a friendster or orkut would have no incentive to do this.
their critical mass of millions of members is their biggest asset (and the thing that is hard to acquire -- the tech part is relatively easy; witness all the knockoffs); opening it up to all other comers (i.e. their competitors) would be foolish, just as it would be foolish for AOL/AIM to open up their user base to MSN, their biggest competitor (unless both user bases were equally sized, in which case they would both benefit equally, or the smaller network paid the larger one for access.)
The value in friendster is not the technology really -- witness the number of open-source ripoffs (there are several more besides this one, even -- slashster and others have been mentioned) and so on. It's the critical mass of millions of users they've attained.
You can have the slickest and fastest social networking site (or IM client, or p2p client, or "portal"...) in the world but without users (no, being open source is not a "feature", end users don't care), a killer feature/gimmick, or an insane marketing budget, it's useless.
Looks like a sausagefest too. Marc? Ben? Roland? Sean?
I need Charlenes here people. Claires. Colettes. Tortured twentysomething souls who lean forward in sleazy web cam shots just to show a little cleavage.
Great. So DDoS victims, in addition to having all of their incoming bandwidth wasted, can now spend all their outgoing bandwidth to strike back at their cunning, ruthless assailants -- you know, like all those clever "Dear friends" who "use this Internet Explorer patch now!".
I've always wondered why on some machines it takes so damn long to browse the network on everything from 95 to XP -- most of the time I simply whimper and mumble incoherently waiting for it to eventually finish, but have never been able to diagnose the problem. Over the 'net it's even more agonizingly slow -- minute-long delays when pings are 30ms or less.
The post suggests that this book tells the answer, but do any enlightened here know some typical causes of the ridiculously poor performance?
They ought to be damn worried about the desktop and the consumer market as well. The Linux desktop as a drop in replacement for XP Home/whatever is still a ways away, but with advances in (the products formerly known as) Mozilla/Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and KDE/GNOME it's only a matter of time before it really improves to the point where a Linux desktop is truly accessible and does everything that 95% of the mass market wants to do.
Plus companies like IBM can afford to throw full-time devs at it in the hopes of avoiding millions of dollars of MS tax/Windows licenses a year.
Finally they're starting to get a taste of their own medicine (getting their market cannibalized by a free alternative).
When quoted for comment, the Berkeley representative cryptically responded "She bang! She bang!" and proceeded to gyrate hysterically, adding "I gave my best and I have no regrets at all."
The seti-at-home-type approach doesn't work here for several reasons:
First of all, they aren't implying that they're having scalability problems.
Second, on a MMORPG server, many of these calculations have to 1) take place instantaneously (latency of communication over the 'net precludes this) and securely 2) and operate on enormous datasets (i.e. databases containing world/player/object/etc information) that can't exactly be sent down some DSL line due to size and security reasons.
Third, you can never ever trust the client to make decisions that can adversely affect other clients or provide undue advantage.
The competitive advantage of cars over carriages is that cars are more useful than carriages.
In this case, MS isn't providing a more useful virus scanner or a better product. Their virus scanner will arguably be less useful than existing offerings in the market. However, (and this is where my anticompetitive gripe comes from) they're able to instantly capture a majority stake of any given market just because they own the underlying platform, whereas other vendors are forced to blow millions on sales and marketing and trying to entice consumers to download and install their product. To add insult to injury, MS includes the product for free with the OS, knowing that given a free pre-installed product that's "good enough" the vast majority will be too lazy to look for better alternatives.
this next service pack is going to seriously fuck up some software industries... a better personal firewall, a popup killer, and now antivirus, all now bundled with the OS? and free?!
it's good that MS is being proactive (and i don't think they're doing this on purpose -- there is of course legitimate demand for these features), but it's chilling to see how they're capable of slaying entire software industries with the press of a button. this is going to RAPE antivirus/firewall/popup killing companies/industries, even if they have better products -- most consumers, and even a good chunk of small to mid-size businesses, only need a basic virus scanner, for example. and it's pretty fucking hard to compete with OS-preinstalled AND free.
