte's Web

http://www.smh.com.au/news/case-studies--profiles/grid-solution-gets-rsp-animated/2007/04/30/1177788054064.html


Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius,
Olive, the Other Reindeer
Santa, vs the Snowman
The Ant Bully

http://gridengine.info/pages/profile-DNA-Productions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_Bully

Grid Engine is hip

Here is a cool blog by a talented 19 year old student, who is writing about Love (Love has many languages, we fail when we speak different love languages) and an intent to install Sun Grid Engine,

http://michsweets.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html

Quotes:

... so, supposed to be installing sun grid engine, but he told us to read up on the installation guide first..which is a whooping 130 pages..just reading the first few pages made me go @_@..and im so not motivated to continue..why am i not falling sick??

... school these days is simply a dread..we come and do nothing but msn, blog hop, blog, gossip, eat..is this what fyp is supposed to be?? its even worse than the first week, at least then we had some research to do..now, nothing, other than downloading the cursed sun grid engine which takes like forever to do so..

... okays, back to sun grid engine and installations and stupid errors and linux commands

Like any compulsory school subject, grid gives some headaches to the students, but boy, are so popular that we entered the world of literature and fiction and hip prose?

Why buy Rolex and Lexus

In smart markets, the ability to process the information, not the information itself, is the scarce Resource (Rashi Glazer, Winning in Smart Markets, Sloan Review)

People do not know what to buy. They read ratings on Amazon.com. They read Consumer Reports. We want others to tell us what to buy.

The trick is to place your product above comparisons.

Many consumers, particularly at the high end of luxury market - which ironically has the most educated buyers - trust only the brand. It is the sweetest spot to be with at least one of your products in the portfolio.

From 19 hours to 2 minutes

Miha, said my sister. I saw the video, I but I never understood a thing of what you were talking about. I know what iPod does. But what Sun Grid Engine is and what it does?

This post is for her.

Do Bible codes predict the future? Still a controversy, but Jeffrey Satinover writes in this book Cracking the Bible Code :

Washington, D.C. Offices of the National Security Agency. April 1989

Gans was senior cryptologic mathematician with the US Department of Defense... He was not awaiting an analysis churned out by the many Cray supercomputers owned by the agency in abundance. He was waiting for a call from his wife, in which she will read him a number - the end product of a non-stop nineteen-day-long calculation programmed into a modest 386 desktop vlone he kept at home.

I smile. A 19 day long calculation could be done today with AMD or Intel double core single CPU notebook in about a quarter of one day (6 hours).

If this is spectacular, then read this. A grid made out of about 100 nodes with dual CPU are very common in 2007. Most grids the financial institutions need are 5,000 nodes or more. So a 100 node grid with Sun Grid Engine software (see below for a demo) would further reduce the execution time from 6 hours to about 2 minutes.

This explains why the agency Gans worked for trashed the 1989 water-cooled Cray machines that had an electricity bill of $1M per month per unit. A few hundred inexpensive servers can do the same job and be paid from the savings in the electricity bills alone.

In 2007 Gans could simply work from home and be with his dear wife most of the time.

Sun Grid Engine and the Obesity Gene

Our Sun Grid Engine software is in the grid environment used to discover the Obesity Gene, announced on April 13. Click here

Our Product Sun Grid Engine Demo

Tuesday March 27, 2007

Introduction to Grid Engine This is an experiment with video as a medium for delivering Grid Engine content to the masses. The demo and interview features Fritz Ferstl, the Director of Grid Engineering in Sun Microsystems. This video is scripted, produced and directed by Sun's Java Ambassador Dan Templeton Tell him what you think on YouTube page for the video Did you learn something? Were you bored? Do you want to see more? Thanks!

A hard day for the Product Manager

One of the secrets for happiness is to read the horoscope and making it come true
Myspace.com horoscope says for a pure Virgo like me, today

Issues involving the complex needs of others can distract you from your daily routines and disrupt your day. But burying your head in the sand isn't a good idea either, for you have much to learn by facing a messy situation now.

This is really my job description today. When days like that strike, it could be worth. The Horoscope continues:

Not only will you gain experience navigating without all the facts, but using your intuition can free you from the restraints of too much analysis.

The religion and ritual in product development

It is not easy being an atheist. Atheists face" an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world".

According to Scott Attran, born a believer and now an atheist scientist,

"...his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism" (New York Times, March 7, 2007, Darwin's God)

One of the bullets in a job definition for a Product Line Manager is to bring emotion to marketing. People worship Harley Davisons, Rolex watches, Windows or Open Source.

My friend Shahin Kahn said one can not fight Linux, because they were a religion. Today, they lost the cult status as it became, via Red Hat and Suse, too commercial.

Linux is more and more atheistic. Once the free-for-all dreams went down the drain, the Linux sects are sprouting everywhere.

