Heh, 'Get rid of that snort box. It's not supported.' The stuff I'm talking about is not skunk works. I'm talking corporate IDS, DNS, secure site-to-site tunnels, and other critical uses. Given our budget, they were only answerable by FOSS.
I'm trying to say that they're *using* strategic/critical FOSS and that they'll make an exception ten seconds after they realize that the choice is Fscking Up to live by a principle (after all, disabling key security would be insane!) or looking the other way while reevaluating the support needs. As for that, when we evaluate support contracts, the economic question is: what's the expected support need?
For each app, there's a need to analyze and balance risk, complexity, support needed, etc. But there are a lot of quiet, critical tasks managed by FOSS and the amount of support needed by an average Unix geek equals the amount bought: $0. Hiring a unix geek gets you a DNS admin and a mail admin that can tar and securely copy files to/from a remote server, and purchased support would be frippery. For a few others, we fall back into some on-demand limited contract prospects: I suspect that an ongoing relationship with a Snort wizard or a MySQL wizard or a Sendmail Voodoo master for hire would save me a few dozen hours per year, much like I do when I need a graphic designer for website revamps.
snark: You asked a person apiece at several F500 firms, and think you got an accurate picture of open-source's deployment?
How precious. Send your resume to Gartner.
Hell, I don't tell my supervisor all the times I use FOSS. Two steps up the food chain, and they don't even realize what is or isn't FOSS. We use it for 'nonstrategic' stuff like Snort, SSH, Nessus, ORCA, a few VPN points, webmail, or LDAP./snark: Dropping the snarkiness, you're right that FOSS support seems to be wide open and growing fast. But the answers are solidifying there, too. Anyone that complains about lacking commercial support, just help 'em out by googling for the needed support. The ads you'll get will include support options up the yin-yang, typically, including 5-sigma, 24x7, focussed expertise for certain families of software, service contracts or single-use or per-hour rates, etc.
So far, I haven't succeeded in getting my supervisor to realize that paying me $500 to research/fix stuff isn't cost effective given those options... but when I do, I'll outsource that part of my job.
If you're the sole user, the costs could be high. But, if you're part of a community of users, costs go down fast. Many eyes, and all that.
2 counter-examples come to mind: early unix patch paradigms, which exemplify how users can create software mods without embracing the work of maintaining a custom fork: patch, and publicize the patch so others help you maintain patch compatibility in the face of an advancing source tree... and OpenVMS, BeOS, Amiga/C64/etc communities that are able to push forward with shared code and new hardware, even if the original is going a different direction or has been outright abandoned.
If an author starts acting greedy, unfairly capitalizing on lock-in, forks so far seem to happen almost *just* to marginalize the author and prevent future damage. Open source treats greed as damage, and routes around it.
Parent said modding source is cost-prohibitive: I'm coding on a mammoth, many-years-old, quirky, close-to-the-hardware, vital in-house app. Sparse documentation, varying quality, high complexity. It took me months to get a footing, and a year to get marginal competence. In another year, I'll understand it enough to refactor and improve aspects that are driving me crazy. Meanwhile, my docs are helping in design already, and the parts that have been refactored so far add docs/modularity/etc. As pricey as this learning curve is, there's no way to re-engineer the whole thing in that sort of time. R&D definitely costs more than grabbing nothing-but-source and peeking inside.
Another simpler example: we took a 'redirect' plugin for mozilla, hardcoded a 'spamtrap@mycompany.com' target and autosend, and *presto*, we've got an idiot-proof in-house gadget that feeds our spamAssassin filter with a button-click. Starting at ZERO, my cost was a few hours to come up to speed on the mozilla code.
Meanwhile, in proprietary code, I recall a stat that ~500 man years created win2k. 3 years of development by a couple hundred geeks, yet the code is frozen, unfixable, untweakable, and pulling revenue enough for several thousand nongeek jobs. That is the epitome of inefficiency, in my book. I'm not offended by the revenue; I'm offended by the stagnated code due to the locked code.
Wow, thanks for that little bit of sunshine (hey, I'm up against my own unrealistic deadlines thanks to my PHB).
1 - Refuse the promotion. It baffles management and can get you fired, but that's better than a job you hate. 2 - When the pager starts ringing at all hours, its time to take your client roster and go independent. Or find some consultancy that'll let you come on board ('hang your shingle') for some percentage added to your rate. If you're lucky, they'll even handle calls, marketing, billing, etc. 3 - Look at a plumber's rate card. Yours should look like that, complete with nasty premiums for after-hours and emergency work. 4 - Refuse to train idiots. Keep a personal roster of wizards and swap on-call requests or other favors to give yourself personal time. 5 - Use your clout to grease any issue possible. If remote-admin hardware saves you a 3-hour drive, respond to a 3 am call by saying that you're unavailable due to another pressing task and that it's a damn shame they didn't install X because it'd allow you to fix this problem remotely. Then go back to sleep. Wake, shower, and then drive there to fix. 6 - Ten seconds after your boss adds manboy-friday to your job description, add it to his. If he won't cover your ass in a pinch, let him flop and twitch when he presumes you'll do the same. And see rule 2.
