“Risiko akzeptieren, Größe wagen” – Lewis Platt (former HP CEO and current non-executive chairman of Boeing)
“Accepting risk–daring greatness”
Category Archives: thoughts
Truly random thoughts
- Commute traffic sucks
- Good health is important – more than anything else
- Designing for reset is hard (my recent headaches at work)
- Life is getting more complicated by the day
- Cool Texas weather is great
- First deep water oil spill in Gulf of Mexico could be beneficial in the long run to get better regulation early on
- Don’t believe oil spill numbers. They went from 1000 barrels/day, to 5000 barrels/day, to 40 000 barrels a day and we still don’t know how many, since there’s no gage 🙂
- Politics are just that
- The rich want the middle class to feel rich, so they can get them to vote in their favor
- American democracy was hijacked by corporations – one man one vote went out the window long time ago
- Juicy steaks are yummy!
- Nature continues to amaze me – comment triggered by wildflower display recently experienced.
- The older I get the more I realize how little I understand
- Flying is great – I feel so connected to everything up there.
Increasing complexity of Innovations
I’d like to share some observations about inventions and innovations. Lots has been written about it, whole books and long essays. Having worked in the high tech industry myself for over ten years now I have my own observations. Many of today’s innovations in the technology field are more like linear extensions of once revolutionary ideas. This is not to discount the achievements of the newer developments, but just to describe the amount or pace of progression. If you think back to one of the early microprocessor designs like the i4004 you’ll find that the development complexity was fairly manageable for a small team of engineers (think 20). The challenge was the unknown market that such a design would find a usage for. It was a contracted design for a commercial calculator at that time, but engineers at Intel realized that it could be utilized in different markets as well.
Future generations of the processor introduced new instructions, even new concepts of memory management and many other improvements. Over multiple generations the design grew from 8080 over 80186, the 8-286, the 80386 to the 80486, where it evolved from the P54 Pentium to an out-of-order design called the P6, or Pentium Pro. This design improved over various generations to the Pentium II Processor, and the Pentium III Processor, spawning the consumer segment Celeron Processor line on its way. All this happened while the complexity rose from generation to generation by a magnitude (the Pentium II processor contains ~11 million logic transistors (this excludes the transistors for the L2 cache)). While the 8080 design team comprised of a handful of engineers, the P6 team consisted of more than 600 engineers at peak time. This poses a significant management challenge to bring such a complex design to market,
The point here is that during all these years of significant x86 or IA-32 architecture improvements, the complexity and along with it the engineering cost of such an innovation was growing exponentially. The recovery of this cost was only possible by stable or growing profit margins, along with growing markets. Over all these years Intel was enjoying a highly profitable x86 business.
From generation to generation the complexity of the micro-architecture grew significantly to provide a compelling solution to the PC market. This increase in complexity was significant and posed a significant market entry barrier for new competitors.
The next generations of P4 processors introduced a new level of complexity with their trace caches for instructions. The next generation Core 2 architecture introduced a level of high performance multi threading architecture and the i7 with a completely new bus interface amongst many other changes.
All these achievements required a magnitude higher development effort over their predecessors. These engineering challenges can only be met by large corporations that already have experience in managing large team, in many cases in a cross site setting.
Unless the market is disturbed by a non-linear development of some kind that is not predicted or embraced by established competitors (see: “The Innovator’s Dilemma”), this vicious cycle cannot be broken. Innovation is key to break out of this loop, although many failures will pave the way to break out. Innovation comes from the right idea at the right time. Should one of the two ingredients fall short, the whole endeavor is doomed. Many failed start-ups illustrate this painfully.
Examples of failures: video phone, tablet PC, net PC, 3D video, speech recognition, to name a few.
My point I’m trying to illustrate is that there a plenty of good ideas out there. But unless the timing is right for cost and market, you’ll be unable to build a business around it. Also, forecasting the future is actually rather simple as long as you’re assuming a linear progression of existing or known technologies. With disruptive technologies, these predictions become utterly useless. And nobody can predict if the time for a disruptive technology has come, unless someone tries.
What if the world doesn’t have an end?
