So that would be 10-20% more front-end hardware, which wouldn't be significant if Rails provided a small productivity boost over equivalent frameworks for "faster" languages.
Sorry, but that's wrong. Have you considered trying, say, math?
Suppose we're talking a 4-developer, 20-server project, which strikes me as typical for something like Twitter. Those developers will have a loaded cost of $600k per year. The servers will be circa 50k to purchase and the same to run for their two-year lifespan. Total two-year cost: $1.2m versus $100k.
A full 20% increase in hardware cost is $20k. That's a whopping 1.67% of the developer budget -- 8 minutes per developer-day -- that you need to save to break even using RoR. Get something like a 5% productivity gain, which is still pretty small, and you're well in the black.
And that's not counting the recruiting boost of using something shiny. Good developers are relatively unmotivated by extra money, so using something relatively new and interesting could easily save you that $20k.
Erlang/Mnesia would have been better fit for what they're doing, it was literally "made for it".
And? That doesn't mean that Ruby on Rails isn't better than whatever they were likely to use, which these days is either PHP or Java. Thanks for the pointer to Mnesia, though.
But what do I know, I don't see any point whatsoever in their site.
That's normally the point where I'd also wonder if perhaps I'm missing something else as well. Congrats on not getting bogged down by pesky humility.
It make me a little sad to see someone who was once on the side of good (the EFF) turn to the side of evil (Wikipedia).
Yes, darn them for providing a great free reference site whose content is all licensed under the GFDL. Thank goodness people are seeing through their sinister plan to educate the populace while proving that open content can work just as well as open software!
Which of those is worth a flip exactly? Anything on the scale of wikipedia or slashdot and how much more hardware does Rails need for equivalent performance to a site done in perl or Zend PHP with an op-cache?
As far as perl or PHP goes, I'm sure Ruby on Rails is about the same to scale. I think all of them have the problem that they're database-centric, so your real scaling issues are about your database and the limitations of a two-tier architecture.
Or wait, he "obstructed" an investigation into whether someone might have committed a crime by outing non-covert agent Plame?
To my mind, obstruction of justice is an incredibly serious crime, especially at this level. A belief that the country is, by and large, justly run is one of the foundations of American society. That, plus the notion that leaks of classified information are serious business, is why the Bush administration appointed Fitzgerald.
If Libby believed it was ok to reveal Plame's identity, then there was no need for him to lie. But he did. Why would he risk so much? We'll never know. And that's exactly why people lie to cops -- to prevent us from finding out the truth and punishing the guilty.
And I note that even Bush isn't agreeing with you. He's saying that Libby's guilty -- and deserving of punishment -- too.
What is this "community" you speak of and who makes it up?
Community on-line or off-, is the set of people who a) show up, b) talk with one another, and c) care.
On-line, and in the context of a company, the community is generally your core set of users that engage enough to feel like they have a relationship. Flickr and EBay are two companies that have a hugely dedicated community and have turned that into a major asset.
I think Google's community is much more diffuse, and has a lot of overlap with internet geekdom in general. And I think they do a better job of engaging that community than Yahoo does. For example:
We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way. Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort, to know what we're saying and why, and to help us refine and improve our policy positions and advocacy strategies. With input and ideas from our users, we'll surely do a better job of fighting for our common interests.
What? They call those dying? I did a lot of floppy disk recoveries in college. And even then we were both awed and slightly scared by the one guy who would do recoveries of corrupt magnetic tapes.
It's a reality of the internet.. the same ease of registration and freedom of use that enables EVERYONE to have domains also enables a secondary market in domain squatting. That's life.. the business world is no different.
You should take a look sometime at photos of people in their natural state, like hunter-gatherer types in the Amazon basin. Note in particular, the many scars, the impressive parasites, and the signs of malnutrition. That is life. What we have is something called "civilization". Look into it -- you might like it.
The kind of controls necessary to prevent this are exactly the kind of controls we should be scared of, and not want.
That would be more persuasive if it did not come after a bunch of proposals for solutions that in fact do not have the problems you mention. Of course, you're probably a human parasite yourself, so going "boogety-boogety" to emotionally anipulate the audience is probably much more appealing than a reasoned argument.
When the NSF directed netsol to begin charging it was $100 for 2 years and $50/yr for renewal. There was widesperead consensus this was WAY too much.