One last thought: work with customers to reinforce yourself as a brand name. Keep contacts with the people that recognize your talent, and send 'em a personal email or card periodically to keep those contacts alive. They'll be who you contact when you transfer or quit. Our phone tech left his firm, he did a lax job of keeping in touch with ex-clients, and I found him when the replacement tech had to call him for advice on our system. Repeatedly, this guy has fallen off our radar over 3 years, and I've hunted him down rather than pay a lesser tech for 3x the hours while they learned the phone system. He's working solo, has an answering service for days/times he won't be calling back quickly, and he's profitable. Considering the hassles I've gone thru to find him, I'd bet half his old customers have lost track of him. If he had even the smallest amount of this sort of self-marketing skill, he'd be in fat city and recruiting/training an assistant.
Watch that plays music? No one wants to do anything except keep time using their watch. I mean no one sensible.
I haven't *owned* a wristwatch in years. I stopped wearing one the day I realized that I always had a cellphone with me that (drum roll) displayed the time.
Likewise, since leaving college I almost never need a calculator. The one in my nokia sucks ass, but in a pinch I'll use it. For tougher stuff, I've got one in my Palm that has engineering functions and does compound TVM/interest calcs. And an optimal single-function device I once called my 2nd brain gathers dust at home.
As for whether this mixing-of-functionalities just an apple/sony question, I was under the impression that ipods acted as a craptabulous address-book, macs gave a slick *integrated* user experience, and so on. I agree Apple's all about obsessing over making things simple and user-friendly, but they're also about transcending old habits when the replacement is elegant and simple.
Simplicity isn't a contradiction to mixed-function. It's just tough to honor both goals at once.
You have a problem and you need help. You are trying to justify smoking on a plane. You can't go a few hours without a smoke? People are doing a favor for your life, how many tmes has it been proven that smoking kills you, and kills you quickly. I'm so glad my city is banning smoking, you people contribute nothing but ill effects to the rest of society. Take a hint and try to quit, its a dirty disgusting habit that shortens your life. It doesn't even calm you until you've become addicted to it. Stop trying to jsutify your actions and instead correct them. Don't force your smoke on other passengers or employees of the airport. If you want to kill yourself, confine it to your house.
Talk about maximum irony, coming from someone named LnxAddct.
Chances are, cute chick doesn't know you're alive. Remedy that by getting presentable (just washed clothes, not a nerdy-suit!) and having a conversation with her. Explain that, while you're cool with her Wifi use, you *need* the MAC. Security reasons. Lock her ass out if she refuses, apologetically. While you're there to get the MAC, offer to tweak firefox, antivir, adaware, etc. Repeat every month, just to make sure she isn't a security risk.
Oh, and don't get your hopes up. But if nothing else, it's practice. Hell, pull a reverse Pygmalion on her: get her advice on pushin' down the nerd quotient.
But for the LOVE of GOD, don't just sit there watchin' her packets fly by without so much as a free six-pack out of the deal.
All Microsoft has to do is support open standards, bust the bejeebers out of security again, and 'work on security' (a remark that admits ActiveX is unkillable but ignores the inevitable forest of.NET security gaps they advocated in paragraph 2).
Check the mirror, dude... your pointy-hair is showing.
I think it's poor judgement coupled with either an unwillingness to learn or deep isolation and a small army of yes-men and yes-women. After monumental success, it seems common to buy into a myth that your shit don't stink. That sort of protection allows/promotes bizarre mindsets like that of Howard Hughes, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and (dah-dum)... George Lucas.
Reading Goldman's 'The Princess Bride' again (the book is clever as hell), I noticed that the difference between the 'good parts version' and the original written by... er... whoever, head like a melon... S. Morgenstern! (love ya, google!) was remarkably similar to the disconnect between early and recent star wars releases.
Lucas has gradually and utterly lost touch with what made Star Wars a success. In geek terms, it's 'Space Opera'. Boy becomes soldier becomes man becomes hero. FUCK all the byzantine, Machavellian political story, Mr. Lucas. Concentrate on telling a rousting-good-story of small people caught up in big events.
The lens of history shows us these stories BECAUSE it can start with the powerful old men and review their pasts for an epic story of some li'l outsider kid. Fiction does this more easily because we're allowed to bend the facts.
Lucas thinks we give a rat's ass about the Archduke Ferdinand. We mostly don't. We like to see the little guy succeed. Rags to Riches or kid-to-emperor. We recognize the pattern, we trust the storyteller and we like to identify with the protagonist. That explains the popularity of Gary Cooper and/or Sargeant York, Audie Murphy, the Band of Brothers series, or the individuals portrayed in Private Ryan.
I used to think that American Graffiti and other early Lucas work was mindnumbingly dense because he was learning. Now I believe it's because Star Wars is the anomaly. Lucas has no CLUE why Star Wars was successful.
I *love* complex stories, like B5. But they're a niche. I like 'em, but someone that likes soap operas isn't gonna like 'em. And so on with other niches. This isn't about the niche success of Star Wars, which might be deserved. It's about Star Wars' decay from universal success to a niche movie making huge money because of inertia, rather than picking up momentum).