When we ask about the beginning or the end of the world we many times fall into the trap of using the experiences from our macro world of concrete objects around us and try to project them to the micro cosmos. Modern physics has recently tried to overcome this limitation of thinking (starting with the relativity theory and later with quantum physics). But it reminds me of that old woman in the audience of a physics congress asking the nobel price winners on the panel, what if we all live on the back of a big turtle? Silence.
But what if?
What if the world doesn’t have a beginning, and the quark isn’t the smallest particle but the boundary of a separate universe it carries inside? What if the world is actually recursive with no end? Our world would then end if some researcher of the (n-1)th world is randomly hitting our quark with a high energy accelerator. Ooops.
Obviously these questions don’t have an answer that is accessable to us – at least not anytime soon. But they make searching for that second missing sock in the morning so much less meaningful and more bearable.
The price of HW technology start-ups
When I was in the valley I talked to a couple of people to understand the state of the venture capital world we’re living in today. It seems not many hardware related start-ups are being funded any more currently. Most of the money goes to Web 2.0 related start-ups or environ-tech companies. This is a little disturbing to me, as I was hoping for a plentiful job market for hardware design engineers after the crash in 2009. But it appears that the cost for putting a business together around hardware is just to steep.
These days you need somewhere in the vicinity of $50Mio to just get anything hardware related going. EDA software licenses, mask making and debug equipment is just so prohibitively expensive, that testing out ideas has become almost impractical. This is left to the big players, the Intels, IBMs and Samsungs of the world. Unfortunately these behemoths of corporations have a very different
risk attitude towards new ventures and are usually much more interested in iterating existing and proven products over and over again. Innovation in the US seems to have slowed significantly with many developments being done now abroad by hungry young companies in Asia, or the Middle East.
Wonders of nature – a growing baby
Watching our baby grow is a truly amazing experience. Everyday you feed him lots of food and a small amount of the provided molecules are going to be used to grow his bones, brain and and other body parts. It makes you wonder how these molecules actually know their way to insert themselves into the right place. And it happens over and over again, baby after baby. And while science has very detailed understanding of many parts of our body, nobody really understands how this amazing process of growing a human being really works. We can only sit and watch in awe this wonder unfolding in front of our eyes every day. Have you ever wondered how this wound you got from falling on your knee actually knows how to heal?
This reminds me of some work I’ve done in the past when I worked on fractal compression algorithms. There, a picture is decompressed by using similar puzzle parts from a domain pool over and over again to build the final image by iterating on a recursive function. This function is defined to converge towards the original image. So the longer you iterate, the closer you reconstruct the original image. Could it be that our DNA encodes such a converging recursive function of the human being, that if we feed these puzzle parts to it (the molecules we consume), it ends up building the same organism again and again – not identically, but approximately the same?
It’s an intriguing thought.
The monetary value of human life
Interesting headline, isn’t it? Why would anyone volunteer to write about this (your newspaper doesn’t)? When we were children we all learned that you can’t put a price tag on a single human life. It’s unethical and also violates the dignity of humans. Sure, that’s one way to look at it. When studying the fine print of my health insurance I’ve learned that other people have since stepped up to the task and actually put a price tag on my life. Mine is currently 2 million dollars. That’s the accumulated life benefit limit on my insurance. So after that you’re pretty much on your own – (get ready to die, no-body’s paying for you here any more). So after the initial shock, that some company has defined how much my life is worth, I thought who else might be inclined to put a value on human life. Turns out companies do it all the time (don’t they have a conscience?) – i.e. car companies that need to determine if they need to have a recall (number of cars with this problem * probability of failure * cost for lost life >=? cost for recall). Insurance companies do it (you carry life insurance, don’t you?). So in business it’s quite common to put a $$$ amount on a human life. Which leads me to the following thought: yesterday there was a suicidal man with a gun at the intersection of two of Austin’s most traveled highways, threatening to kill himself. After a two-hour stand-off with the Austin police the person was taken into custody unharmed. Meanwhile traffic came to a grinding standstill for those two hours. So can I now calculate the loss in GDP contribution from the created traffic jam and compare that with the value of the person’s life? Should the police use this to decide when to intervene or walk away? Police over megaphone: “You’ve 12min left to drop the gun. After that it’s cheaper to kill yourself!” … You obviously don’t want the police to pull the trigger. (Although it would be with the consent of the victim (but you would want to get that in writing) and it would make economic sense.) What a mess.