Yes. The widespread consensus was wrong.
The theory was that with lower costs, more people could have the domains they wanted. Everybody wins! Instead, parasites like Ham came in and pretty effectively grabbed most of the domain names whose value was more than the new price.
Net effect: it's no easier to get a new domain, but all the money is going to a few dicks rather than back into funding infrastructure.
Personally, I think $50 a year is too low. $150 a year for corporate domain names with a minimum three-year commit (and no tasting) is the floor of what I'd like to see. No serious business owner will balk at that, but the speculators will have to give up a lot of their portfolio.
For non-corporations, I'm fine if the other TLDs stay cheap.
IF I made a fortune gobbling up prime real estate, nobody would care. why is this different?
People would care about that if you were doing it on this scale, especially from "land" that had just been created via a lot of publicly funded research, and especially with these margins. But it's worse than that in a couple of ways.
First, there has been a huge amount of innovation on the Internet, partly because "real estate" was cheap. But I had friends recently launch a startup, and I'd guess they spent 30 minutes on domain name research for every hour they spent coding. Finding a good name is a giant pain in the ass now.
Second, a lot of people who buy up real estate provide actual value by building stuff or organizing the building of stuff. These guys provide no value to anybody but themselves.
Third, real estate speculators do not actually try to trick customers of existing businesses into going elsewhere by setting up fake highways and fake stores that are only slightly different.
To my mind, they are in the same class of people as spammers. They have found a way to impose substantial costs on other people while funneling a fraction of that value to their pockets. But because the costs imposed on any one person are relatively small, our venal and/or clueless legislators don't bother to knock the parasites loose from the system.
Yes, but the reader has no direct link from the topic or sub-topic. For example, if somebody makes an argument against linux by quoting an "official" source, you couldn't reply AT ALL under wikipedia's rules unless it was an "official" source that had the reply. No footnotes, no nothing. It stands unanswered.
Wikipedia distills the reliable sources in a topic area. In science, for example, that's generally peer-reviewed journals or major recognized experts. If you have an opinion that you think people should know about, then start writing articles in the publications of your field. Or write books and get other experts to note, discuss, and cite them. Then the opinions will get reflected in Wikipedia. Not before.
Wikipedia isn't the place for cutting-edge dialog. It's a knowledge museum.
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
Their motto is "Don't be evil". Of course they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
To my mind, that's been pretty good so far. This is one example that I like; there is no point to academic essay-writing services except to benefit individual students with money while harming both their peers and the educational institutions involved.
Another great example is spammers. They hate spammers. I hate spammers. Spamers impose enormous costs on other people for generally modest profit on their part. But spam is still pretty much legal in the US because legislators are tech-clueless where they aren't just greedy for contributions.
Maybe one day I'll part ways with them, but so far I like their approach a lot more than I like Yahoo's, "Sure we'll help send Chinese dissidents to jail for decades for expressing themeselves."
The relentless pursuit of profit without regard for other factors is also putting your morality into your business. It's just a particularly sad and stunted morality.
I'm not sure I can think of anyone for whom this would be a good deal, unless they knew pretty much for certain that their business would fail anyway.
Silicon Valley is a very connections-driven game. If the numbers quoted in the article are right, then the cost could be worth it for these guys, as connections with the right funding sources can make the difference between success and failure for some. And even if you end up failing, you could make connections that would be valuable.
That's only for companies that only make sense as VC-funded, though. Anybody with a shot at real revenue should certainly steer clear, though.
Does anyone else think that Paul Graham has a lot in common with people like Joel Spolsky: a pretty good writer, worth reading for some interesting ideas, but with rather too much ego given the real significance of their achievements?
The main difference between him and a number of other SV types is that he is a pretty good writer.
Yes, I find him irritating and arrogant all out of proportion with his actual accomplishments. But I regret to say that can be a useful trait in business. I know plenty of people who are really smart and reasonably modest, and almost all of them end up working for arrogant idiots.
If these fresh-out-of-college dreamers only learn how to get somewhere without getting taken for a ride by some relentless self-promoter like Graham, it'll be well worth six percent of their first company.
Maybe routers (which seem to be the worst offenders) will take the hint. [...] A single tri-color LED should work for that and be a lot less annoying.[...] Let people connect to an embedded webserver if they need more information.
Yes, that's a fantastic idea. Computer having trouble talking via Ethernet? Just talk over the Ethernet port to see if the router knows why.