In a perfect world, someone else would silence his relevance by reinventing the success. Not B5. Not firefly. Star Wars, revisited.
My thoughts also apply to the gradual decay of the Matrix trilogy, btw.
Quants, the near-mythic supergenius wizards of investment banking... use VB? I'd expected Matlab, Mathematica, or some wicked n-dimension proprietary data-trend visualization code. But it's Excel and VB. Heh, how lame is that. Coming from a math/physics background that matches the desired resume, I'd always sighed enviously at the big pay and aura they're given. Well, never again! I fart in your general direction, you under-endowed vee-bee weenies!!!
Oh, and there's the mother of all custom trojan/exploits, just begging to be written. Whether done to monitor their transactions for profit or just do a bit of petty data-tweaking to upset their delicate model, megabucks depending on excel and VB makes for a target-rich environment.
I don't get this. If they're gonna lose a grand, why not at least raise the price accordingly and try to sell them before calling it quits? I ask, because a friend has a cottage business where he makes structural/mechanical parts to convert cars, vans, classic pickups, etc. to 4-wheel-drive. Seems that the market could have just as easily adapted here, letting some bubba take over the job/risk of modding these things. Likewise on battery risks: let someone take new tech and design the charger/battery setups to refurb the car for another decade of use.
I'd have thought of buying one. My car runs 13 mins a day on average. If it weren't so freakin' cold in the winter and I didn't fear soccer-moms-in-SUV's, I'd own a scooter.
Kudos to GM for trying, though. We're seeing progress with hybrids, so the chapter may be closed but another pure-EV chapter might happen based on the tricks they're learning from the Insight, Prius, Civic, Escape (is that Ford's SUV), and that SCHWEET Lexus RX400h hybrid.
A question for patent attorneys (since IANAL): is there a way to write a challenge to such a filing, akin to an amicus brief or a deposition, stating a position or evidence against a given claim, to get it into the official record in case this is ever abused? Seems like that'd be a simple enough thing...
If the PATRIOT Act is too onerous, the critics have the obligation of suggesting how we might better balance the needs to protect the safety of our nation while maintaining civil rights.
No, I really don't have to give you a better way to carry out your goals. That's a specious argument. They're my rights. I get 'em, the guv'mint shouldn't take 'em. End of discussion.
Who deserves credit between leader and primary authors is a gordian knot. I won't go there. A good technical team goes to hell with a crap leader, a crap team can't excel even with a good leader. Some (many?) techies can't step back and see the real-world issues of the things they create. And some (many?) leaders can ruin perfectly brilliant ideas. In that context, Marc was *in charge* of Mosaic when it was taking the world by storm, so he gets credit, fair or not.
To distance the discussion from anti-Marc emotions, let's take Steve Jobs. As I said on another comment made on this thread, I dislike Jobs and his style, but respect what he's done. I don't care about Jobs' technical abilities. They don't matter to me. The fact is, he's had supervisory control of teams that created Apple, the Mac, iPods, Pixar, and so on. At some point, even if he hasn't been author of any of them, he deserves considerable credit for repeatedly recognizing good ideas, recognizing talent, and managing them to a brilliant finish.
Am just gonna drop the whole Marc thing. This is exponentially more attention than I've given him in the last several years, and I was ok with that. I doubt you'll object if I say I expect to forget him again until he either enters the room I'm in, impresses me again, or shows up on the Obit page. Thanks for the commentary, though.
As for "pinnacle" in "jumped the shark": you do know that, by definition, things "start going downhill" immediately after the pinnacle, right?
But Mosaic wasn't jumping the shark! It was the BEGINNING of something big. Until the underlying hypertext language and engine was simple (credit CERN and NCSA (and thus Marc according to Rob McCool's quote in apache's history file)) and the interface was suddenly elegant and powerful and easy (Mosaic), hypertext didn't have traction. And the screaming speed that it acquired is because it *was* revolutionary.
Thinking back, Loudcloud was when I sorta shrugged about MA. The huge press and hype he got there fits 'Jump the Shark'. And his being non-news for enough years confirms that he's gonna have to work harder/smarter than he has to score another success. Name and luck alone won't give him a pass. All that said, Mosaic was enough to merit the ooh-ah's.
Oh, and to be honest, Clark's got a huge rep, but I haven't seen anything 'luminous' since SGI. That was seriously cool. Netscape? Nah... the coolest part was in it unsettling the stock market's self-perceptions. Netscape and everything since then has been applying tech to needed inefficiencies. Nothing so cool, really. Just a matter of Clark recognizing and capitalizing on profitable markets. If SGI was his Che Guevera moment, Netscape and the recent past are more a tech Adnan Khashoggi.
Now to really change the subject to show my meaning: I think that Jobs merits ooh-ah attention (far more than the above 2), but would never work for him, work with him, or even expect to like him. He's been behind several things I deeply respect/admire, and over 25 years has repeatedly led 'luminous' projects that eclipse the above 2's track record.
The B-school discussion I'd like to hear is whether examples exist of Jobs' level of repeated successes without the negative personality traits, of if they're always linked. Do you have to be a overweening type-A tyrant to repeatedly pull insanely-great off?
