It's always all downhill once startups start cutting back on the food perks.
From the linked Valleywag article:
" Google's food perks on the chopping block
There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch -- dinner will be reserved for geeks only -- but it's still a shocking cutback.
Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them.
In 2004, they wrote:
We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge... We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.
" This paper is not the same as the paper that is subject to a lawsuit by NXP. It is available on the web since several months and will be published officially in the proceedings of the Cardis'08 conference in september. The paper of the lawsuit builds on it. "
So while related, it is different for some value of different..
Who's actually in charge of how they spend it? Is it not Congress?
If Congress says no, is this a "we think that's frivolous, bad dog, no biscuit", is it a "you will be breaking the law", or are congressional meetings about this stuff just for fits and giggles?
"This airport is known to be carcinogenic", "This restaurant cooks using ingredients known to be carcinogenic", "You will die a cancerous death if you travel on this highway".. Or words to that effect are all over..
So Taco, like California, is just trying to cover his ass from the inevitable whiners..
While I broadly agree with the thrust of your argument, you're mistaking the ACCC for many other regulatory agencies.
To get your list of "protections" you'd need to include:
* ACCC * ACMA * Reserve Bank * ASIC * FIRB
At the least.
And that is ignoring that the ACCC doesn't at all enforce fair trading laws, which are the perogative of the states (in NSW that means the Dept of Fair Trading, it probably has a similar name in the other states).
While I notice it hasn't in this case, google is normally pretty quick to remove them from its indexes as well, so if you use google, you'll mostly not be able to find them.
However, the basic meme of copy content, add ads and publish, particularly for content like wikipedia that is self-referential, is very widely used.
Can anyone shed any light on why companies repeatedly do this with Busybox?
I can sort of understand their motivation (if not their ethics/commercial sense!) if they've got a highly modified Lunix kernel where they've made extensive changes to the networking stack to enable their "unique" feature or similar, but why with Busybox? Surely the path of least resistance is just to make the tar ball available (or realise, you've stuffed up, and start making the offer and send any that ask the tarball to play catch-up). Are any of these guys really making proprietary improvements with amazing IP involved to Busybox? It seems an unlikely place to do it..
Maybe they've ported it to the latest tiniest CPU, but they still get a time to market advantage their (particularly versus producing Busybox like functionality from scratch!), but even that seems unlikely to be worth fighting hard when you'll quickly realise you'll lose.
Why go to the hassle?
I suspect that this probably boils down to default policies and a lack of understanding of the GPL more than anything, sadly. By default most companies would have a "We don't make available ANY of our IP unnecessarily" and that hasn't yet gelled with the GPL. No one wants to stand up and make the call that compiling Busybox didn't involved much of the companies IP, and releasing the source is an obligation.. The people involved with the IP aren't the same people that make the 'legal' calls and so companies come across with these silly positions..
However, the while google's search results were/are good, the key thing they twigged to earlier than most was how HUGE web advertising was, and how to monetise it. That could have happened in Norway with alltheweb, but it didn't.
When google filed IPO documents people finally understood how HUGE web advertising was.
--Q
Re:I'm in Australia (Adelaide) Looking to move cou
on
Moving Between Countries?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What's the "crosstika" symbol you mentioned? Image link please. He's referring to the Southern Cross, as featured on the Australian and New Zealand flags. It's current with a young crop of (mostly) white anglo Australians as a tattoo motif, and is unfortunately associated with stupid aspects of Nationalism (anti-muslim out cryings, anti-immigration folks, etc).
It's largely the non-Union Jack portion of the Australian flag, so associated with Australian identity. Unfortunately as the GP alluded, the neo-nazi like folks being attracted to such causes in Australia is growing slowly at the moment as we struggle with integrating Muslims, Africans, Asians etc in a western world that has seen neo-cons rise to power.. Hopefully the change of political climate here in Aus, and a change of Whitehouse in the US might help reverse some of the damage of the last 10 years.
A common problem, that a book like this should help correct (NB: I haven't read it).
Back when we were kids, the compiler courses taught us about limitations to LL(k) grammars, that it turns out, aren't true (ok, ok - the theory was in fact correct, but the practical implications they passed on were in fact incorrect).
Enter ANTLR - it changed the game - and you should get to know it and why it it did. Generic LL(k) grammars at your fingertips.
