Melih's Thoughts

Amazon started a contest where a startup was to use their Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as storage, scaled computing, Mechanical Turk, to create a product. The winning entry will win $100,000. I had an idea for this, but I thought that the correct combination of hardware and software didn’t exist yet. I now think that I was wrong, but I’m glad to be wrong. Since I can’t enter the contest, I figured that I would write my idea out here.

What the AWS provides that didn’t exist before is the ability to have truly mobile computing at the small of cost of renting space, bandwidth, and time. In fact the costs are small enough to really bring computing everywhere. If I were to choose where everywhere should start, I would say classrooms all over the country. How?

I think that we’ve reached the point now where the cost of hardware has dropped enough to bring computers into every classroom to the point of 2:1 kids to computer ratio. What about software? Using EC2, OpenOffice.org, and taking advantage of academic pricing on other products, I’m under the impression that the cost of software will drop significantly as well. The unique idea here is that the pricing of software will definitely change. It will become a single image, stored into an EC2 image, and initiated on the cheap PCs. Software usage, software loads, software flat fee, or some other scheme will be devised for this computing anywhere model. Maybe SaaS will solve the problem for us.

All in all, this was just a ramble more than anything else, but I think that the real potential of this stuff is obvious, but in terms of educating the next generation, invaluable.

On the topic of H.R. 106 suggesting that the events in Eastern Anatolia during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire were genocide, I ask my fellow Turks to consider the following argument.

This isn’t an issue of hate, but an issue of reconciliation.

We can continue to sling mud over the definition of a word, or we can move beyond it, and show the world that whatever happened in 1915 isn’t who Turks are today and instead we’re a people focused on progressing as a positive influence in the 21st Century. We’re a model for democracy in a developing part of the world where only bad things happen to people on a daily basis. For better or for worse, we’ve had a woman prime minister. We’ve become a globally pivotal nation, and we need to act as a role model, and not a rebel without a cause.

In my opinion, we should be lobbying the Turkish government not to be as foolish and childish as the American government and to stand as an example of how democracy, a government of choice, works. Democracy should push
forward the thoughts and concerns of the people. How many Americans are concerned with this? Assuredly less than the millions worried about health care, employment, education, etc. If the Turkish government focused on the
domestic issues at hand, and not answering to petty claims by the Democratic leadership, then we would truly trump the American political system which has become a joke since Election 2000.

Another important point to note is that we won’t catch up to the Armenians on this issue. They’re much more organized, and for them it’s as integral an issue as the blood that runs through their veins. Instead we should lead the world to closure on this issue, and allow everyone to reconcile their differences through healthy, non-petty methods.