Nah, I get you just fine: you want famous people to be worthy of the fame and you're quick to hate 'em if they're flawed. Whatever. I don't do that dance, either.
As for your definition, conventional wisdom (and Urbandictionary) says Jumping the shark is:
when your favorite show starts to flag and go downhill, as when Fonzie jumped the shark on waterskis. We all knew that Happy Days was on its way down then. (doesn't fit, since he was unknown *until* after creating Mosaic)
A semi-popular phrase for "selling out" or turning into shit. (he was so unknown that he literally had nothing yet to sell out in Apr '93. Even leaving for netscape wasn't that moment, since it wasn't until Netscape's success that Microsoft and the world paid attention.)
The precise moment when you recognize that something is really over although it's momentum carries it on for a few steps. (and things really have gone on a *few* steps since then, haven't they?)
I don't see a mention of pinnacle in those.
Mozilla is oedipal is *my* projection? No, Mosaic-killer
is one of the two common attributions for Mozilla. I'd bet that having that ambiguity was itself a factor in the name. And that marketing wonks discarded the name in favor of Netscape because mozilla just doesn't parse well for most folks. 'Netscape' had stronger branding potential. This, incidentally, is a theme that repeats in the lagging name recognition of Mozilla vs. fledgling browser Firefox.
As for seeing it all unfold since '90, feel free to elaborate, since that predates Mosaic by a few years. At Sun? At NCSA? You brag, but you're remarkably thin on any details. Insider view? I mean, Sun had how many thousand employees in '90? And Netscape exploded at a rate of thousands per year. I am nowhere near Silicon Valley and I have a dozen friends that are insiders. Most of them have anecdotes and tiny glimpses and rumors.
As for Andreesen's role being a poster-boy, no kidding. He even tended
to say as much back in Netscape's first couple years. Clark? Now THERE's someone whose role in this exemplifies shark jumpin'. The only thing he hasn't done (or done wrong) is sell bottled sugar water. I mean, the industry is glutted with still-living CEO/CIO/CTO almost-greats. That *happens* when a trillion-dollar economy comes to life in a single lifetime.
I'm convinced that most chief executives are cheerleaders. Some are skilled or even brilliant. It takes luck and skill to succeed wildly or repeatedly (and then they write books about you). In an opportune moment, luck can get rid of any need for skill. But all the skill in the world won't help you if you're unlucky the one time it could have mattered.
Unfortunately, investors are quick to fall victim to chasing fame instead of skill. It's easier to recognize, I guess.
I'm not upset. And I think I got skipped by the hero-worship fairy, because I've never, unless ooh-ah is a mantra or something closer to religious genuflecting than I ever meant.
Second verse, same as the first, little bit louder: I wrote "I won't argue that celebrity (even among nerds) always overshoots real value, and that I haven't seen Andreesen do anything that impressed me since then".
I read your 'I've hated Marc since...' comment here, and that's a bit of negative bias. But you're forgetting that knack we all have for holding two irreconcilable views at once: Back when I first got internet access, I remember Michael Hart (Project Gutenberg's originator) and others ranting against apps that were guilty of wasteful packet-spewing. Now, I respect the hell out of Mr Hart (and his lifelong dedication to the idea), but even then I *knew* that he was wrong about bandwidth. Now, Hart was railing against something fairly important to me, but his other accomplishments still get him a four-star rating in my book. Likewise, Marc gets a free beer from me even if he was to confirm he's startlingly two-faced (i.e., if he still opposes government-funded research). Hell, I scarcely know anyone I can agree with about most things. Living in a very conservative state makes this a central theme for me, in fact.
Sticking to the the theme Hart railed on for a moment, Mosaic (and the image tag in particular, since you say it's Andreeson's fault) made the shift that single-handedly kicked off an astronomical increase in public data consumption. With it came an expansion of the broadband market, until I'm on an n-megabit connection that costs me less per month than a nice lunch date. I miss many aspects of the old net, and loathe aspects of what we've become, but I don't go a day without appreciating cheap fat bandwidth and wishing for more, whether it's remote server work or web-based training or just some huge data transfer.
Marc gets a free lifetime supply of geek cred because we saw him hit the ball out of the park once. Even if we downgrade his role like you, to his being a project lead that crufted the job, he had vision and execution that Berners-Lee and others hadn't had. Plus, he and his team gets bonus points for fsckin' brilliant execution of Mosaic's elegant overall interface.
As for jumping the shark, that implies desperation, and the beginning of the end. You'd really pick Mosaic or the Image tag for that moment? Hardly. I mean, his celebrity makes him such a public figure that he's a target-rich environment: Facing off and losing to Redmond, calling the project Mozilla (the Oedipal issues of "Mosaic Killer"), pricing Netscape to zero, selling the firm to AOL. Loudcloud. Whatever this current venture is all about. And you'd pick Mosaic?
-- "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not, 'Eureka! I found it!,' but, 'Thats's funny...'." -- Isaac Asimov
I won't argue that celebrity (even among nerds) always overshoots real value, and that I haven't seen Andreesen do anything that impressed me since then (unless you count the sheer amount of VC largesse he's passed along to techies hired by his companies... ka-ching!)
