The execs are Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen. While at Microsoft, Christensen brought to market the Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and Smartphone, in addition to Mobile Information Server and Server ActiveSync. Tod Nielsen too held senior management positions such as vice president, Platform Group and vice president, Developer Relations.
It says here that Nokia is considered to be a $71 billion company, vs Cisco $123. Also quotes Cisco's chairman from back in April when he said "I am at the altar waiting to partner" (a reference back then to Nortel Networks, not Nokia)
There's a story this morning about how today in Atlanta there's an event called "MGB 2005" with the tagline "Going Beyond," that features several major tracks being presented to Microsoft managers and partners from throughout the world. But apparently the name "Microsoft" is not in evidence on any of the event's signage or collateral relating to the meeting. Anyone know what the exact scoop is on that? Is this where the "Vista" name was cooked up?
"Meanwhile, China continues to be a major source of new American immigrants, and remains a big prize for companies wishing to help it along with building a more capitalistic society." The article asks if there a way for Microsoft in particular, and global businesses in general, to avoid this sort of controversy - whether, that is, they stay agnostic regarding specific political issues, domestic and international. The answer would seem to be: "No!"
here's the beginning of this whole "top software people" exercise:
[From Java Developer's Journal, Sept 2004 issue]
Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World
For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, and coedited "Namespaces in XML" (1996-1999).
Bray is therefore no technological slouchabout. Nor is he without deep insight into the ways of the Web, having served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004, after which he joined Sun as director of Web technologies in March of this year. So when he takes the trouble to describe someone as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world," you know he means it.
The person in question was Adam Bosworth, famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and Internet Explorer 4 even before he joined BEA as VP of engineering in 2001, when BEA bought Crossgain, the company he'd by then cofounded after leaving Microsoft. He went on to become BEA's chief architect before, very recently, leaving the Java app server company to join Google, Inc.
Bray was one of the gurus that a headhunter working with Google, Inc., called for a reference before they hired Bosworth. Bray gave him a glowing one. That's when Bray's description of him as probably one of the top 20 software people on earth appeared. As we all know, Bosworth got the job and now works on software that is very different from what he was archi-tecting at BEA.
"Rather than worrying about what the IT of large corporations needs to do to support the corporation," he explained recently, "I'm worrying about mere mortals. In fact, my mom."
Bosworth says he can only build software if he first gets some mental image in his head of the customers. Who are they? How do they look, feel, think? He calls this "designing by guilt," which he explains as follows: "Because if you don't do what feels right for these customers, you feel guilty for having let them down."
Of course, customers are endlessly disparate, complex, heterogenous, and distinct. But even so, Bosworth says he has always found it necessary to think about a small number of distinct types of customers, and then design for them. "And boy is it satisfying to do this when the people you are designing for are your friends, family, relatives, your smart-aleck son, and so on," Bosworth observes, "and when even your mother can use what you build - I call this the mom factor. It's corny but fun."
What a refreshing approach. No wonder, with this high regard for technology's fundamentals, Bray rates Bosworth as one of the top 20 software people in the world. The question naturally arises, however: who are the other 19?
This is not easy to answer, and not because there are too few candidates but because there are too many. In a phase of the economic cycle most readily remembered for being downbeat and understated, the names of leading i-technologists - whom Internet technologies rely on for their unceasing innovation and ingenuity - nonetheless still trip off most people's lips. Just think of Sergey Brin, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Don Box, Nathan Myhrvold, W. Daniel Hillis, Mitch Kapor...
The "technorati" or "digerati" - call them what you will - the aristocracy of the online world. Can a list of the Top 20 i-Technologists possibly be compiled that doesn't cause the online equivalent of fistfights when published? Obviously not. But that shouldn't deter us from trying. So, have at it. The final list will be reported here, along with the near-misses. You can send your nominations, including your reasoning, to i-Technology's Top Twenty, toptwenty@sys-con.com. It will take more than a month to ensure that everyone with something worth saying has found time, energy, and above all the appropriately persuasive argument to persuade us of the merits of their choice/s. We'll report next issue on how this process is going.
