The reason you might want to imitate Spolsky is the nature of his success. He hasn't got a growth company, he's got a massively successful boutique ISV. They've got several products, none of which is particularly hot; but collectively, they sell more than enough, at a high enough price, for him to maintain an office in Manhattan that an architect redesigns every year. He also pays really high salaries and retains all the dot-com benefits so he can hire one or two rockstars (his term) a year, run an internship program, blog, and just generally be the IT celebrity that he wants to be. The company funds largely useless world tours for the launch of his software, which is just a business deductible junket for him. And I bet the code for all his products is *exactly* the way he likes it.
No one will ever use his name in the same sentence as Torvalds or Jobs or Gates. But he's got a pretty sweet lifestyle, and I bet most here would trade their left nut for it.
Sure, most, perhaps all to date are scams, but this does not mean that one may not come along that is the real deal.
Many scientists feel that when you've tested something a thousand times and come up with the same result a thousand times, you can be pretty confident that the 1,001st test won't be different and you can move on to something more productive. By your logic, all advancement of science would grind to a halt because scientists would spend all their time reverifying widely accepted principles.
More importantly, there isn't even a good faith reason to investigate another perpetual motion machine because, as you admit, all of them have been scams (or pious frauds). The collective enterprise of science has a large but limited amount of energy and time, and there are far better frontiers to explore than taking another look at something that has always failed.
Unlike telephone communications or bank records, there are few, if any, regulations covering privacy in MMOs. If terrorists are clever enough to figure out using the drafts folder of a hotmail account for communicating, they're clever enough to figure out that Blizzard probably won't even ask for a subpoena, they'll just record the keystrokes of anyone the NSA asks them to.
I played a lot of AD&D2, then left it behind in university. Last year I played a 3.5e campaign with a good group of adults--they took it seriously enough to have fun, but not so seriously it turned into a room of rules lawyers arguing hypothetical physics. We also had figures on a large map, and a good DM who kept everything moving. Even then, it was a slow, tedious process of rolling dice and resolving game mechanics more often than character development or plot excitement.
Compare this to WoW, where the archetypes described in the review have been established for years. Seriously, it's strange to read the reviewer talking like 'tanks' and 'nukers' are some new invention by WOTC. The game mechanics are nearly flawless in comparison, just as detailed if you're into comparative spreadsheeting, and the complaints of the community about balance and game logic are actually resolved in free patches every few months.
In comparison, playing D&D seems like a crack addiction with WOTC continually churning out expensive books in bogus generations, with followup expansions that cost still more and don't resolve basic issues in gameplay because they're too busy introducing new races/classes/skilltrees.
In short, D&D seems seriously past its time with MMOs providing a much cleaner, more fun experience. What does D&D still have that I can't get for less money online?
Do you remember, in the last federal election, how Harper opened up the conservative campaign by saying that he'd hold a conscience vote on gay marriage?
At the time, it seemed like a stupid thing to do--the law's pretty settled, no one seems to want to re-open the issue again. After a while, it seemed smart. The Conservatives have a small, hardcore religious constituency that *still* wants to turn back the clock. By starting the campaign with a sop to them, he shut them up, and never had to mention it again. By the time the election had rolled around, the only people who remembered his promise was that constituency.
Now imagine that that small, religious constituency was ten times as big, and had recognizable leaders who proclaimed that any leader they'd support had to pass their sniff test. Imagine how the conservative party would have to be constantly kowtowing to them. Imagine the Reform and the Alliance parties duking it out for their support, each trying to bend over further than the other to promise bible-based policies and demonstrating religiosity.
That's why religion is such a big deal in American politics. The evangelical community is large and well organized, and no Republican wins without their support. They don't have to vote against you--if they don't like you, they can just stay home on election day. Part of Rove's genius in 2004 was to give them a red meat issue--gay marriage--to turn them out in record numbers.
Two of the three cables cut were FLAG cables, which Neil Stephenson wrote about in an epic article for Wired called Mother Earth, Mother Board.
