So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.
The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it:-), but interesting to know that option exists.
Any changes to the infrastructure need to get reviewed by someone in the Wikimedia Operations staff prior to actually going live, and they tend to be pretty careful about letting things through. Here's the list of changes awaiting review, along with discussion of each proposed change in many cases.
Even though Kodak saw digital photography coming, the problem was Kodak's whole financial structure was tied to film, and digital technology was disruptive technology. They might have been able to sustain the brand by merging with or buying the right company at the right time (e.g. Canon), but most companies have a hard time dealing with technology shifts that vaporize their main profit center. It's not as simple as just knowing what the next trend is; it's figuring out how to gracefully wind down the existing cash cow while giving the new technology the management attention and resources it needs to thrive. Even then, there still ends up being a lot of pain because you can just put all of the same people you had producing film to work in a digital camera business.
Agreed, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google would be upset if Chrome marginalized Firefox through merit-based competition.
The main thing I would add is that it was only a matter of time before someone created a competitive Webkit-based browser for Windows, and there's no guarantee that whoever that was was going to be friendly to Google.
Hi there, I'm on the team that deployed Pending Changes. We picked 2000 rather arbitrarily, but it actually was a technical limitation driven by our need to limit possible load on the system rather than an editorial decision. Based on rough community consensus, it's actually in effect on far fewer articles as of this writing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Queue#Using_pending_changes for the community discussion of how and where to apply it.
There have also been some concerns over possible problems related to hydrogen gas leakage.[50] Molecular hydrogen leaks slowly from most containment vessels. It has been hypothesized that if significant amounts of hydrogen gas (H2) escape, hydrogen gas may, because of ultraviolet radiation, form free radicals (H) in the stratosphere. These free radicals would then be able to act as catalysts for ozone depletion. A large enough increase in stratospheric hydrogen from leaked H2 could exacerbate the depletion process. However, the effect of these leakage problems may not be significant. The amount of hydrogen that leaks today is much lower (by a factor of 10–100) than the estimated 10–20% figure conjectured by some researchers; for example, in Germany, the leakage rate is only 0.1% (less than the natural gas leak rate of 0.7%). At most, such leakage would likely be no more than 1–2% even with widespread hydrogen use, using present technology.[50] ...
[50] ^ a b "Assessing the Future Hydrogen Economy (letters)" (PDF). Science. 10 October 2003. Retrieved 2008-05-09.
The implication there is that even if leakage were a major problem, the gas doesn't escape the planet. Even if it did, and we switched entirely to hydrogen, and consumed 100 times the current rate of energy, I have a hard time believing we'd actually make a dent in the oceans. I'm going to guess that, by volume, the amount of oil that was ever on the planet is pretty trivial compared to the size of the oceans. Unlike what happens to oil when we burn it, most/all of the hydrogen would eventually be converted back into water.
If Mr. Sullivan needs [the fact that Jobs doesn't talk about the general problem with proprietary technology] explained to him then maybe he should hold his comments until he understands it. Does he actually expect *every* article, blog post or story to rehash this basic concept?
I think it's reasonable to expect an editorial that complains that Flash is "not open" as its first big bold bullet point would somehow address the reason why Jobs thinks we should care. I know why I care, but it's not at all clear why Jobs thinks I should care.
So you're focused on speed, but dont allow native code? Not allowing trusted code is not the same as not allowing native code. See Native Client. Was it really necessary to accuse the people involved of being unqualified and lazy to ask your question?
It's funny, there was just a RadioLab show on NPR on this subject. They talk about another guy who had a different type of brain damage (tumor removal) which seemed to leave him normal at first, but made him horribly indecisive. They figured out that his emotional response center was damaged. Without the emotional push to make a decision, he would never feel pressure or other emotional drive to make the decision, and couldn't do it. The emotional part is apparently just as important as the logical part in making a decision.
The memoir "Love and Consequences," about a woman's life in South Central Los Angeles, has been uncovered as a hoax. It's the latest of several fictionalized memoirs that have slipped through the publishing industry.[...] So why don't publishers just hire fact-checkers? Publisher James Atlas says fact-checkers have never been part of the $24 billion book business. The job is just too big and expensive, and the industry is shrinking. That leaves fact-checking to editors. Problem is, publishing companies often pressure them to churn out a certain number of books every year.
He'll probably get another chance, quite possibly from someone who has done something dumber. This pales in comparison to what many actors and musicians have done, and they still manage to get work in their field. It's quite possible software engineering is heading in a similar direction, especially where the act of building it becomes a public performance of sorts. Talent often trumps personality.
It will ultimately boil down to whether or not he can identify another niche and successfully build a product to fill that niche. A hotshot with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove has the motivation to do it, even if the reasons are a little pathological. See actor/musician comparison above.
