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59,487 | karzeem | 2007-09-25T18:19:32 | Amazon Launches DRM-free Music Store | http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070925-amazon-launches-public-beta-of-mp3-music-store.html | 5 | 2 | [
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] | null | null | no_error | Amazon’s MP3 store brings more DRM-free music at lower prices than iTunes Store | 2007-09-25T15:57:00+00:00 | Nate Anderson |
Song previews begin playing almost instantly, and checkout was a breeze when we tried it.
Jeff Reguilon and Alan Wiley, editors of the new service, said in Amazon's announcement, "We're music nerds who love bargains and want to be able to transfer our digital music between our computers, portable players and CD-Rs with no strings attached, so we worked to build a place where we would want to shop." They've done a nice job so far, and one suspects that more features and interface tweaks are coming before the "beta" label gets peeled off.
There are a few restrictions. One of the biggest is that there's no redownloading of tracks; you'd better make a backup, because if you lose a song, you'll have to purchase it again to get another copy. Such a policy has an obvious analogue to Amazon's CD sales. If you purchase a Tim McGraw CD and your NPR-loving uncle "accidentally" cracks the disk in two, you are out of luck; Amazon won't send you another copy. In this sense, then, music downloads are treated like physical property.
But they are not property. In fact, what you have purchased is only a "non-exclusive, non-transferable license" to each song. Because you have not actually purchased something physical, Amazon's terms of service explicitly forbid both re-selling and lending. With a CD, of course, you can do both quite legally. Digital downloads can be cheaper and more convenient, but there's no legal way to extract value from them when your tastes in music change. Caveat emptor.
iTunes and Wal-Mart do feature the catalogs of the other two major labels, Sony BMG and Warner, but they are DRM-laden. Encrypted AAC tracks won't play on non-iPods, and encrypted WMA files won't play on iPods. Still, for those who crave choice, iTunes offer more than 6 million tracks, while Amazon offers only a third of that number.
But now that the major stores are shedding DRM, they face increased competition from one another in that part of their business. Amazon's 256kbps tracks are $0.89 or $0.99 each, which compares quite well with Wal-Mart's $0.94 per track price for music at the same bit rate. iTunes continues to sell 256kbps AAC files without DRM for $1.29, but this is only available with EMI tracks at the moment.
Comments are closed. | 2024-11-08T13:13:22 | en | train |
|
59,488 | mhb | 2007-09-25T18:25:28 | Man Has Memory Span of a Few Seconds - Terrifying/Fascinating | http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks | 15 | 6 | [
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] | null | null | missing_parsing | The Abyss | 2007-09-16T20:00:00.000-04:00 | Oliver Sacks | Within months, Clive’s confusion gave way to the agony, the desperation, that is so clear in Miller’s film. This, in turn, was succeeded by a deep depression, as it came to him—if only in sudden, intense, and immediately forgotten moments—that his former life was over, that he was incorrigibly disabled.As the months passed without any real improvement, the hope of significant recovery became fainter and fainter, and toward the end of 1985 Clive was moved to a room in a chronic psychiatric unit—a room he was to occupy for the next six and a half years but which he was never able to recognize as his own. A young psychologist saw Clive for a period of time in 1990 and kept a verbatim record of everything he said, and this caught the grim mood that had taken hold. Clive said at one point, “Can you imagine one night five years long? No dreaming, no waking, no touch, no taste, no smell, no sight, no sound, no hearing, nothing at all. It’s like being dead. I came to the conclusion that I was dead.”The only times of feeling alive were when Deborah visited him. But the moment she left, he was desperate once again, and by the time she got home, ten or fifteen minutes later, she would find repeated messages from him on her answering machine: “Please come and see me, darling—it’s been ages since I’ve seen you. Please fly here at the speed of light.”To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place.But then, seven years after his illness, after huge efforts by Deborah, Clive was moved to a small country residence for the brain-injured, much more congenial than a hospital. Here he was one of only a handful of patients, and in constant contact with a dedicated staff who treated him as an individual and respected his intelligence and talents. He was taken off most of his heavy tranquillizers, and seemed to enjoy his walks around the village and gardens near the home, the spaciousness, the fresh food.For the first eight or nine years in this new home, Deborah told me, “Clive was calmer and sometimes jolly, a bit more content, but often with angry outbursts still, unpredictable, withdrawn, spending most of his time in his room alone.” But gradually, in the past six or seven years, Clive has become more sociable, more talkative. Conversation (though of a “scripted” sort) has come to fill what had been empty, solitary, and desperate days.Though I had corresponded with Deborah since Clive first became ill, twenty years went by before I met Clive in person. He was so changed from the haunted, agonized man I had seen in Miller’s 1986 film that I was scarcely prepared for the dapper, bubbling figure who opened the door when Deborah and I went to visit him in the summer of 2005. He had been reminded of our visit just before we arrived, and he flung his arms around Deborah the moment she entered.Deborah introduced me: “This is Dr. Sacks.” And Clive immediately said, “You doctors work twenty-four hours a day, don’t you? You’re always in demand.” We went up to his room, which contained an electric organ console and a piano piled high with music. Some of the scores, I noted, were transcriptions of Orlandus Lassus, the Renaissance composer whose works Clive had edited. I saw Clive’s journal by the washstand—he has now filled up scores of volumes, and the current one is always kept in this exact location. Next to it was an etymological dictionary with dozens of reference slips of different colors stuck between the pages and a large, handsome volume, “The 100 Most Beautiful Cathedrals in the World.” A Canaletto print hung on the wall, and I asked Clive if he had ever been to Venice. No, he said. (Deborah told me they had visited several times before his illness.) Looking at the print, Clive pointed out the dome of a church: “Look at it,” he said. “See how it soars—like an angel!”When I asked Deborah whether Clive knew about her memoir, she told me that she had shown it to him twice before, but that he had instantly forgotten. I had my own heavily annotated copy with me, and asked Deborah to show it to him again.