Interesting thing about FLAG--it's an entirely private consortium that was created just to build a cable that went from England to Japan. 95% of all undersea cable goes to or from the U.S.; when a study group identified that major gap--Europe to Asia--they launched the project themselves.
Am I to understand that you believe that the apparent motion of Mercury has some causal relationship to the functioning of electronics? Not the real motion of Mercury, which is unchanged, or the real motion of Earth, which is likewise unchanged, but the appearance of moving in the opposite direction?
How about you don't force me to wade through an entire astrology site and just give me a thumbnail explanation of how an issue of relative perception can have an effect on my computer?
Snopes isn't obscure--they're probably the most authoritative debunker of urban legends on the web. On the linked blog post, you can see several comments saying "I used to refer people to Snopes all the time when I got some glurge email."
I won't argue with your overall analysis, but this line caught my eye:
Software does not wear out.
It does wear out, in several ways:
The ecosystem moves on. Businesses exachange Microsoft Office documents. When people outside the company are sending you Office 2003 docs and you can't open them because you're still on Office 97, your software has worn out in crucial way.
The buglist gets longer and longer. Over time, the numbers of bugs and vulnerabilities only goes up. Some of those are fixed in patch releases; some aren't.
The local ecosystem improves. Lots of business software is predicated on interoperability. My employer's IT department goes to heroic lengths to keep our EOLed case tracking software fully functional; an upgrade to a later version was finally required when the underlying database was also EOLed. Continual incremental upgrades are a sound strategy to avoid a massive, system-wide upgrade later.
The software is EOLed. No more support, no more bugfixes.
Expertise moves on. Employees get promoted, leave, switch departments. At a certain point, hiring new talent to maintain old software becomes more difficult because the community of knowledgeable users shrinks. My previous employer was paying $400 an hour for retirees to maintain our twenty year old environmental systems software running on OS/2.
Most importantly, what software is used for changes. As businesses continuously change, their needs change. Old software can become a limiting factor in doing new things.
You're literally right that software doesn't rot, but you're functionally wrong, I think. Mitigating against switching to free replacements is the fact that a strategy of continual, incremental upgrades is generally the best way to handle the overall environment.
ESX is not, itself, linux. It's their virtualization product. It runs on top of a stripped down Linux kernel that provides a bare metal OS.
To put it another way, when you install ESX, you install it on a raw, bootable partition, and boot into it. What gets loaded is a minimal Linux kernel that runs the ESX process and enough hardware drivers for images to do their thing. It contains a minimal shell that you can remote into for management.
Whether or not you can legally sue Oracle/MS due to clauses in the EULA, you can point out that no one does, in practice, sue them despite endless incremental costs associated with their software. What hope would any business have of prevailing in court against those behemoths with their legions of lawyers? The simple cost of suing them is prohibitive--any business that sustained enough damage to make a lawsuit a viable option would be dead already.
VMWare ESX runs a stripped down Linux kernel to provide just barely enough OS to launch images. Solaris and Linux both have kernel level virtualization built in.
Against that, running a complete Microsoft OS underneath your virtualized OSes just seems bizarre from an architectural/performance perspective, as well as a cost perspective. I can't see any traction for MS with this strategy.
The only way I can MS gaining a significant share of the virtualization space is to include it directly in the Windows kernel like Solaris and Linux, so that "Windows Virtual Server" becomes a significant player.
You know, I wish Douglas Adams had been strangled in his crib, just so that the punchline of a cute joke wouldn't become a cliché that geeks feel compelled to drop anytime a question is raised.
And if no one sells to you, then you either go without, or drop the requirement. Yes, it's the same in kind, but different in circumstance. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. Manufacturers fall all over themselves to *voluntarily* sign the purchase agreement mandating eventual adoption of RFID--for most, selling just one or two items in Walmart can double their revenue.