of course this doesn't apply to all software products, but, what's the incentive to create a clever software product anymore, especially a small but ingenious shareware-type app, if all it takes is for MS to assign a couple of lackeys in MS Research to duplicate your product and then preinstall it with the next version of the OS for free? obligatory examples are netscape and winzip but really they're innumerable.
next on death row: spam stoppers, anti-spyware utils...
is kazaa one of the vendors? is there anything they can do about emule or edonkey users?
the latter seem to traffic especially in things like leaked source RARs, and since most of the central servers are overseas and operated independently (and 'overnet' seems truly peer to peer with no central servers), it would be tough to crack down on them, besides having a bunch of fake clients that harvest IPs. anyone know if they do this?
(i imagine the same concept would apply for bittorrent downloaders -- except BT relies on central tracking servers which would be comparatively easy to shut down.)
Ugh... not good advice. For *reading* a contract, yeah, common sense will yield a good *understanding*. For *writing* amendments, the devil is in the details unless the modification is truly trivial. (Furthermore, you can be sure their legal team will reject any 'homebrew' modifications.)
American AC in Paris had a great quote below -- "Assume that you're just as good at revising some lawyer's contract as you'd expect that lawyer to be at revising your code. Act accordingly."
Yeah. Expect whoever's hiring you to perceive any changes to legal documents as threats at first, just as you would modifications to some legalese in your contract by your employer to be some attempt at them fucking you over.
You're right -- your lawyer will find a number of other things that need to be changed as well (my lawyer found 5-10 little nitpicky things) and the process of getting these things changed is a pain in the ass, and can strain a relationship. It also takes FOREVER. Unfortunately, it could also result in you not getting hired.
However, there is a good foundation of trust that results from both sides fully understanding an employment contract -- and you can rest easy knowing there are no 'gotchas' or time bombs lurking in the contract that can fuck you over in case things turn sour. I would not work anywhere without that foundation of mutual trust, but the parent is correct in that at some point you have to pick your battles or risk losing the job.
I just finished a five month-long contract negotiation for a fairly high-level architect position at a startup, and it was painful but everyone is now happy -- just keep your cool (don't get pissed off/frustrated), pick your battles, and be willing to compromise.
Whether you like that or not, it is likely the way it will be. Sure, some people would say, "well I wouldn't want to work for a draconian company like that anyway." Some others would say, "I have been unemployed for months, perhaps I should take the job and swallow my pride."
The proposition that it's that black and white is false.
If you are respectful and have a lawyer propose a reasonable amendment saying that you own the IP to non-competing home projects unrelated to work, they probably won't give a fuck and will have their legal team clear it. They have better things to worry about -- from their perspective they just don't want some asshole employee taking their secrets, leaving, and competing with them -- but do expect that any changes to an NDA/noncompete will be seen as threatening at first.
If it is the case they're draconian idiots then yeah you'll probably want to move on.
But in most cases, they probably don't care, and whoever is hiring you didn't draft the NDA in the first place (hell, it's probably a safe bet they haven't even read it -- they just paid some lawyer to cover their ass.)
yeah, yeah, nobody likes dealing with lawyers. but trying to fudge a contract by yourself is a foolish proposition, especially an NDA. and you can guarantee that a) your employer will freak out initially -- they don't like ANYONE touching their NDAs and jeopardizing their precious IP and b) you'll probably screw up the wording and their legal team will reject your changes on that basis alone.
and if things you develop outside of work really matter to you, and you plan on developing something significant, it's worth the couple grand to get solid advice and contractual clauses that will hold up in a lawsuit. it makes sense and is worth the one time cost to protect yourself and your intellectual assets just like you'd insure your car or house in case of some unlikely disaster.
in fact, i'd ALWAYS recommend having a lawyer review any employment contract before signing, just in case. some clauses in employment contracts can be pretty sneaky or draconian but sadly most people just gloss over them and look where to sign.
i'm not a lawyer but am damn happy that i had one look over/amend my employment contracts before signing.