“You’ve written a book!” he cried, astonished. “Well done! Congratulations!” He peered at the cover. “All by you? Good heavens!” Excited, he jumped for joy. Deborah showed him the dedication page: “For my Clive.” “Dedicated to me?” He hugged her. This scene was repeated several times within a few minutes, with almost exactly the same astonishment, the same expressions of delight and joy each time.Clive and Deborah are still very much in love with each other, despite his amnesia. (Indeed, Deborah’s book is subtitled “A Memoir of Love and Amnesia.”) He greeted her several times as if she had just arrived. It must be an extraordinary situation, I thought, both maddening and flattering, to be seen always as new, as a gift, a blessing.Clive had, in the meantime, addressed me as “Your Highness” and inquired at intervals, “Been at Buckingham Palace? . . . Are you the Prime Minister? . . . Are you from the U.N.?” He laughed when I answered, “Just the U.S.” This joking or jesting was of a somewhat waggish, stereotyped nature and highly repetitive. Clive had no idea who I was, little idea who anyone was, but this bonhomie allowed him to make contact, to keep a conversation going. I suspected he had some damage to his frontal lobes, too—such jokiness (neurologists speak of Witzelsucht, joking disease), like his impulsiveness and chattiness, could go with a weakening of the usual social frontal-lobe inhibitions.He was excited at the notion of going out for lunch—lunch with Deborah. “Isn’t she a wonderful woman?” he kept asking me. “Doesn’t she have marvellous kisses?” I said yes, I was sure she had.As we drove to the restaurant, Clive, with great speed and fluency, invented words for the letters on the license plates of passing cars: “JCK” was Japanese Clever Kid; “NKR” was New King of Russia; and “BDH” (Deborah’s car) was British Daft Hospital, then Blessed Dutch Hospital. “Forever Today,” Deborah’s book, immediately became “Three-Ever Today,” “Two-Ever Today,” “One-Ever Today.” This incontinent punning and rhyming and clanging was virtually instantaneous, occurring with a speed no normal person could match. It resembled Tourettic or savantlike speed, the speed of the preconscious, undelayed by reflection.When we arrived at the restaurant, Clive did all the license plates in the parking lot and then, elaborately, with a bow and a flourish, let Deborah enter: “Ladies first!” He looked at me with some uncertainty as I followed them to the table: “Are you joining us, too?” | 2024-11-08T21:51:10 | null | train |
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59,496 | scw | 2007-09-25T18:41:05 | Excel as a database | http://www.neopoleon.com/home/blogs/neo/archive/2003/09/29/5458.aspx | 2 | 1 | [
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59,504 | jkush | 2007-09-25T18:56:37 | Blue Screen of Death in Halo 3 | Is this photoshopped? | http://www.flickr.com/photos/yamilg/1433360467/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | http_404 | Flickr | null | null |
404
This is not the page you’re looking for.
2024-11-08T12:23:31Z-c128f9de-c13b-4d55-9458-4c1a65ef8bd3@server
It appears the photo or video you seek no longer exists.
Here are some of today’s best photos instead:
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| 2024-11-08T12:23:32 | null | train |
59,512 | tojileon | 2007-09-25T19:20:17 | Love at First Byte | http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html | 54 | 6 | [
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] | null | null | http_404 | Page not found | null | null | 404 ErrorHmm, We’ve Got Nothing | 2024-11-08T10:08:07 | null | train |
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59,531 | nickb | 2007-09-25T20:13:57 | Amazon releases AmazonMP3: A Real Alternative To iTunes | null | http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/game-on-a-real-alternative-to-itunes/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | Game On: A Real Alternative To iTunes | TechCrunch | 2007-09-25T19:51:25+00:00 | Michael Arrington | It may have taken Amazon a few years, but they got it right: their new music store is DRM free and songs, starting at $0.89/track, are cheaper than at Apple’s iTunes. The top 100 best-selling albums are priced no higher than $8.99.
Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI and Universal are on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.
A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news – DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.
Average quality is very high – 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.
| 2024-11-08T09:10:56 | en | train |
59,534 | os111 | 2007-09-25T20:25:08 | Missing from PG's startup essays: acquisition negotiations strategy/advice? | I'd be interested in hearing advice/stories from anybody that has negotiated an acquisition. Specifically, the acquisition of a tiny startup (1-5 people) by a huge company. Thanks. | 27 | 13 | [
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59,548 | transburgh | 2007-09-25T20:46:33 | Amazon MP3 vs. Apple iTunes: Where Should You Shop? | null | http://gigaom.com/2007/09/25/amazon-mp3-vs-apple-itunes-whos-better-now/ | 7 | 0 | null | null | null | http_other_error | 520: Web server is returning an unknown error | null | null |
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| 2024-11-08T17:37:44 | null | train |
59,549 | rml | 2007-09-25T20:49:53 | Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (free download) | Made for a highly enjoyable evening's reading -- does anyone have any other good science fiction books to recommend? Free ones, even? | http://craphound.com/est/ | 3 | 5 | [
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59,553 | kamenrijder | 2007-09-25T20:58:16 | Web Analytics 2.0? I am more worried about Web Analytics 3.0! | http://news.adversitement.nl/newsitems/index/category:popular/newsitem:62 | 3 | 1 | [
59573
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59,565 | omouse | 2007-09-25T21:34:16 | What Interests Programmers | I needed a break from writing this web.py article so I was wondering what would attract programmers to converse about a blog post. Anyone have any more suggestions? | http://neverfriday.com/blog/?p=17 | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,574 | sbraford | 2007-09-25T21:47:04 | This machine kills fascists (pic) | Slightly OT I know =) | http://www.woodyguthrie.org/images/29_6.jpg | 1 | 1 | [
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We're sorry, we can't find what you are looking for
This is most likely our fault and we apologize. If you think this is by mistake, please contact us.
