Sorry, these are just different skins on top of the same Safari (webkit) engine. Of course, Flash is still forbiddden on the iPhone. It's sad, but there's a very good reason for it.
Imagine if anyone could do dummy iPhone apps using Flash, put them anywhere on the web, with absolutely no control from Apple. There'd be popups asking you to enter your credit card every 10 seconds, ads left and right, etc. Users would eventually be fed up and find the iPhone ugly. I guess Apple cares too much to let that happen.
So many great quotes from a certain Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK:
We'll be looking to enhance the service if we get some interest from consumers
PR101: Don't tell journalists that no one cares about your product.
At the moment we don't have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC
CS101: Microsoft doesn't have the technology in-house to do a simple file transfer?
I didn't realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days
How clueless can you be? This guy almost makes me feel good about the other news of the day (Microsoft to laying off 5,000).
I suspect a Microsoft conspiracy to reassure their shareholders that indeed, getting rid of deadwood will not hurt business, on the contrary! He is a living proof (assuming he is one of the "chosen").
Developer count is not what matters. Linux has plenty of great developers. Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.
Sadly, if you google "Ubuntu Marketing", you land on an empty page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/News). Maybe someone needs to update Google's index:-)
Everyone here knows that Linux has the technical goods to take on Windows. But the cheerleading is missing. Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
So yes, Ubuntu being sustainable is a step in the right direction.
the EC said tying Internet Explorer with Windows provides Internet Explorer with an artificial distribution advantage
That's stating the obvious.
Now check out the timeline on this procedure. Microsoft was accused of tying Windows Media Player to Windows in 2004. That's what the current case is based on.
According to a Microsoft spokesperson:
Under EU procedure, the European Commission will not make a final determination until after it receives and assesses Microsoftâ(TM)s response
In other words, expect this to last another few years before anything happens. By then, Internet Explorer will have been renamed Windows 8 and Microsoft will argue that the lawsuit is moot. Do consumers win? Lawyers do, that's for sure. Slow justice is no justice.
Expect Microsoft to offer to ship a version of Windows without any web browser. So you won't be able to download firefox either!
Music companiesâ(TM) digital revenues internationally grew by an estimated 25 per cent in 2008
I can think of a long list of other industries that would love to have that kind of growth given the current economy.
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
This is real scary. And it goes to prove that bad guys always come up with new ways to steal. I don't believe there is a technical solution to this arms race.
Instead, I'd love to see our law enforcement friends be more pro-active and setup traps. Pose as a fake victim. Go out and seek those phishing sites. When the thieves come after your money thinking they just ripped off a stupid Internet newbie, then you can trace their activity and catch them.
That's the best way I can think of scaring the bad guys: when they never know if their next victim might be a cop.
This is one of my pet peeves: why can't computers boot in a second or less?
Imagine a visionary like Steve Jobs (by the way, enjoy your leave of absence and please come back). He goes to his team and says "I don't care what it takes, build me a computer which boots in one second".
Ignore the past, the legacy of tens of years of layer after layer of OS software. Can it be done?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.
The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.
People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.
How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.
The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.
The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.
I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.
I'm sorry to have to be the one to break the bad news to you, but your grades in school don't matter anymore. What recruiters look at is your experience. Which, by definition, you don't have. So your resume ends up at the bottom of the pile.
As soon as you have some kind of job, then companies are much more willing to take you seriously. It's stupid but it's true. I make the same mistake now when I am the one hiring.
Now I'm happy to also give you some good news. You're probably not graduating until the summer. That's great. First of all, the economy will be just about to turn around (the media won't tell you, but they also didn't tell you one year ago that we were in a recession). Second, it gives you some time to add experience to your resume: internships matter a lot, volunteer for an open source project, etc.
Don't have the time? You really have two options: play by university rules and be a bland student, or stand out and go the extra mile. Guess which ones gets the job?
-- FairSoftware.net -- the community where software developers start fair businesses
59 per cent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours.
That's the problem right there: in IT, work can be endless. Saying no is key to keeping your sanity. But 2009 is not the best year to take risks. Good luck finding a job elsewhere.
It's bad in IT, but at least you get to use your brain (to some extent) and some of it is sometimes fun. That's a start.
Do fun stuff on the side and keep your skills current. That could become very handy sooner than you think.
Not too many exciting new features, I'm not sure why they call it 2.0.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
Full-page zoom and auto-scroll? Great. Now I can use Chrome like I use Safari on my iPhone. Of course scaling should scale the whole page, not just the text. It shouldn't be that hard. An old technology like PDF (10 years old) knows that.