Eric S. Raymond has just responded to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and he says, among other things "any time [Sun] try to use my work to justify retaining proprietary control or argue that Linux is somehow less open, that's either culpable stupidity or dishonesty and they should expect to get kicked in the teeth for it by the entire open-source community, starting with me."
Listening to PJ on this issue would be a very good idea - blind loathing of another human being is a very shaky foundation for useful criticism, and intemperate language takes the debate not one inch further forward.
In an interview given just last night, the spec lead for 5.0 is asked what in his view the coolest new feature of the language is. Calvin Austin replies: If I just restrict myself to the language it would be metadata (JSR 175). We've only scratched the surface of its potential. For the platform, it's a bytecode insertion for profiling (JSR 163).
from the article:
Sergey and Larry pocketed $41 million a piece rather than $130 million a man and Eric picked up $31 million. Yahoo and Time Warner also cashed in some of their chips.
The company itself raised $1.2 billion to add to the $500 million it already has in the bank, money nobody knows what Google will do with, one of the many issues hobbling the IPO.
Written by Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research it starts:
I'm a bit stunned by the press feeding frenzy set off by comments (here) Yusuf Mehdi, MSN corporate VP, made during a Wednesday speech. News report after news report claimed that Microsoft would unleash an iPod-killing music player for 50 bucks.
The problem: That's not at all what Mr. Mehdi said.
whoever startd it or didn't start it, it's clearly at an end now -
from that same LinuxWorld piece by Tanenbaum:
Clearing Up Some Misconceptions
I would like to close by clearing up a few misconceptions and also correcting a couple of errors. First, I REALLY am not angry with Linus. HONEST. He's not angry with me either. I am not some kind of "sore loser" who feels he has been eclipsed by Linus. MINIX was only a kind of fun hobby for me. I am a professor. I teach and do research and write books and go to conferences and do things professors do. I like my job and my students and my university. If you want to get a masters there, see my home page for information. I wrote MINIX because I wanted my students to have hands-on experience playing with an operating system.
After AT&T forbade teaching from John Lions book, I decided to write a UNIX-like system for my students to play with. Since I had already written two books at this point, one on computer architecture and one on computer networks, it seemed reasonable to describe the system in a new book on operating systems, which is what I did. I was not trying to replace GNU/HURD or Berkeley UNIX. Heaven knows, I have said this enough times. I just wanted to show my students and other students how you could write a UNIX-like system using modern technology.
A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. I never really applied for the position of King of the Hackers and didn't want the job when it was offered. Linus seems to be doing excellent work and I wish him much success in the future.
While writing MINIX was fun, I don't really regard it as the most important thing I have ever done. It was more of a distraction than anything else. The most important thing I have done is produce a number of incredibly good students, especially Ph.D. students. See my home page for the list. They have done great things. I am as proud as a mother hen. To the extent that Linus can be counted as my student, I'm proud of him, too. Professors like it when their students go on to greater glory. I have also written over 100 published research papers and 14 books which have been translated into about 20 languages. As a result I have become a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and won numerous other awards. For me, these are the things that really count. If MINIX had become a big 'commercial' success I wouldn't have had the time to do all this academic stuff that I am actually more interested in.
I can't begin to do it justice (Groklaw is already linking to it). Enjoy!! (I will reveal in advance only that Torvalds "comes clean" about a lifetime of deception...)
LinuxWorld Says Happy Birthday to PJ
on
Groklaw Turns One
·
· Score: 1
LinuxWorld already joined the congratulatory celebrations on Saturday
O'Gara's predictions have often proven to be on the money - one wonders whether this has leaked from newly-resigned Rich Green, now that - after 14 loyal years at Sun - he's jumped ship to join Bill Coleman at Cassat.
Slashdot Mirror
The execs are Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen. While at Microsoft, Christensen brought to market the Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and Smartphone, in addition to Mobile Information Server and Server ActiveSync. Tod Nielsen too held senior management positions such as vice president, Platform Group and vice president, Developer Relations.
