Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Greetings from Hollywood, California, home of the silver screen, recording studios, Doctor Demento, and earthquakes. I'm speaking on a DRM panel hosted by the media business law firm Foley and Lardner. I'm one of three technology folks in the room, and I'm going to talk about avoiding legal and technical decisions that limit our future rights, opportunities and markets. I don't think I'm going to be popular; perhaps I should not have worn my Diesel Sweeties pirate shirt; "pirate" foments a violent reaction among this group of legal media ninjas.

And if you surf over to the good Doctor's web site, you'll see that he's switched from a nationally syndicated, advertising supported model to a subscription service. Dr. Demento was a Sunday night staple, fitting into the time slice of my teen years between the Wonderful World of Disney and Sunday night NFL games. The shift away from national syndication doesn't mean that there's no longer an audience for his particular brand of wackiness, but rather that audience isn't sitting by the radio on Sunday night, aggregated in one time slot. Now you can listen to what you want when and where you want, without the FCC's censorship. But it's not "free" in the sense of advertising supported radio being free. If you're willing to spend $2 for a sophomoric laugh when you need it most, it's a good deal.

We've often used buildings as examples of "good" and "bad" architecture. They always have to fit within a set of constraints -- street boundaries, zoning laws, public infrastructure bandwidth and until very recently in Philadelphia, the top of Ben Franklin's hat. At the same time, the buildings have to be functional, aesthetically pleasing, and part of the overall urban plan. There are lots of parallels between stacking floors and building software stacks.

At CEC 2007 last week, I couldn't help but pick up on this theme again. With some amazing camera work and editing by Seeley Roebuck, we've produced a CEC video about the Eiffel Tower and the Digital Divide. The Eiffel Tower was, and is, a great piece of engineering, not just in its design but in how it was constructed. It continues to sit not only in the center of Paris but in the center of controversy as well; most currently over the assertion of copyrights (it's in the video, trust me).

But is the Eiffel Tower in Vegas real? It's half-size, it's fairly accurate (if you ignore the slot machines around the footings), and there is an aire du francophone if you listen above the street noise. In the opening sequence of CEC, the narrator said that things can be "real, or virtually real" as actors gave the illusion of moving in and out of a Second Life animation on-screen. If you're using the virtual to build awareness of the real, and to drive common context, it doesn't matter. What does it have to do with the digital divide? Watch the video and the virtual me in front of the virtualized Eiffel Tower will attempt to close the loop.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Princeton University Industrial Affiliates Day and presenting college student opportunities at Sun to a small auditorium full of seniors and graduate students. This is part of our on-going effort to build college and university relationships, make students aware of what Sun is doing and what job opportunities exist, and continue the major campaigns of attracting developers to our platform and entry-level engineers to our company.

I had seven minutes to convey why someone would want to work at Sun, what our culture and career paths are like, and why this might be a good first step in a technology career. And not to set the bar too high, but the master of ceremonies for the day was none other than Brian Kernighan who manages to get laughs without resorting to language syntax references.

The pitch (hey, I'm in sales, there has to be a pitch): Email me, find me on FaceBook, read my blog, or go to Sun's Student Zone for information on campus events and job openings. 15 seconds to summarize the different ways to engage with Sun.

The culture: At Sun, we enjoy disrupting the accepted notions of computing systems. As one of the few true systems companies in the technology space, we have challenged convention from including TCP/IP and Ethernet in the Sun-1 to SMP to open source economics to investing in CMT to drive the next wave of scalability. Sun's engineers make design decisions; we expect our senior engineers to thoroughly "own" their products and technologies. We have a highly open culture, from open doors and inboxes to a focus on transparency through blogging, open source software and hardware (SPARC RTL), and communities that exist outside of Sun. FaceBook group references played here.

The career path: You can be an individual contributor from an entry level person through director and vice president. You don't have to go into management to advance, and outstanding technical contributions are recognized. We have engineers working on everything from magnetic fields and robotics (in the tape world) to cooling, thermal engineering and packaging to processor and ASIC design to operating systems, languages, middleware and security software implementation. We're also building competencies in the "emergent disciplines" -- policy, privacy, energy management, long-term sustainability, recycling and re-use, and embedded systems reliability.

Why I'm here after 18 years: Imagine every device on the edge of the network, and all of the ways you'd use those devices to build a tighter mesh with people around the world. We power that network, from Java environments in the devices through to the storage systems that preserve state in the network.

On the way out, I ran into the Assistant Dean of Development (ie, fundraising) for the Engineering School, who reminded me of my upcoming major-major reunion. I did what any self-respecting engineer would in that situation: I bought an Engineering School t-shirt. I'm still the student when it comes to big campaigns.