Ramblings Of The Unreached Conclusion

In retrospect, it's not surprising that Bin Laden attempted a systemic failure of the United States economic system. There's plenty of existing theory and history to support the concept. Typically, as systems shift from peer-to-peer to centralization, it is to reduce costs. In the case of the U.S., the fanatical dependence on "free markets" is seen as a savior for overextended debt.

The net effect is to reduce overall system redundancy and create a growing number of critical failure points.

In the end, altruistic systems trump centralized and peer-to-peer systems for most environments. (Ignore Beck and Kennedy's counter-rantings. They're clueless. )

Hopefully this conclusion will be clear by the time I finish this blog.

Other cultures/countries don't necessarily need to engage the U.S. directly or offensively. Re-emphasizing altruistic cultural values could be seen as a defensive weapon, one which would be welcomed by U.S. authorities, I'd guess. . Witness the Chinese crack-down on internet porn.

Today I realized that the primary difference between mediator and visitor patterns is the environment they favor. Mediator is a bottom-up pattern, while visitor requires more structure and favors top-down structures. The Chinese crack-down is a top-down effort to create a level of altruistic behavior.

With any luck, I'll whip this site up into the definitive text on the empirical use of transaction costs as a tool for general system analysis.

"I'm going to go drink now".

Heterogenuity & Mythical Man Month

note: Apparently Norway lacks a self-deprecating sense of humor, too!

Look closely at the Heterogenuity and Mythical Man Month charts.
They are (essentially) the same function, measured along different axes....

Project size and heterogenuity are proxies for complexity (transaction costs). One graph is a function of time, one is function of cost. I like to think of MythicalManMonth as a subcase (or instance) of diversity costs.

Okay, I changed my mind, I like this hierarchy better.
Here's a rough class diagram....

(Yo, Norway dudes, I'm just funning with you.
Per capita, Norway is my second best customer ).

System Heterogenuity

(note: This will likely be heavily re-edited tomorrow someday)

Heterogenuity comes in many forms. Biology has "biodiversity"; a diverse ecosphere can survive a wider range of environments and disruptive changes than a monolithic one. In software, it's expressed as class hierarchies. It is a fundamental design driver of systems, but I rarely see academic references to it. I often see the results of haphazard design, but never a guide for matching the optimum level of diversity to a particular system & goal.

Heterogenuity can be viewed as a "cost versus coverage" decision. Low heterogenuity creates a system of lower cost because net transaction costs are minimized for systems of widely shared context.

As diversity increases, a system can span ("survive" or "exploit") a wider range of possible environments. For instance, I may create a software system which runs on a maximum number of Windows systems, regardless of OS versions or hardware configuration. But a system of maximum diversity is more expensive to build and maintain than a homogenous one.

Heterogenuity is a function of marginal cost (i.e. law of diminishing returns). If a project has an expected profit margin, there is a design goal to optimize diversity within its budget:

Why do you care about heterogenuity?

Because it helps to identify likely outcomes and potential problems.

Focus on the strengths and weaknesses of heterogenuity.... a homogenuous system is more susceptible to environmental disruptions and spans a narrow range of environment or market share. A heterogenous system is more complex and more costly.

Example #1 - Over the past fifty years, the United States dollar has become the overwhelming currency of choice in world trade and the introduction of the Euro is displacing existing currencies. Both indicate a trend toward homogenuity for economic reasons - to reduce transaction costs.

What is the trade-off? As the currency system becomes more homogenous, it becomes more susceptible to systemic failure of its dominant members. A close observer might note that the net trade transactions in US dollars have been falling for the past few years, and that several countries are now quietly pursuing alternative currency options. This shows a willingness to reduce systemic risk by accepting higher on-going transaction costs.

Tomorrow night we'll be drinking copious amounts of celebratory beverages and chasing wild abusive women but....

after New Year's we'll expand this definition to show that heterogenuity is at the heart of such varied systems as application software, the United Systems government, biological systems, and the economics of work specialization.

A Pleasant Surprise

About 30% of my search engine hits are variations of "Schramm theory".

About 5% of my search engine hits are variations of "Meme Miner", a visually deceptive tool.

