Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy...
on
Safari 4's Messy Trail
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The big value-proposition of the Mac has been that it is easy for the non-geeky user to use. Unfortunately, things like these make those very users vulnerable. Without exposing easy ways to flush potentially sensitive and private information, it is the same users Apple attempts to serve that will be exposed. And, this will probably be the default browser for most new systems, so unless this is patched, expect the problem to proliferate...
This came about as a result of their acquisition of Powerset. Those guys have been working on Hadoop, and contributing back for a while (pretty much since the beginning). Here's what the linked article in the OP states, "When Microsoft acquired the company, Powersetters Michael Stack and Jim Kellerman took a hiatus from their full-time HBase contributions. But by October, Redmond had cleared the pair to resume their open coding. And that's what we'd call giving yourself cancer. "While Microsoft has supported open source in the past," a company mouthpiece tells us, "this is the first time that Microsoft has continued to support open source with an acquired company."" So, rather than release their entire effort as Open Source, the participants in Kumo/Powerset will continue to work on Open Source projects and software they embed.
Eugene Kleiner,the founder of Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm behind some of the biggest successes of our times (Amazon, Google, Intel, Genentech, etc. etc.) said it best - "When they pass the hors d'oeuvres around, take two". When there's money on the table, you take it.
Love your money, not your stock.
Let's face it - if you came up with this concept with a bunch of your buddies sitting around, you can always come up with another one. Getting a company off the ground is VERY hard, and it is much easier with success under your belt. This will classify as a success. It will make the next one, should you choose to do another, much easier. It will be easier to raise venture money if required, it will be easier to attract talent, and it will be easier to sell to customers. You will learn a lot about taking a product to market, seeing it deployment and learning how customers made purchasing decisions.
Unless, for some reason, you have some killer IP and a clear path to revenue (both of which are, more often than not, not worth the paper they are printed on - technologies have short half-lives and customers change strategies, get acquired, lose or make more than anticipated and contacts within firms get re-org'd, fired or they quit), you really should have a very strong reason for assuming you will do a better job than Megacorp. The only reason to pass would be if you feel the deal is not high enough. That can only be validated via a counter offer. Again, as Eugene Kleiner said, "Never sell unless there are at least two buyers". So, if you feel this offer is fair, you better have a strong reason for thinking you can do better than Megacorp.
Also, get some solid advisers (perhaps professors who serve on boards, or alumni or something) to help you think through this before engaging the professionals (lawyers).
IANAL, but know the following (you prob already do, but I didn't see it discussed here):
There is a big difference between a cash offer and a stock (if illiquid) offer.
Lockouts - how long before you can leave, should you want to
Earnouts - what milestones do you need to hit before you get all your monies disbursed
Non competes
Facebook and Google are well known for going through the halls of places like Stanford and doing 'manquisitions'. The developers get some cash up-front (similar to a signing bonus), get an exit under their belts, get a smaller piece of a hopefully bigger pie, and it gives FB/GOOG a few solid developers to work on projects that the devs are passionate about.
A wormhole has opened up. Don't saunter by!
Choosing to contribute sample code here is definitely interesting here, given that the Stonehenge project is meant to promote interoperability between Web service standards. First Microsoft contributes money, and now they contribute sample code to promote interoperability (between standards and platforms)! Wonders never cease!
Fedora recently claimed that it would take $10B+ to re-build it from scratch. Given that OpenSolaris came from Solaris/Unix, how much more stable/solid is it, as compared to the Linux kernel? Also, I bet there are more Open Source apps that have yet to be 'ported' to it. No empirical data - just a thought...
Thanks Spy - I, for one, was looking forward to testing this out, and, luckily hadn't gotten down to getting the latest bits when I read about the bug. Now I can proceed to find the next ones!
As mentioned earlier, since there are no guarantees as to when the GC gets called, if you do need house keeping on your methods, as opposed to objects, you should use a try/catch/finally block. The "finally" clause is called regardless of whether an exception is thrown or not. This way, you are guaranteed predictability in execution, as opposed to overriding finally(), which may never get called if you have a reference to the object. In C++, since the destructor is always called when the object goes out of scope, you can bank on its execution, but since finally gets called on garbage collection, it may never be called (as mentioned earlier too).
Having lived and worked outside the US, and having had friends move to other countries (New Zealand, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, India, China, etc.), here are some things that might help:
If you are not a spontaneous kinda person, you probably want to have a gig lined up before you get there. That is probably the least painless and most predictable way to go.
Be sure to set your expectations for salary, and what it will buy you at the place you decide to go.
The work culture will probably be very different (hours of work, socializing post-work, etc.).
