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Developer count is not what matters. Linux has plenty of great developers. Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.

Sadly, if you google "Ubuntu Marketing", you land on an empty page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/News). Maybe someone needs to update Google's index :-)

Everyone here knows that Linux has the technical goods to take on Windows. But the cheerleading is missing. Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?

So yes, Ubuntu being sustainable is a step in the right direction.

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FairSoftware.net -- jobs for geeks by geeks

Let's look at the facts:

the EC said tying Internet Explorer with Windows provides Internet Explorer with an artificial distribution advantage

That's stating the obvious.

Now check out the timeline on this procedure. Microsoft was accused of tying Windows Media Player to Windows in 2004. That's what the current case is based on.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson:

Under EU procedure, the European Commission will not make a final determination until after it receives and assesses Microsoftâ(TM)s response

In other words, expect this to last another few years before anything happens. By then, Internet Explorer will have been renamed Windows 8 and Microsoft will argue that the lawsuit is moot. Do consumers win? Lawyers do, that's for sure. Slow justice is no justice.

Expect Microsoft to offer to ship a version of Windows without any web browser. So you won't be able to download firefox either!

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FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss

From the report:

Music companiesâ(TM) digital revenues internationally grew by an estimated 25 per cent in 2008

I can think of a long list of other industries that would love to have that kind of growth given the current economy.

Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.

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FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss

This is real scary. And it goes to prove that bad guys always come up with new ways to steal. I don't believe there is a technical solution to this arms race.

Instead, I'd love to see our law enforcement friends be more pro-active and setup traps. Pose as a fake victim. Go out and seek those phishing sites. When the thieves come after your money thinking they just ripped off a stupid Internet newbie, then you can trace their activity and catch them.

That's the best way I can think of scaring the bad guys: when they never know if their next victim might be a cop.

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FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss

This is one of my pet peeves: why can't computers boot in a second or less?

Imagine a visionary like Steve Jobs (by the way, enjoy your leave of absence and please come back). He goes to his team and says "I don't care what it takes, build me a computer which boots in one second".

Ignore the past, the legacy of tens of years of layer after layer of OS software. Can it be done?

A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.

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FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss

The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.

People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.

How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.

The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.

The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.

It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.

But for me, "good enough" is indeed good enough.

-- FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss

I worked within the same space about 10 years ago - I was a sysadmin for a group of asic design jockies as well as the firmware and device driver guys and I'm gonna call you on this...

The hardware designers were under the same sorts of pressures, if not more so, than the software guys and I saw many bugs that would end up in the shipping silicon. The general attitude was always "oh! a bug: well the software guys will just have to work around it."

And as for "no patching", well that's also BS, you can patch silicon, it's just rather messy having to have the factory do it post-fab by cutting traces on die.

So much for perfection!

The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.

People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.

How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.

The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.

The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.

It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.

But for me, "good enough" is indeed good enough.

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FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss

I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.

I'm sorry to have to be the one to break the bad news to you, but your grades in school don't matter anymore. What recruiters look at is your experience. Which, by definition, you don't have. So your resume ends up at the bottom of the pile.

As soon as you have some kind of job, then companies are much more willing to take you seriously. It's stupid but it's true. I make the same mistake now when I am the one hiring.

Now I'm happy to also give you some good news. You're probably not graduating until the summer. That's great. First of all, the economy will be just about to turn around (the media won't tell you, but they also didn't tell you one year ago that we were in a recession). Second, it gives you some time to add experience to your resume: internships matter a lot, volunteer for an open source project, etc.

Don't have the time? You really have two options: play by university rules and be a bland student, or stand out and go the extra mile. Guess which ones gets the job?

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FairSoftware.net -- the community where software developers start fair businesses

59 per cent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours.

That's the problem right there: in IT, work can be endless. Saying no is key to keeping your sanity. But 2009 is not the best year to take risks. Good luck finding a job elsewhere.

It's bad in IT, but at least you get to use your brain (to some extent) and some of it is sometimes fun. That's a start.

Do fun stuff on the side and keep your skills current. That could become very handy sooner than you think.

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FairSoftware.net -- the community for fair entrepreneurs

Not too many exciting new features, I'm not sure why they call it 2.0.

Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.

Full-page zoom and auto-scroll? Great. Now I can use Chrome like I use Safari on my iPhone. Of course scaling should scale the whole page, not just the text. It shouldn't be that hard. An old technology like PDF (10 years old) knows that.

