Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

We’re teaching 6.171, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, next semester at MIT (February through May 2006).  We need to find a teaching assistant from among the MIT grad student population.  We’re also looking for client projects.  Clients can be from for-profit or non-profit organizations.  The only requirement is that they need an Internet application built where there is significant user-to-user interaction.

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2006-spring/ta is the teaching assistant ad.  http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/client-questionnaire is the starting point for potential clients.

In the 1990s, it was very difficult to get any kind of compensation for developing content and putting it on the Internet.  That’s presumably how we ended up with an Internet that is 99 percent spam, porn, and catalog shopping.  I never liked banner ads and did not place them on any site that I controlled because the ads were so poorly targeted.  It seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and energy when the chance of the reader being interested was so low and therefore the chance of a clickthrough was minimal.  Sure enough, ad rates that had been reasonably high in the 1990s fell to the point that even very popular sites couldn’t get serious money from banner advertising by 2002.

A friend convinced me that perhaps it was time to give Google Ads a try.  The ads are targeted by looking at the words on the page where they appear.  The ads are text, so they’re not graphically obnoxious.  I started my experiment by adding Google ads into the bulletin board pages at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/ .  This is a server that suffered a database meltdown six months ago.  Nobody is going there to post anymore.  I had planned to throw the machine out.  Google’s terms prohibit me from writing about the clickthrough rate, but not the bottom line.  After about 10 days, it seems that the ads are bringing in a steady $60 per day or nearly $20,000 per year.  Encouraged, I put some ads into a few of the pages at http://philip.greenspun.com, including the materialism, flying, and aquarium subdirectories.  These bring in another $20-30 per day and the click through rates are high enough that I don’t feel too embarrassed for wasting screen space and reader attention.

Could it be that we are going to enter a golden age of content, fueled by the Google Ads team?

The controversy over “intelligent design” just won’t disappear from the news.  My biologist friends here in Cambridge are upset with George W. Bush, which I find surprising.

The most plausible outcome of teaching intelligent design in public schools is nil.  All of the people who are currently advocating intelligent design were themselves taught evolution in public school.  They either forgot what they’d been taught, or did not find the unionized civil servant’s (teacher’s) explanation convincing.

You’d expect anyone to be delighted that the President of the United States was paying attention to them or their group.  Saddam Hussein loved having his name in the papers and in W’s speeches so much that he was willing to risk war.  Imagine the delight of physicists if W said that he was staying awake nights worrying about how muons turn into tau neutrinos.  Or of computer scientists if the President were to mention how outraged he was at the syntax of Haskell.  The only thing worse than being talked about badly is not being talked about at all.

Most importantly, you’d expect PhD scientists, who, adjusted for IQ and education, probably have America’s worst career prospects, to be delighted that the next generation will be hobbled.  Consider a 30-year-old soccer player.  What hope can he have of twenty more years of collecting a paycheck unless a Tonya Harding follower comes along to break the knees of all the 15-year-old soccer players?  Similarly for biologists.  A 35-year-old, $35,000/year postdoc’s best hope for a long-term job is the mental crippling of young people so that they can’t conduct experiments successfully.

Harvard has picked a new investment manager for its $26 billion in liquid assets (the university is weathier than this but much of its wealth is in real estate).  According to this New York Times story, Mohamed A. El-Erian is “an emerging markets bond specialist” from “the bond powerhouse Pimco”.  Choosing someone like this to manage its money is essentially a vote that public equities (stocks) will continue to perform poorly for some years to come.  How is it possible for stock prices to remain stalled while corporations earn reasonably good profits and only pay out a small percentage of those profits as dividends (the average S&P 500 company pays out 32 percent of profits as a dividend)?  Looting and dilution by managers granting themselves stock options.  So Harvard, which has been mostly right since World War II and earned more than 19 percent in the last fiscal year, seems to be betting on the continued looting of American corporations by their managers and is apparently planning to put its money to work in foreign countries and via debt instruments.