| 2024-11-08T10:37:56 | null | train |
59,586 | wmf | 2007-09-25T22:17:25 | IPv4 address space heatmap inspired by xkcd | http://maps.measurement-factory.com/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,596 | steffon | 2007-09-25T22:50:21 | What do you think of my startup idea? | I studied a lot of sociology in college and noticed a way that one could organize communities around their shared preferences of content so that people could discover new content with what should be a much higher degree of relevance then current recommendation systems.<p>I'm calling it a discovery engine, where the user can enter the name of a specific piece of content they have in mind, or something they are generally interested in, and receive recommendations of new content from like-minded people.<p>Just like Wikipedia issued a call to all people interested in making an encyclopedia, this would issue a call to all early adopters to be recognized as authorities and trend-setters. Think The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, but taking place online, efficiently, and transparently.<p>The project calls for combining social-bookmarking and user-generated media with an algorithm that both aggregates similar collections of content into networks and makes recommendations of content based on the evolving network structure. The ranks of "influence" and "in the know" are measured against networks of users with similar collections of content. These two rankings incentivize users to continually post relevant content because they want to remain "influential" and "in the know" in front of the people that are genuinely interested in the same content. The majority of users coming to Topiat for recommendations receive relevant recommendations fueled by the work of those who are genuinely influential and in the know.<p>But unlike current recommendation systems, which are domain specific and treat an individual as the sum of all their preferences (e.g. Netflix), the discovery engine would allow users to create networks based on all types of content (any combination of music, products, images, videos, URLs etc.) and enables users to explore different interests they have with the ability to create multiple groups of content on their profile. Each group of content becomes aligned with similar groups of content, from which recommendations are generated and delivered to the user (e.g. my oldies music compared with users with similar tastes in oldies music, my surfing group compared with other users that think of surfer the same way I do).<p>I'm putting together a Y combinator funding proposal based on this basic idea and am looking for feedback before I send it in. If there are any developers that like the idea and want to know more, let me know. Additionally, if you are good with machine learning techniques (e.g. neural networks) and are interested, let me know.
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59,606 | nickb | 2007-09-25T23:19:26 | Josh Kopelman's bad break - Valleywag | null | http://valleywag.com/tech/clips/josh-kopelmans-bad-break-303611.php | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,624 | bootload | 2007-09-26T00:07:02 | Hammer time | http://blog.arc90.com/2007/08/here_comes_the_hammer.php | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,626 | bootload | 2007-09-26T00:09:03 | Sometimes you are truly better off starting from scratch | http://blog.arc90.com/2007/08/sometimes_you_are_truly_better.php | 5 | 1 | [
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59,644 | nickb | 2007-09-26T00:43:56 | SICP: The Closure in the Grass | null | http://www.michaelharrison.ws/weblog/?p=50 | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,646 | nickb | 2007-09-26T00:44:52 | The Mythical Business Layer - Worse Than Failure | null | http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The-Mythical-Business-Layer.aspx | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,662 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T01:29:06 | Is Facebook Doing Enough about Pervs? | null | http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/09/is-facebook-doing-enough-about-pervs.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,663 | nickb | 2007-09-26T01:30:41 | Video Professor upset by criticism, sues 100 anonymous critics | null | http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070925-video-professor-upset-by-criticism-sues-100-anonymous-critics.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,667 | nickb | 2007-09-26T01:46:50 | LINA - run Linux binaries on any OS (like WINE but for Linux apps) | null | http://www.openlina.com/description.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,670 | nickb | 2007-09-26T01:58:44 | Demonoid Down, For Now | null | http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/demonoid-down-for-now/ | 1 | 1 | [
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] | null | null | missing_parsing | Demonoid Down, For Now | TechCrunch | 2007-09-26T00:07:00+00:00 | Nik Cubrilovic |
Our favorite torrent site is no more, at least for today and tomorrow. Demonoid, the previously fully-private torrent catalog and tracker is down, according to reports at TorrentFreak. Trackers have not been responding for over 24 hours, and the site is completely down.
Demonoid was the second largest tracker online, after ThePirateBay, and has seen its fair share of legal threats and takedown notices from copyright holders and associated groups. Demonoid shifted operations from The Netherlands to Canada back in June after their previous ISP balked at legal threats, but it appears that Canada is no safer as the likely cause of the downtime now is the Canadian ISP blocking the website.
Demonoid was our favorite torrent site, because membership and ratio tracking meant that it provided both a large catalog and much better speeds than alternate trackers. Recently they opened up the last 14 days worth of torrent listings to public access, making the site a quasi-private tracker. Demonoid accounts are also amongst the most requested in inviteshare, and its popularity has blossomed recently as it overtook other previously more popular public trackers which were beginning to fill up with fakes and spam.
Copyright groups have had recent successes against tracker sites and catalogs, no less than a few days ago TorrentBox was also taken down. But at the same time, the recent MediaDefender leaks showed that their effort to plant fakes in popular torrent sites had no impact on the most popular torrent sites including Demonoid – a credit to the communities at these sites who would flag fakes.
