This story hits very close to home for myself -- I've sold two companies to larger companies where they commercialized my software. When you're a scrappy startup, you ship instantly. When you get incorporated into a larger organization, you don't ship instantly, which hurts because your intrinsic motivation (for the A-listers and entrepreneurs anyway) is shipping.
One shocking thing in the article for me is just how much people would give up in order to ship faster -- startups that got acquired would give up some of the acquisition money in order to ship faster in the new company. It's probably a limited sample, but I know I've felt that way. This is a large portion of what I call "suck" -- things that slow down shipping. I'm not anti-QA, but after a particular point all you did was slow down shipping.
One satisfying aspect of the work I did at the last acquiring company is that every time I checked in code, I knew I could with a straight face recommend that we ship it. I mean, it wasn't a full QA pass, but it was code with a supporting set of automated unit tests incorporated into a system designed as an extensible framework. Any negative impact would be isolated to that specific functionality (high cohesion, low coupling). A small group of internal power users and my own server would take the daily builds and give feedback as to how it felt in production and report any major issues.
The message here seems to be "if you can optimize the process in some way, optimize it so you ship faster". And in the meantime, go ahead and pretend like you're shipping every day (a complete, ready-to-go, high quality build). You'll be surprised how much better you feel even with that.
The longest word isn't found in the 'a much better answer' link, but rather the other one, somewhat misleadingly. The word, in case you're interested, is supposed to be 'devertebrated', though the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't recognise it.
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
You're implying that there's an invariant API they're using to get this done, and presuming that it's going to follow the design of everything before it. They're not stupid -- they see the number of platforms currently in use, and they've made it a point to explicitly say that supporting rails, Python and PHP is on the roadmap. So as much as you might bitch about the prior desktop APIs (I'm with you there), I'm not sure that a completely new service will necessarily take a wrong turn, especially if compatibility with the popular web application environments is a stated goal.
I look at it from the standpoint of "how hard is it to roll my own EC2 instances and scale up and down based on load?" and "OK, so let's presume that Google actually ends up shipping App Engine, does it meet my needs?" and I think that Azure could be a fit.
Of course they might not end up delivering everything they said (or I could have made it up). But I wouldn't trivially reject the service just because they're made some painful APIs in the past.
I know that Microsoft is making strides with their Microsoft Virtualization efforts. So what prevents them from going in a completely new OS direction and providing legacy application support through virtualization?
I'm not sure it's a lot. More a problem of agreeing it's the right thing to do than the technical work required. So political vs. technical.
One of the things I'm curious about is what kind of collateral damage this kind of thing does to legitimate traffic. Oddly enough, I couldn't get to expedia.com, transformers.com (hey, I have an eight-year-old), and store.apple.com when I first got Comcast. A couple of months later, when the news first broke that they were screwing with the traffic, those sites suddenly started working. Nothing changed at my house, and all of them started working at once.
Nobody in their right mind buys cables at places like Best Buy unless they need the cable right now.
One trick that I learned from the Best Buy sales rep -- buy the cable at Best Buy right now, and return it in 30 days and buy your "real" cable online somewhere that doesn't hurt you in the nethers as badly.
I have a wife. She likes to return things, so it works for me.
Maybe it's trite or overcommercialized, but a club in the vein of "Make" might be doable. People make interesting projects with things available around the home, that might be novel or practical, but usually fun.
TechShop is an effort to do exactly that. They're already in Menlo Park and I went to a presentation in Renton, WA about their expansion into the Seattle area.
...though today you can find him playing polo on a Segway, working at Jazz Semiconductor, or off promoting his autobiography. "I miss the technical camaraderie," Wozniak says. "The whole feeling of being on a revolution, on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies."
Is that really the case? Like Woz is a high profile technical multimillionaire, an inspiration to an entire generation of geeks, and he misses the thrill of being on a revolution and can't figure out how to recreate it?
If that's really the case. I mean, if he really and truly misses it, why not just contact pretty much anyone over the age of 30 in any field he wants:
"Hi, my name is Steve Wozniak"
"Holy shit! I know you! I learned assembly language on an Apple//e! How's it going?!?"
"Not bad, I really like the stuff you do. Do you mind if I come to work and hang out and be a technical comrade?"
"Shit no! Christ, it would be an honor."