This is standard in North America: buyers have logistics requirements that sellers agree to; the contract stipulates penalties for non-compliance. Sellers who don't want to risk the penalties don't agree and don't sell. I worked for a worldwide manufacturer that turned down Walmart's invitation to become an A-list manufacturer for them because the logistics requirements were too onerous for us. We sold to Target instead. That's life.
The idea is that the pallet tag is a unique number that can be matched with the electronic paperwork sent by the manufacturer. Scanning the pallet tag matches the physcial skid of product to a pending inventory transaction that lists all the product; after that, the products themselves are in the DC's system, and handled by logistics software.
Four years ago, when I was working for a manufacturer that was facing Walmart's first attempt to require RFID, the tags cost $0.60 apiece, and the equipment to print and program them was in the tens of thousands of dollars. They also failed to read up to 30% of the time. For a company already driving manufacturers out of business on price, adding that much to the cost of each package of product was impossible, even for Walmart.
See, I think this is the perfect form factor for laptops in general--full size screen and keyboard and really thin, meaning light as well. I hate tiny screens and keyboards, which has kept me away from the ultraportable market until now.
My ideal laptop would be the size of a sheet of letter paper (the most common dimensions around for, well, anything into which you might also stick a laptop), and only 1/2" thick.
I think the uneven shape is intentional--the very thin edge makes the whole unit look slimmer than it actually is, since some of the bulk is hidden. Also, the fact that the leading edge hovers 3/8" off the top of the desk adds a floaty feel to the whole unit (thus, "air"). It's a bit jarring, but I don't find it unpleasant.
The flipdown USB port isn't pretty, but plugging anything into a pretty, hermetically sealed unit uglifies it, so one can think of it as a flip up cover for when you're not using it.
Really, you should imagine pulling this out in a coffee shop or airport, connecting to wifi and doing your thing without something plugged in. In that case, it very much looks wafer-thin, light, and convenient--which is probably what it was supposed to look like.
The Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson covers a thousand year period from when humans first colonize Mars. It presents a pretty plausible, hard science exploration of that millenium, from the technology to do so at the start, through the social changes that occur on Earth (struggling with massive overpopulation) and Mars (the development of planetary polity), towards the general colonization of the solar system (moons, space stations, and asteroids also inhabited).
It certainly doesn't present colonization of the solar system as a panacea for our abuse of the Earth, or as a strictly useful strategy for ending our dependency on a single planet. But it does demonstrate the usefulness and the rewards of continued space exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason you might want to imitate Spolsky is the nature of his success. He hasn't got a growth company, he's got a massively successful boutique ISV. They've got several products, none of which is particularly hot; but collectively, they sell more than enough, at a high enough price, for him to maintain an office in Manhattan that an architect redesigns every year. He also pays really high salaries and retains all the dot-com benefits so he can hire one or two rockstars (his term) a year, run an internship program, blog, and just generally be the IT celebrity that he wants to be. The company funds largely useless world tours for the launch of his software, which is just a business deductible junket for him. And I bet the code for all his products is *exactly* the way he likes it.
No one will ever use his name in the same sentence as Torvalds or Jobs or Gates. But he's got a pretty sweet lifestyle, and I bet most here would trade their left nut for it.
Many scientists feel that when you've tested something a thousand times and come up with the same result a thousand times, you can be pretty confident that the 1,001st test won't be different and you can move on to something more productive. By your logic, all advancement of science would grind to a halt because scientists would spend all their time reverifying widely accepted principles.
More importantly, there isn't even a good faith reason to investigate another perpetual motion machine because, as you admit, all of them have been scams (or pious frauds). The collective enterprise of science has a large but limited amount of energy and time, and there are far better frontiers to explore than taking another look at something that has always failed.
Unlike telephone communications or bank records, there are few, if any, regulations covering privacy in MMOs. If terrorists are clever enough to figure out using the drafts folder of a hotmail account for communicating, they're clever enough to figure out that Blizzard probably won't even ask for a subpoena, they'll just record the keystrokes of anyone the NSA asks them to.
Junkies are always excited about their *next* bag of crack, even when the last has left them wanting... :)
Why I'd even want to play D&D.