Profiles? Ok, could be moderately useful. It sort of conflicts with the OS's notion of swapping between users. So I'd use it more as a workaround because bookmarks are hard to organize.

Greasemonkey scripts? That's my favorite. But it's for power users only. Just read the instructions and imagine your grandma giving it a try:

To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add --enable-user-scripts in the Target field. While you're in the Properties dialog, click on "Open File Location" and create a folder named User Scriptsin the user data directory, where you'll need to manually save scripts.

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FairSoftware.net

Cracking the site was easy, because Twitter allowed an unlimited number of rapid-fire log-in attempts.

Twitter is doubly at fault here. First, it's not that hard to detect rapid-fire password attacks. Even Unix (way before Linux) knew to kick you out after 3 failed attempts. Second, they should enforce better passwords for their employees (not necessarily for regular users, that's another discussion).

He decided not to use other hacked accounts personally. Instead he posted a message to Digital Gangster offering access to any Twitter account by request.

That's where the 18-year old kid is at fault. He showed a lack of hacker ethics. Good hackers may discover an exploit, but they don't do harm.

When I hacked my university's computer network (Vax machines on Bitnet back in 1990), I did it with the knowledge of the sysadmin staff. And once you have made your point, you stand back.

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FairSoftware.net -- geeks starting fair and open software businesses together

I used to think like you. Very paranoid about whatever I thought were great ideas. Don't tell anyone. Ask for a non-disclosure (NDA). I was so convinced that if I even hinted at some of my ideas, everyone would try to steal them from me.

Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.

It took me maybe 10 years to figure that out. I have a few patents, got sued too. The value of a great idea is in its execution.

Take the idea and run with it. Make it happen. Code, develop, market, etc. Just like military planning, great ideas don't survive their first implementation, but they have the potential to evolve in something great.

I have good news for you though: your question is typical of budding entrepreneurs. The simple fact that you even ask is a sign that you'll do great in the future. Just add some experience (~5 years) and you'll have the perfect mix.

Don't believe everything your read. The example in the article is the one in a million occurrence. That's not the kind of odds you want to shoot for.

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http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers and citizen journalists create fair businesses

Instead, look at fairsoftware.net (hey, if I invented it, I can brag about it). You won't earn immediate cash, instead you'll be getting equity into whatever fun software project you find. Or start your own and get more geeks to join you, also for revenue share, not upfront cash.

This is very, very cool.

Do you have any plans to support existing legal entities using FairSoftware? This would provide us with a low-friction approach to collaboration, allowing trust and more permanent relationships to form organically between independent contractors and our organization.

Also, do you have any thoughts on models where external billing is required, such as the iPhone App Store? Serving as a publisher could be one option here (and would be a fairly significant advantage given the difficulties individuals often have dealing with the app store). That's something I'd definitely be interested in collaborating on.

Lastly, a related project -- have you seen One-click Organizations? The information was here, but the the webhost has gone kaput today, so here's the Google Cache version

First: keep your day job: it provides the cash your family needs. Second: forget about traditional part-time work, it usually either pays really low hourly rates, or the work consumes much more than the 5-15 hours you say you have.

Instead, look at fairsoftware.net (hey, if I invented it, I can brag about it). You won't earn immediate cash, instead you'll be getting equity into whatever fun software project you find. Or start your own and get more geeks to join you, also for revenue share, not upfront cash.

Financially, it's the right thing to do: have most of your base covered with salary, and an upside based on equity so that the sky's the limit. Plus it's fun.

My all-time favorite true story occured when I tried to help my dad (I bet that for everyone here, our parents are our #1 support customers).

Dad reports following problem: in the last month or so, the mouse started acting strange. Every time he gestures right, the mouse goes left. When he wants to go up, the mouse moves down.

I look it up online, suspecting some virus having fun. Can't find anything.

Dad reports that he got used to the problem, he just has to gesture in the opposite way and then he can use the computer again. Not a great workaround, but it's good enough for him.

At my next visit home, I finally can diagnose the problem live instead of over the phone: Dad was holding the mouse upside down.

True story - lasted for a month before problem was fixed. My fault for not figuring it out sooner.

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FairSoftware.net: where geeks create side-businesses together

Going by his account name it appears that he's likely the CEO. On the Company page you can see the details. My guess is he will certainly have a bias.

Given that your home page is http://www.fairsoftware.net/ do you have an association with the company? If you do, can I trust your comment that "the current model of entrepreneurship is broken", or is that what you believe based on your need to see your new company succeed? No, I'm not alleging any nefarious motives on your part. I'm sure you genuinely believe what you wrote and am asking whether your perception has been genuinely distorted due to a vested interest.