I thought I understood this stuff, because of so called "definitive" statements when I was a kid, but then someone pointed out that they'd made a break-through or two since I was an undergrad.
If you haven't already, learn about ANTLR - what you remember about parser generators HAS CHANGED (particularly if you're stuck in an LL(1) world).
IANAL but I believe its been covered else where - the bill of rights gives rights to US citizens. This won't help a Canadian popping over to see the bad side of Niagara falls with their ipod.
> One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement.
Why is this an issue? If EMC think the technology is a winner, and they don't have a stake in a particular player (of course they have to choose a supplier, but that hardly indicates a long term commitment) then what do they care who wins?
One of the great things about being in EMCs shoes is that you want these things commoditized.
Either way, as a the sooner SSD is directly competitive the better. They're ICs - you churn them out, and only worry about yield. HDDs are mechanical and will always have their mechanical shortcomings.
--Q
Jumped the shark?
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How bad is this?/. idle?/. has jumped the shark..
(no dispespect to the video makers, but we can all browse youtube randomly if we want...)
The most telling thing in TFA for me was that the bug had been identified by the Samba team and a workaround implemented for Samba.
Surely both the samba communities and the *BSD communities are active enough that this could have been passed on for further investigation by the *BSD crowd? (Sure, samba probably would still need a workaround, particularly given the long uptimes and widespread deployment of *BSDs)
I know nothing of the devs at Samba and *BSD, but seems a bit strange. Perhaps they did try..
Meanwhile, congrats to Marc on fixing a bug. One of the most touted benefits of open source (whatever your license) code.
Bill Gates is still the Chairman, the largest shareholder and founder.
Stevie B is the second largest shareholder.
Between Billy G and Stevie B they hold over 10% of the company (a lot for a large cap company).
Surely the only way Steve gets rolled as CEO is if Bill loses all faith in him, and given their long relationship this seems unlikely.
I doubt very much that in the face of a hostile Bill the board has any hope of removing him even if they, and their institutional shareholders are unhappy with his performance.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that on the back of these problems they'd get rid of him. If it ever got remotely near that, he and Bill would have a word and he'd "retire to spend more time with his family".
> It definitely sounds like a performance hit if it's turned on.
No, if anything they pitch it as a performance gain.
The idea is to run Linux (or OS of your choice), with various control plane functions (it can have an IP address, you can do config, stats collection etc etc), on say (making up these numbers!) 4 of the cores, while the other 60 cores are running without an OS (they offer a BIOS like environment with basic functions to get access to the backplane and subsequently the packets) doing data-plane functions, perhaps doing deep-packet inspection for QoS delivery, security functions (IPS?) etc.
The Linux side, particularly the kernel isn't going to contain your real IP, while the data-plane side is all your secret-sauce. It involves embedded style programming without lots of OS support, but you get speed and the networking vendors are used to this sort of model - it sure beats the hell outa doing it in an ASIC on the dataplane side which is what they're used to.
This isn't an attack on open source - it's using it in a sensible fashion IMO. However, for the paranoid types who've seen the fud, they probably pitch this split of operations as a "licensing containment barrier" cause a marketing person thought it might help somewhere.
I hear what you're saying - it is sort of annoying.
However, a VC funded startup like this has to be focused. They're going to have a list of customers probably about 10 companies long that they want to sell to, and everyone else at this stage is a distraction. Your $1000 does nothing for them, you and your 2000 friends barely helps.
They're going to want Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, Lucent-Alcatel, 3Com, Huaweii, maybe 1 or 2 of the big telcos and that's about it (ok, there are a couple of other big-iron vendors, then the odd niche players like an F5 or so, but it really is limited). They get designed in to core routers at Cisco and they know they succeed.
The interesting thing here will be if they can dislodge the cutting edge in multi-core MIPS CPUs that are currently going in to the current/next-gen products of networking vendors from Cavium (their Octeon line) and RMI (their XLR).
Slashdot Mirror
Try the whole world. According to this counter, the world will be out of IPv4 addresses in 768 days.
OMG. Don't go to that page. It drains IP addresses if you watch!
Won't someone think of the children!
--Q
Does anyone know how much of a factor regular expression processing speed is to modern browser performance? What sort of sites would stress it?
If they had better regexp algorithms, how much would it matter? (and yes, I know its a hard problem)
--Q
It's always all downhill once startups start cutting back on the food perks.