A buddy who went outside the US to an unnamed country (not in Europe) found that he was getting much lower pay for a standard Java developer job there. Plus, he noticed that places he was interviewing at, people were coming in to work rather formally dressed. He also noticed that most people would be very friendly, but wouldn't really socialize after work, and things 'died down' very quickly during the week. Of course, that is just one data point, but basically points to checking out all aspects of 'life', outside of just your day-to-day job.
One of the easier transitions to make will be to join a company with offices in the US and elsewhere, and then transfer within that company to another country. Once grounded, you can choose to stay, return, or move.
If you are willing to chuck up your job, you will probably have the most luck if you can actually go to the country you want to be in and meet face-to-face with companies. That, of course, is rather difficult, unless you have a support network. And paperwork.
Bon Voyage! There is so much you can learn by immersing yourself in a different culture!
IANAD, but from what I've read (and, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night), you have until the age of 35 to build bone density. Depending on genetics, you might be prone to Osteoporosis (I'm taking a wild stab and assuming you are male, but in the very slim chance you are not, that too is another reason you might be prone), and you have to basically lift weights to build bone density (and have calcium in your diet). So, don't leave out the weights!
True dat. There have been hosted servers and virtual servers (ala Linode) for a while now. However, for a class of applications that need to scale almost dynamically and rapidly, and do not want to have to provision peak-load machines for anything outside of peak load, the 'cloud' offerings are ideal. Being able to programmatically scale via bottleneck alleviation through more 'hardware', the offerings make a lot of sense. The ability to have images that can be fired up (pretty soon without any lag) on demand allows a ton of flexibility where, in the past, there was little to none without greater capital expenditure.
The great part is there are already pre-built virtual images that you can ice, or have others develop, so you can fire them up at will.
Imagine a service whereby you can set up a farm of web servers that get fired off so you don't have to worry about getting slashdotted (well, until your bottleneck shifts to another spot) as early! It won't be long before ALL hosting providers start offering programmatic ways of provisioning servers and paying by the drink.
One thing that is interesting to note is that Google, Amazon (and AppNexus, I think) do NOT offer Windows machines by the slice. Now, in the off chance that you are looking for a cloud solution that requires windows tools, and don't want to go with wine or a port, GoGrid might be your provider of choice, until MS has their own offering, or others step up.
Well, you have to compare apples to apples with hosting, though. With Amazon's cheapest EC2 instance, you are looking at $72/month cost, or about $850/year. You have a bit more for storage, static IP, etc. But, it sure as shit beats the heck out of other boxes you could get at guys like GoDaddy and 1and1, where you get a shared box, with minimal control and cpanel or something at best, unlike root access at Amazon or admin access at GoGrid's windows boxes. You could go to services like Linode and get boxes with root access, but when you do the math, you will be hard pressed to get a comparable box at this rate. That, coupled with the flexibility of a pay-as-you-go model really does make this ideal for several situations. With the recent addition of persistent storage, you can even run full-blown db-driven apps here (something that was a pain in the ass before PS, because you had to use s3 as your permanent store). If you go to guys like Rackspace or other reputable providers, you are looking at $600-700 a MONTH as a start. Should you choose to own the iron yourself, you can probably get comparable numbers up to a certain threshold, but then you are left with hardware management issues. Of course, not that Amazon ever goes down;)
Let's have some facts here - how much money is spent on proprietary software from Microsoft vs, oh, say, guns and military programs? This is the classic 'Guns vs Butter' argument in Economics 101. I mean, it's not as if all the software were to be suddenly be made free for governments, they would funnel the 'billions' they spend on Microsoft software into food-for-poor, or cure-diseases programs. As has been sited earlier, only a small fraction of any IT spend goes towards licenses. Services and maintenance contracts make up a bulk - as much as 80% [citation needed], and it is not as if the FSF software is magically cheaper to manage or maintain. Don't get me wrong - I love Open Source as a movement, but it has a long-ass way to go before it becomes truly ubiquitous in the consumer markets, the enterprise and the government. That is what we should all work towards. I don't think philosophical arguments are going to change proprietary source champions. But, if they find an economic way to benefit by releasing code and fostering innovation, I'm sure more of them will start doing so.
Spray or moisten a cloth, but avoid spraying anything directly on the screen/keyboard. You might also want to get a 'compressed air' can and spray the keyboard, since the macbook pro keyboard doesn't come off easily!
that do essentially the same thing with text summary (similar to Mac OS X's summarizer). There's an Open Source project that does this too called Summarizer - http://sourceforge.net/projects/summarizer
Another key advantage with Linux is you can really tweak and tune your init.d so you can control what starts up and what doesn't, at a fairly fine-grained level (should you choose to do so). In the case of Windows, you are pretty much on your own, since the Kernel boot up itself takes up a lot of cycles.
