I've seen specific cases where, unfortunately, a programming team ignored the firefox angle when testing their code, and wrote in.NET specific goodies that only worked in IE.
Sure enough, sales dipped almost 20% for a week. We ran the reports, and Firefox was accounting for 21% of site traffic (until that week, where it dropped off to almost nil). We quickly fixed the code, and firefox shot right back up to 21-22%.
The demographics for this website are a little bit younger than the general population, so it made sense that we had already broken through 20%
Fans cannot get enough of their fictional universes. I've seen the wikis for WoW and other MMOs grow larger than the wikipediae of several second-tier languages. The wikis for complex TV shows (BSG, Lost, 24, etc) are almost as big.
Give these fans a place to 'play' inside a universe linked in with a TV show? Oh yeah-- there's nothing "stupid" about this idea at all.
If I am understanding correctly, you were looking for 'winners' and 'losers' (weasel words in and of themselves, but anyway...) in terms of 'quality' (another semi-subjective term that could make someone go crazy and drive motorcycles across the country for the rest of their lives).
You found that '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.' -- or in plain English: "the app specs had a much bigger influence when compared to internal efficiencies".
I would wonder if you're just seeing a statistical wash-out. Are you dealing with data sets (tens of millions of lines and thousands of functions) that are so large, that patterns simply get washed out in the analysis?
Oh dear, my post is no more clear than the summary...
FWIW, most large Japanese corporations try to silo their divisions as much as possible. Often, large companies will silo a division, until it becomes 'self sufficient' with it's own P&L, and then the parent company will spin it off into quasi-independence. This forces middle managers to be as efficient as possible, but obviously costs somewhat in corporate-wide leveraging-- leveraging usually comes in the form of cheap capital and maybe shared real estate, but not much beyond that.
The German Wikipedia is currently ranked 2nd according to the wikindex.com, but the fascinating part is what other popular wikis are out there: the World of Warcraft wiki is huge, beating many euro language wikipediae; TV show wikis are big, as are online games and sexual collections.
I guess my point is that I agree with you: the interesting thing about wikis is the non-standard collection of ideas, no matter how "non-important" or esoteric they seem to the general public.
I am convinced that SCO and their lawyers are a zombie process at this point. The bankruptcy was an attempt to kill the pid with some hope of clean up, but i fear we are to the stage of kill -9. I don't know what the legal equivalent of this is, except to get the sheriff in his off-hours to go in and lock the doors and just physically seize everything.
This is continuing a hopeful trend. Lessig is aiming directly at Congress, Pete Ashdown (owner of the ISP www.xmission.com ) ran for Senate, and others are beginning to make their way into the political class. Soon enough ($DIETY willing) we will really see politicians who "get it" for privacy protection, data transparency, Open Source, and the social ramifications that those technologies bring.
Politicians make their living off of the same vapourware every election-- and for some inexplicable reason, the masses keep buying into it. How about a short list? 1. Balanced Budget 2. Peace in our time 3. Raise education standards 4. Economic security
At first glance, this may seem off-topic, but I would submit that vapourware is inevitable to anyone who is asking for money/power and promises to give you something later. Companies release press 'early' (vapourware) in the hopes of bouying their stock price or raising VC money; politicians promise the moon to get campaign contributions (VC money). Same thing.
Now that he has a billion dollars, I would hope that Mr Zuckerburg invests in a CEO or COO-- someone over 40 that can at least give the appearance of a "real" company. Yes, I realize that means selling out to a certain degree and it also maybe takes away some (okay most) of the fun, but it also means that certain people (investors) won't think that the staff at facebook is making shit up as they go along.
If I were Mark, I would hire a suit, and put him in front of the crowds, while I stood off to the side and wait for the 'inspirational answer' about the dreamy-dream utopian future and how my software was going to make it happen.
A platform is a semi-permanent thing. You cannot just switch your website platform for a major ecommerce site over the weekend-- plan on several months of pain. If you don't plan, figure on several years of severe pain.