We need a ritual in a product. Our product slowly is getting there...

See http://gridengine.info

What is the Ideal number of product managers?

Question

Any rules of thumb? I have been advised to link it to the number of developers and use a ratio of 1 PM to 10-20 developers. Closer to 10 if outsourcing and need detailed requirements.

Answer

Why should the number of product managers be related to the number of developers? The Product Life Cycle - and common sense - says a PM should only detail product requirements, not engineering solutions. The document produced by the PM is called PRD (Product
Requirements Document). It is the job of engineering to determine
what it can deliver with the existing resources.

Poet's Bukowski customer feedback

America's great poet Charles Bukowski has this 70's poem, just after he could afford to buy things. He lived marginally most of his life before becoming famous.

We are slightly better today, after the product management fixed all the problems that made Bukowski go desperate thirty years ago. In the process, we created the Silicon Valley, the bubble and many of the biggest millionaires in the world.

Now, as then, the wind still blows and the turkey buzzard struts and flounces before his hens in the spring. It the armony we seek when using products

We want products that imitate nature in the way we live with them and we use them


16-bit Intel 8088 chip


with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Charles Bukowski

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6832&poem=44070

A CEO is a Chief Product Manager

Google's product manager for the Spreadsheets project, Jonathan Rochelle, was formerly chief executive of 2Web. 2Web was acquired by Google for it's extraordinary web spreadsheet application.

This an illustration of the statement that a CEO is nothing but a Chief Product Manager.

What is a CEO?

A Chief Executive Officer is nothing but a Chief Product Manager.

A company manages new products in three categories;

• Breakthrough (high risk, high reward)

• Platform (commonality - products with the same customer experience, processor type, clear market segments , etc.)

• Derivative (changes to existing products - lowest risk)

Most companies think that derivatives.(same products updated and improved) will bring us more revenues . They are safe, they have precedents and the business case is easy to justify, even if it gives modest gains

Financial numerical decision makers do not work in breakthroughs, Companies should change the culture and invest more in breakthroughs than in the past. Their reliance on say, 70% Derivative, 25% Platforms and 5% Breakthroughs, will not lead to real competitiveness, real differentiators, real collosal revenues

You may ask how the hell to get approval without financial goals approved in large companies.
There is only one way: via spin-off. Simply true breakthrough ideas can not develop in companies with different missions. Spin-offs will become, one day, a common management tool

What is scary on Silicon Valley is that many large VC - exactly like large companies - are also the slaved of ROI. Most new ventures request a product development completed, at least at prototype level and at least three customers. The name of "Venture" in the VC name becomes sometimes superfluous. They are simply cautious capital investors with modest aspirations for sure gains.

In absence of corporate spin-off policies and true early stage VC's, new breakthrough ideas stale. The 2006 entreptreneurs, - engineers and product managers - desist.

I wish this image of a weakened Silicon Valley will recover and prove me wrong.

We need more Chief Product Managers as CEOs. The more we have, the more lottery tickets we have. The more lottery tickets we have, the higher the jackpots. Great breakthrough companies can not be born without taking real risks.

Does Open Source need Product Managers?

If a company adopts the Open Source business model, does it need Product Managers ?

According to Marc Fleury, the founder and CEO of Jboss, Open Source is the business model for the 21st century. The VC model on Silicon Valley is institutionalized. The French proper adjective is “bourgeoise”. VC are now bourgeoise. Marc writes:

Choose a career path, choose a cubicle, choose endless code review meetings, choose an IDE, choose to be good to authority and hope authority will be good to you, choose a thought leader, choose a license, choose an architecture, choose a paradigm, choose a retirement plan, choose a language, choose your SOA, choose sensitivity training, choose Linux vs. Windows, choose a debugger, choose an MBA, choose the system…

Or…

You can choose not to choose the system. And the reasons? Who needs reasons when you've got Open Source?

But Jboss has a VC, Matrix from Boston. They have products and charge for their products everything in services except one-time license fees. They have a very serious product portfolio strategy and the VP of Product Management is featured on http://www.jboss.com/company/management

They are pretty much a 20th century company. Fleury is quoted in Business Week On Line April 10
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_15/b3979095.htm

Fleury and his investors say they're focused on getting ready for an initial public offering, which will come "sooner rather than later," ... "They'll be rich," Fleury boldly says of investors and employees. "I'll create a generation of open-source millionaires, and I'm damn proud of that.

They sold two days ago the company to Red Hat after having Novell and Red Hat as suitors for $420M. The VC’s got 20 times return for a two year investment, Marc is a very wealthy man. Not so sure about the mainstream employees

The Jboss Product Management did a superb job. It’s impossible to support for money an ever changing open source code, without a release train and product portfolios. They created the infrastructure that made Jboss a sale-able corporation that attracted the big ticket buyers

What is a professional?

I went to an event with Dr. Lee Shulman, the President of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The following thoughts are inspired from his talk.