Takedown efforts seem to be in vain, as even the once much-loved Suprnova has recently made a come-back. The most that a takedown can accomplish is the intermediate interruption of service to that particular community, but as most BitTorrent users access and use more than one site, and the release groups continue unimpeded, the end results of these efforts from copyright groups are very under-whelming. Shutting down Demonoid for a few days will have no impact on the volume of BitTorrent traffic, and Demonoid will be back shortly and with more interest and new users than ever before.
Most Popular
Australian-born entrepreneur and hacker. Currently working in advisory and consulting positions, previously at Techcrunch, Omnidrive and a number of other startups since 2000.
Nik has over 15 years of experience as a developer, penetration tester and solutions architect in industries ranging from finance, manufacturing and real estate through to consumer web application development. Nik has worked for and continues to consult and advise startups, SMB’s, venture capital firms and large enterprises including a number of Fortune 100 companies. Nik has worked and lived in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, throughout continental Europe and Asia and is now based in San Francisco, USA.
Nik has contributed to a large number of open-source projects and published a number of security vulnerabilities for various platforms and applications since 1996. Nik is an advocate of consumer privacy and security protection, applying cryptography to all communication, the Tor anonymity network, Bitcoin and a number of other security and privacy related projects and initiatives. In 2007, he was named in The Bulletin magazine as one of Australia’s “”Smart 100″”.
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| 2024-11-08T17:18:44 | null | train |
59,672 | donna | 2007-09-26T02:17:35 | How to Sell an Idea | http://www.bnet.com/2403-13068_23-52953.html?promo=713&tag=nl.e713 | 4 | 2 | [
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59675
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|
59,676 | SimJapan2005 | 2007-09-26T02:30:53 | 19" Monitor: Dell's SE198WFP or LG's L194WT | anybody have experienced comparing the two?
i am thinking what to get.<p>LG has 2000:1 contrast ratio, Dell monitor quality seems to last longer. | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | invalid_url | null | null | null | null | 2024-11-08T16:37:59 | null | train |
|
59,678 | alaskamiller | 2007-09-26T02:39:25 | Race for Facebook app: Stanford students create Graffiti application for online social network | http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/9/18/raceForFacebookApp | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,688 | hhm | 2007-09-26T03:14:38 | Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right: Wolfram Research on Excel bug | http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/arithmetic_is_hardto_get_right.html | 20 | 11 | [
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59,695 | karzeem | 2007-09-26T03:45:11 | Like Amazon's DRM-free Music Downloads? Thank Apple. | http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/09/drm_part_one | 5 | 2 | [
59757
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,697 | jsjenkins168 | 2007-09-26T03:52:03 | Former chief economist of FCC: "Walled gardens promote innovation" | http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20976213/ | 2 | 3 | [
59701
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,700 | nickb | 2007-09-26T03:56:34 | MIT Prank: John P. Harvard goes Halo | null | http://www.joystiq.com/2007/09/25/the-best-thing-youll-see-today-john-p-harvard-goes-halo/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,708 | alaskamiller | 2007-09-26T04:38:35 | You Can Learn a Great Deal from a 17-Year-Old | http://www.techipedia.com/2007/you-can-learn-a-great-deal-from-a-17-year-old/ | 18 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,710 | nickb | 2007-09-26T04:41:45 | Expect Failure From Hulu: NBCU Chief | null | http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/expect-failure-from-hulu-nbcu-chief/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,711 | palish | 2007-09-26T04:53:59 | Blue Eyes - A Logic Puzzle (spoiler in the comments) | http://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html | 3 | 7 | [
59746,
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] | null | null | missing_parsing | Blue Eyes - A Logic Puzzle | null | null |
If you like formal logic, graph theory, sappy romance, bitter sarcasm, puns, or landscape art,
check out my webcomic, xkcd.
Blue Eyes:
The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World
A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians -- if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (excluding themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph.
On this island there are 100 blue-eyed people, 100 brown-eyed people, and the Guru (she happens to have green eyes). So any given blue-eyed person can see 100 people with brown eyes and 99 people with blue eyes (and one with green), but that does not tell him his own eye color; as far as he knows the totals could be 101 brown and 99 blue. Or 100 brown, 99 blue, and he could have red eyes.
The Guru is allowed to speak once (let's say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island. Standing before the islanders, she says the following:
"I can see someone who has blue eyes."
Who leaves the island, and on what night?
There are no mirrors or reflecting surfaces, nothing dumb. It is not a trick question, and the answer is logical. It doesn't depend on tricky wording or anyone lying or guessing, and it doesn't involve people doing something silly like creating a sign language or doing genetics. The Guru is not making eye contact with anyone in particular; she's simply saying "I count at least one blue-eyed person on this island who isn't me."
And lastly, the answer is not "no one leaves."I've done my best to make the wording as precise and unambiguious as possible (after working through the explanation with many people), but if you're confused about anything, please let me know. A word of warning: The answer is not simple. This is an exercise in serious logic, not a lateral thinking riddle. There is not a quick-and-easy answer, and really understanding it takes some effort.
I didn't come up with the idea of this puzzle, but I've written and rewritten it over the the years to try to make a definitive version. The guy who told it to me originally was some dude on the street in Boston named Joel.