P.S.: Then imagine the next day – “we’re sorry to admit that we miscalculated the loss of GDP by assuming that all 3 highway lanes were open, when in fact one was closed. The victim would have had another 23 minutes. Our regrets go to the family.”
iPOD bummer
Lately I’ve started using an iPOD for listening to music at work and in my car. I was shocked to learn that my device that was previously used with a MAC cannot be managed by a PC without reformatting! I thought we were beyond that and I was definitely expecting Apple to hide the file format mess from the iPOD users – I’m very disappointed, Apple! My Sony walkman never demanded to use only tapes recorded on a Sony tape deck or otherwise reformat them …
Choice of employer by niceness of office
Recently I was marveling at a new office building that was erected at a prime location at Austin. Driving by I was wondering how cool it would be to work in such a pretty office at such a perfect location. (For the locals, I’m talking about the building on top of the mountain at 360 X BeeCaves that looks like a battle ship. When I googled the location, I discovered that a small tech start up has made this building its home. That lead me to dreams of working there – just for the view. I know that’s retarded, because when you work and especially for a start-up you can’t really see where you are. But on the other hand we spend so much time of our lives at the office that the location does matter. We choose the location of our houses carefully, too, don’t we? But for now I just enjoy my current view from the fourth floor break room, where I can oversee Austin town lake. A view I wouldn’t be able to afford, if I had to pay for it…
Cash for clunker
The US is contemplating a program that would be similar to Germany’s “Abwrackpraemie”. the intend is to get old fuel inefficient cars off the road and replace them by new cars. In the proposed legislation you would qualify for $3500 from the government, if your new vehicle gets a 4 mpg better gas mileage, or $4500 if it improves by more than 10 mpg.
Given that my 1993 Explorer with 150k miles on it is on its last stretch, I’ve been looking for possible candidates. The Explorer gets 18 mpg in combined driving, so I need a car that gets at least 22mpg.
First I thought to buy a minivan, but neither the Honda Oddyssee nor the Toyota Siena get the required fuel efficiency of 22mpg, so that idea is out.
Due to the heat in TX that produces a noticable performance loss, especially with the A/C running at all times, I’ve been wanting a turbo charged or super charged engine. Unfortunately either system makes the engine less fuel efficient despite the fun you add. That threw out the Subaru WRX and the Mazda Speed3 (245hp!).
Currently I’m looking at the Volkswagen GTI with its 2.0T (200hp) (turbo), the Mazda MX-5 2.0, 167hp (naturally aspirated), and the Mini Cooper S (167hp, turbo).
The GTI with a DSG gearbox is very refined, but the DSG definitely takes some getting used to. After having read raging reviews, I had high expectations. I have to say I was disappointed. There’s still noticeable lag, when you switch gears, less so than a traditional step tronic though. When launching from a full stop, it takes quite some time until the engine develops enough torque to catapult the heavy Golf forward. Dropping one gear isn’t enough to unleash the full power, but dropping two gears at a time causes even bigger lag. The ride of the Golf is very refined, you’re almost removed from the engine noise and the road, but all this comes at the cost of fun. Under steer is still very pronounced as expected with this car. I liked the fit and finish of the car inside and out, the engine was OK (didn’t feel like a 200hp beast) but the transmission disappointed.
Then I drove the MX-5. The non turbo charged 2.0 liter engine is a good match for the lighter car. While not as strong as the GTI, and not as refined (vibration noticable at the stick shift), it is a good engine for this rear wheel drive car. The ride is low and stiff and the car communicates the road conditions well. The short throw of the shifter makes for a fun handling ride. The car feels like a previous generation technology car – everything is moving and shaking and when you drive you like it. You’re right in the middle of the action. The exhaust sounds good and if the weather is nice you can even drop the top. What you can’t do is loading another two kids in the back-seats – they’re not there. Overall I had a lot of fun with this very affordable roadster.
Next to drive is the Mini Cooper S. I’ll update this post when it happens.