Platform choice should come down to three things, IMHO:
language - must be flexible and interconnectable with 3rd parties. Your platform won't do everything, and you'll be using a lot of 3rd party vendors for analytics, cross-sell, reviews, image hosting, etc. Make sure your language plays nice with others: Java, PHP, perl,.NET are all 'common', so these should be good.
talent - in my previous city, there was a good amount of perl people, as well as java developers. Now I am in the midwest, and everyone seems to be all.NET this and.NET that-- so,.NET seems to make sense, as we would be pulling talent from this pool for our staff. Some areas of the country are stronger in different languages and platforms.
community - there are some great platforms out there, but their communities are dying or shrinking. Other communities have a lot of people, but most of them are script-kiddies. Beware. A platform should be both 1) a bit mature, and 2) viable community.
Having said those points, DO NOT switch platforms just to make your developer happy. If you have a staff of architects and developers and they all agree that some new platform is better in the short- and long-run, then go ahead and switch. But if this is just the whim of 2-3 guys, tell them NO.
One last point: if/when you do switch, make sure the clock drives the functionality, not the other way around. If you let functionality drive the clock, you'll be 4 years and several million dollars into a nightmare. Set a deadline (a REAL deadline) of 6 months and take what you get at the end of that 6 months. your developer crew (internal or external) will be augmenting and building out on that platform no matter what, so you're far better off having something cuick and crude rather than late and fancy. I cannot emphasize this point enough.
I fear that we're in for a long ride on this one. Back in the Day, we all figured that the SCO lawsuit would be quashed within 6 months. I remember a talk at a LinuxWorld several YEARS ago where Eric Raymond or someone openly challenged them to show us all where the 'infringing code' was. Several years ago...
Lawsuits around the GPL and Linux codebase will become a permanent fixture. Our dreams of a single case to finalize up everything nice and tidy are never going to come true. I have every confidence that Open Source will survive, and the GPL will remain intact, but the lawsuit will always be there-- there's just too much potential money sloshing around, and law schools keep pumping out the evil.
I was in Korea, having just hired a new country manager for there, and having finished my assignments for helping to shepherd the deals with the Asian hardware manufacturers. There wasn't that much work, and the company was downsizing its consulting group-- so we separated. It was amicable.
I worked for Red Hat from 2001-2004, and I will say that Matthew Szulik is a good man. He is one of those types that remembers everyone in the room, and remembers your name even though you haven't spoken to him for weeks or months. It was a crazy time, taking the company through the transition from start-up to 'real' company. His emails were sometimes non-sequitir stream of conciousness things, but at other times were very visionary and helpful.
It was great to work for a company where everyone felt they were on a mission-- good times, good times.
I've said it for months now, and I'll wildly guess again: 1. SCO will owe Novell a bunch of money (money that it doesn't have) 2. Microsoft will purchase the remaining 'assets' from SCO. It doesn't really matter if they pay $1 or $1Million 3. Microsoft will do so to get closer to the following goals: 3a. MS now has a hand in the Linux game (possible bump in their stock) 3b. MS can now renegotiate/strengthen their position with Novell 3c. MS can now possibly resurrect the lawsuit or dredge up other scary FUD-alicious items out of what they get (remember it's the appearance of a problem, not an actual problem that makes corporate lawyers CIOs think twice about going open source) 3d. MS pisses off some open source zealots that already hated them (meh) 4. ??? 5. Profit!
a more wretched hive of scum and villainy
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
1. set up a data-laundering haven 2. advertise amongst the warez people and criminal element 3. let enough criminal traffic (drug trafficking info) go through to build up trust that the laundering 'really works' 4. Wait around for the stuff that is important (like nuclear codes or enemy state intel) 5. ??? 6. Promoted to section chief at the invisible mansion! (Profit!)
I don't have one lick of proof to say that our friends in Maryland or their cousins in Langley set this thing up from the beginning, other than it's an obvious slam dunk for them. I don't think the NSA is monitoring certain ports, I think they own the whole thing.