I played a lot of AD&D2, then left it behind in university. Last year I played a 3.5e campaign with a good group of adults--they took it seriously enough to have fun, but not so seriously it turned into a room of rules lawyers arguing hypothetical physics. We also had figures on a large map, and a good DM who kept everything moving. Even then, it was a slow, tedious process of rolling dice and resolving game mechanics more often than character development or plot excitement.
Compare this to WoW, where the archetypes described in the review have been established for years. Seriously, it's strange to read the reviewer talking like 'tanks' and 'nukers' are some new invention by WOTC. The game mechanics are nearly flawless in comparison, just as detailed if you're into comparative spreadsheeting, and the complaints of the community about balance and game logic are actually resolved in free patches every few months.
In comparison, playing D&D seems like a crack addiction with WOTC continually churning out expensive books in bogus generations, with followup expansions that cost still more and don't resolve basic issues in gameplay because they're too busy introducing new races/classes/skilltrees.
In short, D&D seems seriously past its time with MMOs providing a much cleaner, more fun experience. What does D&D still have that I can't get for less money online?
Do you remember, in the last federal election, how Harper opened up the conservative campaign by saying that he'd hold a conscience vote on gay marriage?
At the time, it seemed like a stupid thing to do--the law's pretty settled, no one seems to want to re-open the issue again. After a while, it seemed smart. The Conservatives have a small, hardcore religious constituency that *still* wants to turn back the clock. By starting the campaign with a sop to them, he shut them up, and never had to mention it again. By the time the election had rolled around, the only people who remembered his promise was that constituency.
Now imagine that that small, religious constituency was ten times as big, and had recognizable leaders who proclaimed that any leader they'd support had to pass their sniff test. Imagine how the conservative party would have to be constantly kowtowing to them. Imagine the Reform and the Alliance parties duking it out for their support, each trying to bend over further than the other to promise bible-based policies and demonstrating religiosity.
That's why religion is such a big deal in American politics. The evangelical community is large and well organized, and no Republican wins without their support. They don't have to vote against you--if they don't like you, they can just stay home on election day. Part of Rove's genius in 2004 was to give them a red meat issue--gay marriage--to turn them out in record numbers.
Two of the three cables cut were FLAG cables, which Neil Stephenson wrote about in an epic article for Wired called Mother Earth, Mother Board.
Interesting thing about FLAG--it's an entirely private consortium that was created just to build a cable that went from England to Japan. 95% of all undersea cable goes to or from the U.S.; when a study group identified that major gap--Europe to Asia--they launched the project themselves.
Add AT&T to your roster of dark conspirators...
Am I to understand that you believe that the apparent motion of Mercury has some causal relationship to the functioning of electronics? Not the real motion of Mercury, which is unchanged, or the real motion of Earth, which is likewise unchanged, but the appearance of moving in the opposite direction?
How about you don't force me to wade through an entire astrology site and just give me a thumbnail explanation of how an issue of relative perception can have an effect on my computer?
Snopes isn't obscure--they're probably the most authoritative debunker of urban legends on the web. On the linked blog post, you can see several comments saying "I used to refer people to Snopes all the time when I got some glurge email."
You're literally right that software doesn't rot, but you're functionally wrong, I think. Mitigating against switching to free replacements is the fact that a strategy of continual, incremental upgrades is generally the best way to handle the overall environment.
You're right and you're wrong.
ESX is not, itself, linux. It's their virtualization product. It runs on top of a stripped down Linux kernel that provides a bare metal OS.
To put it another way, when you install ESX, you install it on a raw, bootable partition, and boot into it. What gets loaded is a minimal Linux kernel that runs the ESX process and enough hardware drivers for images to do their thing. It contains a minimal shell that you can remote into for management.
Whether or not you can legally sue Oracle/MS due to clauses in the EULA, you can point out that no one does, in practice, sue them despite endless incremental costs associated with their software. What hope would any business have of prevailing in court against those behemoths with their legions of lawyers? The simple cost of suing them is prohibitive--any business that sustained enough damage to make a lawsuit a viable option would be dead already.
