VMware - A new kind of simple machine

What they taught us in grade school about "simple machines" needs updating, as shown by the wildly successful launch of a new company, VMware. (Priced at $29 it closed the first day at $51 and is now $117 a share, two months later, and growing.)

Why is that so successful? What energy source is that tapping into? Let's look at that.

You remember "simple machines", of course, right? (No, not the rock group.) Our class "went over" this standard list, I think:

• the lever
• the wheel and axle
• the inclined plane
• the wedge
• the screw
• the pulley

Actually, our textbook had this great picture of a steam shovel with transparent overlays that you could flip one by one and peel down the layers and see all the parts inside. I liked that the best and spent more time playing with that than listening, I confess.

So, if you're hyper-active, interrupt yourself and flip to "how stuff works" and see how those huge T-shaped construction cranes get the cab and T-part up on top. Hint - it's not with a bigger crane -- they build themselves up by adding pieces just below the top.

But, back to "simple machines".

First - why did they bother mentioning that? Why are these in the school curriculum at all? A hundred years ago, most people had to solve problems that involved moving heavy objects around the farm, and this was a list of helpful answers to how to do that.

These days, I think most grade-school students in the urban USA have never seen a pulley, "wheels" means a car or bike, "screw" doesn't refer to a machine, and, never having split wood, they don't recognize a "wedge" or why that might be useful to them.

It's a shame, because the whole point was supposed to be a set of really helpful ideas you could go home and use right away to make your life easier, and that got lost somewhere between prep for the SAT and classes that don't seem related to real life.

The whole concept of rigging up something outside you to amplify your own efforts so you could move things you thought were beyond you seems to have been lost.

So, these are now almost unknown, along with other basic skills everyone once knew, like how to make a campfire from scratch in the woods, even with a box of matches, or why washing hands is important so you and your friends don't get sick or die from some disease.

Besides, there are other "simple machines" that I find useful to know too. Siphons have come in handy.

Pushing "sideways" on a taut rope can move heavy objects a few inches at a time, which is often all you need, etc. (Yes, Martha, you CAN push on a rope.)
So, if you don't have a mental toolbox of possibly useful tools, you should consider starting one.
If you have one, here's another one - a "virtual machine."

In the immediate sense, what VM sells is software that lets you make something that looks from the outside just like a file to one computer (Mac, PC, or Linux), but that seems from the inside as if it is an entire computer of one of those types. The result is that you can effectively run a PC on your Mac, or Linux on your PC, etc. That's helpful and cool by itself. In fact, you could have many different virtual computers running at the same time inside one real piece of hardware.

This is an improvement over IBM's mainframe "VM/370" operating system introduced back in 1972, that let each user have a "virtual machine" of their own inside the IBM mainframe, but they were all just clones of the mainframe. (Today, you could have a VM inside your VM, etc.) That was very helpful because it totally insulated users from each other, so that if one person totally messed up their program, it wouldn't take down the whole mainframe, just their own virtual machine, and everyone else would be unaffected.

Some of my friends found out that

if you put a virtual PC inside your PC, it actually runs a lot faster than the real PC.

The reason is that the real PC keeps doing really stupid things like checking many times a second to see if you just put in a CD, and these really slow it down. The virtual PC only has to check a virtual CD drive, which is much faster because it's all in memory, not hardware. So VMware is helpful in making an old machine run faster doing the same thing.

But there's a different side to it, which is the other way around. VMware also sells "virtual servers", which let you take multiple real computers and connect them and create a single, seamless, virtual mega-computer out of the pieces. In this case, you are making "unity" out of "multiplicity" or even "diversity". Or, you can make MANY different virtual servers, of any type, out of many different pieces of hardware you have kicking around.

So, hardware and software become completely decoupled.

The great thing is that if one of the actual physical computers goes down, it doesn't break anything, it just slows everything down a little. Conversely, if your virtual server isn't fast enough, or doesn't have enough RAM, just scrounge up some more discarded PC's and hook them in and make your single virtual server run faster.

This is a machine solution to the class of problem I spend a lot of time on, namely, how to get committees to work. How can we co-operate so that adding another person always improves our thinking power, so we can tackle hard problems by just adding enough people until the problem budges.

This is the new kind of "simple machine" that we need to build, socially.

Since everyone seems to have forgotten the whole point of the "machine" concept, which was to make our chores easier, people aren't even looking for some new "machine" that will make our current jobs easier. (Although some thought that "computers" would help.)

The "magic" is the same as with a simple machine, like a big pry bar. Instead of pushing on the boulder with our hands, we go get some tool instead, and make a two-stage solution, where we push on the tool, the tool amplifies our push, and the tool pushes on the boulder, moving it.

We need to get back to that concept, socially. We need to stop trying to "push on" social problems one person at a time, looking for a "stronger" person if one person can't move the boulder - and think about ways to get a middle step -- building a virtual strong person out of many actual people, where the virtual strong person can lift the boulder easily.
That would say we need to put energy and resources and effort into doing for people what VMware did for computers -- solving the problems of how to make them work together as if they were one, seamlessly.

Like VMware, when we finally get it cracked, it will be wildly, amazingly helpful, successful, and popular and we'll be able to do things easily that we had given up on doing before.

It's a cool problem, and we really need more people working on it.

(Crowbar photo from flickr by jwhairybob)
(Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil by by chris.diewald )

Shining Star - Signs of Peace

There is a great collection of photos in Flickr by "Dale73", ( Dale Taylor) like the one above.
The caption for that one in Flickr is:

I work in a school with 314 children born in 16 different countries. Together with their parents they represent over 40 nations. They speak 20 different languages, follow more than 15 religions...they play and work side by side, appreciating they are different but the same...they don't see the differences as boundaries to who can be friends, they like (or dislike :) one another because of the fun they can have with each other, the sharing, the caring, the talking, the playing, regardless of colour, religion or race. They show us what the world could be....

unity without diversity is bad for everyone

It's not the size, it's the lack of diversity -- the world financial markets show us the risks of unity without diversity, and the 366 point drop in the Dow Jones last friday is just a taste of it.