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59,720 | matstc | 2007-09-26T05:35:03 | Web 2.0 whiteboard | http://thinkature.com/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | missing_parsing | thinkature.com | null | null |
2024 Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
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59,730 | karthikv | 2007-09-26T06:04:54 | 10 ways the world could end (video) | http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/167 | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,752 | imperator | 2007-09-26T07:14:47 | Idea: Competitive Microblogging | I have this idea for a website where you can craft competitions around goals you want to achieve.<p>For example, if you want to eat healthy, you set up a competition for eating healthy and invite your friends to it. Then you log your meals with them. It keeps you objective and focused because you want to look good to your friends and perhaps best them.<p>This idea isn't relegated to one thing, any goal you wish to achieve you can set up a competition around.<p>The inspiration for this came from reading PG's essay on "How Not to Die." This paragraph kept harassing me.<p>"You've probably noticed that having dinners every Tuesday with us and the other founders causes you to get more done than you would otherwise, because every dinner is a mini Demo Day. Every dinner is a kind of a deadline. So the mere constraint of staying in regular contact with us will push you to make things happen, because otherwise you'll be embarrassed to tell us that you haven't done anything new since the last time we talked."<p>The idea of using others as objective markers for your progress isn't new, but I don't think it's really been digitized.<p>I'm going to apply to Ycombinator with this idea, so if there's anyone who wants to come in on it as my partner, please email me at [email protected].<p>The other point of this post is to see what people think. The comments here are always thoughtful, so please, do tell. | 9 | 6 | [
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59,764 | Neoryder | 2007-09-26T09:09:24 | Ten Tips For A Slightly Less Awful Resume | http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightly-less-awful-resume.html | 50 | 28 | [
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Objective: Obtain a position at IBM-- some idiot applying to Amazon.comWARNING: These are my own *personal* opinions, not Google's or Amazon's or anyone else's. I do think you'll find that most resume screeners at tech companies — particularly tech companies that build their own software in-house, like Yahoo! or eBay or Amazon.com or Microsoft or Google — will agree with a lot of this stuff, on the whole. But experienced screeners disagree on lots of the little details, and in the end these are just my own opinions. These tips are not guaranteed to get you any better results. Your mileage may vary. Do not use these tips in a bathtub or when standing in a pool of water. Do not tap on the glass or the tips will be irritated. Do not feed the tips. Etc.Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.If you've spent more than approximately seventeen kiloseconds as an industry programmer, you've had to review bad tech resumes. It's just part of the job. Programmer resumes ultimately have to be gauged by programmers — it takes one to know one. So it winds up being a kind of karmic revenge on you for bad resumes that you've written. C'mon, you know you've done it. You even knew it was bad when you were writing it. Admit it! You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't you? Argh!So why are tech resumes so bad? You know what I mean. You see the craziest stuff on resumes. Like the candidate who proudly lists every Windows API call she's ever used. Or the candidate who lists every course he took starting from junior high school. Or the one who lists college extension courses he took while doing time for armed robbery.Or that really dumb guy who accidentally listed "work at IBM" as the objective on his Amazon resume. Ha, ha! What a dork!Oh wait — that was me. D'oh. I sometimes refer to it as my "million dollar typo". It's kind of a painful story, especially for my eardrums, since whenever I tell it people predictably point at me and scream with hysterical girly laughter. Dammit. Not to mention the fact that it cost me a fortune in stock-option valuation because I applied before the IPO and was quite understandably ignored by Amazon recruiters until I re-applied long after the IPO, this time saying that haha, no hard feelings, my bad, I actually wanted to work for Amazon. Ahem.But hey, I deserve what I got (in a word: "nothing"), because I was, if I may employ the common parlance, an idjit. I think almost everyone's been guilty at one time or another of idjicy when writing a tech resume, although maybe not quite as flagrant as mine was. And if almost everyone's guilty of it, then they must be hard to write.I think there are multiple root causes. One is that nobody teaches us what companies are looking for. And we don't write resumes very often in our careers, so we don't get much practice at it.Another root cause is that much of the advice on resume-writing from other industries doesn't necessarily carry over to tech resumes. I'll cover some of these mismatches in my tips below.Another minor, yet oddly persistent problem is that many candidates are raving pathological liars. You'd be amazed at how many candidates tell me: "Oh, I just put that buzzword on there for the recruiters." Needless to say, this response leads directly to the time honored end-of-interview transmission code: DYHAQFM? ("Do you have any questions for me?")In spite of all these problems I hold out hope that it might be possible to get at least some people to write better programmer resumes by giving a few free tips. You never know. After all, I can't ask my favorite phone-screen questions anymore – candidates tell me they've read my blog. So maybe someone will pay attention to these tips, too.I'm just talking about software engineer resumes today, and specifically just the subset intended for applying to companies that build their own software. I have no idea how much (if at all) this stuff applies to resumes for other kinds of positions, or companies. Maybe not much. Sorry!Anyway, here are my resume-writing tips, which I'm giving directly to you, free of charge, with no strings attached, because I care about you so much.Tip #1: Nobody cares about youHa, ha! Saw that one coming, I'll bet.Well, let's be a bit more precise: nobody cares about you yet. Not during resume screening, anyway.Resume screening is just pattern matching. People are trying to figure out if you have the skills they're looking for. If they could do this reliably without human intervention, so much the better. Screeners will like your resume best if it's easy to scan visually, and stories about you and your fun-loving personality and fiercely loyal carnivorous parakeet and year-long hiking expedition in Tibet and blah Blah BLAH just don't scan.The output of the resume screening step is a decision: should they proceed with you or decline