Your post is full of fail.
That may be their strategy, but it sucks.
VMWare ESX runs a stripped down Linux kernel to provide just barely enough OS to launch images. Solaris and Linux both have kernel level virtualization built in.
Against that, running a complete Microsoft OS underneath your virtualized OSes just seems bizarre from an architectural/performance perspective, as well as a cost perspective. I can't see any traction for MS with this strategy.
The only way I can MS gaining a significant share of the virtualization space is to include it directly in the Windows kernel like Solaris and Linux, so that "Windows Virtual Server" becomes a significant player.
Are you saying that a discussion of cancer statistics isn't a good way to make small talk?
You know, I wish Douglas Adams had been strangled in his crib, just so that the punchline of a cute joke wouldn't become a cliché that geeks feel compelled to drop anytime a question is raised.
And if no one sells to you, then you either go without, or drop the requirement. Yes, it's the same in kind, but different in circumstance. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. Manufacturers fall all over themselves to *voluntarily* sign the purchase agreement mandating eventual adoption of RFID--for most, selling just one or two items in Walmart can double their revenue.
This is standard in North America: buyers have logistics requirements that sellers agree to; the contract stipulates penalties for non-compliance. Sellers who don't want to risk the penalties don't agree and don't sell. I worked for a worldwide manufacturer that turned down Walmart's invitation to become an A-list manufacturer for them because the logistics requirements were too onerous for us. We sold to Target instead. That's life.
The idea is that the pallet tag is a unique number that can be matched with the electronic paperwork sent by the manufacturer. Scanning the pallet tag matches the physcial skid of product to a pending inventory transaction that lists all the product; after that, the products themselves are in the DC's system, and handled by logistics software.
Four years ago, when I was working for a manufacturer that was facing Walmart's first attempt to require RFID, the tags cost $0.60 apiece, and the equipment to print and program them was in the tens of thousands of dollars. They also failed to read up to 30% of the time. For a company already driving manufacturers out of business on price, adding that much to the cost of each package of product was impossible, even for Walmart.
Wow! That's brilliant! It's even better than your advice on stocks to "buy low, sell high"!
Not with Intel embedded graphics, it won't.
See, I think this is the perfect form factor for laptops in general--full size screen and keyboard and really thin, meaning light as well. I hate tiny screens and keyboards, which has kept me away from the ultraportable market until now.
My ideal laptop would be the size of a sheet of letter paper (the most common dimensions around for, well, anything into which you might also stick a laptop), and only 1/2" thick.
I think the uneven shape is intentional--the very thin edge makes the whole unit look slimmer than it actually is, since some of the bulk is hidden. Also, the fact that the leading edge hovers 3/8" off the top of the desk adds a floaty feel to the whole unit (thus, "air"). It's a bit jarring, but I don't find it unpleasant.
The flipdown USB port isn't pretty, but plugging anything into a pretty, hermetically sealed unit uglifies it, so one can think of it as a flip up cover for when you're not using it.
Really, you should imagine pulling this out in a coffee shop or airport, connecting to wifi and doing your thing without something plugged in. In that case, it very much looks wafer-thin, light, and convenient--which is probably what it was supposed to look like.
The Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson covers a thousand year period from when humans first colonize Mars. It presents a pretty plausible, hard science exploration of that millenium, from the technology to do so at the start, through the social changes that occur on Earth (struggling with massive overpopulation) and Mars (the development of planetary polity), towards the general colonization of the solar system (moons, space stations, and asteroids also inhabited).
It certainly doesn't present colonization of the solar system as a panacea for our abuse of the Earth, or as a strictly useful strategy for ending our dependency on a single planet. But it does demonstrate the usefulness and the rewards of continued space exploration.
Funny, I think that Pope Benedict released a papal bull describing Catholic hell that way--a state of "eternal separation from God."
Which would suck, really, if you knew that there was God. An eternity of "doh!"