One day, companies will select the Product Managers the way we select our medical doctors. In software, I see constantly fantastic quality code and ideas that go down the drain, unfulfilling the potential.

The medical doctors are specialists on types of illnesses. We ask for their reputation.

What is a professional? A professional is someone who does not simply know about something. A professional does something with what he knows. S/He is not judged by what s/he knows, but by what s/he produces as a result of that knowledge. This means understanding the individuals who will both need and afford the product. The most widely used word is “market”. The market is an impersonal abstraction. A market is made of people, who are not an amorphous mass that swallows hamburgers and Barbie dolls.

Woody Allen about luck

"People are afraid to acknowledge or to face what huge dependency they have on luck,". "There's a tendency to think we have great control over our lives or some control, but the truth of the matter is that we don't have the control that you think. You think you have control - you think if you get up in the morning, you exercise, you eat right and don't smoke, you will be healthy. But it doesn't work that way - you still get cancer and you still get hit by a bus. So much is luck. But if you face that, it's a very unpleasant feeling. You like to feel 'I have some control over events' ... You do have some control, but much less than you think, and that's why I wanted to make the movie."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/667205.html

Like most people on this planet

Everyone talks of the dot.com crash. There was no sudden crash. The shares went down, the analysts speculated, as they always do. Then, the shares went a bit up now just to keep the hope alive. Then more down, and down and down, a bit down, a bit up, and then collapsed and stayed there

I drive by horrible looking homes that cost un-reachable millions of dollars. VC’s, licking their wounds, sit on top of heaps of money fearful to make a move. There are no pensions waiting for us in California.

There are no other options. It's all we have left: our know-how to make software boom. They know how to make software everywhere is Internet. But one needs Sillicon Valley to make software boom.

My Daughter

Her poem is titled Who am I

Who Am I?

I am a writer with flowing ideas.
I am an actress who desires lines.
I am a girl with many questions.
I have no time- only a busy schedule.
I love to watch movies and want to make them.
I am constantly on the Internet.
I am a dreamer with a vast imagination.
I am a person with expressive opinions.
I am a bookworm who loves to read fiction.
I am someone who tries her best and nothing less.

“Do you like it?”, she asked
“I do.”
“Why all people hate us?”
“Hate us, our family?”
“No, they hate America. They hate our government , they hate us.”

I see Americans as winners of a lottery ticket. We came from Canada or Iran or Romania or wherever. Do the haters see we Americans, are nothing but one of them?

“We are not Americans dad. We are Canadians.”
“OK, Canadians. The same logic applies.”
“They seem to love Canadians. The same said a boy in my class about Mexico. They like Canada and Mexico.”

Someone once said that if America didn't exist, it should have been invented.

“Someone in my class asked why don't we go to Canada and Mexico.”
“Because..” I said
“And EVERYBODY likes the British... Everyone in my class wants to go to Britain.”

The "to-be-or-not-to-be" of any blogger

I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.

I opened an old copy of New Yorker, and here it was.

Miha

How good you are

How good you are depends on how many poems you have written in your life

A Distinguished Engineer at Sun, Richard Gabriel, says:

Writing code certainly feels very similar to writing poetry. When I'm writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I'm writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place.

http://java.sun.com/features/2002/11/gabriel_qa.html

Can a product manager be a star?

Am I glamorizing the product management? Can a product manager be a star? For all their potential, most corporations' product managers are process-focuses contributors. Here is sample of what a PM should manage from Product Development Management Association (PDMA) (http://www.pdma.org/library/glossary.html)

Commercialization, PAC (Product Approval Committee), Performance Satisfaction Surveys, Product Requirements Document , Six Sigmas, SWOT Analysis, Worth What Paid For (WWPF)... Each concept is a time consuming process. Their sheer number overwhelms and shifts the focus from creativity to the obsession of meeting a certain deadline. PMs have tens and even hundreds of tedious items on their to do lists.

So where are the Product Managers who make products out of words and intention? PDMA offers this definition, copied from someone else book:

Creativity: "An arbitrary harmony, an expected astonishment, a habitual revelation, a familiar surprise, a generous selfishness, an unexpected certainty, a formable stubbornness, a vital triviality, a disciplined freedom, an intoxicating steadiness, a repeated initiation, a difficult delight, a predictable gamble, an ephemeral solidity, a unifying difference, a demanding satisfier, a miraculous expectation, and accustomed amazement." (George M. Prince, The Practice of Creativity, 1970) Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate.

This is similar to poet Rimbaud definition of poetry: ''a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.”

Engineers may become stars. CEOs are stars. Product Managers must be first promoted or start their own companies, together with their favorite and trusted engineers. A star product is not an act of solitary creativity, like poetry.

