Hack This, Please

Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.

Comments

In summary..

[Anonymous Coward]

he preliminary results of the BCG/OSDN survey reveal that:

* Participants note extremely high levels of creativity in their projects.
* Having fun, enhancing skills, access to source code and user needs drive contributions to the Open Source community. Defeating proprietary software companies is not a major motivator.
* The Open Source community is truly global in composition with respondents coming from 35 countries.
* Most participants dedicated at least 10 hours per week in their shared programming efforts
* Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average over 10 years of programming experience.

Sheesh indeed!

[despik]

Jesus F. Christ, not Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, better known as Woz. In his own words:

My company was CL9 and we built the CORE universal remote control. This was before the simple idea of preprogramming all the codes used by the common companies was done. My device looked at the IR signal and analyzed it and recreated it. It also had to determine if certain codes needed to be emitted more than once to work. My device had 16 user buttons and a few more control buttons. They were all large and finger sized. You could put the CORE into one of 16 keyboards, so you really had 256 total keys to use. Any key could have a sequence of any of the other keys and any IR codes that you read in. So a single key could turn on the TV, then turn on the VCR, then select channel 4, etc. More than that, the 'sequence' attached to a key could access all the control buttons. The lessor used control buttons were covered by a slider to keep things looking simpler. This remote control kept it's own time and could emit IR signals at certain times. You could hit "AT-5-PM-6" (4 buttons total) to execute button 6 at 5 PM. Even the buttons that programmed the main user buttons could be included in a program. Thus button 1 could reprogram button 2, etc. This allowed a simple level of programming without normal program loops. You could program the remote control to skip daylight savings time with a sequence like "AT-2-AM-Set-Hour up" (5 buttons). I was able to create a program that would keep daylight savings time going up and down on the right days forever, including leap years, but it was quite an effort and required a lot of keys to hold current states.