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The Economist on Mitchell Baker
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a
story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit. You perhaps know her as
Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox." From the article: "Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer--her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."
...the trapeze is strangely arousing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.
This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.
She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.
Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.
There's also a nice, and very frank, quote about software patents being used for abusive purposes.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
even though she doesn't write any code, they figured having a woman telling the developers what to do would be the best way to get them to obey as they were used to taking orders off their mothers/wives
i kid, i kid, posting this from firefox, keep up the good work guys
Unfortunately, the Charlie Rose show charges $30 for a copy of the show on which Mitchell Baker appeared.
Transcripts are cheaper, but the Charlie Rose show does not guarantee the accuracy of its transcripts.
Customer: How did they get there?
Support guy: It's the cable company, they send them down the wire.
Customer: I want you to do something about it! NOW!
Support guy: Not my department sir.
Customer: I'm going to report this.
Support guy: They'll say you did it.
If you don't know 'Jam' you're really missing something
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240273/
She was amazingly socially unsophisticated.
I'm not sure what that means. Could you elaborate?
She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.
You are hiding behind a linguistic construct called the passive voice to express an opinion. But what is the basis for your opinion? You simply do not say.
Look: http://www.mozilla.org/press/image-library/people- mitchell-baker.jpg
"Trained as a lawyer"
But, but, I thought we didn't like lawyers. but we like women...*HEAD EXPLODES*
Ahh, finally here is an expansion of that buzzword, AJAX - Async Javascript And XML! Thank you, Economist! Now I know the secret of all those karma-whores, who simply got modded insightful/interesting by simply pointing out that AJAX is based on Javascript, everytime there is any story with the AJAX word in it ;-)
OSS's draw is in its lack of a social strata. If geeks had to socialize in order to make great products like firefox, then microsoft would be a much happier company.
This seems to be a leadership problem: There is a huge well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and memory hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug. It seems to be the kind of problem that can exist when a programming team is led by someone with no technical knowledge.
This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660
See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.
You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.
Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.
The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613
I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) I
I just cranked out a batch to her picture. Is that weird, or does that mean I'm into bestiality?
I don't know anything about Baker, but I can't say enough about Brendan Eich. Excellent technical skills, very good people skills. Good leader, good teacher. Brendan is a person who has earned a great deal of trust and respect.
I'm sorry if this comes across as a troll or flamebait post (it's not intended as either; it's honest criticism), but I've unfortunately got to say it shows in Mozilla. Many of the higher-ups don't seem to know or care much about the code at all. Mitchell Baker is just one example of an incompetent person with a high-up position in the Mozilla organisation; Asa Dotzler is another, as is David Baron. Now, the latter two may actually have contributed code (I think David has, at least; not sure about Asa), but both have shown that they ultimately care more about marketing than about code quality; and the founding of a for-profit (!) company that takes over from the non-profit we had until now shows what it's all about really: making money for a few while those who actually do the grunt work and wrote the code don't get a dime.
And that's not just theory, either: I use Mozilla (1.7.12) daily, and have for years, so I know what I'm talking about. The 1.7 series is supposed to be in deep maintenance mode - supposed to have been for a long time, in fact -, but still, it crashes or locks up on me daily — literally. There is not a single day where I don't have to kill Mozilla from the task manager or where it does not crash.
Quality is something different.
And it's not like I haven't tried to get these things fixed. I once tracked down a lock-up to specific conditions that triggered it and reported them on Bugzilla; the only thing that happened was that a few months later, I got an email telling me that there had not been any activity on the bug and that it would be closed automatically if there wouldn't be any in the future, either. Think about that: nobody confirmed the bug, nobody looked into it, nobody asked questions - nothing at all. And that's a lock-up — just as bad as a crash, and with the exception of a security hole, the worst kind of bug there is. But nobody cared enough to even look at it.
I'm still using Mozilla, but quite honestly, there is exactly one reason left why I still do: AdBlock. As soon as something similar for Opera pops up (sorry for the pun), I'll switch, and I will *never* go back.
Hear that, Mozilla people? You have lost me. And you not only have lost me for your current products; the incompetence, ignorance and arrogance you have shown means that you've lost me for good. As soon as I can, I will abandon your products, and I will never touch them again. And I will tell my story to everyone who's interested in it so they'll be able to see through the marketing and the hype, too, which seems to be all that you are focussing on these days.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Here's a quote from the Economist article about Mitchell Baker: 'For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with "spare time and no social life". Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer -- her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek.'
Although, as the Economist article says, Mitchell Baker "gradually found herself the leader of this project" (the Mozilla Foundation), she is not able to understand or detect when there is a technical problem. How can someone lead a group when she cannot begin to understand the conversations?
The word "geek" is extremely offensive, although the word is often used in a way that implies that it is acceptable. Calling someone a geek is the social equivalent of calling a black person a nigger.
Having "no social life" is not a benefit for a programmer. It is a huge shortcoming in everything in life, including programming.
Although I myself am a programmer, I'm married to the woman of my choice. I have no trouble getting and holding the attention of attractive women, and not because of looks. The unthinking assumption that technically knowledgeable people are socially unskilled is unacceptable, and for many, not true.
Bored moderators: A discussion of a serious bug that has not been adequately investigated is not off topic. It is evidence of a leadership problem. That's what is being discussed, Mitchell Baker's leadership, or lack thereof.
as well as values. Anybody who is working to improve the world around her is more than just interesting.
Honestly, I find her a lot more attractive for that than any generic barbi doll out there, as well as yourself.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
a story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler
Sounds like the synopsis of a porno movie.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
gains mark3=t share
Quote from a comment posted below: Mozilla browser "... crashes or locks up on me daily...". (From the comment Never written any code.)
As the comment poster says, that is evidence of poor leadership.
Other main fact is that I have not had one browser based attack succeed on my main computers (work or home), compared to the M$ fiascos that cause a significant amount of our company's IT budget to be consumed in "silly patchwork" fixes, and it doesn't matter to me what Ms. Baker looks like or how much code she has/hasn't written.
What matters is that Firefox and Thunderbird have been well guided, to the extent that there needs to be enough profitibility in a related enterprise to defend both against corporate, copycat, or cracker type attacks.
Sure, Mozilla is our pet lizard, but wouldn't you rather have a good chief lizard wrangler than nobody?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Mitchell Baker declared "Wired" Magazine's Sexiest Woman Alive.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Let's see, unilaterally means of or relating to one side only. Hrmm. So, unironically would mean of or relating to one Ron only?
So far we have...
- she's ugly
- she's socially inept
- she's a lawyer
- she has a bad hair cut
- she's obviously "not a leader"
- she's not a geek (this was posted as a bad thing)
- she doesn't care about the code
- she only cares about marketing
- Mozilla never fixed my pet bug (several times).
- the software crashes on me every day
Back to your basements, little boys, or your mother will spank you.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Oh well, he's Lead Engineer, at any rate... the position that counts.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You're a real geek. :)
Distro is d0ne Here for successful escape them by clean for the next consider that ri_ght
And thus reminds me of what friend of mine said (he's a gen. consel):
In the end, laywers always win (cha-ching).
We are obviously studied the wrong subject if we wanted to spur innovation.
Hah! No replies yet, I guess this stopped him well!
Mwahahahaha.
Seriously. She's my new hero. I had no idea who was "behind" the success of Mozilla and its offspring, or that any one individual really was. But I think that Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla and the rest are keys to the survival of the web as a useful tool, and it's great to put a name and face with the success.
With a dozen more like her, the net would be a much better place.
Real person involved with computers. Shocking.