All that said, I wouldn't want to work with him, and I'm hoping someone more levelheaded manages to metaphorically kick his ass in the next niche he competes in.
Interesting license clause for an 'open source' project: "You MAY NOT use the Licensed Software to operate in or as a time-sharing, outsourcing, service bureau, application service provider or managed service provider environment."
It's more open than most (i.e. other than that clause and a somewhat obnoxious advertising clause), it's MPL. It's a lot better than the typical EULA attached to this type of software. But, it'd be nice to reclaim the phrase "open source", per Michael Tiemann's essay on the subject. It lacks a lot of the obnoxious prohibitions on reverse engineering, so it's most likely better than the competition.
Perhaps its time to come up with a pithy name for this type of software, without resorting to anything/too/ derogatory. I nominate "fauxpen source".
I think that Microsoft's culture did represent a huge improvement over the status quo of the day (before IBM got knocked off the top of the hill). While Microsoft was (and I'm sure remains) very hierarchical, the brutally frank conversations that happened there up-and-down the management chain were welcomed, whereas in most organizations, people worried about getting fired for even the mildest criticism of their bosses. Free soft drinks and casual Monday through Friday weren't the norm when Microsoft was first started. Generous stock options for rank-and-file employees also wasn't the norm, and even though Microsoft wasn't entirely unique in this regard, they were unique in offering MSFT stock options, which, for a while, were worth *a lot*. So, I think they can be forgiven for thinking "if they can't take the abuse, let 'em work for IBM". It's easy, in hindsight, to wonder how much better they could have done by using the state of the art management practices of 2007, but not much more useful than to wonder how much more productive Isaac Newton could have been with a computer.
However, they have a tougher job now. Stock options don't motivate the way they used to, and there are very few places left that think its a good idea to require good CompSci graduates to come to work dressed in suit and tie, so there's no remaining competitive advantage in having a lax dress code. I really hope for their sake that the hundreds of old timer managers there have broken a lot of the really bad habits that have gotten them to this point, or else the next generation of stars they need to recruit are going to look elsewhere.
It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading. Even though the stock price has been relatively stagnant for the past few years, revenue and profit growth are proof that the company still has healthy numbers.
However, anyone considering working there needs to ask themselves what they really want to accomplish in life. Looking back, it can't be very fulfilling to say "I helped make that company successful. I fit in, by emulating the bullying, belittling style of my bosses all the way to the top, and now look what we've created!"
There are plenty of companies out there (*cough* [1]) who are trying to be successful while actually also having the kind of environment where you look forward to seeing the people you work with. Having hippy-dippy ideals creates plenty of problems, but they are way more interesting problems than the problems you find at a company like Microsoft.
Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.
Most homes are vulnerable to someone breaking in and spraypainting "funny" things on the wall, but I imagine anyone on the receiving end wouldn't find it funny at all, even if the recipient is some 1337 hax0r. At the most extreme end, humans are vulnerable to failure when a bullet is put through the head, but rational people agree that we don't approve of exploiting that vulnerability for fun and profit.
Exploiting vulnerabilities on a big website, even an "uncool" website, is juvenile and criminal. There are plenty of perfectly legal and more effective ways of making a statement about MySpace, if that's the goal. I'm not sure I understand the need to make a statement about it anyway; let's just agree that it's GeoCities 2005 and move on.
5GB is a number Joe came up with after checking out all sources (servers, clients, libraries, scripts) plus unit tests, packaging tools, and test plans. None of the 5GB includes user generated content of any kind (i.e. textures, lsl scripts, objects, etc.). One can get into all sorts of arguments about methodology (as seems to happen whenever we publish a stat), but the point is, we've got a lot of code.
Today was a small step in the grand scheme of things. As one of the other posters pointed out, the amount of code we posted was a number much smaller than 5GB. But, this will hopefully be an important step in giving people control of their own computers. We certainly don't want you to have to install proprietary software on your computer to enjoy Second Life, and now, you won't have to. Admittedly, there are still some rough edges in a purely open source compile, but that's a bug, not a feature.
What does "breaking the 4G barrier" mean? The Samsung demo looks cool enough, but saying that they "broke the 4G barrier" means about as much as "this one goes to eleven". The "4G" moniker isn't well defined enough to use as a litmus test of anything other than "hey, if you thought that 3G was overhyped and overpriced, well, just wait until you see this!"
Argh...sorry, a moderation snafu caused me to mod this down when I was trying to mod up. So, I'm commenting to invalidate my moderation.
Time is what Linux has always had on its side. It can be maddening waiting around, but I'm not sure what compromises will really be necessary in the end. The MP3 patents actually expire relatively soon (2010, from what I understand), at which point another big hurdle will be cleared. Most factors tend to favor Linux in the long term.