It's gratifying that a high percentage of the audience remembers the real message instead of the flashy advertising. I hope it's not just because of the red & blue shadings on the Schramm diagram.

IT Departments At Large Corporations

An interesting general-purpose diagram for creating and managing information technology in large corporations!

Sports Fans

For the ESPN dude,
maybe you want this link,
the "patriots vs eagles" link.

Keyring Example

The Internet is sure acting funny for these past couple of months.
My traffic for December is marginally higher, but my first-time logins
from the peripheral countries is surprisingly high.

First time logins from Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Ghana, Santa Domingo, Lithuania, Iceland (I think it's new, my skew from the Nordic countries is very high, another strange Internet phenomenon).

I don't track it closely enough to be exhaustively correct, but it just seems like I'm getting a higher-than-normal number of "third-world" countries.

Very odd.

I wonder if it means that my broadcast has skewed somehow, or if the Internet is physically expanding faster along the outer range.

Alien Intelligence (James Martin) & Structured Blogs

In my more pessimistic moods, I imagine that I post about "Law of Demeter" and fifty Google programmers scratch their heads and ask each other, "What's a da-meter, Billy Bob?". (After all, it's a fundamental concept of Google's business.)

In my more optimistic moods, I imagine that Google has outsourced all their programming to China, and the programmers know all about Demeter, but can't read my post because I didn't internationalize the blog.

I have the same conflicted thoughts about mentioning a book written by James Martin. Everybody in IT should know who he is, but in America today we focus on gaming The Rules, not on producing fundamental values. So I'm betting on my pessimistic thoughts today -

Alien Intelligence by James Martin

Published in 2000, the peak of the bubble.
Read the synopsis.

Ebay requires an explicit decision to buy or sell a product.
This requires thought and effort.
It also entails risk that time and effort will not be rewarded with a profitable transaction.

Imagine that I'm posting to a structured blog.
I post about my old car.
Later, I post about a new automobile purchase.
Imagine that Mary Contrary in Smallville, Kansas posts about receiving her driver's license and her new part-time job.

So far, no explicit transaction has taken place, but an intelligent system with historical information might deduce that a potential buy/sale transaction exists. An intelligent agent surfing millions of blogs might deduce and exploit transactions before they proceed to a user-participation system like Ebay.

Imagine an invisible, generic agent capturing buy/sell transactions before buyers and sellers finish that explicit decision to list or research products. Do you even need advertising?

And now, in the hysterically deadpan words of Spikyme...

I'm going to go drink now, too.

SOA & J2EE Transaction Models

note to self: The Vogue has a good alcohol:price ratio
note to others: Apparently Norway lacks a sardonic sense of humor

Last night wasn't a total loss (the Vogue was an okay place), and I worked out two simple models for SOA and J2EE systems. I used a standard MVC pattern for J2EE and assumed a heterogenous network for SOA (to require transformation transactions).

A diagram of transaction count spanning network organization -

A visual diagram is always good. In SOA, the ESB (bus) manages all control and some routing; in the MVC, the controller manages all routing, control and creation (remember our pattern model). So centralized traffic is high in MVC.

The assumption of heterogenous network is valid for large networks & companies, but you might argue that J2EE matches SOA across homogenous networks. But even then, the transaction count for the controller rises faster than for the ESB. SOA is more scalable because it pushes transactions to the periphery of the network (into the services) and puts less incremental traffic on the bus.

I see now that the issue with SOA is network latency, which might be why the phrase "coarse-grained services" shows up so often now in the design literature.

PF Chang Fortune Cookie

My christmas meal at PF Chang's ended with a fortune cookie prediction....

Your dearest wish will come true".

I chuckled when I first read it.

After awhile, I realized that I no longer have any idea of what my "dearest wish" would be. My scamming, sack-of-shit Mormon fuck-o "friends" at Boise State University wiped out my last chance at a real career or retirement. I spent several years trying to rebuild the results of their provincial, cover-my-Church-buddy's-ass mentality, but in 2004 I finally gave up and just torched it all.

Now I have a laptop, a sleeping bag and some clothes and I go from contract job to contract job. I don't think I'll bother to rebuild anything permanent again. It cost too much effort and heartbreak and I'd rather travel around now.