Giacomo Casanova as a product

Giacomo Casanova seduced 116 women and detailed his adventures in a massive autobiography written in the eighteenth century. He is the most famous womanizer in the world, a spy, a diplomat, an opera librettist, a mathematician, a poet, a cleric, a fugitive, a librarian, a gambler (he created the business of lottery), a magic practitioner conversant with the Jewish Kabbalah.

He spoke French, Italian, Latin, Greek and English. He translated Iliada in Italian He did not speak German, yet he spent the last fourteen years of his life in the Dax Palace of Count Waldstein in Bohemia. “The world greatest lover” as an old man was sexually impotent, and a broken dreamer. The servants of Count Waldstein made him suffer indignities, like using pages of his books as toilet paper. He had only the pleasure of remembering, which brought at the same time grief. German poet J.W. Goethe visited him

Casanova deeply believed in God and his faith sustained him. He never participated in an orgy and believed that pleasure should received and given equally. His publishers, Brockhaus, ironically were German, the only major language Casanova did not speak . He wrote 4554 pages in French, not Italian which was his native tongue. He died before he finished his memoirs in 1798, just as the nineteenth century was about to step in.

From now on, Casanova became an unending series of products. In 1821, a heavily edited German version was published for the puritan German audience. The German censorship raised difficulties.

French editions copied the German version. Brockhaus published in 1832 a French Edition, but French Censorship was even harsher than the German. So the French edition was published in Brussels, Belgium..

These editions even had text added that Casanova never wrote. Casanova was not recollecting his life. He was re-living it. So the original manuscript was withheld for more than 160 years. The final , original Casanova was published in February 1960. The American edition was published between 1966 and 1971 , an original translation of Willard Trask. The paper back edition is from John Hopkins University Press.

In age of Viagra and Howard Stern, Giacomo Casanova image is benign. He had the elegance to practice the true sexual emotional adventure, which is claimed by voluptuous ED (Erectile Dysfunctional) drug companies, Casanova was not a chemical automated button. He was witty conversationalist, a man with magic and an encyclopaedic mind.

Giacomo Casanova's 116 women record in 1700's pales in comparison to Bill Wyman, who claimed he slept with 2000 women during his time with the Rolling Stones.

[Casanova] is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, gossip, in... the whole personality of his mistresses. (V.S. Pritchet)

A search on Amazon.com for Casanova yielded 1,063 books, 131 videos, and among other , one software title: Casanova: The Duel of the Black Rose . It is a video game published in February 2005

The time has come for the software Casanovas. We can call a grid architecture or an Operating System or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, Casanova. No software is perfect. As it goes through release after release, it aims at a perfection that will never achieve.

As Casanova himself writes, unabridged and in the original manuscript:

My ill fortune nor less than my good proved to me that both in this physical world and in the moral world good comes from evil and evil comes from good.... The one thing necessary is courage, for strength without confidence is useless.

Buddha and the Product Manager

If Robert Frost defined literature as "words that have become deeds" then product management is " words that have become products."

Proctor and Gamble created the position of product manager in the 1940's. The PM run the business of a product or brand. There was not high technology at stake. On the surface just staples, like soap and shampoos

My own definition of a Product Manager is for 2005. A PM has the ability to take engineering ideas and make them pay off. S/he treats engineering talent as an equity which needs constantly to increase its valuation.

A entrepreneurial Product Manager creates tangibles (investors, revenues, partners) out of words, ideas, and intentions that come both from engineering and from customers.

Ideally, he has to have , like the great original Budha, Siddhartha Gautama,

... a cool head and warm heart, a blend that shielded him from sentimentality, on one hand, and indiference, on the other.... Every problem that came his way was automatically subjected to cool, dispassionate analysis...yet this critical logical component was balanced by a strong component of tenderness and compassion.

(Smith and Novak, Budhism, HarperSanFrancisco)

This chemistry makes the greatest products ever. Business 101 books recommend never to negotiate with a lower authority not empowered to make concessions. Buddha did talk to the supreme Spirituality in the Nature.

Miha

The Poetry of the Valley: Is Google pure poetry?

Robert Frost defined literature as ''words that have become deeds,''
Poetry is more. Poetry is ''a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.'' (quote from the French poet, Rimbaud.)

Almost any Sillicon Valley start-up is then literature. Getting financed is like publishing a book, like "words that have become deeds."

Some very few start-ups become the essence of literarture. They are pure poetry. They use a disruptive "long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses." Google as a start-up was pure poetry. No everyone understood their poetry before the IPO. Today their success seems natural, because our senses are changed for ever. We "google" each other as normally as having a cup of coffee.

Any Google (or E-Bay or Amazon) immitators are not going to make the same impact. They lack the intrinsic poetry of the original. They must come out with a different gigantic and rational derangement of all our already changed senses.

Sell Products, Not Blogs

Many people blog. They think the product is the blog. No. You still need a product to sell.