The problem with citizendium is the basic premise that the masses aren't "qualified" to contribute. This is what made the wikipedia so much fun-- all of us dilletantes had a place to put in our smattering of knolwedge about history, geography, or punk rock. But only a minority of the population graduates college, and an even smaller minority have the advanced degree in place to be a qualified 'authority' to speak authoritatively on a given subject. Citizendium depends on this minority, and frankly wikipedia is migrating the same direction.
As a result, the masses are moving toward what they know: TV shows, pop culture, and fictional universe wikis. The Lyric wiki is 6th on the http://wikindex.com/, and the TV wiki is 13th overall. World of Warcraft, Star Trek, and Battlesar Galactica are bigger than many non-european language wikipediae.
People go where they feel smart. When citizendium makes things tough, only the tough will remain.
You're absolutely right-- there are many more wiki software packages out there, and there certainly are thousands more wikis out there. We are limited by two things: 1. The software that we can consistently spider for statistics (i.e. the stats are always in the same place at ~/stats.html) 2. The wiki repositories that we have discovered so far.
If you know of some wiki lists, please contact me (mail me). If you have a wiki that you don't see, please add it in.
As to your concern about the inability to see general trends with such a small sample size, I would respond that all polling is done from relatively small sample groups. Our accuracy would certainly increase with a greater population, but we have sufficient to spot some very general trends, IMHO.
We started http://wikindex.com/ a while ago to see which wikis were big, and we have noticed some major trends:
subject specific wikis (protein biology, Asian travel, etc) are much more vibrant (where vibrancy is measured as the ratio of updates to total pages)
fictional universe wikis are insanely popular - Memory Alpha (The Star Trek wiki) beats all but a handful of the european language wikipediae, and the battlesar galactica wiki is even bigger.
wikis are the new bulletin boards - TV shows are using them for all the complex character backfill. Have you lost track in "24" or "Lost"? Try the wiki, it's aaaalll in there.
According to the http://www.wikindex.com/, The English Wikipedia is still waaay above any other wiki out there. I have been tracking wikis for a while, and just like other blogs and websites, the bulk of them focus on pop culture, and wikis are increasingly splitting into niche fields. So, if you assume that really only 1% of readers out there actually contribute, and that 1% are fanatic about something but have limited time, then they would more likely contribute to a topic-specific wiki rather than the general encyclopedia.
This makes sense-- would you rather read about Ubuntu updates on the general encyclopedia, or a ubuntu-specific wiki? On a lighter note, one can almost see which TV shows have greater loyalty based on their wiki sites.
Larry can certainly try, and Oracle will certainly take up Korea (where they have a monopoly) and a fair amount of the market, but I do not see this working for them long-term. Customers (like me) do not like to get all our software from a single place. The "Lock-in" problem exists almost just as much for Open Source software as it does for proprietary software. What happens if/when Oracle deicded to fork the kernel to better support their Db? What happens if/when those forks start to limit my options? Voila-- I am at the mercy of Oracle for support, compatability, and expandability. No thanks, that was the primary reason we all hated Microsoft, remember?
Red Hat or SuSE work when they come from IBM or HP or Fujitsu because the hardware/OS marriage makes sense. Hardware is pretty much a commodity at this point, so I know I have flexibility. RHEL or SuSE are forced to play nice with all the major HW vendors, so that keeps them honest and in line.
Sorry, but the temptation for Oracle to start dicking with the kernel would be just too tempting, and just too sticky for me.
As I told newsforge a few months back, we have seen unparalleled success with deploying MediaWiki at our company as an intranet.
What started 13 months ago as a quick way to get an intranet up and running has now blossomed into a vibrat communications channel with over 7000 pages, all written by our employees. It has become the defacto home for development specs, engineering and network documentation, vendor notes, product notes, warehouse processes, call center training, etc.
