I want my life to end. I am tired of f@#$ing up everything. I am tired of people always telling me that they do not like me. I am tired of trying to be decent. I hope that someone finds this post and I hope that my parents know that I f@#$ed up not them. It is my fault I screwed up my own life. The hate that rages within me, rages not for those I love so dearly or those who have crossed my path. This hate rages full force towards me and only me.

I have long forgiven those who've hurt me, but I have not and cannot come to terms to forgive myself for the things I have done to myself, and the things I've done to hurt those in my life.

Should you Give One, Get One in order to get an XO to use as a netbook for serious adult-type productivity? I wouldn’t: The child-sized, rubbery keyboard wasn’t meant for grown-up touch typists. And while OLPC has introduced an XO that runs Windows XP, the G1G1 laptops are the original ones, running Linux and the decidedly kid-oriented “Sugar” user interface.

There's one big improvement this year. OLPC has arranged for Amazon to handle fulfillment.

Last year, the fulfillment firm chosen by OLPC proved incapable of getting laptops out to donors in an organized and timely fashion: When I made a donation I didn’t to the fact that I had to wait for weeks after the estimated arrival date had come and gone so much as that the fulfillment house lost my mailing address. Repeatedly.

Well, it's been an interesting 28 months here at Nortel for me. All functions and resources (other than a few corporate activities) will be decentralized and integrated into full business units. The central CTO and R&D functions will be divided and moved into each BU and, as such, my role is no longer needed. I am comfortable with this direction. I was brought into Nortel to help correct many years of neglect on R&D. I believe that has been accomplished. In the new formation, the global CTO role is not necessary.

I am, as many of you know, an optimist.

Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim.

(Photo by cheetah100)

CrispyGamer Must Be Running Out of Money

- If you’re not paying attention, it may seem as if the cratering economy ...
- CrispyGamer, a newish videogame site, has raised $8.25 million from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.
- But CrispyGamer also says it has a staff of 20 people, including five full-time writers (what does everyone else do there?). That’s an awfully big staff to keep afloat on $2 CPMs–and it’s hard to imagine that CripsyGamers’s backers imagined that’s what they were getting into earlier this year.

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Asked at a speech this month whether he would consider entering the political arena, the 53-year-old Mr. Schmidt shouted, "H-, no!" But some tech and media executives speculate that he might desire a role in an Obama administration, possibly the chief technology officer post Sen. Obama has said he would create.

(Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³)

In 2008, I shouldn’t see local businesses still acting as if the web and search are as far away from them as they thought in 1998.

I needed new locks for the house. That sent me to Google to try a search for “locksmith 92663.” The local locksmiths obviously never search like this in a way that their customers might. The results I got back were loaded with “mapspam,” where a single company appears to have registered many fake addresses to crowd out competitors.

I had to struggle through Google’s help pages to eventually find the correct instructions. If I’m a small business owner seeing a fake business, I want a prominent link somewhere that says “Report Fake Business!”

Since Georges Doriot got the ball rolling in 1946, the venture business has remained a straightforward proposition. Invest long-term and earn a return for your limited partners. There have been structural changes, mostly involving VCs edging out of early-stage investment to focus on big bang later-stage deals. But venture investors have generally avoided the financial adventurism common to Wall Streeters.

Except, in one important respect: Many of the limited partners that fattened venture funds are the same pension funds, endowments and other institutions that in recent years levered up, piled into hedge and private equity funds, and otherwise made a big problem even bigger.

In turn, venture capitalists in recent years plowed much of that money into Web 2.0 companies, such as YouTube and Facebook.

From there, the piece just needs a punchy conclusion, which we'll supply: "Now that the economic crunch is affecting online advertising, these investments are no longer seen as can't-lose deals. It's time to pull out!"

It would seem a dangerous gamble for Huffington to intentionally affect the brutality and off-the-wall demands of, say, Anna Wintour. It's not clear that a website like Huffington Post, bookmarked rather than subscribed to, will ever be able to comfortably lock in readers and advertisers like a Vogue, or to offer the same sort of glamor as a perquisite to staff.