you? Once that go/no-go decision is made and entered into the system, the screeners want to forget all about you. Seriously. They need their cache cleared for the next pattern-matching session. So anything you say about yourself — anything that differentiates you from a machine that can crank out beautiful code — is just an annoying and potentially harmful distraction. At best, the screener will ignore it. At worst, they'll get mad at you and start grading more harshly.So your best strategy is to avoid talking about yourself. All your hopes, fears, goals, dreams, ambitions — DELETE. (Your resume's going to get a lot shorter from these tips, in case you were wondering.) Your cover letter? DELETE. Nobody cares! Your little clever in-joke in your objective? DELETE. Especially that one. Resumes are not a time to be funny. Believe me, your resume is probably already funny enough without any additional effort on your part.But what about your precious hobbies section, which identifies you as a well-rounded and socially adjusted person of taste and culture? DELETE! Unless you have relevant hobbies, that is. If your resume is borderline, and you say you're a World Origami Federation grandmaster, then you obviously don't have enough time for programming, so it'll likely get eighty-sixed. If your hobby is writing code, or administering a website, or doing anything remotely computer-related, then it might tip the scales in your favor. Otherwise, just don't mention it!Face it: all the traditional advice about trying to convince the hiring manager that you're a plucky, scrappy young individual from a farm in Alabama who's destined for greatness on account of your Uncle Ted having given you that pep talk after you fell off your horse when you were a kid — that advice may as well have come from the back end of your horse, because the hiring manager just wants to profile your current skill set. Mr. Plucky goes into the Round File.Don't get all depressed about this tip. People will start caring more about you as a person in later phases of the recruiting process, particularly if you're one of those candidates who doesn't really like showering.Tip #2: Use Plain TextYour resume is going to go through a bunch of automated transformation tools and will be mangled horribly along the way. Any non-ASCII character, such as those nonstandard Microsoft Word bullets, or any accented character, or (heaven help you) Unicode will be turned into our old favorite, the question-mark character ("?").You don't want your resume to look like this: Resum? for Bob?T???Moblin ?Experience 1997?Present? Vice?F???**??didn?t?do?sh???for?ten?yea???So write it in plain text. Yes. Text. You know. Like from a typewriter, or Windows Notepad. ABCs, not PDF.Don't expect any whitespace to make it through except newlines and single spaces. And don't assume your resume will be viewed in a fixed-width font. If you make a nice pretty formatted table using tab characters, it will look like ascii-art smoke signals by the time a human being looks at it.The maximum amount of ASCII art you can get away with, and even this is stretching it, is hyphenated lines and bullets. For instance, this might be OK:Education--------- * B.S. Computer Science, University of Wherever, 1997 * M.S. Resume Writing, 2003 – graduated .357 magnumBut I wouldn't overdo it.If your name has accent characters in it, your best bet is to change your name. For instance, if your name is Pièrre l'Éléphant, think about whether you'd prefer to have it seen as "Pi?rre l'?l?phant" or "Pierre l'Elephant". Sure, your accented characters might make it through, but I'd play it safe.HTML formatting usually makes it through safely because it's plain text. However, even if your tags are left alone by the automated mangler, there's no guarantee that your resume will be viewed from a browser, and nobody wants to read through a bunch of ugly markup while they're trying to assess your skills. So you shouldn't use HTML either.Text! All the best resumes are plain text. Use text.Tip #3: Check, please!Attend to your basic hygiene: spell-check, grammar-check, style-check.For starters, they have these wonderful programs called "spell checkers", and they even know some computer jargon. For God's sake, don't submit a resume without a spell-check. This is one bit of traditional advice that's still true for tech resumes. People care about your spelling, because if you're misspelling things it means you don't care enough about the quality of your job application to spend 30 seconds running it through a program that can find your mistakes for you. That's pretty damn lazy.If you flat-out refuse to use a spell-checker, please at least refrain from misspelling Lisp as "Lips". You'd be amazed at how often people do this.Don't misspell "Curriculum Vitae". The proper spelling is r-e-s-u-m-e, unless you have a Ph.D. or you're applying for a non-US company where "CV" is standardized. In the US, "curriculum vitae" is likely to be mistaken for a venereal disease.Please, please, please learn the difference between "lead" and "led". It's one of the most common grammatical errors on resumes, and it annoys the hell out of many screeners. "Lead" is either the present-tense verb meaning "not doing any coding", or it's a metallic element that makes you sterile if you accidentally ingest it. "Led" is the past tense of "lead". Example: * 1995-1996: lead a team doing blah blah blah. we were...The date is long past, and rest of the paragraph is in the past tense, so this is clearly one of those people who don't know "lead" from "led". That, or she was trying to sterilize her team members. Either way, it doesn't look good.Keeping the tense consistent between sentences in a paragraph is related to the important grammatical notion of "parallelism", in which you try to use the same structure for clauses in a sentence. For instance, you should never say: "Job responsibilities: pretty much doing nothing and pick my nose." Screeners will be much more impressed if you use the parallel gerund form, picking your nose.None of this advice applies to blogs, of course. If you find spelling or grammatical errors in my blog, it's because I put 'em there on purpose. Pshaw.To finish off our spiffy lead/led example, I should note that you can also use "lead" as a noun, as in "tech lead", but you risk having it interpreted as "wanker", so read tip 5 before you attempt it.So! Spell check and grammar check. Gotta have 'em. What about style?I could of course rant at length about style, but it's pretty open-ended: people constantly find clever new ways to be unclever. So I will restrict my stylistic remarks to the use of the word "utilize". "Utilize" has been scientifically demonstrated to be used only by stupid people, so if you use it you could easily be mistaken for one. A stupid person, that is, not a scientist. "Utilize" is one of the all-time classic Stupidity Indicators, right up there with saying "choo-choo-choo" out loud when you're thinking. Ever notice how only stupid people make train noises when they're thinking? "Oh gosh, lemme think, chsh chsh chsh... hmmm, choo choo choo..."Yup. They sound like Winnie the Pooh, who as you may