From the linked Valleywag article:
"
Google's food perks on the chopping block
There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch -- dinner will be reserved for geeks only -- but it's still a shocking cutback.
Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them.
In 2004, they wrote:
We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge ... We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.
What went wrong? ...
"
--Q
The originally proposed wording:
"Open source means you should sell your shares."
Just got reworked to make it easier to read.
--Q
To quote from the paper you linked:
"
This paper is not the same as the paper that is subject to a lawsuit by NXP. It is available on the web since several months and will be published officially in the proceedings of the Cardis'08 conference in september. The paper of the lawsuit builds on it.
"
So while related, it is different for some value of different..
--Q
Information wants to be free.
Luckily, so does public transport.
--Q
Yes, they can.
Peter Finch (who won Australia's first Acting Oscar?) has got the only posthumous Oscar for Acting (there are others in other categories).
Sadly, another Australian may get one this way..
--Q
How does this happen?
Who's actually in charge of how they spend it? Is it not Congress?
If Congress says no, is this a "we think that's frivolous, bad dog, no biscuit", is it a "you will be breaking the law", or are congressional meetings about this stuff just for fits and giggles?
--Q
You should come to California.
"This airport is known to be carcinogenic", "This restaurant cooks using ingredients known to be carcinogenic", "You will die a cancerous death if you travel on this highway".. Or words to that effect are all over..
So Taco, like California, is just trying to cover his ass from the inevitable whiners..
--Q
While I broadly agree with the thrust of your argument, you're mistaking the ACCC for many other regulatory agencies.
To get your list of "protections" you'd need to include:
* ACCC
* ACMA
* Reserve Bank
* ASIC
* FIRB
At the least.
And that is ignoring that the ACCC doesn't at all enforce fair trading laws, which are the perogative of the states (in NSW that means the Dept of Fair Trading, it probably has a similar name in the other states).
You're misattributing most of your argument.
--Q
There are many many many of these sites.
While I notice it hasn't in this case, google is normally pretty quick to remove them from its indexes as well, so if you use google, you'll mostly not be able to find them.
However, the basic meme of copy content, add ads and publish, particularly for content like wikipedia that is self-referential, is very widely used.
--Q
Can anyone shed any light on why companies repeatedly do this with Busybox?
I can sort of understand their motivation (if not their ethics/commercial sense!) if they've got a highly modified Lunix kernel where they've made extensive changes to the networking stack to enable their "unique" feature or similar, but why with Busybox? Surely the path of least resistance is just to make the tar ball available (or realise, you've stuffed up, and start making the offer and send any that ask the tarball to play catch-up). Are any of these guys really making proprietary improvements with amazing IP involved to Busybox? It seems an unlikely place to do it..
Maybe they've ported it to the latest tiniest CPU, but they still get a time to market advantage their (particularly versus producing Busybox like functionality from scratch!), but even that seems unlikely to be worth fighting hard when you'll quickly realise you'll lose.
Why go to the hassle?
I suspect that this probably boils down to default policies and a lack of understanding of the GPL more than anything, sadly. By default most companies would have a "We don't make available ANY of our IP unnecessarily" and that hasn't yet gelled with the GPL. No one wants to stand up and make the call that compiling Busybox didn't involved much of the companies IP, and releasing the source is an obligation.. The people involved with the IP aren't the same people that make the 'legal' calls and so companies come across with these silly positions..
--Q
As a search user, I agree. The simple design has been good.
However, we're talking about business models - they got the search business model right, where so many others missed the boat.
--Q
alltheweb was good, agreed.
However, the while google's search results were/are good, the key thing they twigged to earlier than most was how HUGE web advertising was, and how to monetise it. That could have happened in Norway with alltheweb, but it didn't.
When google filed IPO documents people finally understood how HUGE web advertising was.
--Q
It's largely the non-Union Jack portion of the Australian flag, so associated with Australian identity. Unfortunately as the GP alluded, the neo-nazi like folks being attracted to such causes in Australia is growing slowly at the moment as we struggle with integrating Muslims, Africans, Asians etc in a western world that has seen neo-cons rise to power.. Hopefully the change of political climate here in Aus, and a change of Whitehouse in the US might help reverse some of the damage of the last 10 years.
---Q
A common problem, that a book like this should help correct (NB: I haven't read it).
Back when we were kids, the compiler courses taught us about limitations to LL(k) grammars, that it turns out, aren't true (ok, ok - the theory was in fact correct, but the practical implications they passed on were in fact incorrect).