The newspaper quoted by Reuters and MarketWatch appears to be the UK newspaper "The Business" (formerly named "Sunday Business").
It says here that Nokia is considered to be a $71 billion company, vs Cisco $123. Also quotes Cisco's chairman from back in April when he said "I am at the altar waiting to partner" (a reference back then to Nortel Networks, not Nokia)
There's a story this morning about how today in Atlanta there's an event called "MGB 2005" with the tagline "Going Beyond," that features several major tracks being presented to Microsoft managers and partners from throughout the world. But apparently the name "Microsoft" is not in evidence on any of the event's signage or collateral relating to the meeting. Anyone know what the exact scoop is on that? Is this where the "Vista" name was cooked up?
"Meanwhile, China continues to be a major source of new American immigrants, and remains a big prize for companies wishing to help it along with building a more capitalistic society." The article asks if there a way for Microsoft in particular, and global businesses in general, to avoid this sort of controversy - whether, that is, they stay agnostic regarding specific political issues, domestic and international. The answer would seem to be: "No!"
Seems like a very easy to use interface. I love the idea of having these illustrious blog domains for free - what's the twist? Is there one?
Seems like a very easy to use interface. I love the idea of having these illustrious blog domains for free - what's the twist? Is there one?
[From Java Developer's Journal, Sept 2004 issue]
Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World
For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, and coedited "Namespaces in XML" (1996-1999).
Bray is therefore no technological slouchabout. Nor is he without deep insight into the ways of the Web, having served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004, after which he joined Sun as director of Web technologies in March of this year. So when he takes the trouble to describe someone as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world," you know he means it.
The person in question was Adam Bosworth, famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and Internet Explorer 4 even before he joined BEA as VP of engineering in 2001, when BEA bought Crossgain, the company he'd by then cofounded after leaving Microsoft. He went on to become BEA's chief architect before, very recently, leaving the Java app server company to join Google, Inc.
Bray was one of the gurus that a headhunter working with Google, Inc., called for a reference before they hired Bosworth. Bray gave him a glowing one. That's when Bray's description of him as probably one of the top 20 software people on earth appeared. As we all know, Bosworth got the job and now works on software that is very different from what he was archi-tecting at BEA.
"Rather than worrying about what the IT of large corporations needs to do to support the corporation," he explained recently, "I'm worrying about mere mortals. In fact, my mom."
Bosworth says he can only build software if he first gets some mental image in his head of the customers. Who are they? How do they look, feel, think? He calls this "designing by guilt," which he explains as follows: "Because if you don't do what feels right for these customers, you feel guilty for having let them down."
Of course, customers are endlessly disparate, complex, heterogenous, and distinct. But even so, Bosworth says he has always found it necessary to think about a small number of distinct types of customers, and then design for them. "And boy is it satisfying to do this when the people you are designing for are your friends, family, relatives, your smart-aleck son, and so on," Bosworth observes, "and when even your mother can use what you build - I call this the mom factor. It's corny but fun."
What a refreshing approach. No wonder, with this high regard for technology's fundamentals, Bray rates Bosworth as one of the top 20 software people in the world. The question naturally arises, however: who are the other 19?
This is not easy to answer, and not because there are too few candidates but because there are too many. In a phase of the economic cycle most readily remembered for being downbeat and understated, the names of leading i-technologists - whom Internet technologies rely on for their unceasing innovation and ingenuity - nonetheless still trip off most people's lips. Just think of Sergey Brin, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Don Box, Nathan Myhrvold, W. Daniel Hillis, Mitch Kapor...
The "technorati" or "digerati" - call them what you will - the aristocracy of the online world. Can a list of the Top 20 i-Technologists possibly be compiled that doesn't cause the online equivalent of fistfights when published? Obviously not. But that shouldn't deter us from trying. So, have at it. The final list will be reported here, along with the near-misses. You can send your nominations, including your reasoning, to i-Technology's Top Twenty, toptwenty@sys-con.com. It will take more than a month to ensure that everyone with something worth saying has found time, energy, and above all the appropriately persuasive argument to persuade us of the merits of their choice/s. We'll report next issue on how this process is going.