Profiles? Ok, could be moderately useful. It sort of conflicts with the OS's notion of swapping between users. So I'd use it more as a workaround because bookmarks are hard to organize.
Greasemonkey scripts? That's my favorite. But it's for power users only. Just read the instructions and imagine your grandma giving it a try:
To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add --enable-user-scripts in the Target field. While you're in the Properties dialog, click on "Open File Location" and create a folder named User Scriptsin the user data directory, where you'll need to manually save scripts.
Cracking the site was easy, because Twitter allowed an unlimited number of rapid-fire log-in attempts.
Twitter is doubly at fault here. First, it's not that hard to detect rapid-fire password attacks. Even Unix (way before Linux) knew to kick you out after 3 failed attempts. Second, they should enforce better passwords for their employees (not necessarily for regular users, that's another discussion).
He decided not to use other hacked accounts personally. Instead he posted a message to Digital Gangster offering access to any Twitter account by request.
That's where the 18-year old kid is at fault. He showed a lack of hacker ethics. Good hackers may discover an exploit, but they don't do harm.
When I hacked my university's computer network (Vax machines on Bitnet back in 1990), I did it with the knowledge of the sysadmin staff. And once you have made your point, you stand back.
-- FairSoftware.net -- geeks starting fair and open software businesses together
I used to think like you. Very paranoid about whatever I thought were great ideas. Don't tell anyone. Ask for a non-disclosure (NDA). I was so convinced that if I even hinted at some of my ideas, everyone would try to steal them from me.
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
It took me maybe 10 years to figure that out. I have a few patents, got sued too. The value of a great idea is in its execution.
Take the idea and run with it. Make it happen. Code, develop, market, etc. Just like military planning, great ideas don't survive their first implementation, but they have the potential to evolve in something great.
I have good news for you though: your question is typical of budding entrepreneurs. The simple fact that you even ask is a sign that you'll do great in the future. Just add some experience (~5 years) and you'll have the perfect mix.
Don't believe everything your read. The example in the article is the one in a million occurrence. That's not the kind of odds you want to shoot for.
-- http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers and citizen journalists create fair businesses
What I remember is "20 FF 58". That means jump to subroutine at address $FF58, which happens to be in the ROM of the Apple II and contains the magical "60", meaning return. What is the point of jumping to a return? So that you can find out your own address by looking at the stack(*). From there, you could start relocating your code. Remember: no virtual memory, no pagination, no nothing. You had to find a way.
(*) and later discover that in the 1/million chance that you got an interrupt precisely during the return, what's on the stack is not your address, but someone else's. But interrupts on the Apple II were infrequent to say the least.
This is great... Now, all you have to do is install the preventive multitasking OS I had written at the time then try to bootstrap Minix from it, and you'll have the best of the 80s.
So many memories, so little time. How many people on/. even have fond memories of the Apple II? Just showing my age I guess. Anyone below 30 who even knows what it was like at the time? I ran my first BBS on an Apple II. Kind of like slashdot, minus the traffic:-)
In a recent study of the top 140 corporations in America, 12 were using OpenOffice. That's not exactly much. With the coming recession, I can see quite a few companies deciding to cut their costs and switch to OpenOffice. It beats upgrading to Office 2007, that's for sure.
We only need another 4 companies in that sample to get a 50% market share increase!
Linux also will strenghten its dominant position in servers. Sun is going out of business, just like SGI a few years back. Sun is the only one that doesn't know it yet.
Wait, but if Sun is going out business, who will pay all these engineers who contribute to Open Source projects today? "Houston, we have a problem."
So this pending recession has some good for FOSS, and some not so good. By the way, don't listen to the pundits that tell you the recession will last years. Those same pundits four months ago were saying life is great. They don't have a clue, they just echo the popular opinion of the time.
Let's see. You'll get a CS degree but don't feel like writing code for a living. That's a tough one.
Are you a "people" person? All those introverted geeks need to talk to each other, make decisions and agree on stuff. Something that they (on average) do very poorly. You would have a career in product marketing, since you understand the geeks and can talk to them.
If that makes sense to you, then short-term, your best bet is to join an open source project and volunteer to *organize* stuff. Not code, but organize. You'd be amazed how badly needed it is for most projects.
First: keep your day job: it provides the cash your family needs. Second: forget about traditional part-time work, it usually either pays really low hourly rates, or the work consumes much more than the 5-15 hours you say you have.