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a 100 pages story from John Steinbeck. He was born in Salinas, educated in Stanford and worked as a transient worker at farms in California, near Soledad in the 1930's. American Heritage dictionary has a word for this farm worker: a bindle stiff meaning a migrant worker or hobo who carries his own bedroll.

Many years later , in 1962, Stenbeck won the Nobel prize.

Even before the word autistic was invented, the main character is Lennie, an autistic young man with a big soul and unable to care for himself. The only woman in the story, Curly's wife does not have a name. Everyone is very unhappy and thirsty for friendship and love. Everyone works hard, just to be lonelier and lonelier.

Sillicon Valley is an alter ego of the farm near Salinas River a few miles from Soldedad, that Stenbeck describes. We work hard. We came from all over the world. We have ideas, but few dare to hope. We work for large companies and small companies and start ups are fewer and fewer. We know the rule of the the game is today only. We are the bindle stiffs in a modern post-bubble Sillicon Valley.

The title of the story comes from a poem of Robert Burns:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy.

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, begin to go awry. This is the American dream from a powerful writer, who goes inside the souls, to see it better and describe it.

Life is much better than in the thirties. A friend, born in America , said he wants to move to South Carolina. Do you have any friends there? I asked. No, he said. In San Francisco, we do not have many friends either.

I love America. I love being here. I love my imaginary independence. I can not go back. I read Steinbeck, again and wonder who reads him any more, besides the high school students, who read him because they have to, not because they want to.

Steinbeck make me feel I am normal. California is and is not an infinite El Dorado, be it gold, movies, beaches, hippies or software. Illusory freedom has a price. The secret is to keep trying - not easy to do - even when the best laid schemes o' mice an' men, begin to go awry.

Poetry for Russian Souls Only

After the poetry reading, I went to Igor Yevelev to congratulate him. "Congratulations" I said. He ducked backwards, as if taking cover. "I know you Israelis.." he said. "Israeli? I am Romanian".

"Same thing," said Igor from his imaginary safety.

I looked behind and I saw the line of elderly Russian women who understood Yevelev translations. That's what Yevelev cares about. He cares about the Russians who now can drink Yehuda Amichai poems, as if Yehuda Amichai was Russian.

What the Poetry Translator feels, is what the Immigrant Engineer fears here in America: being reduced to a Don Quijote de la Mancha enraged at the windmills.

I was one of the Windmills, admiring Igor, who was too hurt to recognize supporters from windmills.

Igor Yevelev arrived ten years ago from Belarus and writes poetry. He translated the most famous Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai in Russian. The room was full of elderly people, mostly women who spoke Russian. He read the poems first in English. The audience did not react. Then he read his Russian translations. I speak no Russian, so I look around. A lady next to me had shiny eyes. The audience clapped wildly, with visible pleasure.

When he translates, Igor said, he changes to words day after day. As he discovers more meanings, he replace the Russian words, and gets more and more exact poetic feelings. A Russian reader must feel the same emotions and the native Hebrew readers.

"What is is my first language?", he asks himself, a questions people love asking him most of the time. It depends. If I speak or write about love, is Russian. If I speak about being laid off at the office, it's English.

Igor works for a large semiconductor company. They outsource jobs to India.

Tonight, I found a love poem of Yehuda Amichai, Once A Great Love:

Once a great love cut my life in two.
The first part goes on twisting
at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The poem goes on:

The passing years have calmed me
and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

But I stopped after the third verse: there is no healing yet, here in Silicon Valley

April 3, 2005 1:30 a.m. In 30 minutes the clock changes. It jumps ahead one hour.

I use the Oracle of Kabbalah, by Richard Seidman, a BuJu (A Budhist Jew). I draw at random 4 cards with the Hebrew letters of the aleph-beth.

I have Aleph, Pei, The Missing Letter, and Ayin.

Aleph is the symbol of the Holy One, of Ultimate Oneness . óìà (elef), 1,000 the largest number represented by a letter. Ein ïéà Sof, means “Ultimate Nothingness”

“Our minds”, says Seidman, “are impossible to grasp: They are simultaneously empty and full.”

The three elements of the Creation, begin with à : Adamah (earth) , Avir (air) and Esh (fire)

The meaning of Aleph is that I am Nothing at All and that I am, notwithstanding.

The danger of Aleph is that we can be paralyzed with ambivalence. Because it is close to ultimate nothingness , we can see the existence is useless, senseless.

Aleph is the first letter of my name: It signifies power, like an Ox, or indecision, like Hamlet. In spite of all this, I exist.



Pei ô. . The numerical value is 80. It's the symbol of mouth. Gd created the entire Universe through speech. Moses stuttered. Gd assured him, He will help, by giving Moses every word he needs to say. Moses transcends limitations. The heart of the wise adds learning to one's lips. We have two ears and one mouth? Because we should listen twice as much as we speak.'