If you don't want to see the lights, ask them to put a cover on the thing. Then those of us who know what the lights are for can lift the cover. Or you could do what I do and put the bits and bobs out of sight, which works just as well.
$20K for 6%? Thats idiotic. A VC looking at that type of deal is not going to be impressed.
6% for $20K plus a seal of approval and a summer of mentoring and promotion from a guy who clearly knows how to toot horns, if mainly his own.
It's still not a deal I'd take. But it probably makes sense for some.
$20K should buy no more than a thenth that amount, and thats expensive.
Seriously? His valuation for some kids who have an idea and half-built prototype is circa $0.3m, which I agree is low. You're suggesting that it's low to put a $3m valuation on 20kloc, a neat notion, and people with no startup experience? If you think that's a good deal, I'll tell you where to send the checks, as I'm sure I can find you plenty of those.
I just don't get the human race. It just seems clear that no matter what century it is, there is some kind of witch hunt or persecution of somebody for something.
Just so you're not doing the same thing, you should read the other side of the story. Personally, I still suspect the college was probably wrong, but not blatantly wrong like TFA suggests.
They started talking about work-related things, and one of them turned to me and said "Are you a Goolger?" (Google employee) and I said no. All three of them suddenly became very careful not to use any terms that would give me a clue what they were talking about- using lots of pronouns and very general type of language as to not disclose any of what they were talking about.
That's not necessarily the NDA, especially the interview one. That's more likely just Google culture, which is to generally keep undisclosed stuff private. That's as it should be; it is to Google's benefit (and to each employee's benefit) to keep places like Microsoft and Yahoo guessing.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Just line out, and initial the parts you want struck. Add the phrase to the effect that by accepting this NDA as modified that Google agrees to it in it's modified entirety. Then get a photocopy of it. Usually companies will accept the modified contract without even looking at it, they are that self-absorbed.
If they haven't even looked at it and you were expecting that, then you don't have "a meeting of the minds", which at the heart of any contract. That will indeed get you out of the NDA.
However, that could well also lose you the job. I'm perfectly willing to negotiate a standard contract; I think the initial version is a good default, not a mandate. But if I ever found a candidate changing a document without saying, "Hey, let's make this more sane by X, Y, and Z," then there is zero chance I'd hire them.
Your strategy probably works well at large, retarded companies. But you should carefully consider how much you want to be working for idiots.
The law doesn't matter in that case - it just means he can't get sued. His sponsors can still pull their funding[...]
Unfortunately, nothing means you can't get sued. As one of my lawyers is fond of saying, "They can sue you for anything." The law decides whether or not you win, but there can be an awful lot of pain and expense between getting sued and winning.
Why is Microsoft the only company constantly expected to make decisions anti to their business model?
I think Slashdot is pretty consistent in expecting companies to make decisions in favor of Slashdot readers. And when they don't, we expect them not to lie to us too much.
The problem with Microsoft is that their business model, which involves creating a fair bit of vendor lock-in and maintaining their monopoly by any means necessary, is one that doesn't fit well with either of those criteria.
and how many customers did you cut off for sending spam (intentional or unintentional) in violation of your TOS?
Nice! He completely blows your claims out of the water, and you just change the subject.
ISPs allow spam because they make more money putting up with it than by dealing with it properly.
Hardly. A lot of them get rid of quite a lot of it, which is why major spammers don't just buy OC3 circuits. But you're right that they don't have an incentive to care about a lot of this. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and blaming individual ISPs won't get you anywhere.
It's compounded by the fact that almost anybody who signs up with an ISP just picks the one with the lowest price in boldface, without worrying about how good or how responsible their provider is. And an added bonus is the geeks who seem to whine when the don't get Rolls Royce service on Fisher Price consumer DSL.
No, I strongly disagree with any sort of port blocking, either inbound or outbound. Unless free and open communications are allowed, they're not an ISP, they're a "web browsing service provider," and they are damaging, not helping, the Internet.
I didn't know they had time machines back in 1995, but that's clearly where your message is coming from.
In 2007, 99.93% of customers of a modern ISP wouldn't know SMTP from a fuel additive. The remaining 0.07% should feel free to ask for dangerous ports to be opened.
I should not be penalized or limited because of the actions of others.