Enter ANTLR - it changed the game - and you should get to know it and why it it did. Generic LL(k) grammars at your fingertips.
I thought I understood this stuff, because of so called "definitive" statements when I was a kid, but then someone pointed out that they'd made a break-through or two since I was an undergrad.
If you haven't already, learn about ANTLR - what you remember about parser generators HAS CHANGED (particularly if you're stuck in an LL(1) world).
--Q
'cause like, polar robots have something better to explore than like the *poles* ?
--Q
IANAL but I believe its been covered else where - the bill of rights gives rights to US citizens. This won't help a Canadian popping over to see the bad side of Niagara falls with their ipod.
--Q
> One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement.
Why is this an issue? If EMC think the technology is a winner, and they don't have a stake in a particular player (of course they have to choose a supplier, but that hardly indicates a long term commitment) then what do they care who wins?
One of the great things about being in EMCs shoes is that you want these things commoditized.
Either way, as a the sooner SSD is directly competitive the better. They're ICs - you churn them out, and only worry about yield. HDDs are mechanical and will always have their mechanical shortcomings.
--Q
How bad is this? /. idle? /. has jumped the shark..
(no dispespect to the video makers, but we can all browse youtube randomly if we want...)
--Q
I really agree. One of the first things to learn in becoming a good manager is that different people are, well, different.
Forcing everyone in to the same paradigm is hard..
--Q
The most telling thing in TFA for me was that the bug had been identified by the Samba team and a workaround implemented for Samba.
Surely both the samba communities and the *BSD communities are active enough that this could have been passed on for further investigation by the *BSD crowd? (Sure, samba probably would still need a workaround, particularly given the long uptimes and widespread deployment of *BSDs)
I know nothing of the devs at Samba and *BSD, but seems a bit strange. Perhaps they did try..
Meanwhile, congrats to Marc on fixing a bug. One of the most touted benefits of open source (whatever your license) code.
--Q
Bill Gates is still the Chairman, the largest shareholder and founder.
Stevie B is the second largest shareholder.
Between Billy G and Stevie B they hold over 10% of the company (a lot for a large cap company).
Surely the only way Steve gets rolled as CEO is if Bill loses all faith in him, and given their long relationship this seems unlikely.
I doubt very much that in the face of a hostile Bill the board has any hope of removing him even if they, and their institutional shareholders are unhappy with his performance.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that on the back of these problems they'd get rid of him. If it ever got remotely near that, he and Bill would have a word and he'd "retire to spend more time with his family".
--Q
> It definitely sounds like a performance hit if it's turned on.
No, if anything they pitch it as a performance gain.
The idea is to run Linux (or OS of your choice), with various control plane functions (it can have an IP address, you can do config, stats collection etc etc), on say (making up these numbers!) 4 of the cores, while the other 60 cores are running without an OS (they offer a BIOS like environment with basic functions to get access to the backplane and subsequently the packets) doing data-plane functions, perhaps doing deep-packet inspection for QoS delivery, security functions (IPS?) etc.
The Linux side, particularly the kernel isn't going to contain your real IP, while the data-plane side is all your secret-sauce. It involves embedded style programming without lots of OS support, but you get speed and the networking vendors are used to this sort of model - it sure beats the hell outa doing it in an ASIC on the dataplane side which is what they're used to.
This isn't an attack on open source - it's using it in a sensible fashion IMO. However, for the paranoid types who've seen the fud, they probably pitch this split of operations as a "licensing containment barrier" cause a marketing person thought it might help somewhere.
--Q
I hear what you're saying - it is sort of annoying.
However, a VC funded startup like this has to be focused. They're going to have a list of customers probably about 10 companies long that they want to sell to, and everyone else at this stage is a distraction. Your $1000 does nothing for them, you and your 2000 friends barely helps.
They're going to want Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, Lucent-Alcatel, 3Com, Huaweii, maybe 1 or 2 of the big telcos and that's about it (ok, there are a couple of other big-iron vendors, then the odd niche players like an F5 or so, but it really is limited). They get designed in to core routers at Cisco and they know they succeed.
The interesting thing here will be if they can dislodge the cutting edge in multi-core MIPS CPUs that are currently going in to the current/next-gen products of networking vendors from Cavium (their Octeon line) and RMI (their XLR).
--Q