Instead, look at fairsoftware.net (hey, if I invented it, I can brag about it). You won't earn immediate cash, instead you'll be getting equity into whatever fun software project you find. Or start your own and get more geeks to join you, also for revenue share, not upfront cash.
Financially, it's the right thing to do: have most of your base covered with salary, and an upside based on equity so that the sky's the limit. Plus it's fun.
My all-time favorite true story occured when I tried to help my dad (I bet that for everyone here, our parents are our #1 support customers).
Dad reports following problem: in the last month or so, the mouse started acting strange. Every time he gestures right, the mouse goes left. When he wants to go up, the mouse moves down.
I look it up online, suspecting some virus having fun. Can't find anything.
Dad reports that he got used to the problem, he just has to gesture in the opposite way and then he can use the computer again. Not a great workaround, but it's good enough for him.
At my next visit home, I finally can diagnose the problem live instead of over the phone: Dad was holding the mouse upside down.
True story - lasted for a month before problem was fixed. My fault for not figuring it out sooner.
-- FairSoftware.net: where geeks create side-businesses together
I really wish the motion would pass. Finally, we could extract soundbites from the RIAA's lawyers to show how ridiculous their position is.
But my guess is that it's not going to happen: it's a long shot. Allowing media in the courtroom is the exception, not the rule. What I wish for, I usually don't get...
15 years ago, I used to buy CDs. I couldn't listen to the tracks ahead of time, often 90% of the album sucked. But I had to pay the $15 anyway. Now I buy my music legally, online, but I often just buy one song (99 cents), the ones I really like.
Guess what, the RIAA's business is dying. They don't provide value anymore (if they ever did).
When that happens to a corporation in America, you have two options: Change your business model, adapt and become competitive again.
Or ask the government for a bailout. Dear RIAA, stop the lawsuits, just ask Uncle Sam for $100 billions. It's much easier and faster than your current approach.
Correct on all counts. Now, as to bias, it's a chicken and egg problem: am I pretending there is a problem with funding startups because I started a company in that space, or did I believe there was a problem and therefore started a company to fix it?
VCs have a saying (that I really don't like because it sounds arrogant), but applicable here: "no conflict, no interest". It means that if you really were not biased and had no interest in a topic, then how could you possibly have an interesting opinion? I think it's a valid point.
Transparency is the answer. I trust everyone to be smart enough to draw their own conclusions.
As I said in a previous comment, the current model of entrepreneurship is broken. VCs have left. In 2009, capital will be really hard to find. But there is a silver lining: capital is no longer necessary to start companies.
Again, fairsoftware.net among others is allowing people who don't have any money and don't have any VC buddies to start businesses together.
It will work because for software at least, a few smart developers can beat established software giants. Groundbreaking software can now be built quickly and cheaply by reusing a lot of existing code. You can thank the Open Source community's efforts for that.
I have a lot of respect for Mike Malone, the author of the article. He wrote one of my favorite books: "Going Public: Mips and the Entrepeneurial Dream". If you have any ounce of entrepreneurship in you, this book will reveal it. I'm sure it started vocations. But in today's piece, I disagree that Sarbanes-Oxley is the main problem, although it did reduce the number of IPOs.
The best advice I ever received for starting a company? Drop Powerpoint and your VC pitch. Write code instead.
One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.
Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate that.
My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: geeks starting a side business together.
One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.
Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate it.
My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: friends starting a side business together.
For once, I'll recommend to RTFA first before commenting. It's a tough choice.
On one hand, it's great that a family with such a tough hereditary problem can know that their kids and grand-kids won't be affected. On the other hand, I'm just so scared of the consequences: we are playing with nature and past experience shows that we usually don't fully understand the long-term consequences of our actions. We usually regret such experiments.
But who am I to tell this family to go ahead and accept brest cancer? Can you look them in the eye and say "choose cancer"?
-- fairsoftware.net -- Software Bill Of Rights: transparency, equal rights and revenue sharing
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, these are just different skins on top of the same Safari (webkit) engine. Of course, Flash is still forbiddden on the iPhone. It's sad, but there's a very good reason for it.
Imagine if anyone could do dummy iPhone apps using Flash, put them anywhere on the web, with absolutely no control from Apple. There'd be popups asking you to enter your credit card every 10 seconds, ads left and right, etc. Users would eventually be fed up and find the iPhone ugly. I guess Apple cares too much to let that happen.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
So many great quotes from a certain Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK:
We'll be looking to enhance the service if we get some interest from consumers
PR101: Don't tell journalists that no one cares about your product.