Try not to put people down. But speak from the heart.


Sefer HaTemunah says there is 23rd letter, missing from our aleph-beth. There is missing mysterious consonant. It is exactly what we lack to create harmony. There is only humor to save me, or this is the missing link that stops being what I could be. We don't know the numerical value. We will know when Messiah will come and reveal it to us. That means not in my life time.

Ayin, ò. Numerical Value 70. Here is the meaning of of the shadow of Ayin, “The greater the Sage, the greater the Evil inclination.” Lurianic Kabbalah says great sages should marry the righteous daughter of a Gentile.

Downfall

I sawDownfall the movie about Hitler's last days. Bruno Graz interpreted Hitler. He was shouting and had many moments of silence. I saw his buildings of the cities he never had a chance to build. It reminded me of the cults who committed suicide following theirleader. One was in Guyana. Other was in Texas

I walked out and the air was cool on Santana Row, the nicest street in San Jose. Who in San Jose will go to see this movie? They were Russians. Or they Los Gatos residents with intelligent daughters. We were visibly shaken. The intelligent daughter said: " I have seen this war through Jewish eyes, American Eyes, British eyes. I have never seen in through the German eyes.", she said

Three things hit my head: one was the unbelievable German discipline. The other one was the scene where Mrs Goebels poissons her children. The other one was the suffering of the Germans themselves, who sacrificed their children for a lost cause.

Is leadership like that? I mean, do CEOs of companies have a spark of dictatorship? Do they fanatically defend ideas that fail miserably and we follow them because they are charismatic?

Thoughts fly

After the dream of life is gone, one must carry on without it. Tennessee Willaims wrote in "A cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

Joseph dreamed a dream and told it to his brothers, and they hated him even more. [Genesis 37:5]

Come and see: Joseph told the dream to his brothers, and they made the dream disappear; for twenty-two years it was delayed.

Silicon Valley spirituality

At the end, both the innocent and the guilty are executed without distinction wrote Franz Kafka in his diary in 1915.

When in Silicon Valley, take the exit San Antonio Road West in Palo Alto. You'll see the Sun's old headquarters on the right site, ready to be demolished on that prime real estate area, to accomodate a community center. Turn right on Charleston and then turn right again on Fabian Way. Every single almost-new office building has signs for lease. Fabian Way meets the highway 101 and makes a sharp left turn. An abandoned restaurant has a rotten "Available" sign dangling in the windy rain.

For the next mile, almost every prime single office park is empty and available. They are facing Highway 101, where motorists could have seen the huge signs of of the Valley legends of the past.

The Bay Area continues to suffer one of the worst regional downturns in the nation's history, having lost 400,000 -- or 13 percent -- of the jobs in its seven-county area since 2001, according to the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/11139446.htm

What is going on... is the end of Silicon Valley as we know it . Larry Ellison, Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2003

I will never be well again, wrote Kafka to his fiancee Felice Bauer, after learning he has tuberculosis, in October 1917. He knew he will never marry her.

Stanford University is only two miles away. There is this inscription on the Wall of the West Transept of Stanford's Memorial Church

Thoughts and words travel just as God's life travels, They do not travel like an individual, but you breathe your spiritual life into the atmosphere as you do your breath, and some one else breathes it in. Those not present still receive it, for it permeates space, and all live in it and receive from it according to their unfoldment.

There is hope, I think, I believe, I need to believe. The indifference of the natural Darwinian laws of survival is not absolute. Maybe Stanford's blows it's spiritual life, made out of thoughts and words beyond the Valley, touching the planet. But the strongest, the purest breathing of that spirit is still here, in Silicon Valley.

If America didn't exist, it should have been invented

The lines below belong to Aleksander Hemon, a writer born in Bosnia who learned English while writing his first book.

At a certain point... I was the only one talking, and all the suppressed misery of living in America surged from me. Oh, how many times I had wished death to the entire college football teams. It was impossible to meet a friend, without making a fucking appointment weeks in advance, and they were no coffee gardens where you could sit and watch people walk by. I was sick of being asked where I was from... With every particle of my being I detested the word "carbs" and the systematic extermination of joy from American life.

He describes what a Bosnian " alter ego", Josef Pronek really thinks of himself

He began thinking of himself as someone else -- a cartoon character, a dog, a detective, a madman -- and began fantasizing about abandoning his body altogether and becoming nothing, switching it off like the TV .

He realized that his previous life was completely beyond anyone's reach and that he could entirely reinvent it, create a legend, like a spy.

My question is why the real Pronek does not go back to Bosnia, now that war ended in Sarajevo? (this being another annoying question people ask unhappy immigrants).

Because America has always absorbed Josef Proneks, who reinvented themselves. I can talk about my product in grid computing, only in America. Elsewhere they talk about the science of Grid Computing, as it were a Goddess in a temple full of Universities and Governments.