Right on, Ryan. Owen and I have, like, 20 years of magazine work between us. If there aren't supermodels or at least Al Gore traipsing through the place daily, you're only going to drop off your boss's dry cleaning so many times.

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seems misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depends on entrepreneurs and innovations — and green-tech businesses getting “traction.” Most of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s ventures are long-term investments. And entrepreneurs are still bringing new ideas through the door at a steady pace. “I don’t expect the credit crunch will change that,” said partner John Denniston.

Some of the firm’s fledging green ventures are evolutionary improvements on current technologies that will soon hit the market, like the electric Think car. Others promise to revolutionize various aspects of the energy economy — solar power or biofuels — much as Netscape or Google remade the Web, or Genentech ushered in the biotechnology era.

Kleiner was not the only venture firm that had suddenly seen the future and decided it was green. But Kleiner’s past success tends to legitimize the prospects of business ideas that in many cases have spent decades on the economic fringe.

The most challenging aspect of Kleiner’s endeavor is for green tech to expand into the markets more rapidly than any energy technology has done before. Academics sometimes call this process the diffusion of technology. Diffusion can go very fast, with personal computers or Facebook. But in the field of energy, new technologies have moved quite slowly into the mainstream. It has been 54 years since the silicon solar cell was invented in New Jersey at Bell Laboratories. A front-page article in the Times heralded the breakthrough – in 1954 — as something that promised to revolutionize the world.

John Doerr: “To get solutions at scale, we’re going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We’ve got to use policy to harness innovation to make sure that the right thing to do is a profitable thing to do — so it becomes the probable thing to have happen.”

Al Gore believes when the governments of the world assign a price to carbon—within a year or two — demand for carbon-free electricity will explode.

Partner Randy Komisar says the energy market is large and outdated: “I’m not very good at hitting the bull’s-eye. I need a big target. And this is the biggest target I’ve ever seen in my life.”

(Photo by Ausra)

• Apple leaks have shifted from scrappy fan sites into the mainstream. Mac rumors are regularly published by Engadget, owned by AOL. Perhaps Apple is now seeking to avoid legal fisticuffs with more established companies.
• Apple's legal efforts to identify leakers have been entirely fruitless. And as Apple expands its roster of partners—the iPhone will be sold in 70 countries by the end of the year—the number of people possessing information about future products will increase.
• Strong-arming fan sites into removing their reports only serves to confirm those reports. Few were following Think Secret's story about the Mac mini until Apple sued us, propelling the leak into the pages of The New York Times.
• Negative PR ultimately tarnishes Apple's brand when it threatens, subpoenas, and sues sites run by some of its biggest fans.

(Photo by AP/Steven Senne)

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. We're all using databases all the time.

But that's about to change. Chips with two and four processor cores are common and Intel hints that we'll eventually see hundreds of cores per chip, which brings us right back into the 1970s and '80s and the world of parallel computing. That's where databases start to screw up. More than just slow reads and writes, relational databases also create false dependencies between pieces of data. If one chunk of data (A) is dependent on another chunk of data (B), then no work can be done on A until all work on B is complete.

While the database guys are busy figuring out how to add more and more concurrency internally, in reality when you take a few steps back and think of a large set of commodity boxes all executing a single data munching app, then no matter how sophisticated we get, the relational database will still effectively be a single thread to that app.

To scale the Google search service, Google first had to free itself of the false dependencies. So they created MapReduce — a set of operations and a way to store the data for those operations while preserving the natural independence that is inherent in each problem, building the whole mess atop the Google File System.

Google led the way but many other companies have followed suit, opening doors to a wide range of new ways of thinking about large-scale data manipulation. Suddenly there are different ways to store the data, new ways to write applications, and new places (thousands of cheap boxes) to run such applications.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between unlocked and contract-free. Countries where you can buy iPhone 3Gs both unlocked and contract-free include Italy, Belgium, South Africa, Czech Republic, and Greece. But unlike Hong Kong, you can’t buy them directly from Apple in those countries.