(N.B. I interviewed candidates for tech jobs at a startup. With companies with a large HR dept, the experience may be slightly different.)
Applications are great, from an employer's perspective.
If you've ever put up a job posting in any kind of public space/forum/job site, you would know that you will start getting flooded with absolute shit resumes that don't match and by desperate people cutting pasting and clicking send. (I've even seen candidates put up autoresponders to job posting sites.. no shit.)
An application, besides the marginal advantages that other respondents have already pointed out, tells me that 1) you've at least read the fucking post and what we're looking for 2) are not just some jerkoff spamming any job posting he sees and that you 3) will at spend ten minutes actually CONSIDERING and THINKING what you're about to apply for, since reading your resume and phone screening/interview will definitely take up (i.e. waste) a lot of my time (and conversely, if you can't be bothered to fill out a 10 minute app, you're not going to do very good work on the job.)
BostonWorks let me put up 3 simple 'interview questions' beforehand -- loved that feature -- and I made them have easy 2 sentence max responses. It was amazing how many people submitted blank responses or how many I could screen just from reading their absolutely braindead replies. It was GREAT.
And finally, enough people will apply that frankly I only need to consider those who submit a thoughtful, properly formatted app.
I agree though that it wastes time on both ends, which sucks. But realize the root cause, which sucks more; the whole process stems from the fact that you need some way of putting up enough barriers to entry to keep obviously unqualified idiots from wasting your time.
Slashdot Mirror
a friendster or orkut would have no incentive to do this.
their critical mass of millions of members is their biggest asset (and the thing that is hard to acquire -- the tech part is relatively easy; witness all the knockoffs); opening it up to all other comers (i.e. their competitors) would be foolish, just as it would be foolish for AOL/AIM to open up their user base to MSN, their biggest competitor (unless both user bases were equally sized, in which case they would both benefit equally, or the smaller network paid the larger one for access.)
-fren
The value in friendster is not the technology really -- witness the number of open-source ripoffs (there are several more besides this one, even -- slashster and others have been mentioned) and so on. It's the critical mass of millions of users they've attained.
You can have the slickest and fastest social networking site (or IM client, or p2p client, or "portal"...) in the world but without users (no, being open source is not a "feature", end users don't care), a killer feature/gimmick, or an insane marketing budget, it's useless.
-fren
looks like this site just took it in the backend.
-fren
Looks like a sausagefest too. Marc? Ben? Roland? Sean?
:)
I need Charlenes here people. Claires. Colettes. Tortured twentysomething souls who lean forward in sleazy web cam shots just to show a little cleavage.
Work with me here!
-fren
...okay, okay, I'm going to hell...
-fren
Great. So DDoS victims, in addition to having all of their incoming bandwidth wasted, can now spend all their outgoing bandwidth to strike back at their cunning, ruthless assailants -- you know, like all those clever "Dear friends" who "use this Internet Explorer patch now!".
"More than 500.000 already infected!"
-fren
I've always wondered why on some machines it takes so damn long to browse the network on everything from 95 to XP -- most of the time I simply whimper and mumble incoherently waiting for it to eventually finish, but have never been able to diagnose the problem. Over the 'net it's even more agonizingly slow -- minute-long delays when pings are 30ms or less.
The post suggests that this book tells the answer, but do any enlightened here know some typical causes of the ridiculously poor performance?
-fren
They ought to be damn worried about the desktop and the consumer market as well. The Linux desktop as a drop in replacement for XP Home/whatever is still a ways away, but with advances in (the products formerly known as) Mozilla/Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and KDE/GNOME it's only a matter of time before it really improves to the point where a Linux desktop is truly accessible and does everything that 95% of the mass market wants to do.
Plus companies like IBM can afford to throw full-time devs at it in the hopes of avoiding millions of dollars of MS tax/Windows licenses a year.
Finally they're starting to get a taste of their own medicine (getting their market cannibalized by a free alternative).
-fren
Apparently it's a smashing success among morbidly obese teens.
