Category Archives: Technology

Fifty Years Ago Today …

The 1964 New York World’s Fair comes to a close after a two-year run. More than 51 Million people attended the exposition designed to showcase mid-20th-century American culture and technology that is still inspiring some people today, as evidenced by its inclusion in Walt Disney Pictures recent epic film, Tomorrowland. While it was not sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions, it was the first time many of the attendees saw, and interacted with, mainframe computers, computer terminals with keyboards and CRT displays, and telephone modems when the few corporations that had computer equipment kept it in back offices.

Major exhibitors included General Motors, IBM, Bell Systems, Sinclair Oil, and Ford Motor Company — still big names in American Industry 50 years later. While it may have been a financial disaster, it’s legacy and remnants still live on today, with a handful of the pavilions being relocated to new homes around the country, including a ski lodge in western New York, a radio station in Wisconsin, a Hilton Hotel in Missouri, a Four Seasons Lodge in Missouri, a church in California, a science center in Seattle, and attractions at Disneyland.

These days there are conventions galore, but when was the last time there was a true international exposition that really tried to look ahead to what we could achieve with peace and prosperity instead of war mongering (and that people remember) ?

Technological Damnation 91: Proprietary Madness Continued


Can I play with madness?
The prophet stared at his crystal ball
Can I play with madness?
There’s no vision there at all
  Dickinson, Harris, & Smith, 1988

And, as a result, big companies have decided to create their own vision, separate from everyone else’s, and thrust their own visions of damnation upon us. Locking us into technology platforms that we just can’t get out of.

Proprietary designs. Proprietary protocols. Proprietary APIs. All designed to lock you in and keep you in chains.

All the big companies in the tech space at large have done it. Adobe. Apple. Google. IBM. Microsoft. Etc. And now some, like Microsoft, are taking it further than we ever thought possible. Earlier this year, Microsoft decided to go beyond automatic updates to automatic OS upgrades without the user’s permissions. (Which, of course, bricked a number of machines due to problems with drivers and underlying hardware incompatibility.) Now, they’ve supposedly backtracked on this, but it seems that those who have been upgraded, or choose to upgrade, to Windows 10 will have updates forced upon them with no ability to choose or defer, meaning their machines could be bricked at anytime! Ouch! (And that’s why the doctor does not use Windows.)

But they didn’t start the fire. (Although it appears they did a lot of research in choosing the best accelerants.) Pretty much every big tech company has forced proprietary designs (that restrict upgrades to other products provided by the same company or authorized partners), protocols (for interfacing), or APIs (for developing) upon us and still does.

And it’s not limited to the tech space at large and underlying operating systems. In our space, we have proprietary networks, like Ariba, that mandates its hosted P2P tool users also use the Ariba network for all connectivity with suppliers, even in cases where suppliers are connected to other networks that then connect to Ariba’s in the same transaction stream (Source: SpendMatters: “Ariba Doesn’t Have Customers It Has Prisoners”). (And since suppliers have to pay to use the Ariba Network, this puts a heavy price tag on purchases through the network as opposed to a network where the buyer pays a flat fee and the supplier doesn’t, because the supplier is just going to increase their prices to cover this cost.) And to make matters worse, as Ariba starts to lose prominence in the traditional analyst rankings, it’s stepping up its efforts with the smaller tier firms who, probably lacking the manpower to do the in-depth analysis the larger firms are capable of, are giving it rave reviews on the plus side with very little mention of the weaknesses on the negative side. Case in point: a recent review by Ovum which called Ariba the “largest supplier network”, listed four strengths, and only one weakness. SI has to wholeheartedly agree with Spend Matter’s review of Ovum’s analysis  in “beware analyst research ovums review of the ariba network” — the coverage of the weaknesses was not thorough or fair and while SI does not have insight into Ariba’s network statistics beyond what they publish, SI does know that Basware’s volume is on par with Ariba’s published numbers. While Basware may not be a household name in North America, they are probably the biggest and most established network player in Europe in this space and one of the oldest (as the company turned 30 this year).

To make matters worse, there’s not a lot of open standards in our space. You could say that we have cXML, which a number of PunchOut sites are based on, but do we? While it is open and free for use without restrictions apart from restrictions relating to publications of modifications and naming, this protocol was not only created by Ariba in 1999 but is still controlled by Ariba. They could change it at any time, force all sites on the Ariba network to update at that time, and offer very little documentation or guidance as to how anyone outside of that network will go about doing that and, more importantly, support multiple versions simultaneously (for those in the network and those not), which would be a major IT headache. Even worse, they could decide to replace it with cXML 2.0, keep that version proprietary, and create a dichotomy where only those in the network have 2.0 and those don’t.

There is no completely free, non-proprietary, fully open-source standard in our space, and no guarantees. Proprietary Madness is a damnation that is going to haunt us for years to come.

Thirty Years Ago Today

The Free Software Foundation, which launched the GNU General Public License, was founded by Richard Stallman, and the fee software movement, which started when he launched the GNU Project on 27 September 1983, began in earnest.