If you move to a bad neighborhood, don't be surprised when people won't come to your house. Sure, it won't be technically your fault, but after the second time they have their car broken into, they will realize it's sure not their fault that you live in the ghetto.
So, is it true that absolutely *no* collage dropout can be considered a genius these days? The fact I've been a self taught workaholic software engineer since an early age doesn't count at all? Is it my fault for starting a career and making money instead of wasting my time over a pointless CS degree?
As somebody else pointed out, their hiring goal isn't to get every good person possible. It's to avoid getting any bad ones while still keeping up a good hiring rate. The correct strategy there is to downcheck people for pretty much any reason they can find.
The founders were both in a top-end CS PhD program when they started Google. Like everybody else, they have a bias toward hiring people like them. Part of that's irrational monkey bias, but part of it makes a lot of sense: it's easiest to evaluate somebody a lot like yourself.
Further, Google is probably one of the places in the world where a super-solid CS education matters most. For your average professional programmer, Moore's Law covers up a lot of flaws. But when your code is going to run on 100,000 boxes or more, a deep understanding can easily save many times your salary.
And beyond that, just the fact that they are filled with eggheads means an egghead background means you'll be able to communicate much more effectively with your colleagues.
So you shouldn't take it personally. Google is what it is. Like, say, Walmart, they've done a good job holding on to their roots and turning that into something very successful. That you don't fit in at Google (or at Walmart) is more about them than it is about you. So don't sweat it.
They want young, smart people. Forget it if you are old (>30) and smart, you won't even make it to the interview.
They've recently hired a number of 35-ish people that I know, so I doubt that's the case.
However, they do probably favor what I think of the "absent-minded professor" type, where 90% of your time it taken up with hacking on one thing or another because you love it so much. That's probably age-biased, as a lot of great technical people eventually discover things like girlfriends, kids, and other hobbies.
Slashdot Mirror
So that would be 10-20% more front-end hardware, which wouldn't be significant if Rails provided a small productivity boost over equivalent frameworks for "faster" languages.
Sorry, but that's wrong. Have you considered trying, say, math?
Suppose we're talking a 4-developer, 20-server project, which strikes me as typical for something like Twitter. Those developers will have a loaded cost of $600k per year. The servers will be circa 50k to purchase and the same to run for their two-year lifespan. Total two-year cost: $1.2m versus $100k.
A full 20% increase in hardware cost is $20k. That's a whopping 1.67% of the developer budget -- 8 minutes per developer-day -- that you need to save to break even using RoR. Get something like a 5% productivity gain, which is still pretty small, and you're well in the black.
And that's not counting the recruiting boost of using something shiny. Good developers are relatively unmotivated by extra money, so using something relatively new and interesting could easily save you that $20k.
Erlang/Mnesia would have been better fit for what they're doing, it was literally "made for it".
And? That doesn't mean that Ruby on Rails isn't better than whatever they were likely to use, which these days is either PHP or Java. Thanks for the pointer to Mnesia, though.
But what do I know, I don't see any point whatsoever in their site.
That's normally the point where I'd also wonder if perhaps I'm missing something else as well. Congrats on not getting bogged down by pesky humility.
It make me a little sad to see someone who was once on the side of good (the EFF) turn to the side of evil (Wikipedia).
Yes, darn them for providing a great free reference site whose content is all licensed under the GFDL. Thank goodness people are seeing through their sinister plan to educate the populace while proving that open content can work just as well as open software!
Which of those is worth a flip exactly? Anything on the scale of wikipedia or slashdot and how much more hardware does Rails need for equivalent performance to a site done in perl or Zend PHP with an op-cache?
Twitter is on the scale of Slashdot, as you can see on Alexa.. You can read about how their site is built and why people expecting to scale are using RoR.
As far as perl or PHP goes, I'm sure Ruby on Rails is about the same to scale. I think all of them have the problem that they're database-centric, so your real scaling issues are about your database and the limitations of a two-tier architecture.
Or wait, he "obstructed" an investigation into whether someone might have committed a crime by outing non-covert agent Plame?
To my mind, obstruction of justice is an incredibly serious crime, especially at this level. A belief that the country is, by and large, justly run is one of the foundations of American society. That, plus the notion that leaks of classified information are serious business, is why the Bush administration appointed Fitzgerald.