There is also a risk in perverting the language that is not mentioned, as the term "hedge" used to mean "to make safer with a contrary bet" whereas today it appears to mean "to make riskier by highly leveraging the same bet".

Of course, once upon a time, a "bank" was a conservative, responsible place that had long-term plans and stability, not a place with a fortune that could rise or fall, as one shocked European banker noted, with the federal funds rate changing by one point for one quarter.

Here's the highlights from an article today that touches those points.

One World Taking Risks Together
New York Times
by Nelson D. Schwartz
Oct 21, 2007

HUGE financial losses in the United States spark fears in Europe.... the Panic of 1907, which culminated exactly 100 years ago today.

But this time around, it may take much longer to repair the damage and restore confidence than it did a century ago. It’s not only that the sums are larger now...It’s also that the breadth and complexity of today’s global markets create risks so great that no group of business leaders — or even a single country — can control them.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Interconnected global markets should make the world economy more stable, according to traditional economic theory, with risk spread more widely and strength in one region offsetting weakness in another.

“In practice, we’re not seeing that happening,” says Richard Bookstaber, a veteran hedge fund manager and author of a new book, “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation.”

Although international financial links are nothing new, as the Panic of 1907 shows, what’s different now is how closely international markets are correlated with one another.

“As markets become more linked, diversification doesn’t work as well.”

As a result, Mr. Bookstaber argues that today’s global financial markets may actually be more risky than in the past. That’s because the same types of investors are taking on the risky bets and then simultaneously heading for the exits when trouble comes, even if they’re on opposite sides of the world.

Actually, there's nothing wrong with this aspect of traditional economic theory, only with how well people read the book. Statistics says that the overall risk will go down if the individual risks happen independently - which is to day, it's a truly diverse world, where knowing what's going on in place A doesn't tell you what's going on in place B. And that is true.

But if everyone uses exactly the same strategy, the power of diversity reduces to the leaf-in-the-wind behavior of one individual, just with everyone else along for the ride.

This is also why tyranny doesn't work, and cannot work as a governmental system for very long, or why we see the same risks in "Theory X" companies that may be huge but really are only slaves of a few guys at the top with a big magnifying glass.

Diversity is not what unity must overcome - it is what gives unity strength.

An ecology with a single kind of plant in it will collapse as soon as the first virus figures out where lunch is located. Any global world with a single kind of thinking is equally unstable. This is a basic law of nature and statistics and cannot be overcome by wishful thinking or by anyone who was "right in the past."

Including diverse cultures and people in the decision-making process is not "accommodation" -- it is recognizing a case where all of us are actually much wiser than some of us.

It also illustrates the need for actually educating people so that they actually understand basic concepts and don't simply try to echo mindlessly what others are doing. Without "independent investigation of the truth", the system breaks down.

Again, let me refer to the basic principles held and advocated by the Baha'i Faith, as a set of guidelines I urge everyone to investigate independently. These are the kinds of things we should be studying in school.

Whether it is "race unity" or "unity of religions" the "unity" the Baha'is advocate is not the false "unity" achieved if everyone comes around to my point of view - it is the true unity that emerges from everyone keeping their independence on all but those things we need to stop killing each other and talk like adults about common issues.

It involves submission to God, not to some different self-appointed leader, and just enough civilization to have a "learning culture" that doesn't rip itself to shreds over the fact that the world appears very different to different people and at different times.

Global domination or "conquest" by any one nation or culture or way of thinking is a recipe for disaster, as the financial markets are telling us over and over. We do not all want to be clones of any one approach. Those who dream of global conquest are chasing a phantom that only exists in dreams, because simplifying any system that much will cause it to collapse.

That's the key lesson that we need to understand. Systems require diversity for the magic to work. You can prove it with math and you can simulate it on computers. Or we can keep on watching what happens around us when we try to deny that natural law - about like trying to deny the law of gravity.

This is just critical at this stage in nation-state development, where huge countries are in the middle of preparing for a massive confrontation over who will "dominate" the world. No one can "dominate" the world without destroying it and imploding. We are gearing up on a fool's mission that cannot possibly succeed for anyone. There will be no winners of that fight.

The reason world conquest has failed in the past is not that it was incomplete, but that it tried to be too complete. It squeezed the life out of all it touched with a unity without diversity. It didn't work not because of some error in execution, but because the whole idea is fatally flawed. It's impossible. It can't ever work, regardless how brilliantly executed. We need to let go of it.

So here's the take-away lesson.

All the frequencies matter. There's no point in reading the "news" if you don't spend equal time reflecting on the "olds", or you'll end up with a false impression of what's going on, really. In fact, as the Times article begins, we should have learned more from exactly 100 years ago friday and what happened then. Most of what is around us is actually more "old" than "new".

I remember watching two experts play the board game "Go" one day. Every now and then what looked like a surprise move would take a whole army and change the board. When it was over I comment on how much the board changed from move to move. They both looked at me baffled and replied that the board hadn't changed by more than half a point in the last 100 moves. I just wasn't able to see what was really going on by looking at what was changing. I needed to stop looking at the "field" and look at the "ground" instead for a while.

In regards to world conquest? To quote the "Whopper" computer in the old movie "War Games" -- "Hmm. Curious game. The only way to win is not to play."

(photo credit: moto browniano on Flickr)