Some things I've learned:
do NOT allow MSWord or other complex documents to be uploaded as attachments-- it destroys the point of interactive communication
train, train, and train some more. I am talking about a lot of coaching to get people through their first additions and edits. Once they 'get it', they'll be hooked.
you will not be loved for the first while: everytime you get an attached Word or OpenOffice document, reply back to the person with "thanks, but why didn't you just put this on the wiki?" or "Thanks, please see my response/corrections/additions on the wiki". This pisses people off, because they are used to email ping-pong, but eventually they'll come around.
you will not be loved by anyone who is feudal or territorial with "their" project or "their" process. Your choices are to train them, or when that fails, fire them (no, seriously).
If you can get critical mass going, you will be amazed at the results: email attachments almost evaporate, communication and overall awareness increase, the org flattens out a bit, innovation comes from anywhere, and development time is shortened.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen specific cases where, unfortunately, a programming team ignored the firefox angle when testing their code, and wrote in .NET specific goodies that only worked in IE.
Sure enough, sales dipped almost 20% for a week. We ran the reports, and Firefox was accounting for 21% of site traffic (until that week, where it dropped off to almost nil). We quickly fixed the code, and firefox shot right back up to 21-22%.
The demographics for this website are a little bit younger than the general population, so it made sense that we had already broken through 20%
Fans cannot get enough of their fictional universes. I've seen the wikis for WoW and other MMOs grow larger than the wikipediae of several second-tier languages. The wikis for complex TV shows (BSG, Lost, 24, etc) are almost as big.
Give these fans a place to 'play' inside a universe linked in with a TV show? Oh yeah-- there's nothing "stupid" about this idea at all.
If I am understanding correctly, you were looking for 'winners' and 'losers' (weasel words in and of themselves, but anyway...) in terms of 'quality' (another semi-subjective term that could make someone go crazy and drive motorcycles across the country for the rest of their lives).
You found that '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.' -- or in plain English: "the app specs had a much bigger influence when compared to internal efficiencies".
I would wonder if you're just seeing a statistical wash-out. Are you dealing with data sets (tens of millions of lines and thousands of functions) that are so large, that patterns simply get washed out in the analysis?
Oh dear, my post is no more clear than the summary...
FWIW, most large Japanese corporations try to silo their divisions as much as possible. Often, large companies will silo a division, until it becomes 'self sufficient' with it's own P&L, and then the parent company will spin it off into quasi-independence. This forces middle managers to be as efficient as possible, but obviously costs somewhat in corporate-wide leveraging-- leveraging usually comes in the form of cheap capital and maybe shared real estate, but not much beyond that.
The German Wikipedia is currently ranked 2nd according to the wikindex.com, but the fascinating part is what other popular wikis are out there: the World of Warcraft wiki is huge, beating many euro language wikipediae; TV show wikis are big, as are online games and sexual collections.
I guess my point is that I agree with you: the interesting thing about wikis is the non-standard collection of ideas, no matter how "non-important" or esoteric they seem to the general public.
I am convinced that SCO and their lawyers are a zombie process at this point. The bankruptcy was an attempt to kill the pid with some hope of clean up, but i fear we are to the stage of kill -9. I don't know what the legal equivalent of this is, except to get the sheriff in his off-hours to go in and lock the doors and just physically seize everything.
MAKE IT STOP!!!!
This is continuing a hopeful trend. Lessig is aiming directly at Congress, Pete Ashdown (owner of the ISP www.xmission.com ) ran for Senate, and others are beginning to make their way into the political class. Soon enough ($DIETY willing) we will really see politicians who "get it" for privacy protection, data transparency, Open Source, and the social ramifications that those technologies bring.
Politicians make their living off of the same vapourware every election-- and for some inexplicable reason, the masses keep buying into it. How about a short list?
1. Balanced Budget
2. Peace in our time
3. Raise education standards
4. Economic security
At first glance, this may seem off-topic, but I would submit that vapourware is inevitable to anyone who is asking for money/power and promises to give you something later. Companies release press 'early' (vapourware) in the hopes of bouying their stock price or raising VC money; politicians promise the moon to get campaign contributions (VC money). Same thing.