Just like they've done with many other products (e.g. XBox), they'll persist until they build a brand in the market. Apple certainly doesn't have much to worry about with their first iteration, but its probably bad news for a lot of the second tier players. Over time, they'll apply more pressure to Apple.
One question (with a rather obvious answer) is "do you see Microsoft exiting this market once they enter it?" Microsoft rarely concedes defeat; they just release a new version.
Dreamhost is only a dollar more per year, and includes privacy guard as a base-level feature (which costs $1/year on GoDaddy), so they're arguably the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.
The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it :-), but interesting to know that option exists.
Any changes to the infrastructure need to get reviewed by someone in the Wikimedia Operations staff prior to actually going live, and they tend to be pretty careful about letting things through. Here's the list of changes awaiting review, along with discussion of each proposed change in many cases.
From TFA: "The company has more than 180 patents, both issued and pending, covering its solutions, software and differentiated intellectual property."
Even though Kodak saw digital photography coming, the problem was Kodak's whole financial structure was tied to film, and digital technology was disruptive technology. They might have been able to sustain the brand by merging with or buying the right company at the right time (e.g. Canon), but most companies have a hard time dealing with technology shifts that vaporize their main profit center. It's not as simple as just knowing what the next trend is; it's figuring out how to gracefully wind down the existing cash cow while giving the new technology the management attention and resources it needs to thrive. Even then, there still ends up being a lot of pain because you can just put all of the same people you had producing film to work in a digital camera business.
Agreed, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google would be upset if Chrome marginalized Firefox through merit-based competition.
The main thing I would add is that it was only a matter of time before someone created a competitive Webkit-based browser for Windows, and there's no guarantee that whoever that was was going to be friendly to Google.
Hi there, I'm on the team that deployed Pending Changes. We picked 2000 rather arbitrarily, but it actually was a technical limitation driven by our need to limit possible load on the system rather than an editorial decision. Based on rough community consensus, it's actually in effect on far fewer articles as of this writing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Queue#Using_pending_changes for the community discussion of how and where to apply it.
The implication there is that even if leakage were a major problem, the gas doesn't escape the planet. Even if it did, and we switched entirely to hydrogen, and consumed 100 times the current rate of energy, I have a hard time believing we'd actually make a dent in the oceans. I'm going to guess that, by volume, the amount of oil that was ever on the planet is pretty trivial compared to the size of the oceans. Unlike what happens to oil when we burn it, most/all of the hydrogen would eventually be converted back into water.
If Mr. Sullivan needs [the fact that Jobs doesn't talk about the general problem with proprietary technology] explained to him then maybe he should hold his comments until he understands it. Does he actually expect *every* article, blog post or story to rehash this basic concept?
I think it's reasonable to expect an editorial that complains that Flash is "not open" as its first big bold bullet point would somehow address the reason why Jobs thinks we should care. I know why I care, but it's not at all clear why Jobs thinks I should care.
So you're focused on speed, but dont allow native code? Not allowing trusted code is not the same as not allowing native code. See Native Client. Was it really necessary to accuse the people involved of being unqualified and lazy to ask your question?
It's funny, there was just a RadioLab show on NPR on this subject. They talk about another guy who had a different type of brain damage (tumor removal) which seemed to leave him normal at first, but made him horribly indecisive. They figured out that his emotional response center was damaged. Without the emotional push to make a decision, he would never feel pressure or other emotional drive to make the decision, and couldn't do it. The emotional part is apparently just as important as the logical part in making a decision.
Something like Geekcorp would be a great place to look for opportunities.
See? That's the way you do it!
He'll probably get another chance, quite possibly from someone who has done something dumber. This pales in comparison to what many actors and musicians have done, and they still manage to get work in their field. It's quite possible software engineering is heading in a similar direction, especially where the act of building it becomes a public performance of sorts. Talent often trumps personality.
It will ultimately boil down to whether or not he can identify another niche and successfully build a product to fill that niche. A hotshot with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove has the motivation to do it, even if the reasons are a little pathological. See actor/musician comparison above.
All that said, I wouldn't want to work with him, and I'm hoping someone more levelheaded manages to metaphorically kick his ass in the next niche he competes in.
Interesting license clause for an 'open source' project: "You MAY NOT use the Licensed Software to operate in or as a time-sharing, outsourcing, service bureau, application service provider or managed service provider environment."
/too/ derogatory. I nominate "fauxpen source".
It's more open than most (i.e. other than that clause and a somewhat obnoxious advertising clause), it's MPL. It's a lot better than the typical EULA attached to this type of software. But, it'd be nice to reclaim the phrase "open source", per Michael Tiemann's essay on the subject. It lacks a lot of the obnoxious prohibitions on reverse engineering, so it's most likely better than the competition.