-fren
When quoted for comment, the Berkeley representative cryptically responded "She bang! She bang!" and proceeded to gyrate hysterically, adding "I gave my best and I have no regrets at all."
-fren
FYI... here's a free app that removes MS Word metadata (useful for sensitive docs for distribution)
http://www.docscrubber.com/download.html
-fren
I think 'liking Ruff' that much is illegal in most states. :P
-fren
rock-paper-scissors to settle the disputes of mankind. And drunken boxing.
-fren
wtf?
The seti-at-home-type approach doesn't work here for several reasons:
First of all, they aren't implying that they're having scalability problems.
Second, on a MMORPG server, many of these calculations have to 1) take place instantaneously (latency of communication over the 'net precludes this) and securely 2) and operate on enormous datasets (i.e. databases containing world/player/object/etc information) that can't exactly be sent down some DSL line due to size and security reasons.
Third, you can never ever trust the client to make decisions that can adversely affect other clients or provide undue advantage.
-fren
Liv Tyler was hot until one of my buddies pointed out the striking, eerie resemblance to Steven Tyler.
And then the vomiting began.
*sigh*
-fren
- download source, fix bugs, recompile
;)
i keed, i keed...-fren
The car vs carriage analogy isn't valid.
The competitive advantage of cars over carriages is that cars are more useful than carriages.
In this case, MS isn't providing a more useful virus scanner or a better product. Their virus scanner will arguably be less useful than existing offerings in the market. However, (and this is where my anticompetitive gripe comes from) they're able to instantly capture a majority stake of any given market just because they own the underlying platform, whereas other vendors are forced to blow millions on sales and marketing and trying to entice consumers to download and install their product. To add insult to injury, MS includes the product for free with the OS, knowing that given a free pre-installed product that's "good enough" the vast majority will be too lazy to look for better alternatives.
-fren
this next service pack is going to seriously fuck up some software industries... a better personal firewall, a popup killer, and now antivirus, all now bundled with the OS? and free?!
it's good that MS is being proactive (and i don't think they're doing this on purpose -- there is of course legitimate demand for these features), but it's chilling to see how they're capable of slaying entire software industries with the press of a button. this is going to RAPE antivirus/firewall/popup killing companies/industries, even if they have better products -- most consumers, and even a good chunk of small to mid-size businesses, only need a basic virus scanner, for example. and it's pretty fucking hard to compete with OS-preinstalled AND free.
sigh. grab your ankles.
of course this doesn't apply to all software products, but, what's the incentive to create a clever software product anymore, especially a small but ingenious shareware-type app, if all it takes is for MS to assign a couple of lackeys in MS Research to duplicate your product and then preinstall it with the next version of the OS for free? obligatory examples are netscape and winzip but really they're innumerable.
next on death row: spam stoppers, anti-spyware utils...
they really ought to have split MS up.
-fren
is kazaa one of the vendors? is there anything they can do about emule or edonkey users?
;)
the latter seem to traffic especially in things like leaked source RARs, and since most of the central servers are overseas and operated independently (and 'overnet' seems truly peer to peer with no central servers), it would be tough to crack down on them, besides having a bunch of fake clients that harvest IPs. anyone know if they do this?
(i imagine the same concept would apply for bittorrent downloaders -- except BT relies on central tracking servers which would be comparatively easy to shut down.)
seems like a natural, uh, application, for the freenet project
ah well. it's kinda scary that even the largest/richest software co in the world can't stop the spread of their IP, and that it takes only one person.
-fren
Ugh... not good advice. For *reading* a contract, yeah, common sense will yield a good *understanding*. For *writing* amendments, the devil is in the details unless the modification is truly trivial. (Furthermore, you can be sure their legal team will reject any 'homebrew' modifications.)
American AC in Paris had a great quote below -- "Assume that you're just as good at revising some lawyer's contract as you'd expect that lawyer to be at revising your code. Act accordingly."