There is valuable data that you can get from an analytics package, but not all analytics packages need to be invasive at the client-side. A ton of accurate info (including bot traffic) can be obtained from server-side packages like Webalizer and AWstats. These do not invade the user's privacy and give you an accurate idea of what is hitting your servers. That being said, it is not as easy to process the information just from the server side. However, best of all, these apps are free and Open Source!
Slashdot Mirror
The big value-proposition of the Mac has been that it is easy for the non-geeky user to use. Unfortunately, things like these make those very users vulnerable. Without exposing easy ways to flush potentially sensitive and private information, it is the same users Apple attempts to serve that will be exposed. And, this will probably be the default browser for most new systems, so unless this is patched, expect the problem to proliferate...
This came about as a result of their acquisition of Powerset. Those guys have been working on Hadoop, and contributing back for a while (pretty much since the beginning). Here's what the linked article in the OP states, "When Microsoft acquired the company, Powersetters Michael Stack and Jim Kellerman took a hiatus from their full-time HBase contributions. But by October, Redmond had cleared the pair to resume their open coding. And that's what we'd call giving yourself cancer. "While Microsoft has supported open source in the past," a company mouthpiece tells us, "this is the first time that Microsoft has continued to support open source with an acquired company."" So, rather than release their entire effort as Open Source, the participants in Kumo/Powerset will continue to work on Open Source projects and software they embed.
Love your money, not your stock.
Let's face it - if you came up with this concept with a bunch of your buddies sitting around, you can always come up with another one. Getting a company off the ground is VERY hard, and it is much easier with success under your belt. This will classify as a success. It will make the next one, should you choose to do another, much easier. It will be easier to raise venture money if required, it will be easier to attract talent, and it will be easier to sell to customers. You will learn a lot about taking a product to market, seeing it deployment and learning how customers made purchasing decisions.
Unless, for some reason, you have some killer IP and a clear path to revenue (both of which are, more often than not, not worth the paper they are printed on - technologies have short half-lives and customers change strategies, get acquired, lose or make more than anticipated and contacts within firms get re-org'd, fired or they quit), you really should have a very strong reason for assuming you will do a better job than Megacorp. The only reason to pass would be if you feel the deal is not high enough. That can only be validated via a counter offer. Again, as Eugene Kleiner said, "Never sell unless there are at least two buyers". So, if you feel this offer is fair, you better have a strong reason for thinking you can do better than Megacorp.
Also, get some solid advisers (perhaps professors who serve on boards, or alumni or something) to help you think through this before engaging the professionals (lawyers).
IANAL, but know the following (you prob already do, but I didn't see it discussed here):
Facebook and Google are well known for going through the halls of places like Stanford and doing 'manquisitions'. The developers get some cash up-front (similar to a signing bonus), get an exit under their belts, get a smaller piece of a hopefully bigger pie, and it gives FB/GOOG a few solid developers to work on projects that the devs are passionate about.
A wormhole has opened up. Don't saunter by!
Choosing to contribute sample code here is definitely interesting here, given that the Stonehenge project is meant to promote interoperability between Web service standards. First Microsoft contributes money, and now they contribute sample code to promote interoperability (between standards and platforms)! Wonders never cease!
I found this laptop and started writing this reply when it suddenly froz...
Fedora recently claimed that it would take $10B+ to re-build it from scratch. Given that OpenSolaris came from Solaris/Unix, how much more stable/solid is it, as compared to the Linux kernel? Also, I bet there are more Open Source apps that have yet to be 'ported' to it. No empirical data - just a thought...
Thanks Spy - I, for one, was looking forward to testing this out, and, luckily hadn't gotten down to getting the latest bits when I read about the bug. Now I can proceed to find the next ones!
As mentioned earlier, since there are no guarantees as to when the GC gets called, if you do need house keeping on your methods, as opposed to objects, you should use a try/catch/finally block. The "finally" clause is called regardless of whether an exception is thrown or not. This way, you are guaranteed predictability in execution, as opposed to overriding finally(), which may never get called if you have a reference to the object. In C++, since the destructor is always called when the object goes out of scope, you can bank on its execution, but since finally gets called on garbage collection, it may never be called (as mentioned earlier too).
A buddy who went outside the US to an unnamed country (not in Europe) found that he was getting much lower pay for a standard Java developer job there. Plus, he noticed that places he was interviewing at, people were coming in to work rather formally dressed. He also noticed that most people would be very friendly, but wouldn't really socialize after work, and things 'died down' very quickly during the week. Of course, that is just one data point, but basically points to checking out all aspects of 'life', outside of just your day-to-day job. One of the easier transitions to make will be to join a company with offices in the US and elsewhere, and then transfer within that company to another country. Once grounded, you can choose to stay, return, or move. If you are willing to chuck up your job, you will probably have the most luck if you can actually go to the country you want to be in and meet face-to-face with companies. That, of course, is rather difficult, unless you have a support network. And paperwork. Bon Voyage! There is so much you can learn by immersing yourself in a different culture!
