Toluu : I, Cringely . The Pulpit

I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS

I, Cringely is the blog of Robert X. Cringely. Copyright 2006 PBS Online.

Last week I was in Boston to moderate a panel at the MIT Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference -- one of those tech shindigs so expensive I can only attend as hired help. My panel was on parallel computing and it produced this column and another I'll file early next week. This week is about databases and next week is about threads. Isn't this a grand time to be a nerd?

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. If your web site uses dynamic content, you need a database. If you run SAP or any ERP or CRM application, you need a database. We're all using databases all the time, whether we actually have one installed on our personal computers or not.

But that's about to change.

We're entering the age of cloud computing, remember? And clouds, it turns out, don't like databases, at least not as they have traditionally been used.

This fact came out in my EmTech panel and all the experts onstage with me nodded sagely as my mind reeled. No database?

No database.

Parallel computing used to mean scientific computing, where hundreds or thousands of processors were thrown at technical problems in order to solve them faster than Moore's Law might otherwise have allowed. The rest of us were relying on rising clock rates for our performance fix, but scientists -- s

The Cringely PlanSeptember 27

In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn't burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn't much different from that.

An unmanaged forest, one without the sort of fire control we attempted to provide, would naturally burn every few years. The undergrowth would build up, reach a critical mass, some source of ignition would come along -- usually lightning -- and all that undergrowth would burn. The redwoods themselves would be scarred but not really threatened, as we could see from the charring that marked them from countless such fires over centuries. Of course burning undergrowth threatened homes and property, too, so there was a natural desire on the part of that community to want the next burn to not come this year, please not this year. So there came a policy of aggressively fighting fires with the result that we eventually faced 60 (now 90!) years of flammable material growth rather than six or eight years. And the probable fire fueled by 60 years of undergrowth would have been so bad that our job changed to one of trying to preven

Door Number ThreeSeptember 22

I'll begin this third and (I promise) last column on IT management with a confession: I have been fired from every job I have ever held. This is certainly not something I set out to do, nor did I even realize it until one day my young and lovely wife mentioned that I had never told her about voluntarily leaving any position. It's not that I've had so many jobs, either. This one and the one before it have kept me going for more than 20 years. But they always seem to end the same way. This one might, too. You can never tell.

Most of the times I have been fired it's because I've been judged to be unmanageable, which is to say I won't shut up. The ultimate reason given is usually something minor. The last time around, for example, I was fired because I didn't transfer the cringely.com domain to my employer. They asked me to do it and I said "no." Had they said, "Transfer the domain or you will be fired," I might have decided differently. But they never said that -- never gave a hint of the consequences -- so I assume the real goal was less to get the domain and more to get rid of me.

The guy who had me fired, Stewart Alsop (maybe you've heard of him), ultimately lost his own job for firing me, at least according to International Data Group Chairman Pat McGovern, who told the story to 300 people once at a DEMO conference.

Back when I was a kid and working at WWST Radio in Wooster, Ohio, I was fired for writing those seven unspeakable words in t

LeadershipSeptember 17

Last week's column on bad IT management and the strong response from readers that followed show this to be a huge issue. There are WAY too many IT managers who either can't or shouldn't manage technical teams. Last week I maintained that having a firm technology base, or at least the ability and willingness to acquire one, was essential for good managers. While readers got carried away with which technical test is the best, I don't think there is much dispute that there are certain aspects of technical management that are helped by the manager being a code god. But that's far from all there is to the job. So this week I want to go deeper and look at what's really missing in nearly every instance of such bad management, which is leadership.

The distinction between management and leadership is a critical one. Management is -- at its very best -- an exercise in coping while leadership is so much more. Last week's simple idea that the manager ought to at least be able to tell good work from bad is exemplified by Bill Gates, who liked to claim that he could tell good code from across the room and that whatever task a team was facing was something he could code in Visual Basic over a weekend. Both statements are nonsense, of course, but Bill knew he had to talk the talk, making him at least an adequate manager.

Does it make him a leader? I don't think so. But let's not blame Bill for that. Let's blame Charles Simonyi.

Charles is the guy who cam

Fire Your BossSeptember 11

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. This week is also a time when the world economy is under stress comparable or greater to that imposed seven years ago. Whatever you are feeling in your wallet, I can't overemphasize the impact the current global credit crunch is having on our economy and that of other nations, including Germany and Japan. We're in a mess -- one that is at least TWO YEARS from being resolved no matter who is the President. This matters to a technology columnist because it is something the technology community will eventually have to address, just as we did 9/11. I think some coping skills are in order.

First let's take a look at a small part of my column from September 13, 2001 -- a column that wasn't especially popular with readers at the time, but I think stands up pretty well with time:

" 'To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,' wrote Mark Twain. In the current context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation's enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gat