"You don't have to pay me, I mean, I'm a multimillionaire."
"No, that's cool, come on over."
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I personally am not a multimillionaire, and I know a lot of people, and I have literally done jobs for $0 just to hang out at places and work with cool people.
Make the world what you want. It seems that this is especially easy advice to give to someone who is financially independent.
With behavior like that, SourceForge can't be considered a safe location for important code. I'd suggest that it's time to get projects off SourceForge. Make offsite backups of anything important now.
I'd probably have suggested this long ago. Last year they had at least a four day outage where there was no CVS access, which prompted at least one developer to pack up and leave.
I do appreciate the complexity of system uptime -- I really do. But if you can't have at least "one nine" uptime, you're not much good to anyone. I'm not sure if I care if this was an isolated incident or not, it should never happen for a service that's in such wide use. And yeah, I get that it's community supported and what do I expect for my $0. So I guess that's an excuse to do a poor job. So I guess I'll go pay money to Dreamhost and use their one nine uptime service instead. At least they'll apologize in a tongue in cheek kind of way when you bitch about it, since no amount of money will bring your little Billy back.
So I guess I've argued myself into a corner here. I started out being mad that SourceForge doesn't offer the quality of service I might like, and that you should go pick somewhere else to put your code. And then I realized that for the most part, no one offers any kind of service guarantee unless you run it yourself, in which case you can be pissed, but you're pissed at yourself. So you didn't fix the service problem, but at least you know where the bastard lives and can TP his house.
So never mind, no one does a good job. SourceForge is as good as any. Knock yourself out and turn the other cheek when CVS is down for four days or when they yank a part of the service that you liked.
Slashdot Mirror
...provide hosting for Cornell University FPGA Class Project during Slashdotting.
This story hits very close to home for myself -- I've sold two companies to larger companies where they commercialized my software. When you're a scrappy startup, you ship instantly. When you get incorporated into a larger organization, you don't ship instantly, which hurts because your intrinsic motivation (for the A-listers and entrepreneurs anyway) is shipping.
One shocking thing in the article for me is just how much people would give up in order to ship faster -- startups that got acquired would give up some of the acquisition money in order to ship faster in the new company. It's probably a limited sample, but I know I've felt that way. This is a large portion of what I call "suck" -- things that slow down shipping. I'm not anti-QA, but after a particular point all you did was slow down shipping.
One satisfying aspect of the work I did at the last acquiring company is that every time I checked in code, I knew I could with a straight face recommend that we ship it. I mean, it wasn't a full QA pass, but it was code with a supporting set of automated unit tests incorporated into a system designed as an extensible framework. Any negative impact would be isolated to that specific functionality (high cohesion, low coupling). A small group of internal power users and my own server would take the daily builds and give feedback as to how it felt in production and report any major issues.
The message here seems to be "if you can optimize the process in some way, optimize it so you ship faster". And in the meantime, go ahead and pretend like you're shipping every day (a complete, ready-to-go, high quality build). You'll be surprised how much better you feel even with that.
Yeah, one of the new aluminum MacBooks (non-Pro).
Model Identifier: MacBook5,1
~$ uname -rs /usr/share/dict/words
Darwin 9.5.1
~$ grep "^[asdfgqwertzxcvb]\{13,\}$"
aftercataract
devertebrated
tesseradecade
Someone with an OED can feel free to check them.
All code is final code.
What are the implications for hyperbondage?
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
You're implying that there's an invariant API they're using to get this done, and presuming that it's going to follow the design of everything before it. They're not stupid -- they see the number of platforms currently in use, and they've made it a point to explicitly say that supporting rails, Python and PHP is on the roadmap. So as much as you might bitch about the prior desktop APIs (I'm with you there), I'm not sure that a completely new service will necessarily take a wrong turn, especially if compatibility with the popular web application environments is a stated goal.
I look at it from the standpoint of "how hard is it to roll my own EC2 instances and scale up and down based on load?" and "OK, so let's presume that Google actually ends up shipping App Engine, does it meet my needs?" and I think that Azure could be a fit.
Of course they might not end up delivering everything they said (or I could have made it up). But I wouldn't trivially reject the service just because they're made some painful APIs in the past.
The PGP page for the effort wasn't up yet when the CNET story broke, but it is now. More information there.
