Silicon Valley and Tinsel Town

I tend to refrain from negative posts because I generally do not find them very interesting, but I do need to get something off my chest.

When I was a VC, I had to interact quite a bit with Silicon Valley (VCs, bankers and entrepreneurs alike), whether as a source of ideas, news, deals, money, you name it.  I of course travelled there quite a few times and loved the weather, the geography and the sense of it being the center of my beloved industry, IT.

Something always bothered me though: as an avowed European player, I always felt quite a bit of haughtiness on the part of the SV people I met.  It was not xenophobia, people in Silicon Valley are *very* open to people from outside the US.  It went deeper than that: if you weren’t part of the Valley scene, you were a bit player and could not understand things as well as people who lived and worked somewhere between SF and San Jose (Jim, Andy, yes, I am talking about you).

I worked out of the Boston office of a large VC fund for a while and it was the same, the difference being that the East Coast VCs actually felt they were better than SV, themselves.

I think this arrogance is exploding on the blog scene, and I think the worst offender is the celebrated Marc Andreessen.  His blog is interesting and Marc is indisputably an industry luminary but sometimes he just goes on and explain how Tinsel Town should be rebuilt on the Silicon Valley image, thus showing to the rest of the world how Silicon Valley has become Hollywood: the same insularity, the same belief they have cracked the code and are the Masters of the Universe whose model can be used to solve all of the World’s problems.  Doesn’t that also remind you of Wall Street in the 80s?

If you want to have a feel where this might lead (beyond the groupthink), read Indecent Exposure : A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street.

HTML rendering in Thunderbird

I generally like Thunderbird, but I think their HTML rendering sucks on Ubuntu: it is way slower than on Windows, and I find myself waiting for pages to display, over and over again.  How come?  I thought it used the same rendering engine as Firefox, which is decent on Gutsy.

I hate HTML email as much as the other guy, but it really can’t be helped.

Let’s wait for 3.0 and see.

Very cheap notebooks

I am getting awfully interested in the awfully cheap sub-notebook segment of the OLPC, Classmate and Asus eee.  As far as I am concerned, the latter is my current choice for the Xmas season, if only because it is indeed shipping.

A couple of thoughts:

* these laptops are so limited in proc power, it seems only Linux can deliver a nice user experience on them.  OK, you can install XP but it sucks on a real laptop so how bad can it get on these toys?

* Could these machines help make 20XX the year of Linux on the desktop?

If you can read French, the ultimate eee blog is here.  This guy knows his sh*t.

Compiz-Fusion on Ubuntu Gutsy

Looks like Compiz-Fusion is pretty stable, now: I have been able to get it to work on three out of the four computers at home running Ubuntu. The fourth one I did not even try as it is a bottom of the barrel, gOS worthy machine.

It is really cool: most of the effects are nice, but not exactly useful. That should not prevent you from using them: eye candy is important! Some are really, really good and save you lots of time (like transparent windows, so you can check what’s behind).

The ultimate guide to what you can do with CF is here: my hat off to Forlong for the clarity of his explanations.