Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

Cisco announced the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta [my employer] today. It's an excellent match. I think John Chanbers of Cisco had it basically right when he said: “As consumers demand more sophisticated information and entertainment services in their home, tightly coupled applications, devices and networks will be essential. The collective strength of [Cisco's other recent acquisition] Linksys and Scientific-Atlanta will extend Cisco’s leadership position across the entire networked digital home.”

Couldn't have said it better myself Bishop Spong. Pat Robertson has said so many silly and ridiculous things that I wonder why anyone would pay much attention to him on any subject.

Peter Drucker would have been mildly amused to learn that some "knowledge worker" had almost instantly updated Drucker's biographic entry on Wikipedia when it became known that he had passed away at the age of 95. My life was profoundly influenced by the elegance and simplicity of Peter Drucker's ideas, and I'm sure I'm joined by millions of others in morning his passing. I was at Baylor University in 1966 and I remember being advised to purchase Druker's new book "The Effective Executive." The advice came from professor Justin Longenecker who, in my opinion, was one of the greatest teachers at Baylor ever. Prof. Longenecker taught from his own highly regarded textbooks on management and organization theory, but he also humbly tipped his hat to Drucker. I scraped the money together that sememter and bought both books. I still have them on my desk to this day and I've read them both many times.

Craig Venter is planning to use his insights about the genome to develop "bio-factories" which synthetically produce organisms that might produce hydrogen fuel or other types of useful, non-polluting materials.

Sony appears to have gone overboard with DRM. They are apparently putting executable code on music CDs [so-called "root kit" software] that surreptitiously installs and then hides Sony's digital rights management technology on your PC even when you merely listen to your CD. This article from David Berlind lays out the particulars.

So what's wrong with Alito as a Supreme Court nominee according to Schumer? He's a conservative. He's not a woman or a minority. He is not "mainstream" enough [according to Schumer] like Sandra Day O'Connor. He will not [according to Schumer] "unify" the country like Sandra Day O'Connor did? So did we really need a press conference from Schumer to tell us that Bush was nominating a conservative? No, but that wasn't what this press conference was really about. Schumer is already running for President. And the most interesting message in his remarks was this: "It is an immutable law of history that when a president tries to govern from the extreme, his presidency and the country end up losing. Democrats learned this when we governed from the far left. President Bush will learn this as well." Translation...Gore/Kerry/Dean etc. couldn't win because they were too far left and Hillary is just like them. I [Schumer] am ...

Have you noticed the amount of big-media-trashing-blogs activity lately? Take for example an article by Bradley Johnson in AdAge on October 24, 2005 [QwikFIND ID: AAR05Y] which begins with this startling assertion: "...U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs." So that's interesting! AdAge thinks they have proven that employees are "wasting" huge amounts of work time reading "non-work" blogs. What's the source of their evidence that non-work blog reading is a big time-wasting problem? 1. First, AdAge seems to have used ComScore's classification system to put all blogs into four categories; (1) business, (2) tech & media, (3) political/news and (4) everything else. 2. Second, admitting their lack of real data about whether the information in blogs in the ComScore categories are work-related or not, AdAge made...