As I said in a previous comment, the current model of entrepreneurship is broken. VCs have left. In 2009, capital will be really hard to find. But there is a silver lining: capital is no longer necessary to start companies.

Again, fairsoftware.net among others is allowing people who don't have any money and don't have any VC buddies to start businesses together.

It will work because for software at least, a few smart developers can beat established software giants. Groundbreaking software can now be built quickly and cheaply by reusing a lot of existing code. You can thank the Open Source community's efforts for that.

I have a lot of respect for Mike Malone, the author of the article. He wrote one of my favorite books: "Going Public: Mips and the Entrepeneurial Dream". If you have any ounce of entrepreneurship in you, this book will reveal it. I'm sure it started vocations. But in today's piece, I disagree that Sarbanes-Oxley is the main problem, although it did reduce the number of IPOs.

The best advice I ever received for starting a company? Drop Powerpoint and your VC pitch. Write code instead.

One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.

Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate that.

My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.

Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: geeks starting a side business together.

One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.

Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate it.

My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.

Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: friends starting a side business together.

For once, I'll recommend to RTFA first before commenting. It's a tough choice.

On one hand, it's great that a family with such a tough hereditary problem can know that their kids and grand-kids won't be affected. On the other hand, I'm just so scared of the consequences: we are playing with nature and past experience shows that we usually don't fully understand the long-term consequences of our actions. We usually regret such experiments.

But who am I to tell this family to go ahead and accept brest cancer? Can you look them in the eye and say "choose cancer"?

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fairsoftware.net -- Software Bill Of Rights: transparency, equal rights and revenue sharing

In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.

Here's the beginning of an idea for you: if you were to implement the ultimate Google Apps PC, which relies on a web browser for word editing, presentations, etc. Would it look like IE and a start menu, or could you make it really seamless?

In other words: I use my computer more and more just to interact online, not so much to run applications locally on my machine. But every OS out there still thinks of the web as just another program. Can't we do better?

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fairsoftware.net -- home of the Software Bill of Rights

Some of my favorite highlights from recent incidents (I know, I shouldn't RTFM):

Names and Social Security numbers of at least 250,000 found through search engine
Date: 2008-12-02
Organizations: Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation

I guess there are many different ways you an innovate...

Social Security numbers of 341 posted on web
Date: 2008-12-04
Organizations: Economic Research Institute

If it's for research, then it's ok to post on the web...

Stolen laptop contains names and Social Security numbers of "several thousand " employees
Date: 2008-12-11
Organizations: Hewlett-Packard

If you thought only small time loser organizations like the first two on my list where subject to embarrassing data loss, that one would set you straight.

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http://fairsoftware.net/ -- Software Bill Of Rights

Enforcement would be nice. How hard would it be for some FBI office to sign up to get all the possible spam out there, and start replying to all the great offers from African banks?

Of course, a lot of the perpetuators do not reside in the US, but quite a few do. The more legitimate a business looks like, the more likely it has a US presence that can be used to stop it.

So vote with your US tax dollars and force your government to allocate serious funds to the problem. Please!

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http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create

Very chilling. Do not take your freedom for granted. I'll share my personal story to show how quickly a thriving democracy can turn into an oppresive regime, here in the US.

Remember the times that led to the invsasion of Iraq? American flags on every highway overpass?

I just happened to be in the process of getting my green card, which means my future was at the mercy of a faceless US government bureaucrat. A rejection and I'd have to pack with my family (including two US born children) and find another place in the globe to settle.

I had published a couple of letters to the editors in the San Jose Mercury News, discussing politics. I was reading foreign media which were hinting that US intelligence on Iraq WMD was bogus. Guess what? I stood very quiet, very silent. Who knows who was listening and how far the goverment was willing to go to silence dissent. If it had been just me, I would have stood up and fought for my rights, but with my family in mind, I decided to cave.

Think about this for a second: the best place on earth, and still scared of what the government might do to me. Call me paranoid, but it felt like a very real threat. It's only in the last two years or so, with Obama rising, that the oppressive feeling has left.

-- http://fairsoftware.net/

Don't pray to Messiah Obama just yet. I somehow doubt he's going to fix things. He'll probably just make it more dangerous for us by furthering the goals of big brother and the nanny state.

Blaming presidents can only get you so far. Don't look just at the president when you see the US turning into the USSR.