Eric S. Raymond has just responded to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and he says, among other things "any time [Sun] try to use my work to justify retaining proprietary control or argue that Linux is somehow less open, that's either culpable stupidity or dishonesty and they should expect to get kicked in the teeth for it by the entire open-source community, starting with me."
As the parent AC says:
I would suggest you all read what else PJ of Groklaw wrote about that whole issue here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200410261 33519345
And here's some more incontrovertible LinuxWorld.com evidence of being a Microsoft shill, perhaps? "Dear Bill Gates, As Evil Geniuses Rate, You Have a Way to Go..." - by the magazine's senior editor James Turner.
In an interview given just last night, the spec lead for 5.0 is asked what in his view the coolest new feature of the language is. Calvin Austin replies: If I just restrict myself to the language it would be metadata (JSR 175). We've only scratched the surface of its potential. For the platform, it's a bytecode insertion for profiling (JSR 163).
Maybe she has a point. That last part I mean?
and when that fails try here - sorry about that ;-)
Try here for Google access to over 200 free Internet tehcnology interviews - Java, Linux, Web services, .NET, the works...
Now where's my iPod...
...MSFT did themselves a favor looking at SAP and not Computer Associates!
Written by Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research it starts:
I'm a bit stunned by the press feeding frenzy set off by comments (here) Yusuf Mehdi, MSN corporate VP, made during a Wednesday speech. News report after news report claimed that Microsoft would unleash an iPod-killing music player for 50 bucks.
The problem: That's not at all what Mr. Mehdi said.
Clearing Up Some Misconceptions
I would like to close by clearing up a few misconceptions and also correcting a couple of errors. First, I REALLY am not angry with Linus. HONEST. He's not angry with me either. I am not some kind of "sore loser" who feels he has been eclipsed by Linus. MINIX was only a kind of fun hobby for me. I am a professor. I teach and do research and write books and go to conferences and do things professors do. I like my job and my students and my university. If you want to get a masters there, see my home page for information. I wrote MINIX because I wanted my students to have hands-on experience playing with an operating system.
After AT&T forbade teaching from John Lions book, I decided to write a UNIX-like system for my students to play with. Since I had already written two books at this point, one on computer architecture and one on computer networks, it seemed reasonable to describe the system in a new book on operating systems, which is what I did. I was not trying to replace GNU/HURD or Berkeley UNIX. Heaven knows, I have said this enough times. I just wanted to show my students and other students how you could write a UNIX-like system using modern technology.
A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. I never really applied for the position of King of the Hackers and didn't want the job when it was offered. Linus seems to be doing excellent work and I wish him much success in the future.
While writing MINIX was fun, I don't really regard it as the most important thing I have ever done. It was more of a distraction than anything else. The most important thing I have done is produce a number of incredibly good students, especially Ph.D. students. See my home page for the list. They have done great things. I am as proud as a mother hen. To the extent that Linus can be counted as my student, I'm proud of him, too. Professors like it when their students go on to greater glory. I have also written over 100 published research papers and 14 books which have been translated into about 20 languages. As a result I have become a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and won numerous other awards. For me, these are the things that really count. If MINIX had become a big 'commercial' success I wouldn't have had the time to do all this academic stuff that I am actually more interested in.
Andy Tanenbaum is a hero.
Linux Kernel Submission Process Revised and Tightened
Plenty more where that came from...
I can't begin to do it justice (Groklaw is already linking to it). Enjoy!! (I will reveal in advance only that Torvalds "comes clean" about a lifetime of deception...)
LinuxWorld already joined the congratulatory celebrations on Saturday
There's a piece at LinuxWorld on Daniel's resignation, quoting how Nicholas Petreley made Gentoo his favorite distro a year ago...
O'Gara's predictions have often proven to be on the money - one wonders whether this has leaked from newly-resigned Rich Green, now that - after 14 loyal years at Sun - he's jumped ship to join Bill Coleman at Cassat.