-fren
Yeah. Expect whoever's hiring you to perceive any changes to legal documents as threats at first, just as you would modifications to some legalese in your contract by your employer to be some attempt at them fucking you over.
You're right -- your lawyer will find a number of other things that need to be changed as well (my lawyer found 5-10 little nitpicky things) and the process of getting these things changed is a pain in the ass, and can strain a relationship. It also takes FOREVER. Unfortunately, it could also result in you not getting hired.
However, there is a good foundation of trust that results from both sides fully understanding an employment contract -- and you can rest easy knowing there are no 'gotchas' or time bombs lurking in the contract that can fuck you over in case things turn sour. I would not work anywhere without that foundation of mutual trust, but the parent is correct in that at some point you have to pick your battles or risk losing the job.
I just finished a five month-long contract negotiation for a fairly high-level architect position at a startup, and it was painful but everyone is now happy -- just keep your cool (don't get pissed off/frustrated), pick your battles, and be willing to compromise.
-fren
If you are respectful and have a lawyer propose a reasonable amendment saying that you own the IP to non-competing home projects unrelated to work, they probably won't give a fuck and will have their legal team clear it. They have better things to worry about -- from their perspective they just don't want some asshole employee taking their secrets, leaving, and competing with them -- but do expect that any changes to an NDA/noncompete will be seen as threatening at first.
If it is the case they're draconian idiots then yeah you'll probably want to move on.
But in most cases, they probably don't care, and whoever is hiring you didn't draft the NDA in the first place (hell, it's probably a safe bet they haven't even read it -- they just paid some lawyer to cover their ass.)
-fren
yeah, yeah, nobody likes dealing with lawyers. but trying to fudge a contract by yourself is a foolish proposition, especially an NDA. and you can guarantee that a) your employer will freak out initially -- they don't like ANYONE touching their NDAs and jeopardizing their precious IP and b) you'll probably screw up the wording and their legal team will reject your changes on that basis alone.
and if things you develop outside of work really matter to you, and you plan on developing something significant, it's worth the couple grand to get solid advice and contractual clauses that will hold up in a lawsuit. it makes sense and is worth the one time cost to protect yourself and your intellectual assets just like you'd insure your car or house in case of some unlikely disaster.
in fact, i'd ALWAYS recommend having a lawyer review any employment contract before signing, just in case. some clauses in employment contracts can be pretty sneaky or draconian but sadly most people just gloss over them and look where to sign.
i'm not a lawyer but am damn happy that i had one look over/amend my employment contracts before signing.
hope this helps.
-fren
this is the same device CNN allegedly used to spruce up their Gulf War footage :)
god bless america...
-fren
(N.B. I interviewed candidates for tech jobs at a startup. With companies with a large HR dept, the experience may be slightly different.)
Applications are great, from an employer's perspective.
If you've ever put up a job posting in any kind of public space/forum/job site, you would know that you will start getting flooded with absolute shit resumes that don't match and by desperate people cutting pasting and clicking send. (I've even seen candidates put up autoresponders to job posting sites.. no shit.)
An application, besides the marginal advantages that other respondents have already pointed out, tells me that 1) you've at least read the fucking post and what we're looking for 2) are not just some jerkoff spamming any job posting he sees and that you 3) will at spend ten minutes actually CONSIDERING and THINKING what you're about to apply for, since reading your resume and phone screening/interview will definitely take up (i.e. waste) a lot of my time (and conversely, if you can't be bothered to fill out a 10 minute app, you're not going to do very good work on the job.)
BostonWorks let me put up 3 simple 'interview questions' beforehand -- loved that feature -- and I made them have easy 2 sentence max responses. It was amazing how many people submitted blank responses or how many I could screen just from reading their absolutely braindead replies. It was GREAT.
And finally, enough people will apply that frankly I only need to consider those who submit a thoughtful, properly formatted app.
I agree though that it wastes time on both ends, which sucks. But realize the root cause, which sucks more; the whole process stems from the fact that you need some way of putting up enough barriers to entry to keep obviously unqualified idiots from wasting your time.
-fren