The leading theory regarding why Apple is doing this in Hong Kong is that it’s a strategic move in Apple’s ongoing negotiations to officially sell the iPhone in mainland China. Earlier this week came reports that China Mobile is trying to get Apple to sell iPhones without 3G and without Wi-Fi.

So, assuming Apple is not interested in selling crippled Wi-Fi-less iPhones to satisfy China Mobile’s demands, but still wants to profit from the enormous Chinese market, selling unlocked contract-free iPhones in Hong Kong is the optimal way to supply the mainland Chinese gray market.

(Photo by Dan Butterfield)

1. DO appear on Twitter as a real person. Be like comcastcares, not Wachovia.
2. DON'T let your PR firm do the tweeting. A customer-facing employee like comcastcares is best.
3. Who to follow:
   DO follow people who follow your company's account.
   DO follow people who tweet about the company more than once.
   DO follow people who talk about the company's space.
4. DO reply to people who direct-message you. Be engaged and responsive. Be personable. There's nothing worse than sending someone a direct message on Twitter ... and hearing nothing back.

Maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress. It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. Professors feared that engineers would use the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, as a crutch.

For all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement: writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Oh, and we tidied the author's bio: Damon Darlin is not on Twitter.

Problem: You wake up in bed with someone, and you have no recollection of the night before — including his/her name.
Solution: Go with Michael or Elizabeth! According to admissions statistics, those have been the most popular names for the last 2 years

Problem: She goes dry.
Solution: Do not just keep thrusting, didn’t you learn about friction in physics class?

Problem: You left your iTunes on shuffle and Zelda music came on.
Solution: Do not stop kissing, and ask the girl, “how far do you want to go?” “Err, we can go to base 3.14,” is probably how you should respond.

Problem: You haven’t had sex in months or you’ve never had sex.
Solution: Join the club. I haven’t had sex in months.

See, Paul? Bedroom success for MIT students hasn't changed since your own college days!

(Nerd sex illustrated by Randall Munroe/xkcd.com)

People like this are not sick. Most people really never think. Most people just go to work, do the same old thing, and go home. Our programmer can’t *stop* thinking. Our programmer looks at social situations and doesn’t see how they connect to his current stable of pet projects. This guy operates on raw intuition. He never stops thinking about the big picture.

Clean up your rhetoric a little. Acknowledge that the guy has a point. Be up front and clear or you’re nothing but a used car salesman to him. People have to communicate a finite self-contained need. He needs a chance to show off his “super powers."

Handing some micromanager authority over his to-do list is dangerous: there are more dependencies and variables than what anyone else will see or care about, but that are critically important to our programmer/”genius”. In an ideal world, he’d have “June Cleaver” at home to make sure he has dressed himself properly. He’d have an accountant and a secretary. At work, he’d be steered, not “managed”. Once a year, he’d have the chance to work on a two-month project that he prototypes and architects himself where he has the chance to be appreciated as the “genius” that he is.

Kinoma Play seems to totally take over the device's multimedia functions, hiding every trace of Windows Mobile's clunky, antiquated, menu-driven operating system.

It's also a fast search engine for multimedia content on the phone, on the Web or even on your computer via remote search. Kinoma Play works with services including YouTube, Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb and SHOUTcast.

I selected Flickr from Kinoma Play's list of services and signed into my Flickr account in just a few steps. My photos and those of friends were easy to browse.

A section called the Kinoma Guide compiles over 100,000 podcast episodes, radio stations, videos, live television and Webcam clips, panoramas and photos into easy-to-browse categories.

With a touch on the Menu Pod icon, users can add any media to favorites or to an "on-the-go" list. This same tool also sends multimedia to others via email.

I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface.

Kinoma is working on Symbian, Linux and even iPhone versions of its application and will release one of those versions by the end of this year.

(Photo by Kimona)