"Can you f*** it?"
decode_string = "01001001 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 01101100 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101111 01110000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01110010 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01101100 01101111 01110010 01100100 01110011"
final_string = ""
composed_char = 0
for the_char in decode_string:
if the_char != ' ':
composed_char <<= 1
composed_char |= ord(the_char) - ord('0')
else:
if composed_char:
final_string += chr(composed_char)
composed_char = 0
print final_string
I know that Microsoft is making strides with their Microsoft Virtualization efforts. So what prevents them from going in a completely new OS direction and providing legacy application support through virtualization?
I'm not sure it's a lot. More a problem of agreeing it's the right thing to do than the technical work required. So political vs. technical.
Since we're already off-topic, this won't hurt. A song about good ole Werner. The bottom line -- take a job with the team on top.
Wow, I'm really interested in this! What were the details behind his departure from Microsoft... I'll bet it was something really juicy...
Uh.
I tied my bathrobe for this?
Sigh. Nickrolled.
Brain slug infected man tells non-brain slug infected man not to worry about brain slug infection.
Mmmm. Double-sized Milky Way. aaaaagggggcccchhhh (drools).
One of the things I'm curious about is what kind of collateral damage this kind of thing does to legitimate traffic. Oddly enough, I couldn't get to expedia.com, transformers.com (hey, I have an eight-year-old), and store.apple.com when I first got Comcast. A couple of months later, when the news first broke that they were screwing with the traffic, those sites suddenly started working. Nothing changed at my house, and all of them started working at once.
Possibly coincidence. Possibly not.
I had this image of Kevin James eating Ray Romano when I read the title. Sigh. I guess I need more help than I thought.
One trick that I learned from the Best Buy sales rep -- buy the cable at Best Buy right now, and return it in 30 days and buy your "real" cable online somewhere that doesn't hurt you in the nethers as badly.
I have a wife. She likes to return things, so it works for me.
Wait, wait, wait, back up a second. When is the beer coming?
TechShop is an effort to do exactly that. They're already in Menlo Park and I went to a presentation in Renton, WA about their expansion into the Seattle area.
Is that really the case? Like Woz is a high profile technical multimillionaire, an inspiration to an entire generation of geeks, and he misses the thrill of being on a revolution and can't figure out how to recreate it?
If that's really the case. I mean, if he really and truly misses it, why not just contact pretty much anyone over the age of 30 in any field he wants:
"Hi, my name is Steve Wozniak" //e! How's it going?!?"
"Holy shit! I know you! I learned assembly language on an Apple
"Not bad, I really like the stuff you do. Do you mind if I come to work and hang out and be a technical comrade?"
"Shit no! Christ, it would be an honor."
"You don't have to pay me, I mean, I'm a multimillionaire."
"No, that's cool, come on over."
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I personally am not a multimillionaire, and I know a lot of people, and I have literally done jobs for $0 just to hang out at places and work with cool people.
Make the world what you want. It seems that this is especially easy advice to give to someone who is financially independent.
apparently they were just pining for the fjords.
the short answer is "no."
With behavior like that, SourceForge can't be considered a safe location for important code. I'd suggest that it's time to get projects off SourceForge. Make offsite backups of anything important now.
I'd probably have suggested this long ago. Last year they had at least a four day outage where there was no CVS access, which prompted at least one developer to pack up and leave.
I do appreciate the complexity of system uptime -- I really do. But if you can't have at least "one nine" uptime, you're not much good to anyone. I'm not sure if I care if this was an isolated incident or not, it should never happen for a service that's in such wide use. And yeah, I get that it's community supported and what do I expect for my $0. So I guess that's an excuse to do a poor job. So I guess I'll go pay money to Dreamhost and use their one nine uptime service instead. At least they'll apologize in a tongue in cheek kind of way when you bitch about it, since no amount of money will bring your little Billy back.
So I guess I've argued myself into a corner here. I started out being mad that SourceForge doesn't offer the quality of service I might like, and that you should go pick somewhere else to put your code. And then I realized that for the most part, no one offers any kind of service guarantee unless you run it yourself, in which case you can be pissed, but you're pissed at yourself. So you didn't fix the service problem, but at least you know where the bastard lives and can TP his house.
So never mind, no one does a good job. SourceForge is as good as any. Knock yourself out and turn the other cheek when CVS is down for four days or when they yank a part of the service that you liked.