Very chilling. Do not take your freedom for granted. I'll share my personal story to show how quickly a thriving democracy can turn into an oppresive regime, here in the US.

Remember the times that led to the invsasion of Iraq? American flags on every highway overpass?

I just happened to be in the process of getting my green card, which means my future was at the mercy of a faceless US government bureaucrat. A rejection and I'd have to pack with my family (including two US born children) and find another place in the globe to settle.

I had published a couple of letters to the editors in the San Jose Mercury News, discussing politics. I was reading foreign media which were hinting that US intelligence on Iraq WMD was bogus. Guess what? I stood very quiet, very silent. Who knows who was listening and how far the goverment was willing to go to silence dissent. If it had been just me, I would have stood up and fought for my rights, but with my family in mind, I decided to cave.

Think about this for a second: the best place on earth, and still scared of what the government might do to me. Call me paranoid, but it felt like a very real threat. It's only in the last two years or so, with Obama rising, that the oppressive feeling has left.

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http://fairsoftware.net/

USB 2.0 gave us high-speed and full-speed. Some marketing department had to work really hard on the USB 3.0 specs, to come up with... super-speed.

Now let's talk about the obvious problem: at 5 Gbit/s, it's faster than the Ethernet in my house (1 Gbit/s). Am I the only one who didn't really notice a 10X speed improvement when moving from 100 Mbit Ethernet to gigabit Ethernet? Conventional hard drives are just too slow.

Maybe SSD + USB 3.0 would be really cool. Imagine a Flash based HD camera talking to a Flash based hard drive. Is 2009 the year of the Flash?

Which brings me back to my original point: for the next generation USB, I propose the name flash-speed :-)

PS: thanks to Intel for helping Linux stay on the leading edge. It looks like Linux may even support this before Windows, thanks to the Windows 7 schedule... I just wish Intel's pre-conditions on contributing to the xHCI specs didn't start with stuff like:

Step 1. Print and execute the xHCI Contributor agreement. Note: The agreement must be executed by a corporate officer.

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http://fairsoftware.net/

Not surprising if you look at the 3D effects that Apple put into Time Machine and the document stack. I love these.

What will make this really interesting is the navigation itself: since Apple is about to get rid of all buttons on the trackpad (and mouse?), I'm wondering if they have thought of some fancy 3 or 4-finger gestures to move around in 3D. I can think of some games that could use that.

The first time I saw the idea of 3D navigation for the desktop was when Hypercard came out (was that 10, 15 years ago?). Someone came up with this concept of a house where you'd store various things. In the basement would be the backups. On the desk in the office would be the open documents, etc. You'd just walk around your house in what (at the time) felt like 3D.

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http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create

In my view of the world, there are 5 key companies that completely redefine the way businesses are created using the web, aka "startup 2.0":

- http://ycombinator.com/: Paul Graham can take a bunch of smart college kids, feed them $15K for 3 months, bring them to Silicon Valley and watch them succeed - his success rate is amazing.

- http://fairsoftware.net/ (disclosure: I'm one of the founders): eliminate the need for any startup capital when you have a good idea for a software or a web site, just go ahead and create a virtual online corporation, hire friends or strangers, ship and share revenue. Never talk to a lawyer. Shopping and banking are online nowdays, why not the corporation itself?

- http://thefunded.com/: once your business is showing potential, maybe (just maybe) you want to raise money from VCs. Thanks to TheFunded, VCs are not the ruling masters of their universe anymore.

- http://vator.tv/: once you have a cool product, it's time to pitch it to the world. You don't need to have a friend at CNN anymore. Well, actually with vator, you do :-)

- http://partnerup.com/: you need to find co-founders to start your enterprise 2.0. Traditional job boards are for 9-5 jobs at Fortune 500 companies. PartnerUp is the only one I have seen that really focuses on early stage opportunities.

I believe innovation will come from all these new startups that can now be created online, with collaborators distributed potentially all over the world, just like Open Source. That's big enough that it may create an entirely new economy within 5 years.

This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.

Secure or not, it goes against the main founding principle of the web, which is portability. There are other ways to solve the performance issue, I thought just-in-time compilers were getting pretty close anyway (50% according to http://www.mobydisk.com/softdev/techinfo/speedtest/index.html).

On the security side, I'll just quote Google's description: "modules may not contain certain instruction sequences". That doesn't sound like a robust way to detect malicious code.

http://fairsoftware.net/ where software developers share revenue from the apps they create together