But I'd used and struggled to interest others in hypertext systems using three other platforms before a friend showed me Mosaic 0.9 for X/Motif in early '93. Mosaic was nothing less than revolutionary. For that single thing, like Woz's work on Apples and a few others, Marc has earned a whole lifetime of ooh-ahh in my book.
Oh, and downplaying Mosaic to 'jumping the shark' is either wrong-headed, revisionist, or a manifestation of some sort of jealousy issue you're on your own to work out. If Mosaic was such a marginal improvement, it wouldn't have completely uprooted gopher/wais/etc. Cern's hypertext tool looked like a VT100 had barfed, gophers were stodgy and centralized rather than allowing populist page-creation like cern or Mosaic did, Apple's hypercard stack (? I forget the product name, if that's not it) was elegant but proprietary and completely oblivious to the internet or widespread cross-linking, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, 'Get rid of that snort box. It's not supported.' The stuff I'm talking about is not skunk works. I'm talking corporate IDS, DNS, secure site-to-site tunnels, and other critical uses. Given our budget, they were only answerable by FOSS.
I'm trying to say that they're *using* strategic/critical FOSS and that they'll make an exception ten seconds after they realize that the choice is Fscking Up to live by a principle (after all, disabling key security would be insane!) or looking the other way while reevaluating the support needs. As for that, when we evaluate support contracts, the economic question is: what's the expected support need?
For each app, there's a need to analyze and balance risk, complexity, support needed, etc. But there are a lot of quiet, critical tasks managed by FOSS and the amount of support needed by an average Unix geek equals the amount bought: $0. Hiring a unix geek gets you a DNS admin and a mail admin that can tar and securely copy files to/from a remote server, and purchased support would be frippery. For a few others, we fall back into some on-demand limited contract prospects: I suspect that an ongoing relationship with a Snort wizard or a MySQL wizard or a Sendmail Voodoo master for hire would save me a few dozen hours per year, much like I do when I need a graphic designer for website revamps.
snark:
/snark:
You asked a person apiece at several F500 firms, and think you got an accurate picture of open-source's deployment?
How precious. Send your resume to Gartner.
Hell, I don't tell my supervisor all the times I use FOSS. Two steps up the food chain, and they don't even realize what is or isn't FOSS. We use it for 'nonstrategic' stuff like Snort, SSH, Nessus, ORCA, a few VPN points, webmail, or LDAP.
Dropping the snarkiness, you're right that FOSS support seems to be wide open and growing fast. But the answers are solidifying there, too. Anyone that complains about lacking commercial support, just help 'em out by googling for the needed support. The ads you'll get will include support options up the yin-yang, typically, including 5-sigma, 24x7, focussed expertise for certain families of software, service contracts or single-use or per-hour rates, etc.
So far, I haven't succeeded in getting my supervisor to realize that paying me $500 to research/fix stuff isn't cost effective given those options... but when I do, I'll outsource that part of my job.
Parent forgets you can always fork.
If you're the sole user, the costs could be high. But, if you're part of a community of users, costs go down fast. Many eyes, and all that.
2 counter-examples come to mind: early unix patch paradigms, which exemplify how users can create software mods without embracing the work of maintaining a custom fork: patch, and publicize the patch so others help you maintain patch compatibility in the face of an advancing source tree... and OpenVMS, BeOS, Amiga/C64/etc communities that are able to push forward with shared code and new hardware, even if the original is going a different direction or has been outright abandoned.
If an author starts acting greedy, unfairly capitalizing on lock-in, forks so far seem to happen almost *just* to marginalize the author and prevent future damage. Open source treats greed as damage, and routes around it.
Parent said modding source is cost-prohibitive: I'm coding on a mammoth, many-years-old, quirky, close-to-the-hardware, vital in-house app. Sparse documentation, varying quality, high complexity. It took me months to get a footing, and a year to get marginal competence. In another year, I'll understand it enough to refactor and improve aspects that are driving me crazy. Meanwhile, my docs are helping in design already, and the parts that have been refactored so far add docs/modularity/etc. As pricey as this learning curve is, there's no way to re-engineer the whole thing in that sort of time. R&D definitely costs more than grabbing nothing-but-source and peeking inside.
Another simpler example: we took a 'redirect' plugin for mozilla, hardcoded a 'spamtrap@mycompany.com' target and autosend, and *presto*, we've got an idiot-proof in-house gadget that feeds our spamAssassin filter with a button-click. Starting at ZERO, my cost was a few hours to come up to speed on the mozilla code.
Meanwhile, in proprietary code, I recall a stat that ~500 man years created win2k. 3 years of development by a couple hundred geeks, yet the code is frozen, unfixable, untweakable, and pulling revenue enough for several thousand nongeek jobs. That is the epitome of inefficiency, in my book. I'm not offended by the revenue; I'm offended by the stagnated code due to the locked code.
Tomorrow? Saturday? I think you meant Sunday. Oh, and you get your wish in 2007, 2012, 2018, 2029.
Its also called hitch-hiking. 9 parts cool, 1 part spooky nasty shit.
See authentication and validation. Also see 'found dead in a ditch'.