If Libby believed it was ok to reveal Plame's identity, then there was no need for him to lie. But he did. Why would he risk so much? We'll never know. And that's exactly why people lie to cops -- to prevent us from finding out the truth and punishing the guilty.
And I note that even Bush isn't agreeing with you. He's saying that Libby's guilty -- and deserving of punishment -- too.
Community on-line or off-, is the set of people who a) show up, b) talk with one another, and c) care.
On-line, and in the context of a company, the community is generally your core set of users that engage enough to feel like they have a relationship. Flickr and EBay are two companies that have a hugely dedicated community and have turned that into a major asset.
I think Google's community is much more diffuse, and has a lot of overlap with internet geekdom in general. And I think they do a better job of engaging that community than Yahoo does. For example: -- From Google's new Public Policy Blog
I can't imagine Yahoo saying something like that and meaning it.
The interesting question: How much does that difference have to do with Yahoo's CEO from 2001-2007 having spent most of his life at Warner Brothers?
My favorite Terry Semel fact: he had never used e-mail before starting at Yahoo[1]. And this was in 2001! No wonder he's done a poor job.
Word is that their software engineering efforts are a sad, sad mess, with a lot of smart people spending most of their time on politics.
[1] Source: The Economist, 10 May 2007, "Face Value: Out-Googled"
What? They call those dying? I did a lot of floppy disk recoveries in college. And even then we were both awed and slightly scared by the one guy who would do recoveries of corrupt magnetic tapes.
It's a reality of the internet.. the same ease of registration and freedom of use that enables EVERYONE to have domains also enables a secondary market in domain squatting. That's life.. the business world is no different.
You should take a look sometime at photos of people in their natural state, like hunter-gatherer types in the Amazon basin. Note in particular, the many scars, the impressive parasites, and the signs of malnutrition. That is life. What we have is something called "civilization". Look into it -- you might like it.
The kind of controls necessary to prevent this are exactly the kind of controls we should be scared of, and not want.
That would be more persuasive if it did not come after a bunch of proposals for solutions that in fact do not have the problems you mention. Of course, you're probably a human parasite yourself, so going "boogety-boogety" to emotionally anipulate the audience is probably much more appealing than a reasoned argument.
When the NSF directed netsol to begin charging it was $100 for 2 years and $50/yr for renewal. There was widesperead consensus this was WAY too much.
Yes. The widespread consensus was wrong.
The theory was that with lower costs, more people could have the domains they wanted. Everybody wins! Instead, parasites like Ham came in and pretty effectively grabbed most of the domain names whose value was more than the new price.
Net effect: it's no easier to get a new domain, but all the money is going to a few dicks rather than back into funding infrastructure.
Personally, I think $50 a year is too low. $150 a year for corporate domain names with a minimum three-year commit (and no tasting) is the floor of what I'd like to see. No serious business owner will balk at that, but the speculators will have to give up a lot of their portfolio.
For non-corporations, I'm fine if the other TLDs stay cheap.
IF I made a fortune gobbling up prime real estate, nobody would care. why is this different?
People would care about that if you were doing it on this scale, especially from "land" that had just been created via a lot of publicly funded research, and especially with these margins. But it's worse than that in a couple of ways.
First, there has been a huge amount of innovation on the Internet, partly because "real estate" was cheap. But I had friends recently launch a startup, and I'd guess they spent 30 minutes on domain name research for every hour they spent coding. Finding a good name is a giant pain in the ass now.
Second, a lot of people who buy up real estate provide actual value by building stuff or organizing the building of stuff. These guys provide no value to anybody but themselves.
Third, real estate speculators do not actually try to trick customers of existing businesses into going elsewhere by setting up fake highways and fake stores that are only slightly different.
To my mind, they are in the same class of people as spammers. They have found a way to impose substantial costs on other people while funneling a fraction of that value to their pockets. But because the costs imposed on any one person are relatively small, our venal and/or clueless legislators don't bother to knock the parasites loose from the system.
Yes, but the reader has no direct link from the topic or sub-topic. For example, if somebody makes an argument against linux by quoting an "official" source, you couldn't reply AT ALL under wikipedia's rules unless it was an "official" source that had the reply. No footnotes, no nothing. It stands unanswered.
Yes. As they say: The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.
Wikipedia distills the reliable sources in a topic area. In science, for example, that's generally peer-reviewed journals or major recognized experts. If you have an opinion that you think people should know about, then start writing articles in the publications of your field. Or write books and get other experts to note, discuss, and cite them. Then the opinions will get reflected in Wikipedia. Not before.