At the moment we don't have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC
CS101: Microsoft doesn't have the technology in-house to do a simple file transfer?
I didn't realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days
How clueless can you be? This guy almost makes me feel good about the other news of the day (Microsoft to laying off 5,000).
I suspect a Microsoft conspiracy to reassure their shareholders that indeed, getting rid of deadwood will not hurt business, on the contrary! He is a living proof (assuming he is one of the "chosen").
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
Developer count is not what matters. Linux has plenty of great developers. Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.
Sadly, if you google "Ubuntu Marketing", you land on an empty page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/News). Maybe someone needs to update Google's index :-)
Everyone here knows that Linux has the technical goods to take on Windows. But the cheerleading is missing. Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
So yes, Ubuntu being sustainable is a step in the right direction.
--
FairSoftware.net -- jobs for geeks by geeks
Let's look at the facts:
the EC said tying Internet Explorer with Windows provides Internet Explorer with an artificial distribution advantage
That's stating the obvious.
Now check out the timeline on this procedure. Microsoft was accused of tying Windows Media Player to Windows in 2004. That's what the current case is based on.
According to a Microsoft spokesperson:
Under EU procedure, the European Commission will not make a final determination until after it receives and assesses Microsoftâ(TM)s response
In other words, expect this to last another few years before anything happens. By then, Internet Explorer will have been renamed Windows 8 and Microsoft will argue that the lawsuit is moot. Do consumers win? Lawyers do, that's for sure. Slow justice is no justice.
Expect Microsoft to offer to ship a version of Windows without any web browser. So you won't be able to download firefox either!
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
From the report:
Music companiesâ(TM) digital revenues internationally grew by an estimated 25 per cent in 2008
I can think of a long list of other industries that would love to have that kind of growth given the current economy.
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
This is real scary. And it goes to prove that bad guys always come up with new ways to steal. I don't believe there is a technical solution to this arms race.
Instead, I'd love to see our law enforcement friends be more pro-active and setup traps. Pose as a fake victim. Go out and seek those phishing sites. When the thieves come after your money thinking they just ripped off a stupid Internet newbie, then you can trace their activity and catch them.
That's the best way I can think of scaring the bad guys: when they never know if their next victim might be a cop.
--
FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss
This is one of my pet peeves: why can't computers boot in a second or less?
Imagine a visionary like Steve Jobs (by the way, enjoy your leave of absence and please come back). He goes to his team and says "I don't care what it takes, build me a computer which boots in one second".
Ignore the past, the legacy of tens of years of layer after layer of OS software. Can it be done?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.
--
FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss
The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.
People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.
How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.
The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.
The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.
But for me, "good enough" is indeed good enough.
--
FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss
I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.
I'm sorry to have to be the one to break the bad news to you, but your grades in school don't matter anymore. What recruiters look at is your experience. Which, by definition, you don't have. So your resume ends up at the bottom of the pile.
As soon as you have some kind of job, then companies are much more willing to take you seriously. It's stupid but it's true. I make the same mistake now when I am the one hiring.
Now I'm happy to also give you some good news. You're probably not graduating until the summer. That's great. First of all, the economy will be just about to turn around (the media won't tell you, but they also didn't tell you one year ago that we were in a recession). Second, it gives you some time to add experience to your resume: internships matter a lot, volunteer for an open source project, etc.
Don't have the time? You really have two options: play by university rules and be a bland student, or stand out and go the extra mile. Guess which ones gets the job?
--
FairSoftware.net -- the community where software developers start fair businesses
59 per cent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours.
That's the problem right there: in IT, work can be endless. Saying no is key to keeping your sanity. But 2009 is not the best year to take risks. Good luck finding a job elsewhere.
It's bad in IT, but at least you get to use your brain (to some extent) and some of it is sometimes fun. That's a start.
Do fun stuff on the side and keep your skills current. That could become very handy sooner than you think.
--
FairSoftware.net -- the community for fair entrepreneurs
Not too many exciting new features, I'm not sure why they call it 2.0.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
Full-page zoom and auto-scroll? Great. Now I can use Chrome like I use Safari on my iPhone. Of course scaling should scale the whole page, not just the text. It shouldn't be that hard. An old technology like PDF (10 years old) knows that.