Wow, thanks for that little bit of sunshine (hey, I'm up against my own unrealistic deadlines thanks to my PHB).
1 - Refuse the promotion. It baffles management and can get you fired, but that's better than a job you hate.
2 - When the pager starts ringing at all hours, its time to take your client roster and go independent. Or find some consultancy that'll let you come on board ('hang your shingle') for some percentage added to your rate. If you're lucky, they'll even handle calls, marketing, billing, etc.
3 - Look at a plumber's rate card. Yours should look like that, complete with nasty premiums for after-hours and emergency work.
4 - Refuse to train idiots. Keep a personal roster of wizards and swap on-call requests or other favors to give yourself personal time.
5 - Use your clout to grease any issue possible. If remote-admin hardware saves you a 3-hour drive, respond to a 3 am call by saying that you're unavailable due to another pressing task and that it's a damn shame they didn't install X because it'd allow you to fix this problem remotely. Then go back to sleep. Wake, shower, and then drive there to fix.
6 - Ten seconds after your boss adds manboy-friday to your job description, add it to his. If he won't cover your ass in a pinch, let him flop and twitch when he presumes you'll do the same. And see rule 2.
One last thought: work with customers to reinforce yourself as a brand name. Keep contacts with the people that recognize your talent, and send 'em a personal email or card periodically to keep those contacts alive. They'll be who you contact when you transfer or quit. Our phone tech left his firm, he did a lax job of keeping in touch with ex-clients, and I found him when the replacement tech had to call him for advice on our system. Repeatedly, this guy has fallen off our radar over 3 years, and I've hunted him down rather than pay a lesser tech for 3x the hours while they learned the phone system. He's working solo, has an answering service for days/times he won't be calling back quickly, and he's profitable. Considering the hassles I've gone thru to find him, I'd bet half his old customers have lost track of him. If he had even the smallest amount of this sort of self-marketing skill, he'd be in fat city and recruiting/training an assistant.
(for the non-regex nerds, I just said "I know you are but what am I")
Likewise, since leaving college I almost never need a calculator. The one in my nokia sucks ass, but in a pinch I'll use it. For tougher stuff, I've got one in my Palm that has engineering functions and does compound TVM/interest calcs. And an optimal single-function device I once called my 2nd brain gathers dust at home.
As for whether this mixing-of-functionalities just an apple/sony question, I was under the impression that ipods acted as a craptabulous address-book, macs gave a slick *integrated* user experience, and so on. I agree Apple's all about obsessing over making things simple and user-friendly, but they're also about transcending old habits when the replacement is elegant and simple.
Simplicity isn't a contradiction to mixed-function. It's just tough to honor both goals at once.
Talk about maximum irony, coming from someone named LnxAddct .
No kidding.
Chances are, cute chick doesn't know you're alive. Remedy that by getting presentable (just washed clothes, not a nerdy-suit!) and having a conversation with her. Explain that, while you're cool with her Wifi use, you *need* the MAC. Security reasons. Lock her ass out if she refuses, apologetically. While you're there to get the MAC, offer to tweak firefox, antivir, adaware, etc. Repeat every month, just to make sure she isn't a security risk.
Oh, and don't get your hopes up. But if nothing else, it's practice. Hell, pull a reverse Pygmalion on her: get her advice on pushin' down the nerd quotient.
But for the LOVE of GOD, don't just sit there watchin' her packets fly by without so much as a free six-pack out of the deal.
Translation:
.NET security gaps they advocated in paragraph 2).
All Microsoft has to do is support open standards, bust the bejeebers out of security again, and 'work on security' (a remark that admits ActiveX is unkillable but ignores the inevitable forest of
Check the mirror, dude... your pointy-hair is showing.
I don't think it's greed.
... er... whoever, head like a melon... S. Morgenstern! (love ya, google!) was remarkably similar to the disconnect between early and recent star wars releases.
I think it's poor judgement coupled with either an unwillingness to learn or deep isolation and a small army of yes-men and yes-women. After monumental success, it seems common to buy into a myth that your shit don't stink. That sort of protection allows/promotes bizarre mindsets like that of Howard Hughes, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and (dah-dum)... George Lucas.
Reading Goldman's 'The Princess Bride' again (the book is clever as hell), I noticed that the difference between the 'good parts version' and the original written by
Lucas has gradually and utterly lost touch with what made Star Wars a success. In geek terms, it's 'Space Opera'. Boy becomes soldier becomes man becomes hero. FUCK all the byzantine, Machavellian political story, Mr. Lucas. Concentrate on telling a rousting-good-story of small people caught up in big events.
The lens of history shows us these stories BECAUSE it can start with the powerful old men and review their pasts for an epic story of some li'l outsider kid. Fiction does this more easily because we're allowed to bend the facts.
Lucas thinks we give a rat's ass about the Archduke Ferdinand. We mostly don't. We like to see the little guy succeed. Rags to Riches or kid-to-emperor. We recognize the pattern, we trust the storyteller and we like to identify with the protagonist. That explains the popularity of Gary Cooper and/or Sargeant York, Audie Murphy, the Band of Brothers series, or the individuals portrayed in Private Ryan.