Now that he has a billion dollars, I would hope that Mr Zuckerburg invests in a CEO or COO-- someone over 40 that can at least give the appearance of a "real" company. Yes, I realize that means selling out to a certain degree and it also maybe takes away some (okay most) of the fun, but it also means that certain people (investors) won't think that the staff at facebook is making shit up as they go along.
If I were Mark, I would hire a suit, and put him in front of the crowds, while I stood off to the side and wait for the 'inspirational answer' about the dreamy-dream utopian future and how my software was going to make it happen.
deal with the devil, and you'll be rich-- but you'll lose your soul. Tell Robert Johnson hello, Miguel.
Oh, you might've mentioned that you've never worked in IT before.
An unresearched attack, nice. Well, I have spent my whole career managing engineers, but I defer to your lower Slashdot number.
Platform choice should come down to three things, IMHO:
Having said those points, DO NOT switch platforms just to make your developer happy. If you have a staff of architects and developers and they all agree that some new platform is better in the short- and long-run, then go ahead and switch. But if this is just the whim of 2-3 guys, tell them NO.
One last point: if/when you do switch, make sure the clock drives the functionality, not the other way around. If you let functionality drive the clock, you'll be 4 years and several million dollars into a nightmare. Set a deadline (a REAL deadline) of 6 months and take what you get at the end of that 6 months. your developer crew (internal or external) will be augmenting and building out on that platform no matter what, so you're far better off having something cuick and crude rather than late and fancy. I cannot emphasize this point enough.
which we call 'the moon'
I fear that we're in for a long ride on this one. Back in the Day, we all figured that the SCO lawsuit would be quashed within 6 months. I remember a talk at a LinuxWorld several YEARS ago where Eric Raymond or someone openly challenged them to show us all where the 'infringing code' was. Several years ago...
Lawsuits around the GPL and Linux codebase will become a permanent fixture. Our dreams of a single case to finalize up everything nice and tidy are never going to come true. I have every confidence that Open Source will survive, and the GPL will remain intact, but the lawsuit will always be there-- there's just too much potential money sloshing around, and law schools keep pumping out the evil.
Both Viking landers (US) landed in 1976, not 1982.
why did i leave?
I was in Korea, having just hired a new country manager for there, and having finished my assignments for helping to shepherd the deals with the Asian hardware manufacturers. There wasn't that much work, and the company was downsizing its consulting group-- so we separated. It was amicable.
I worked for Red Hat from 2001-2004, and I will say that Matthew Szulik is a good man. He is one of those types that remembers everyone in the room, and remembers your name even though you haven't spoken to him for weeks or months. It was a crazy time, taking the company through the transition from start-up to 'real' company. His emails were sometimes non-sequitir stream of conciousness things, but at other times were very visionary and helpful.
It was great to work for a company where everyone felt they were on a mission-- good times, good times.
Good Luck, Mr Szulik.
I've said it for months now, and I'll wildly guess again:
1. SCO will owe Novell a bunch of money (money that it doesn't have)
2. Microsoft will purchase the remaining 'assets' from SCO. It doesn't really matter if they pay $1 or $1Million
3. Microsoft will do so to get closer to the following goals:
3a. MS now has a hand in the Linux game (possible bump in their stock)
3b. MS can now renegotiate/strengthen their position with Novell
3c. MS can now possibly resurrect the lawsuit or dredge up other scary FUD-alicious items out of what they get (remember it's the appearance of a problem, not an actual problem that makes corporate lawyers CIOs think twice about going open source)
3d. MS pisses off some open source zealots that already hated them (meh)
4. ???
5. Profit!
1. set up a data-laundering haven
2. advertise amongst the warez people and criminal element
3. let enough criminal traffic (drug trafficking info) go through to build up trust that the laundering 'really works'
4. Wait around for the stuff that is important (like nuclear codes or enemy state intel)
5. ???