Profiles? Ok, could be moderately useful. It sort of conflicts with the OS's notion of swapping between users. So I'd use it more as a workaround because bookmarks are hard to organize.
Greasemonkey scripts? That's my favorite. But it's for power users only. Just read the instructions and imagine your grandma giving it a try:
To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add --enable-user-scripts in the Target field. While you're in the Properties dialog, click on "Open File Location" and create a folder named User Scriptsin the user data directory, where you'll need to manually save scripts.
--
FairSoftware.net
Cracking the site was easy, because Twitter allowed an unlimited number of rapid-fire log-in attempts.
Twitter is doubly at fault here. First, it's not that hard to detect rapid-fire password attacks. Even Unix (way before Linux) knew to kick you out after 3 failed attempts. Second, they should enforce better passwords for their employees (not necessarily for regular users, that's another discussion).
He decided not to use other hacked accounts personally. Instead he posted a message to Digital Gangster offering access to any Twitter account by request.
That's where the 18-year old kid is at fault. He showed a lack of hacker ethics. Good hackers may discover an exploit, but they don't do harm.
When I hacked my university's computer network (Vax machines on Bitnet back in 1990), I did it with the knowledge of the sysadmin staff. And once you have made your point, you stand back.
--
FairSoftware.net -- geeks starting fair and open software businesses together
I used to think like you. Very paranoid about whatever I thought were great ideas. Don't tell anyone. Ask for a non-disclosure (NDA). I was so convinced that if I even hinted at some of my ideas, everyone would try to steal them from me.
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
It took me maybe 10 years to figure that out. I have a few patents, got sued too. The value of a great idea is in its execution.
Take the idea and run with it. Make it happen. Code, develop, market, etc. Just like military planning, great ideas don't survive their first implementation, but they have the potential to evolve in something great.
I have good news for you though: your question is typical of budding entrepreneurs. The simple fact that you even ask is a sign that you'll do great in the future. Just add some experience (~5 years) and you'll have the perfect mix.
Don't believe everything your read. The example in the article is the one in a million occurrence. That's not the kind of odds you want to shoot for.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers and citizen journalists create fair businesses
What I remember is "20 FF 58". That means jump to subroutine at address $FF58, which happens to be in the ROM of the Apple II and contains the magical "60", meaning return. What is the point of jumping to a return? So that you can find out your own address by looking at the stack(*). From there, you could start relocating your code. Remember: no virtual memory, no pagination, no nothing. You had to find a way.
(*) and later discover that in the 1/million chance that you got an interrupt precisely during the return, what's on the stack is not your address, but someone else's. But interrupts on the Apple II were infrequent to say the least.
This is great... Now, all you have to do is install the preventive multitasking OS I had written at the time then try to bootstrap Minix from it, and you'll have the best of the 80s.
So many memories, so little time. How many people on /. even have fond memories of the Apple II? Just showing my age I guess. Anyone below 30 who even knows what it was like at the time? I ran my first BBS on an Apple II. Kind of like slashdot, minus the traffic :-)
In a recent study of the top 140 corporations in America, 12 were using OpenOffice. That's not exactly much. With the coming recession, I can see quite a few companies deciding to cut their costs and switch to OpenOffice. It beats upgrading to Office 2007, that's for sure.
We only need another 4 companies in that sample to get a 50% market share increase!
Linux also will strenghten its dominant position in servers. Sun is going out of business, just like SGI a few years back. Sun is the only one that doesn't know it yet.
Wait, but if Sun is going out business, who will pay all these engineers who contribute to Open Source projects today? "Houston, we have a problem."
So this pending recession has some good for FOSS, and some not so good. By the way, don't listen to the pundits that tell you the recession will last years. Those same pundits four months ago were saying life is great. They don't have a clue, they just echo the popular opinion of the time.
--
Software Bill Of Rights: transparency, open management, equal rights and revenue sharing
Let's see. You'll get a CS degree but don't feel like writing code for a living. That's a tough one.
Are you a "people" person? All those introverted geeks need to talk to each other, make decisions and agree on stuff. Something that they (on average) do very poorly. You would have a career in product marketing, since you understand the geeks and can talk to them.
If that makes sense to you, then short-term, your best bet is to join an open source project and volunteer to *organize* stuff. Not code, but organize. You'd be amazed how badly needed it is for most projects.
--
the elephant in the room: How to Make Money with Open Source?
First: keep your day job: it provides the cash your family needs. Second: forget about traditional part-time work, it usually either pays really low hourly rates, or the work consumes much more than the 5-15 hours you say you have.