I used to think that American Graffiti and other early Lucas work was mindnumbingly dense because he was learning. Now I believe it's because Star Wars is the anomaly. Lucas has no CLUE why Star Wars was successful.
I *love* complex stories, like B5. But they're a niche. I like 'em, but someone that likes soap operas isn't gonna like 'em. And so on with other niches. This isn't about the niche success of Star Wars, which might be deserved. It's about Star Wars' decay from universal success to a niche movie making huge money because of inertia, rather than picking up momentum).
In a perfect world, someone else would silence his relevance by reinventing the success. Not B5. Not firefly. Star Wars, revisited.
My thoughts also apply to the gradual decay of the Matrix trilogy, btw.
Don't forget this baby: SGI Indigo. Astounding graphics, raw power, and a gorgeous blue case.
Quants, the near-mythic supergenius wizards of investment banking... use VB? I'd expected Matlab, Mathematica, or some wicked n-dimension proprietary data-trend visualization code. But it's Excel and VB. Heh, how lame is that. Coming from a math/physics background that matches the desired resume, I'd always sighed enviously at the big pay and aura they're given. Well, never again! I fart in your general direction, you under-endowed vee-bee weenies!!!
Oh, and there's the mother of all custom trojan/exploits, just begging to be written. Whether done to monitor their transactions for profit or just do a bit of petty data-tweaking to upset their delicate model, megabucks depending on excel and VB makes for a target-rich environment.
Of course, it'd also be an improvement if the patent reviewer *read* the freakin' challenge brief and said: uh, no way is this a valid patent.
But then, we've devolved way beyond the grasp of mere common sense, haven't we.
I don't get this. If they're gonna lose a grand, why not at least raise the price accordingly and try to sell them before calling it quits? I ask, because a friend has a cottage business where he makes structural/mechanical parts to convert cars, vans, classic pickups, etc. to 4-wheel-drive. Seems that the market could have just as easily adapted here, letting some bubba take over the job/risk of modding these things. Likewise on battery risks: let someone take new tech and design the charger/battery setups to refurb the car for another decade of use.
I'd have thought of buying one. My car runs 13 mins a day on average. If it weren't so freakin' cold in the winter and I didn't fear soccer-moms-in-SUV's, I'd own a scooter.
Kudos to GM for trying, though. We're seeing progress with hybrids, so the chapter may be closed but another pure-EV chapter might happen based on the tricks they're learning from the Insight, Prius, Civic, Escape (is that Ford's SUV), and that SCHWEET Lexus RX400h hybrid.
A question for patent attorneys (since IANAL): is there a way to write a challenge to such a filing, akin to an amicus brief or a deposition, stating a position or evidence against a given claim, to get it into the official record in case this is ever abused? Seems like that'd be a simple enough thing...
I can't tell if this is an unintentional oxymoron or of there's some cool/hot bad/good jargon in use.
To distance the discussion from anti-Marc emotions, let's take Steve Jobs. As I said on another comment made on this thread, I dislike Jobs and his style, but respect what he's done. I don't care about Jobs' technical abilities. They don't matter to me. The fact is, he's had supervisory control of teams that created Apple, the Mac, iPods, Pixar, and so on. At some point, even if he hasn't been author of any of them, he deserves considerable credit for repeatedly recognizing good ideas, recognizing talent, and managing them to a brilliant finish.
Thinking back, Loudcloud was when I sorta shrugged about MA. The huge press and hype he got there fits 'Jump the Shark'. And his being non-news for enough years confirms that he's gonna have to work harder/smarter than he has to score another success. Name and luck alone won't give him a pass. All that said, Mosaic was enough to merit the ooh-ah's.
Oh, and to be honest, Clark's got a huge rep, but I haven't seen anything 'luminous' since SGI. That was seriously cool. Netscape? Nah... the coolest part was in it unsettling the stock market's self-perceptions. Netscape and everything since then has been applying tech to needed inefficiencies. Nothing so cool, really. Just a matter of Clark recognizing and capitalizing on profitable markets. If SGI was his Che Guevera moment, Netscape and the recent past are more a tech Adnan Khashoggi.
Now to really change the subject to show my meaning: I think that Jobs merits ooh-ah attention (far more than the above 2), but would never work for him, work with him, or even expect to like him. He's been behind several things I deeply respect/admire, and over 25 years has repeatedly led 'luminous' projects that eclipse the above 2's track record.
The B-school discussion I'd like to hear is whether examples exist of Jobs' level of repeated successes without the negative personality traits, of if they're always linked. Do you have to be a overweening type-A tyrant to repeatedly pull insanely-great off?
As for your definition, conventional wisdom (and Urbandictionary) says Jumping the shark is:
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when your favorite show starts to flag and go downhill, as when Fonzie jumped the shark on waterskis. We all knew that Happy Days was on its way down then. (doesn't fit, since he was unknown *until* after creating Mosaic)
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A semi-popular phrase for "selling out" or turning into shit. (he was so unknown that he literally had nothing yet to sell out in Apr '93. Even leaving for netscape wasn't that moment, since it wasn't until Netscape's success that Microsoft and the world paid attention.)