IANAD, but from what I've read (and, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night), you have until the age of 35 to build bone density. Depending on genetics, you might be prone to Osteoporosis (I'm taking a wild stab and assuming you are male, but in the very slim chance you are not, that too is another reason you might be prone), and you have to basically lift weights to build bone density (and have calcium in your diet). So, don't leave out the weights!
True dat. There have been hosted servers and virtual servers (ala Linode) for a while now. However, for a class of applications that need to scale almost dynamically and rapidly, and do not want to have to provision peak-load machines for anything outside of peak load, the 'cloud' offerings are ideal. Being able to programmatically scale via bottleneck alleviation through more 'hardware', the offerings make a lot of sense. The ability to have images that can be fired up (pretty soon without any lag) on demand allows a ton of flexibility where, in the past, there was little to none without greater capital expenditure. The great part is there are already pre-built virtual images that you can ice, or have others develop, so you can fire them up at will. Imagine a service whereby you can set up a farm of web servers that get fired off so you don't have to worry about getting slashdotted (well, until your bottleneck shifts to another spot) as early! It won't be long before ALL hosting providers start offering programmatic ways of provisioning servers and paying by the drink.
One thing that is interesting to note is that Google, Amazon (and AppNexus, I think) do NOT offer Windows machines by the slice. Now, in the off chance that you are looking for a cloud solution that requires windows tools, and don't want to go with wine or a port, GoGrid might be your provider of choice, until MS has their own offering, or others step up.
Well, you have to compare apples to apples with hosting, though. With Amazon's cheapest EC2 instance, you are looking at $72/month cost, or about $850/year. You have a bit more for storage, static IP, etc. But, it sure as shit beats the heck out of other boxes you could get at guys like GoDaddy and 1and1, where you get a shared box, with minimal control and cpanel or something at best, unlike root access at Amazon or admin access at GoGrid's windows boxes. You could go to services like Linode and get boxes with root access, but when you do the math, you will be hard pressed to get a comparable box at this rate. That, coupled with the flexibility of a pay-as-you-go model really does make this ideal for several situations. With the recent addition of persistent storage, you can even run full-blown db-driven apps here (something that was a pain in the ass before PS, because you had to use s3 as your permanent store). If you go to guys like Rackspace or other reputable providers, you are looking at $600-700 a MONTH as a start. Should you choose to own the iron yourself, you can probably get comparable numbers up to a certain threshold, but then you are left with hardware management issues. Of course, not that Amazon ever goes down ;)
Let's have some facts here - how much money is spent on proprietary software from Microsoft vs, oh, say, guns and military programs? This is the classic 'Guns vs Butter' argument in Economics 101. I mean, it's not as if all the software were to be suddenly be made free for governments, they would funnel the 'billions' they spend on Microsoft software into food-for-poor, or cure-diseases programs. As has been sited earlier, only a small fraction of any IT spend goes towards licenses. Services and maintenance contracts make up a bulk - as much as 80% [citation needed], and it is not as if the FSF software is magically cheaper to manage or maintain. Don't get me wrong - I love Open Source as a movement, but it has a long-ass way to go before it becomes truly ubiquitous in the consumer markets, the enterprise and the government. That is what we should all work towards. I don't think philosophical arguments are going to change proprietary source champions. But, if they find an economic way to benefit by releasing code and fostering innovation, I'm sure more of them will start doing so.
Spray or moisten a cloth, but avoid spraying anything directly on the screen/keyboard. You might also want to get a 'compressed air' can and spray the keyboard, since the macbook pro keyboard doesn't come off easily!
that do essentially the same thing with text summary (similar to Mac OS X's summarizer). There's an Open Source project that does this too called Summarizer - http://sourceforge.net/projects/summarizer
Another key advantage with Linux is you can really tweak and tune your init.d so you can control what starts up and what doesn't, at a fairly fine-grained level (should you choose to do so). In the case of Windows, you are pretty much on your own, since the Kernel boot up itself takes up a lot of cycles.
There is valuable data that you can get from an analytics package, but not all analytics packages need to be invasive at the client-side. A ton of accurate info (including bot traffic) can be obtained from server-side packages like Webalizer and AWstats. These do not invade the user's privacy and give you an accurate idea of what is hitting your servers. That being said, it is not as easy to process the information just from the server side. However, best of all, these apps are free and Open Source!