I don't think I care that much anymore (you can never be sure of your own motives), but I wish I could get my wife re-married off to somebody stable and mainstream. She didn't deserve the last eight years.

So what is my dearest wish?

I sat at the Vogue tonight, drinking and wondering....

Okay, I admit I'd probably smile if a meteor hit Boise or Salt Lake City, but I can't honestly say it's my dearest wish. For awhile, I wanted an architect job title, but right now I'm as close as I can come without becoming a glad-handing, backstabbing, politizing, sack-of-shit game player like I've worked with on and off over the past five years.

I don't need more money, especially now.

Okay, it would be nice if I could find some kinky, younger chick that matched my proclivities, but.... you know it would just get fucked up somehow anyway, and I kind of doubt that it's my "dearest wish". It sounds like too much work and responsibility.

A warmer sleeping bag might be nice.

Wait, no...

A new laptop would be better.

A new job at Google, maybe? Naw, not really. Those guys are okay, I suppose, but for some reason, Google just don't spark my interest. Sorry, Bruno, but it just sounds boring to me.

Do I have any serious enemies that I'd wish harm on? Let me think..... no, not really, I don't think. I don't even care about the Mormons anymore; they're fucked up and I avoid them in job searches, but I don't care that much now, except after I've been drinking and pondering a weird-ass fortune cookie that made no sense to me.

Gad. I can't believe I got a free fortune cookie wish and I can't think of anything to wish for.

Wikipedia Semantic Analysis

Who can resist a little funning at Google's expense, hey?

This link was sent to me by a long-time acquaintance.

It's a high-brow analysis of the dynamic semantics of Wikipedia, leading back to power laws.

I have little doubt that it shows that Wikipedia is expressed and categorized to minimize total transaction costs, that it functions internally like the Internet functions and I strongly suspect that Usenet (using Dejanews as a proxy) works the same, too, so it may be a reflection of the human mind works.

I suppose I should do an entry comparing and contrasting Mediator pattern and Power law distribution as
complimentary reducers of transaction costs and my theory about why......

But instead, I'm off to Howl At The Moon,
the employee rendition of "Time Warp" alone is almost worth the price of admission!

Google Bait #351

Q: What's the biggest difference between Google and Microsoft?!

A: 860 miles!

OUCH!
That one's gotta hurt!

If you want to escape this living hell,
cast off your chains and be free,
If you don't believe you owe it to yourself,
you can owe it to ME!

Mono Project Meme

11-Jan-2006: Updated graph using keyword search of "Mono Linux" instead of "Mono Software" and a longer time period so you can clearly see the inflection point and downward slope.

--------------------

The Mono Project looks dead to me.

Their blog tends to re-inforce my opinion,
but I did learn a lot about Iraq and Evil George Bush.

A healthy, growing meme should look like this -

Google Baiting

Q: What's more fun than pulling Google's chain?!

A: Pulling my own chain!

(But if I do that, I'd be arrested for child abuse, so Google it is!)

Ho!

Q: What's better than seeing 30 Google IP addresses in one day?!

A: Seeing 100 Microsoft addresses on the same day!

Ho HO!

Ebay Bandwidth

We know that the Ideosphere has finite bandwidth.
That is, the sum of our collective brain power has finite storage and I/O capacity.

In 1995, Ebay was barely a ripple on the Internet, consuming no bandwidth or resources.
But today, Ebay consumes mental bandwidth.

Many sellers need to know that Ebay exists, what it does, how effective it is, how to use it.
Many buyers need to know about Ebay.
The Fedex delivery guy needs to know a little about Ebay.
So does the UPS delivery guy.

Ebay aborbs a measurable amount of society's thought process and memory storage.

If the "attention crisis" is real, if our finite collective bandwidth is under increasing competition for its consumption, then Ebay's slice of that bandwidth has an increasing marginal cost over time. In other words, there is an increasing potential profit for somebody, somewhere, if they can eliminate Ebay from our thoughts and memories, but retain the economic function of Ebay.

Imitation : The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Why, thank you, Google Guys!
(wink wink)

Google Zeitgeist Graphs