… old people must really be stupid and lazy.  http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html is a report on what happens when you give seed capital to 18-21-year-olds so that they can start little tech companies.  My personal theory is that most supranormal profits are the result of people who understand one class of customer better than anyone else.  College-aged kids generally haven’t spent enough time with customers to know anything at all.  They might have a lot of energy, skill, and dedication, but have not seen customers first-hand.  The programmers who built SAP, for example, spent years at IBM doing consulting work.  After having seen 10+ companies’ problems and built 10+ similar solutions they decided to go off on their own, rewrite it all, package it up, and sell it.

Graham has introduced some bias into the experiment by hand-picking companies to fund.  The teams that he funded were the ones who came to him with the ideas that he liked best.  On the other hand, if these guys are succeeding as well as he suggests it must mean that the competition is very weak.  Who are the competitors?  Older programmers working in bureaucracies at larger companies, which have strong brands and near-infinite capital.  So basically what Graham is proving is that these folks are incredibly unproductive and their aggregate work product is almost worthless.

Apple has released a new iPod that is supposed to set the world, and its stock, on fire.  This is the video-capable iPod, a 30 GB version of which will be available for $299.  Let’s compare this to the Creative Zen Vision, which came out last month.

• Apple:  2.5″ screen, 320×240 pixels of resolution, 5 ounces, batteries stuck inside the case, $299 at amazon, shipping soon?
  
• Creative: 3.7″ screen, 640×480 pixels, 8.4 ounces, removable batteries, $399 at amazon, in-stock now

For photographers who want to show off and video fans who just love their TV, the Creative seems like a better value due to its vastly bigger screen and higher resolution.  What do folks think?  Will adding video to the iPod be any more significant than adding video capture capability has been to little point-and-shoot digicams or cell phones?

Personally I have always preferred the user interface of the Creative MP3 jukeboxes, which have more buttons than their Apple counterparts, and don’t rely on a control wheel so much.  Creative’s desktop PC software was rather clunky last I tried it (two years ago) and I prefer simply to sync the player using Windows Media Player.

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/whole-house-music is my latest consumerism article.  Please comment!

Gregory Olsen has returned to Earth.  Folks and the media didn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to the welfare of this 60-year-old private citizen during his ten-day space odyssey.  To me this is additional support for my proposal of nearly two years ago (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/11/18) in which I suggested that human space flight be turned over to private adventurers like Mr. Olsen so that we don’t have the tragic spectacle of young government employees getting killed in the line of duty.  Olsen’s biography makes it apparent that he is as qualified to do scientific experiments as anyone that has ever ridden on a NASA flight.

A female friend of mine worked in Afghanistan for eight months and got friendly with the locals.  One of the things that men with extra cash like to do over there is have sex with boys, usually around 14 years of age.  One of the ways in which they showed hospitality to my friend was by offering her the services of their boy toys.  Afghanistan being a traditional Islamic society in which women are the property of either their father or their husband, these guys had no knowledge of what an adult woman would choose for herself.  They assumed that an adult woman with free will would jump at the chance to have sex with a 14-year-old boy and were surprised when my friend turned down their gracious offers.

Is there among the readers a Solaris sysadmin expert in the Boston area?  The ancient E450 server that ran http://philip.greenspun.com and part of photo.net suffered a system drive failure last week.  This was the only unmirrored disk, ironically enough.  A week-old backup of the server root has been loaded onto a GNU/Linux system and the site is back up.  The guys running photo.net, however, can’t find a Solaris 7 media kit and can’t get the E450 to boot from a CD-ROM.  Is there anyone who reads this Weblog who might have the right mental and physical stuff for booting up the E450 and mounting the working disk drives in read-only mode?  The server is in Central Square, Cambridge.  Your potential reward:  everlasting gratitude, public glory (if you want it), and dinner in Central Square.

[Epilogue:  This posting brought a lot of heroes out of the net/woodwork!  The prize goes to Rob Isaac of Auckland, NZ, who offered to FedEx a CD-ROM and any required chassis pieces, up to and including a fresh SCSI CD-ROM drive.  The photo.net guys were finally able to net boot the E450 from one of the new Linux machines.  So thanks to everyone who commented or sent email.]