How can we make grids in from grids that work as if in the dreams? Grids that can be acquired by people and needed for ever and ever thereafter? Like electricity, gas, TV and soap operas?

This happened in Sillicon Valley. Bosnians, Russians and Indians reinvented themlves, whether they wanted or not, in product managers.

The same Bosnians, Russians Romanians would have been local celebrities or romantic failures at home, feeling cozy either way, drinking in cute bars among people who cared and loved them. Those loving girl friends - together with loving wives and loving friends and mothers and fathers - never believed back home one could be more than what they saw in front of their eyes. The beauty of being Bosnian contains a stoic limitation that all understand back home

We globalize as much as we want. But, as Arturo Uslar Petri, a Venezuelan writer, said: if America didn't exist, it should have been invented.

From the novella "Blind Jozef Pronek and the Dead Souls"

A Poem by Wally Keller

1ST NTRM RPORT ON TH CAUSS & MANIFESTATNS OF DVERGNT THINK
PROCEDUR CONCERNNG TH POLITICS OF SPRING

Th Peopls Rpublic of Poetry was nspird durng a short-livd lov
afair wth a dipoemat's butiful dawtr.

Delina, may your cheeks be trilliums and sanctioned by the
Provincial Government of Poetry.

[...]

If a poet were the premier of something, what might that something
be? Would it be a nation of obedient poetry lovers? Would the
national militia consist of mighty tulips armed with colour and
sunshine? Would the national anthem be a long joyful sigh after
love? Would the Union of Pollen Producers go on strike, demanding
higher rates of sunlight and more elaborate fringe benefits, such
as lighter showers and heavier dew? Would this cause an image-
national crisis? Would the Creative Intelligence Agency report
that the Insect Pollen Transportation Organization had been
infiltrated by dissident outside agitators, such as breezes? Then
what would our foreign policy be? Would we accept only immigrants
carrying passport dreams? Then what about the refugees from Grief
and defectors from Despair? Would we send out ambassadors to
collect the neglected? Would we establish dipoematic relations
with Pain, negotiate for a ceasefire, and settle for shorter
durations? Will we pick and choose our enemies (Banality,
Mediocrity) at the drop of a poem and come sharging, singing the
Battle Hymn of the Poetic?

mystics-in-residence

We have identity facades. We have a name, a job title, a SSN, a Meyer-Briggs evaluation a status (divorced, remarried), a boss, a company, an university degree, a dentist, a car, a diary or scraps of papers, a lover (real or imaginary). Most facades are hidden in the huge underwater side of the Iceberg.

The job title is right at the top of the visible floating iceberg. In Silicon Valley we even have a put-on air of bohemian product managers. We are the ones who explore the collective soul of a mass of amorphous invisible people.

We segment the collective sub-consciousness and think of products as objects with ideas that feed the illusions other people deeply care for. We do not deliver, we bring deliverance to this world. Or do we?

The product managers in Silicon Valley are the mystics-in-residence who listen twenty four hours a day to hear God speaking to them.

Think Google. Think Solaris 10. Think Seti@Home. They are here.

Think Grid Computing. Its on its way.

The Invisible Angels

I went to an one-day workshop at the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, in San Jose, California. It seeks what is divine in every person, independent of ethnicity and tribe and religion. The Reverend is a Lady named Ellen Grace O'Brian who signs the letters: "Reverence to the Divine within you."

The center is in a splendid colonial house on University Avenue with shady trees and old mansions in Rose Garden district of San Jose.

The meditation today was lead by Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, who wrote many extraordinary books. He comes from the new movement of Renewal. He teaches a meditation course he calls "Shiviti: Living in the presence of God."

They were about 20 people. One lady with a tiny cross on her neck said she communicates with animals: squirrels, dogs, birds. Other lady was a Palo Alto social worker with wavy hair and intelligent eyes. Another woman with a beautiful voice assisted many terminal patients to feel better waiting for their death. They were few men. one was Pastor. Another was the husband of a lady who grew up Jewish in San Francisco, but forgot all about it.

As a mantra we sang:

Adonai. A-do-naiiii, elra-chum v'-cha-nun... erech a--payim

and then we walked meditating in the beautiful garden with old Spanish tiles and fountains with humming waters. Flowers were floating in tiny containers spread over the grass and lustful, yet restrained, wild-looking plants.

It was strange to see the Pastor and the Lady who spoke with squirrels, walking and saying Adonaiiii...

I thought what to ask God. I had a more direct conversation with my mother and father who are dead many years, yet, if I would not believe there a Divine, I could even try to utter a word. The feeling that they hear me, made me open.

I read in one of Rami's books that what we know for sure is that I will die and that I love my family and few other people. We are here temporarily part of an infinity. We have "nefesh" (which means "me" and has an ego). Nefesh means soul, but in Hebrew, there are 5 words for soul: nefesh, ruach, neshamah, Chayya and Yechidah, each one level higher than the other.