recall "thinks" by pounding his head and saying "think think think." DYHAQFM!Tip #4: Avoid Weasel WordsWeasel Words are impressive-sounding verbs that make it sound like you did something useful, when in fact all you did was snork down chocolates from the big candy bowl in the conference room while other people did all the actual work."Participated" is the all-time champion Weasel Word. As an example of just how weaselly it is, consider this: I can say truthfully that I participated in the Gulf War. I even received a medal for it. The actual form of my participation involved watching it on CNN; I happened to be active duty Navy at the time but wasn't on tour. But I "participated" so I got a medal, despite the fact that I probably couldn't identify the Persian Gulf on a map.Heck, I even "participated" in the election of George W. Bush, specifically by not voting for him. But it's true! I participated!Given that you can participate in something without doing much or having any real impact, the word "participate" becomes a semantic sink: it sucks all meaning out of a paragraph, nullifying any deductions we can make about your actual contribution. If any form of "participated" appears in a paragraph describing something you did, experienced resume screeners will simply draw a big red line through that paragraph and move on."Proposed" is another Weasel Word, unless it's immediately followed by a claim of bona-fide work, such as "...and implemented". There's a certain type of candidate who drifts from job to job and produces nothing but proposals. This can mean that the person doesn't like to do real work, or that nobody ever listens to the person, but either way it's not good.One big class of Weasel Words is the "stalker" category, including "analyzed", "studied", "learned", "observed", "watched" and their ilk. Nobody wants to hire you based on your extensive experience with observing work occurring. If all you did was analyze stuff, assuming it wasn't some sort of rigorous statistical analysis worth bragging about, then just take that whole item out of your tech resume.Resume screeners keep an eye out for non-weasel words, aka Productivity Words. These are words that you can't weasel out of when someone asks you about them. The best are synonyms of "got real stuff done", including "coded", "implemented", "developed", "delivered", and "launched".It's perfectly OK to use "designed", as long as you follow it up with a Productivity Word. If you design something without implementing it, then it's just a synonym for "Proposed". If you prefer to design things that other people ultimately implement, then you're quite possibly outstanding material for a company full of kneebiters. But a real tech company like Amazon or eBay or Microsoft or whoever isn't going to hire you, because they can find plenty of people who can both design things and implement them."Tech lead" is, sadly, another weasel word if you're applying for an individual contributor position, because it's all too easy for your tech skills to rust into oblivion if you spend long enough as a tech lead without helping with the coding. It's especially a red flag for college hires who are talking about their group projects; weaker programmers often gravitate towards the coordinator position on their project, and wind up not having any real knowledge to show for their effort. Hence, if you're applying for a programming position and you were a project leader of any kind, make sure to call out whether you did any coding on the project, or screeners will assume that you did none.Tip #5: Avoid Wank WordsWank Words are words that inflate your perceived importance (e.g. using "architected" rather than "designed"), or words that have simply become synonyms, such as "Rational UML Process", for the so-called work done by people who sit on their asses and don't know how to code anymore.Wank Words are worse than just devoid of content; they're active indicators of total inactivity. Resume screeners either delete Wank Words or replace them with the word "wank" (e.g., "Certified Wank Master"), which makes the resume a lot easier to scan."Advocate" is a common wank word, when it refers to a title or position. If it's a verb then it's just a weasel word, but if you think it's your title, then you've inflated yourself into Wanker territory. Either way, if you're walking around advocating stuff, it means you're not working. Also, it means nobody listens to you, because if you possessed actual leadership, people would just do what you recommended and then you wouldn't need advocate it anymore. So "advocate" just means "wanker"."Consultant" is often another absolutely outstanding synonym for "wanker". Now let me just add, before I get stabbed to death by eager members of the heavily armed Consultant Industry, that some consultants are great. The problem is that the odds are completely stacked against you in tech resume screening. It's like fast-food experience when applying to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant. It might have helped you hone your waiter skills, but the odds are against it, and a lot of the art of resume screening is about weighing odds.The problem with "consultant" is that it has two meanings. It can either mean "person who was hired on a contract basis to fill a coding need in the organization", or it can mean "person hired to 'consult', aka 'wank', because the hiring organization is too clueless to solve their own problems and too incompetent to retain even one full-time staff member capable of helping them, so they turn to paid self-help." When you see the word on a resume, it can be hard to distinguish which kind it is.The all-time worst Wank Word is probably "Methodologist". It will definitely get your resume circulated around at tech companies, but not for the reasons you were hoping. Any sort of amusing synonym for "Methodologist", such as Scrum Master, generally has the same effect.Wank Words are a bit like the adjectives on restaurant menus — meaningless fluff words added in an attempt to make the dish sound tasty. You can get a much clearer idea of what the hell it is that you're contemplating eating if you take all the adjectives out, including nouns and noun-strings that serve as adjectives. For instance, House Cured Spice Rubbed Apple Smoked Line Caught Columbia River Coho Salmon, when all the Wank Words are removed, becomes "Salmon", which is of course the only part of the description that you're actually eating. Depending on how you feel about what that winds up being, you can replace all the adjectives with either "icky" or "yummy", e.g. "Yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy Salmon", or "Icky icky icky icky icky icky icky icky Eggplant."Hence, many wank-filled resumes wind up looking, after the screeners have marked them up a bit, like this: "Senior wanker wanking for the Wank-Wank Institute of Wankology on the wank wank wank project during which I wanked successfully with seven other wanky wankers."Well, "senior" is also kind of a wank word, but you get the idea.Tip #6: Don't be a Certified LoserDon't ever, ever use the word "certified" your resume. It's far and away one of the