Perhaps its time to come up with a pithy name for this type of software, without resorting to anything
I think that Microsoft's culture did represent a huge improvement over the status quo of the day (before IBM got knocked off the top of the hill). While Microsoft was (and I'm sure remains) very hierarchical, the brutally frank conversations that happened there up-and-down the management chain were welcomed, whereas in most organizations, people worried about getting fired for even the mildest criticism of their bosses. Free soft drinks and casual Monday through Friday weren't the norm when Microsoft was first started. Generous stock options for rank-and-file employees also wasn't the norm, and even though Microsoft wasn't entirely unique in this regard, they were unique in offering MSFT stock options, which, for a while, were worth *a lot*. So, I think they can be forgiven for thinking "if they can't take the abuse, let 'em work for IBM". It's easy, in hindsight, to wonder how much better they could have done by using the state of the art management practices of 2007, but not much more useful than to wonder how much more productive Isaac Newton could have been with a computer.
However, they have a tougher job now. Stock options don't motivate the way they used to, and there are very few places left that think its a good idea to require good CompSci graduates to come to work dressed in suit and tie, so there's no remaining competitive advantage in having a lax dress code. I really hope for their sake that the hundreds of old timer managers there have broken a lot of the really bad habits that have gotten them to this point, or else the next generation of stars they need to recruit are going to look elsewhere.
....is not an interesting problem to solve.
It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading. Even though the stock price has been relatively stagnant for the past few years, revenue and profit growth are proof that the company still has healthy numbers.
However, anyone considering working there needs to ask themselves what they really want to accomplish in life. Looking back, it can't be very fulfilling to say "I helped make that company successful. I fit in, by emulating the bullying, belittling style of my bosses all the way to the top, and now look what we've created!"
There are plenty of companies out there (*cough* [1]) who are trying to be successful while actually also having the kind of environment where you look forward to seeing the people you work with. Having hippy-dippy ideals creates plenty of problems, but they are way more interesting problems than the problems you find at a company like Microsoft.
1. Shameless plug
Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.
I might experience a little schadenfreude, but I also would happily approve of the cleaning lady being thrown into the clink.
Most homes are vulnerable to someone breaking in and spraypainting "funny" things on the wall, but I imagine anyone on the receiving end wouldn't find it funny at all, even if the recipient is some 1337 hax0r. At the most extreme end, humans are vulnerable to failure when a bullet is put through the head, but rational people agree that we don't approve of exploiting that vulnerability for fun and profit.
Exploiting vulnerabilities on a big website, even an "uncool" website, is juvenile and criminal. There are plenty of perfectly legal and more effective ways of making a statement about MySpace, if that's the goal. I'm not sure I understand the need to make a statement about it anyway; let's just agree that it's GeoCities 2005 and move on.
5GB is a number Joe came up with after checking out all sources (servers, clients, libraries, scripts) plus unit tests, packaging tools, and test plans. None of the 5GB includes user generated content of any kind (i.e. textures, lsl scripts, objects, etc.). One can get into all sorts of arguments about methodology (as seems to happen whenever we publish a stat), but the point is, we've got a lot of code.
Today was a small step in the grand scheme of things. As one of the other posters pointed out, the amount of code we posted was a number much smaller than 5GB. But, this will hopefully be an important step in giving people control of their own computers. We certainly don't want you to have to install proprietary software on your computer to enjoy Second Life, and now, you won't have to. Admittedly, there are still some rough edges in a purely open source compile, but that's a bug, not a feature.
What does "breaking the 4G barrier" mean? The Samsung demo looks cool enough, but saying that they "broke the 4G barrier" means about as much as "this one goes to eleven". The "4G" moniker isn't well defined enough to use as a litmus test of anything other than "hey, if you thought that 3G was overhyped and overpriced, well, just wait until you see this!"
Argh...sorry, a moderation snafu caused me to mod this down when I was trying to mod up. So, I'm commenting to invalidate my moderation.
Time is what Linux has always had on its side. It can be maddening waiting around, but I'm not sure what compromises will really be necessary in the end. The MP3 patents actually expire relatively soon (2010, from what I understand), at which point another big hurdle will be cleared. Most factors tend to favor Linux in the long term.
Just like they've done with many other products (e.g. XBox), they'll persist until they build a brand in the market. Apple certainly doesn't have much to worry about with their first iteration, but its probably bad news for a lot of the second tier players. Over time, they'll apply more pressure to Apple.
One question (with a rather obvious answer) is "do you see Microsoft exiting this market once they enter it?" Microsoft rarely concedes defeat; they just release a new version.
Need I say more?
Dreamhost is only a dollar more per year, and includes privacy guard as a base-level feature (which costs $1/year on GoDaddy), so they're arguably the same price.
Rob