6. Promoted to section chief at the invisible mansion! (Profit!)
I don't have one lick of proof to say that our friends in Maryland or their cousins in Langley set this thing up from the beginning, other than it's an obvious slam dunk for them. I don't think the NSA is monitoring certain ports, I think they own the whole thing.
The problem with citizendium is the basic premise that the masses aren't "qualified" to contribute. This is what made the wikipedia so much fun-- all of us dilletantes had a place to put in our smattering of knolwedge about history, geography, or punk rock. But only a minority of the population graduates college, and an even smaller minority have the advanced degree in place to be a qualified 'authority' to speak authoritatively on a given subject. Citizendium depends on this minority, and frankly wikipedia is migrating the same direction.
As a result, the masses are moving toward what they know: TV shows, pop culture, and fictional universe wikis. The Lyric wiki is 6th on the http://wikindex.com/, and the TV wiki is 13th overall. World of Warcraft, Star Trek, and Battlesar Galactica are bigger than many non-european language wikipediae.
People go where they feel smart. When citizendium makes things tough, only the tough will remain.
You're absolutely right-- there are many more wiki software packages out there, and there certainly are thousands more wikis out there. We are limited by two things:
1. The software that we can consistently spider for statistics (i.e. the stats are always in the same place at ~/stats.html)
2. The wiki repositories that we have discovered so far.
If you know of some wiki lists, please contact me (mail me). If you have a wiki that you don't see, please add it in.
As to your concern about the inability to see general trends with such a small sample size, I would respond that all polling is done from relatively small sample groups. Our accuracy would certainly increase with a greater population, but we have sufficient to spot some very general trends, IMHO.
According to the http://www.wikindex.com/, The English Wikipedia is still waaay above any other wiki out there. I have been tracking wikis for a while, and just like other blogs and websites, the bulk of them focus on pop culture, and wikis are increasingly splitting into niche fields. So, if you assume that really only 1% of readers out there actually contribute, and that 1% are fanatic about something but have limited time, then they would more likely contribute to a topic-specific wiki rather than the general encyclopedia.
This makes sense-- would you rather read about Ubuntu updates on the general encyclopedia, or a ubuntu-specific wiki? On a lighter note, one can almost see which TV shows have greater loyalty based on their wiki sites.
Larry can certainly try, and Oracle will certainly take up Korea (where they have a monopoly) and a fair amount of the market, but I do not see this working for them long-term. Customers (like me) do not like to get all our software from a single place. The "Lock-in" problem exists almost just as much for Open Source software as it does for proprietary software. What happens if/when Oracle deicded to fork the kernel to better support their Db? What happens if/when those forks start to limit my options? Voila-- I am at the mercy of Oracle for support, compatability, and expandability. No thanks, that was the primary reason we all hated Microsoft, remember?
Red Hat or SuSE work when they come from IBM or HP or Fujitsu because the hardware/OS marriage makes sense. Hardware is pretty much a commodity at this point, so I know I have flexibility. RHEL or SuSE are forced to play nice with all the major HW vendors, so that keeps them honest and in line.
Sorry, but the temptation for Oracle to start dicking with the kernel would be just too tempting, and just too sticky for me.
- do NOT allow MSWord or other complex documents to be uploaded as attachments-- it destroys the point of interactive communication
- train, train, and train some more. I am talking about a lot of coaching to get people through their first additions and edits. Once they 'get it', they'll be hooked.
- you will not be loved for the first while: everytime you get an attached Word or OpenOffice document, reply back to the person with "thanks, but why didn't you just put this on the wiki?" or "Thanks, please see my response/corrections/additions on the wiki". This pisses people off, because they are used to email ping-pong, but eventually they'll come around.
- you will not be loved by anyone who is feudal or territorial with "their" project or "their" process. Your choices are to train them, or when that fails, fire them (no, seriously).
If you can get critical mass going, you will be amazed at the results: email attachments almost evaporate, communication and overall awareness increase, the org flattens out a bit, innovation comes from anywhere, and development time is shortened.