Wikipedia isn't the place for cutting-edge dialog. It's a knowledge museum.
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
Their motto is "Don't be evil". Of course they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
To my mind, that's been pretty good so far. This is one example that I like; there is no point to academic essay-writing services except to benefit individual students with money while harming both their peers and the educational institutions involved.
Another great example is spammers. They hate spammers. I hate spammers. Spamers impose enormous costs on other people for generally modest profit on their part. But spam is still pretty much legal in the US because legislators are tech-clueless where they aren't just greedy for contributions.
Maybe one day I'll part ways with them, but so far I like their approach a lot more than I like Yahoo's, "Sure we'll help send Chinese dissidents to jail for decades for expressing themeselves."
The relentless pursuit of profit without regard for other factors is also putting your morality into your business. It's just a particularly sad and stunted morality.
Rather than outright deletion, Wikipedia should allow "unofficial" opinions to exist somewhere. The "citation police" sometimes get carried away.
They absolutely have a place for that. It's called "the entire rest of the internet".
I'm not sure I can think of anyone for whom this would be a good deal, unless they knew pretty much for certain that their business would fail anyway.
Silicon Valley is a very connections-driven game. If the numbers quoted in the article are right, then the cost could be worth it for these guys, as connections with the right funding sources can make the difference between success and failure for some. And even if you end up failing, you could make connections that would be valuable.
That's only for companies that only make sense as VC-funded, though. Anybody with a shot at real revenue should certainly steer clear, though.
Does anyone else think that Paul Graham has a lot in common with people like Joel Spolsky: a pretty good writer, worth reading for some interesting ideas, but with rather too much ego given the real significance of their achievements?
The main difference between him and a number of other SV types is that he is a pretty good writer.
Yes, I find him irritating and arrogant all out of proportion with his actual accomplishments. But I regret to say that can be a useful trait in business. I know plenty of people who are really smart and reasonably modest, and almost all of them end up working for arrogant idiots.
If these fresh-out-of-college dreamers only learn how to get somewhere without getting taken for a ride by some relentless self-promoter like Graham, it'll be well worth six percent of their first company.
Maybe routers (which seem to be the worst offenders) will take the hint. [...] A single tri-color LED should work for that and be a lot less annoying.[...] Let people connect to an embedded webserver if they need more information.
Yes, that's a fantastic idea. Computer having trouble talking via Ethernet? Just talk over the Ethernet port to see if the router knows why.
If you don't want to see the lights, ask them to put a cover on the thing. Then those of us who know what the lights are for can lift the cover. Or you could do what I do and put the bits and bobs out of sight, which works just as well.
$20K for 6%? Thats idiotic. A VC looking at that type of deal is not going to be impressed.
6% for $20K plus a seal of approval and a summer of mentoring and promotion from a guy who clearly knows how to toot horns, if mainly his own.
It's still not a deal I'd take. But it probably makes sense for some.
$20K should buy no more than a thenth that amount, and thats expensive.
Seriously? His valuation for some kids who have an idea and half-built prototype is circa $0.3m, which I agree is low. You're suggesting that it's low to put a $3m valuation on 20kloc, a neat notion, and people with no startup experience? If you think that's a good deal, I'll tell you where to send the checks, as I'm sure I can find you plenty of those.
I just don't get the human race. It just seems clear that no matter what century it is, there is some kind of witch hunt or persecution of somebody for something.
Just so you're not doing the same thing, you should read the other side of the story. Personally, I still suspect the college was probably wrong, but not blatantly wrong like TFA suggests.
They started talking about work-related things, and one of them turned to me and said "Are you a Goolger?" (Google employee) and I said no. All three of them suddenly became very careful not to use any terms that would give me a clue what they were talking about- using lots of pronouns and very general type of language as to not disclose any of what they were talking about.
That's not necessarily the NDA, especially the interview one. That's more likely just Google culture, which is to generally keep undisclosed stuff private. That's as it should be; it is to Google's benefit (and to each employee's benefit) to keep places like Microsoft and Yahoo guessing.
Just line out, and initial the parts you want struck. Add the phrase to the effect that by accepting this NDA as modified that Google agrees to it in it's modified entirety. Then get a photocopy of it. Usually companies will accept the modified contract without even looking at it, they are that self-absorbed.