Talking with mother and father, I switched to God. I wanted to know
what I really want. I want to know who really am I.

I went back to the room. We will repeat a few times the same: we go out, walk, try to say something, come back. In the second walk we walked slowly and said: HaRachaman, HaRachaman, HaRachaman, for twenty minutes. Again I see the Lady from San Francisco and a young woman with many earrings, saying HaRachaman HaRachaman.... HaRachaman .

Somebody asked what it means. It means the ONE who has pity. But we can say whatever we want: we can say Spaghetti, if we want and feel better. All we want is to change the low mood in spirited high mood.. We want to leave the "Mochin d'Katnut" (katan means small in Hebrew) and reach the state of "Mochin d'Gadlut" (Gadol means great in Hebrew).

I went to eat in an Ethiopian Restaurant. , The Queen of Sheba on Alameda street on San Jose, one block away. Most people ate chip and fish, but the Ethiopian menu was on the last page. I ordered a vegetarian Atklit (curried vegetable stew made with carrots, potatoes, cabbage, peppers and onions) and Misir Key Tot (Lentils cooked in Berbere sauce (Spicy ....)

While eating, I started reading the last book of Rami Shapiro, named "Open Secrets" and it is dedicated to Father Thomas Keating.

In the foreword, Rami confesses that a few years ago , in spite of being the author of many books read all over the world, of being a successful Rabbi, of being invited by his peers to advise them, he "felt stale and listless." He talked to everyone (family, therapist, friends). They were sympathetic but could not help him.

So he turned to his Rabbi the Zalman Shachter Shalomi who knows Rami
Shapiro for twenty years. Zalman said:

"your teachings on the Internet, your books , your courses, all had a profound impact on the Jewish people, in America and South America and around the world.... You are a prophetic voice for the twenty-first century Judaism. ... When I am seeing you are not happy, I know why: enough with the Jews."

“Excuse me?”, said Rami

“Enough with the Jews”, repeated Rabbi Zalman who was sitting next to his wife, Eve. "now you must take your teachings beyond the walls of the synagogue."

"Am I supposed to become a missionary?"

"This is what I think: Shift your focus, no need to convert anyone.
There is a need to enlighten people about what Judaism is and what it says. I suggest you offer Judaism for people who wish to learn from it as they do from Buddhism and Sufism. Create a Judaism for everyone, not just for Jews."

I clicked. There is an organization in Venice, CA, called One-River . They seek “spiritual literacy“ as an on-going quest for meaning and wisdom through the study of the world's spiritual literature: Baghavad Gita, Chuang Tzu, Dhammapada, Diamond Sutra, Gospel of Thomas, Hadith, Heart Sutra, Hebrew Bible, Koran, New Testament, and the Tao te Ching.

I left the restaurant, leaving part of the Misir Key Tot on the plate - it was really spicy. After lunch, all makes more sense.

Back in the classroom I hear the Pastor and beautiful ladies singing again Adonai mantra (mantra is plural, I learned).


Rami ended our day by saying we have two lives: Life 1 and Life 2.

In Life 1, stage 1, we accumulate: bicycles, cars, degrees, education, jobs, money, spouses and furniture and children. Life 1 stage 2, is when we seek spirituality: we treat spirituality with the same desperation as we treat the accumulations from Stage 1: we buy CDs and tapes and books and attend retreats and seek answers, to the questions we have difficulty to ask, - or - hear replies that never quite make it.

The Life 2, we just exist (Hineni= I am ). No accumulations, just exist.

Life 2 is sad. It was the life of my mother in an old age home. I think Life 2, as Rami describes it, is a luxury. While he signed his book for me, I asked if he read "Values Prosperity and Talmud" by Larry Kahaner, It has a chapter of the spirituality of money. "Of Money?" "Yes", of money."

I also wanted to remind him about the prayer for "parnasa" (a word that means the combination of a good livelihood without sacrificing the inner happiness). The prayer says something like that: "God give us the food before we notice that we need it, make us have a bit more than enough to keep your obligations. Always you give my livelihood by opening your hand, and do not let us depend upon those made of flesh and blood..."

On Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year), we watch the letters of secret names of Gd that we are not allowed to say with loud voice and not even try to read them. Just look at them a few seconds, before going on...

The word of God we spell

' H I H

We say it Adonai, we do not pronounce the spelling

If we place it vertically, we see in Hebrew characters:

y

h

w

h

Every person we meet is accompanied by a an Angel from God. The angel is invisible, so we must look very intense at each person who walks on the street. We all have head, bodies, hands and legs. 'HIH sign resembles a head, a body, the hands and the legs human beings have.

Everyone has his or her Angel, almost invisible.


References:

Center for Spiritual Enlightenment
http://www.csecenter.org/

One River foundation
http://one-river.org/SLM-home.html