Instead, look at fairsoftware.net (hey, if I invented it, I can brag about it). You won't earn immediate cash, instead you'll be getting equity into whatever fun software project you find. Or start your own and get more geeks to join you, also for revenue share, not upfront cash.
Financially, it's the right thing to do: have most of your base covered with salary, and an upside based on equity so that the sky's the limit. Plus it's fun.
My all-time favorite true story occured when I tried to help my dad (I bet that for everyone here, our parents are our #1 support customers).
Dad reports following problem: in the last month or so, the mouse started acting strange. Every time he gestures right, the mouse goes left. When he wants to go up, the mouse moves down.
I look it up online, suspecting some virus having fun. Can't find anything.
Dad reports that he got used to the problem, he just has to gesture in the opposite way and then he can use the computer again. Not a great workaround, but it's good enough for him.
At my next visit home, I finally can diagnose the problem live instead of over the phone: Dad was holding the mouse upside down.
True story - lasted for a month before problem was fixed. My fault for not figuring it out sooner.
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FairSoftware.net: where geeks create side-businesses together
I really wish the motion would pass. Finally, we could extract soundbites from the RIAA's lawyers to show how ridiculous their position is.
But my guess is that it's not going to happen: it's a long shot. Allowing media in the courtroom is the exception, not the rule. What I wish for, I usually don't get...
15 years ago, I used to buy CDs. I couldn't listen to the tracks ahead of time, often 90% of the album sucked. But I had to pay the $15 anyway. Now I buy my music legally, online, but I often just buy one song (99 cents), the ones I really like.
Guess what, the RIAA's business is dying. They don't provide value anymore (if they ever did).
When that happens to a corporation in America, you have two options: Change your business model, adapt and become competitive again.
Or ask the government for a bailout. Dear RIAA, stop the lawsuits, just ask Uncle Sam for $100 billions. It's much easier and faster than your current approach.
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Free and Fair, Friend or Foe?
Correct on all counts. Now, as to bias, it's a chicken and egg problem: am I pretending there is a problem with funding startups because I started a company in that space, or did I believe there was a problem and therefore started a company to fix it?
VCs have a saying (that I really don't like because it sounds arrogant), but applicable here: "no conflict, no interest". It means that if you really were not biased and had no interest in a topic, then how could you possibly have an interesting opinion? I think it's a valid point.
Transparency is the answer. I trust everyone to be smart enough to draw their own conclusions.
As I said in a previous comment, the current model of entrepreneurship is broken. VCs have left. In 2009, capital will be really hard to find. But there is a silver lining: capital is no longer necessary to start companies.
Again, fairsoftware.net among others is allowing people who don't have any money and don't have any VC buddies to start businesses together.
It will work because for software at least, a few smart developers can beat established software giants. Groundbreaking software can now be built quickly and cheaply by reusing a lot of existing code. You can thank the Open Source community's efforts for that.
I have a lot of respect for Mike Malone, the author of the article. He wrote one of my favorite books: "Going Public: Mips and the Entrepeneurial Dream". If you have any ounce of entrepreneurship in you, this book will reveal it. I'm sure it started vocations. But in today's piece, I disagree that Sarbanes-Oxley is the main problem, although it did reduce the number of IPOs.
The best advice I ever received for starting a company? Drop Powerpoint and your VC pitch. Write code instead.
One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.
Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate that.
My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: geeks starting a side business together.
One reason corporations don't like part-time is that as long as you are full-time, you actually tend to work way past 40 hours a week. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, under impossible deadlines.
Once you are part-time, you start saying no to crazy demands. Corporations just hate it.
My answer? Be your own boss. It comes with a caveat: starting your own business alone is a bad idea. Guess what? It takes more than one person to provide something of value. It doesn't take an army of hundreds, but a small dedicated group of friends can do amazing things. The sum really is larger than the parts.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: friends starting a side business together.
For once, I'll recommend to RTFA first before commenting. It's a tough choice.
On one hand, it's great that a family with such a tough hereditary problem can know that their kids and grand-kids won't be affected. On the other hand, I'm just so scared of the consequences: we are playing with nature and past experience shows that we usually don't fully understand the long-term consequences of our actions. We usually regret such experiments.
But who am I to tell this family to go ahead and accept brest cancer? Can you look them in the eye and say "choose cancer"?
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fairsoftware.net -- Software Bill Of Rights: transparency, equal rights and revenue sharing