If they haven't even looked at it and you were expecting that, then you don't have "a meeting of the minds", which at the heart of any contract. That will indeed get you out of the NDA.
However, that could well also lose you the job. I'm perfectly willing to negotiate a standard contract; I think the initial version is a good default, not a mandate. But if I ever found a candidate changing a document without saying, "Hey, let's make this more sane by X, Y, and Z," then there is zero chance I'd hire them.
Your strategy probably works well at large, retarded companies. But you should carefully consider how much you want to be working for idiots.
One technicality, but an important one:
The law doesn't matter in that case - it just means he can't get sued. His sponsors can still pull their funding[...]
Unfortunately, nothing means you can't get sued. As one of my lawyers is fond of saying, "They can sue you for anything." The law decides whether or not you win, but there can be an awful lot of pain and expense between getting sued and winning.
Why is Microsoft the only company constantly expected to make decisions anti to their business model?
I think Slashdot is pretty consistent in expecting companies to make decisions in favor of Slashdot readers. And when they don't, we expect them not to lie to us too much.
The problem with Microsoft is that their business model, which involves creating a fair bit of vendor lock-in and maintaining their monopoly by any means necessary, is one that doesn't fit well with either of those criteria.
and how many customers did you cut off for sending spam (intentional or unintentional) in violation of your TOS?
Nice! He completely blows your claims out of the water, and you just change the subject.
ISPs allow spam because they make more money putting up with it than by dealing with it properly.
Hardly. A lot of them get rid of quite a lot of it, which is why major spammers don't just buy OC3 circuits. But you're right that they don't have an incentive to care about a lot of this. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and blaming individual ISPs won't get you anywhere.
It's compounded by the fact that almost anybody who signs up with an ISP just picks the one with the lowest price in boldface, without worrying about how good or how responsible their provider is. And an added bonus is the geeks who seem to whine when the don't get Rolls Royce service on Fisher Price consumer DSL.
No, I strongly disagree with any sort of port blocking, either inbound or outbound. Unless free and open communications are allowed, they're not an ISP, they're a "web browsing service provider," and they are damaging, not helping, the Internet.
I didn't know they had time machines back in 1995, but that's clearly where your message is coming from.
In 2007, 99.93% of customers of a modern ISP wouldn't know SMTP from a fuel additive. The remaining 0.07% should feel free to ask for dangerous ports to be opened.
I should not be penalized or limited because of the actions of others.
If you move to a bad neighborhood, don't be surprised when people won't come to your house. Sure, it won't be technically your fault, but after the second time they have their car broken into, they will realize it's sure not their fault that you live in the ghetto.
So, is it true that absolutely *no* collage dropout can be considered a genius these days?
The fact I've been a self taught workaholic software engineer since an early age doesn't count at all?
Is it my fault for starting a career and making money instead of wasting my time over a pointless CS degree?
As somebody else pointed out, their hiring goal isn't to get every good person possible. It's to avoid getting any bad ones while still keeping up a good hiring rate. The correct strategy there is to downcheck people for pretty much any reason they can find.
The founders were both in a top-end CS PhD program when they started Google. Like everybody else, they have a bias toward hiring people like them. Part of that's irrational monkey bias, but part of it makes a lot of sense: it's easiest to evaluate somebody a lot like yourself.
Further, Google is probably one of the places in the world where a super-solid CS education matters most. For your average professional programmer, Moore's Law covers up a lot of flaws. But when your code is going to run on 100,000 boxes or more, a deep understanding can easily save many times your salary.
And beyond that, just the fact that they are filled with eggheads means an egghead background means you'll be able to communicate much more effectively with your colleagues.
So you shouldn't take it personally. Google is what it is. Like, say, Walmart, they've done a good job holding on to their roots and turning that into something very successful. That you don't fit in at Google (or at Walmart) is more about them than it is about you. So don't sweat it.
They want young, smart people. Forget it if you are old (>30) and smart, you won't even make it to the interview.
They've recently hired a number of 35-ish people that I know, so I doubt that's the case.
However, they do probably favor what I think of the "absent-minded professor" type, where 90% of your time it taken up with hacking on one thing or another because you love it so much. That's probably age-biased, as a lot of great technical people eventually discover things like girlfriends, kids, and other hobbies.