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The precise moment when you recognize that something is really over although it's momentum carries it on for a few steps. (and things really have gone on a *few* steps since then, haven't they?)
I don't see a mention of pinnacle in those.Mozilla is oedipal is *my* projection? No, Mosaic-killer is one of the two common attributions for Mozilla. I'd bet that having that ambiguity was itself a factor in the name. And that marketing wonks discarded the name in favor of Netscape because mozilla just doesn't parse well for most folks. 'Netscape' had stronger branding potential. This, incidentally, is a theme that repeats in the lagging name recognition of Mozilla vs. fledgling browser Firefox.
As for seeing it all unfold since '90, feel free to elaborate, since that predates Mosaic by a few years. At Sun? At NCSA? You brag, but you're remarkably thin on any details. Insider view? I mean, Sun had how many thousand employees in '90? And Netscape exploded at a rate of thousands per year. I am nowhere near Silicon Valley and I have a dozen friends that are insiders. Most of them have anecdotes and tiny glimpses and rumors.
As for Andreesen's role being a poster-boy, no kidding. He even tended to say as much back in Netscape's first couple years. Clark? Now THERE's someone whose role in this exemplifies shark jumpin'. The only thing he hasn't done (or done wrong) is sell bottled sugar water. I mean, the industry is glutted with still-living CEO/CIO/CTO almost-greats. That *happens* when a trillion-dollar economy comes to life in a single lifetime.
I'm convinced that most chief executives are cheerleaders. Some are skilled or even brilliant. It takes luck and skill to succeed wildly or repeatedly (and then they write books about you). In an opportune moment, luck can get rid of any need for skill. But all the skill in the world won't help you if you're unlucky the one time it could have mattered.
Unfortunately, investors are quick to fall victim to chasing fame instead of skill. It's easier to recognize, I guess.
I'm not upset. And I think I got skipped by the hero-worship fairy, because I've never, unless ooh-ah is a mantra or something closer to religious genuflecting than I ever meant.
...' comment here, and that's a bit of negative bias. But you're forgetting that knack we all have for holding two irreconcilable views at once: Back when I first got internet access, I remember Michael Hart (Project Gutenberg's originator) and others ranting against apps that were guilty of wasteful packet-spewing. Now, I respect the hell out of Mr Hart (and his lifelong dedication to the idea), but even then I *knew* that he was wrong about bandwidth. Now, Hart was railing against something fairly important to me, but his other accomplishments still get him a four-star rating in my book. Likewise, Marc gets a free beer from me even if he was to confirm he's startlingly two-faced (i.e., if he still opposes government-funded research). Hell, I scarcely know anyone I can agree with about most things. Living in a very conservative state makes this a central theme for me, in fact.
Second verse, same as the first, little bit louder: I wrote "I won't argue that celebrity (even among nerds) always overshoots real value, and that I haven't seen Andreesen do anything that impressed me since then".
I read your 'I've hated Marc since
Sticking to the the theme Hart railed on for a moment, Mosaic (and the image tag in particular, since you say it's Andreeson's fault) made the shift that single-handedly kicked off an astronomical increase in public data consumption. With it came an expansion of the broadband market, until I'm on an n-megabit connection that costs me less per month than a nice lunch date. I miss many aspects of the old net, and loathe aspects of what we've become, but I don't go a day without appreciating cheap fat bandwidth and wishing for more, whether it's remote server work or web-based training or just some huge data transfer.
Marc gets a free lifetime supply of geek cred because we saw him hit the ball out of the park once. Even if we downgrade his role like you, to his being a project lead that crufted the job, he had vision and execution that Berners-Lee and others hadn't had. Plus, he and his team gets bonus points for fsckin' brilliant execution of Mosaic's elegant overall interface.
As for jumping the shark, that implies desperation, and the beginning of the end. You'd really pick Mosaic or the Image tag for that moment? Hardly. I mean, his celebrity makes him such a public figure that he's a target-rich environment: Facing off and losing to Redmond, calling the project Mozilla (the Oedipal issues of "Mosaic Killer"), pricing Netscape to zero, selling the firm to AOL. Loudcloud. Whatever this current venture is all about. And you'd pick Mosaic?
--
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not, 'Eureka! I found it!,' but, 'Thats's funny...'." -- Isaac Asimov
But I'd used and struggled to interest others in hypertext systems using three other platforms before a friend showed me Mosaic 0.9 for X/Motif in early '93. Mosaic was nothing less than revolutionary. For that single thing, like Woz's work on Apples and a few others, Marc has earned a whole lifetime of ooh-ahh in my book.
Oh, and downplaying Mosaic to 'jumping the shark' is either wrong-headed, revisionist, or a manifestation of some sort of jealousy issue you're on your own to work out. If Mosaic was such a marginal improvement, it wouldn't have completely uprooted gopher/wais/etc. Cern's hypertext tool looked like a VT100 had barfed, gophers were stodgy and centralized rather than allowing populist page-creation like cern or Mosaic did, Apple's hypercard stack (? I forget the product name, if that's not it) was elegant but proprietary and completely oblivious to the internet or widespread cross-linking, and so on.