It took less than 15 years from the start of the movement, to the dismay of companies like IBM and Microsoft, for many open source projects, including Linux (1991), Apache (1995), MySQL (1995), and PHP (1995), to dominate the web.

And allow LOLCats everywhere to dominate the web. 😉

Seventy Three Years Ago Today

The space race begins with the launch of a V2/A4-rocket from Test Stand VII at Peenemunde, Germany which becomes the first man-made object to reach space.

Less than nineteen years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space when he orbited the earth on 12 April 1961 in a Soviet Vostok spacecraft.

And a mere eight years later, unless conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the United States put the first man on the moon on 20 July 1969.

Less than two years after that, the Soviet Union launched the first space station, Salyut, and public-sector extra-planetary supply management began.

Speaking of the space race, the Space Shuttle Atlantis made its maiden flight thirty years ago today on 3 October 1985, forty two years after the space race began. Atlantis, the fourth operational space shuttle, flew thirty-three missions and orbited the earth a total of 4,848 times, travelling a distance that was more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Notable missions were it’s 4th, which deployed the Magellan probe bound for Venus, its 5th, which deployed the Galileo probe bound for Jupiter, its 14th, which represented the 100th US manned mission and the first shuttle docking with Mir, its 21st, which was its first docking with the International Space Station (ISS), and its 30th, which was the final Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission.

And eleven years ago, less a day, on 4 October 2004, SpaceShipOne won the $10 Million Ansari XPrize when it became the first-even private vehicle to carry a human being into space.

And this year, Space Exploration Techologies, SapceX, became the first company to ship private cargo to the ISS using its own rocket and ship, the Dragon.

And Virgin Galactic is working on a new SpaceShipTwo that could be ready to take commercial passengers into space as early as next year.

It won’t be long before someone puts up a private space station, and private sector extra-planetary supply management becomes a reality. (And when it does, and you need someone to optimize those supply models, you know who to call.)

Technological Damnation 79: Big Data / “Data” Scientists

About the only technological damnations that grind the doctor‘s gears more than “Big Data” are Mobile, Apps, or The Cloud (which may be the worst damnation of them all).

So why is this a damnation? Besides the facts that “big data” is not new and the term “data scientist” is bullish!t? Let’s list a few reasons:

  • it’s unnecessary confusion for the sole purpose of
  • fear marketing and
  • labour cost inflation.

Let’s take each of these one by one.

Big Data is NOT new

We’ve always had more data than we could fit in memory, or even on a hard disk. When the doctor was getting his degrees back in the early 90’s, he was focussing on (multi-dimensional) data structures, algorithms, and computational geometry (which are the fundamental computer science and mathematics theories that underlie databases, analytics, and optimization) and when he was designing structures and algorithms to process this data efficiently and effectively, and studying their ability to scale, he regularly ran into the problem of not having enough memory to fit all of the data in memory that he wanted (to study large scale applications) or not enough disk space to store everything he wanted (and support swap files). Physicists, (GIS) engineers, operations researchers, etc. always had (access to) more data than they could work with at any one time or even fit on a single machine. Nothing has changed. Yes it is true that we can collect data faster than ever with so many devices with microprocessors and onboard memory collecting data every second, but it’s also true that hard drives and memory have scaled. Back in the day, the doctor‘s first PC had a 10 GB hard drive and 1 MB of RAM (and that was a lot). Now, the doctor‘s three-year old mid-end laptop has 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive (and the average server has 256 GB, or more, of RAM and a few terabytes of hard drive space).

“Data” Scientist is a bullsh!t term

Pardon my language, but what the hell is a “data” scientist. Don’t you understand that every scientist is a “data” scientist. All scientists collect data, analyze data, interpolate data, make hypotheses on data, and collect more data to test those hypotheses. All scientists do this, no exceptions. Some, such as statisticians or computer scientists, focus more on data analysis and interpretation than others, but they are not a “data” scientist. They are a statistician or a computer scientist.

Unnecessary Confusion

Pretty much everyone who uses “big data” or “data scientist” is using it in such a way as to do their best to confuse you to the point where you feel stupid and ask them for help. Help which will cost a small fortune.

Fear Marketing

Most utilization of the terms is designed to not only confuse you, but instill as much fear as possible because it is designed to make you feel like you don’t understand it, but your competitors do and, moreover, if you don’t figure it out fast, your competitors are going to use their understanding to derive insights that these competitors will then use to steal your customers and your marketshare — so you better pay a big fistful of cash to take a ride on the “big data” bandwagon fast, or risk being stranded on the side of a desert road with no horse, no water, and no map.

Labour Cost Inflation

Because the providers who are driving the “big data” bandwagons are driving unnecessary demand for their analysts (which they are calling “data scientists”) through their confusion-based fear marketing, and rapidly reducing availability of those resources (beyond normal utilization of those resources) when they are successful, they are able to unrealistically inflate prices because of the perceived lack of resource supply. Net effect, you pay more for resources you may not even need!

In short, not only is “big data” an eternal damnation (and one that children of the 80’s would proclaim originated on Eternia), but it is a damnation that will be in your face day-in and day-out until the providers find a new fear-driven bandwagon to thrust upon you.