most prominent red flags in resume screening, bordering on a dead-giveaway round-file 86-that-bad-boy no-review-required situation, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know what I mean, well, you know the old saying about not knowing who the sucker is at the poker table.)Certification is for the weak. It's something that flags you as a technician when you really want to be an engineer. If you want to be a television repairman, you can become certified in TV repair. If you want to work for Sony and design their next big-screen TV, then you clearly don't need a busy-working-adults course on how to repair the fugging things.Same goes for tech certification. It means you had to take a course to learn something you could have read in a book. If you know something, just say you know it, and then be prepared to answer questions about it during your phone screens and/or interviews. If you feel compelled to add that you're certified in said skill, it's just broadcasting that you lack confidence in your own self-assessments, which doesn't help you in the slightest.Seriously. Take all mentions of certifications off your tech resume. It's actively hurting your chances of getting an interview.Tip #7: Don't say "expert" unless you really mean itThe term "expert" makes experts' eyes glow red. It doesn't bother me personally, but I know enough interviewers who care vastly about it that I'm advising you to steer clear. If you say you're an expert in something, many interviewers take it to mean you claim to have a bigger penis than they do, metaphorically speaking of course, and they're going to pull out their still highly metaphorical measuring stick during the interview and size you up. I employ this metaphor in its most gender-neutral possible interpretation, needless to say.A friend of mine at Amazon once told me that he takes resumes that list "expertise" and he tells the candidate something along these lines: "Wow! You don't often find true experts in fields like this. I feel like I've found a kindred spirit here. I don't often do this, but I'm going to pick one of these technologies you're an expert at, and we're doing to do an incredibly deep technical dive on the subject. But before I start, is there anything you want to take off the resume?"He says it's like truth serum. (Hi, H.B.!)Tip #8: Don't tip your handResume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that nobody wants you if you're desperate. And there are dozens of sure-fire little ways to let it slip out accidentally that you are, in fact, desperate, such as (just as one example) using the word "desperate" on the actual resume. Don't do that.Ideally you want to appear confident and competent. Regardless of your overall skill level, from "Magna Cum Laude" to "Platyhelminthes", you'll want to appear confident that you can function effectively at that level.One way of sounding really desperate is to apply for 18 jobs in one sentence. "Objective: Highly personable, results-oriented programmer seeking opportunity to lead or contribute individually on projects or programs involving e-commerce, 3D multiplayer gaming, b2b, web programming or client/server networking with database or other persistence strategies while utilizing my broad background in problem-solving to do pretty much any menial job you'll give me oh please please please hire me, I'm d-d-des-desp-waaaaaaah!" Works like a charm!You can apply for 18 jobs, but you should send 18 different resumes, each targeted at that job, and you shouldn't send them all at once.Another really obvious sign of desperation is saying you're eager to learn. Never, ever say "eager to learn" on a resume. In the ancient and occult secret rosetta-stone decoder language of technical resume screeners everywhere, "eager to learn" means "unskilled labor". Let's face it: if you were really eager to learn, you'd have done it by now."Fast learner" — definitely another bad one. Doubly so, because it combines desperation with ignorance; you wouldn't need to call it out if you could demonstrate something concrete that you've already learned. If you have some true demonstration that you're a fast learner, such as entering college at age 14, then sure, call it out. But the phrase "fast learner" is a fast track to the Big Resume Bin in the Sky."Motivated" is another resume-screening synonym for "desperate". Don't say you're motivated. It's like wearing a suit to the interview. It'll turn people off, guaranteed.The best way to sound non-desperate is to be non-desperate. You can do that by lowering your expectations, tightening your belt, and not applying for that job you know you're not qualified for. Failing that, just make a nice clean resume that sticks the bare facts about your skills and accomplishments.Tip #9: Don't bore us to deathConsider this resume statement: * designed and developed runtime library code to emulate MS-DOS and BIOS calls on a variety of Unix platforms. This enables binary-ported DOS application programs such as Quicken and Microsoft Word to run under a commercial emulator on Unix platforms. This enables users who do not currently have access to a DOS machine, but who have blah blah BLAH lather rinse repeat.All it needs is the first sentence; we can deduce the rest.Incidentally, if you're cleverly thinking of commenting that I need to follow Tip #9 in my blogs, well, just remember this: if you ever write well enough to attract commenters, they'll hate you too. So there!Seriously, take a close look at your resume and delete anything that seems obvious. If you worked at a company that everyone in the world has heard of, such as Microsoft or Amazon, then don't spend time explaining to us what they do.Be as specific as possible. Don't say "managed several small projects and one medium-sized one." That's useless. If the projects were too small to detail, then don't mention them at all.Don't repeat information from section to section. That happens a lot. Candidates seem to think that screeners might miss something important on the resume, so they wind up saying the same thing over and over. This copy-and-paste strategy has two major downsides. The first is that the screener will be irked that you're repeating yourself, causing them to start grading more harshly. The second is that if you're repeating something the screener finds comical, such as "Senior Agile Methodologist" or "Certified J2EE Consultant", you're not exactly helping by repeatedly honking it out like a wounded seagull.Resumes aren't a time for storytelling. Your goal, as a resume writer, should be to cover your entire academic and professional career in a way that makes it as easy as possible for screeners to match up your skills and accomplishments with things they recognize. It's basically a checklist.Don't go overboard on me and make a resume with so little information that nobody can figure out what the heck you did on any of your projects — I've seen that too. When in doubt, provide more information, not less. There's nothing wrong with a long-ish resume, despite what you might have heard from other industries. Just try to leave out stuff that can be found through a search engine.Tip #10: Don't be a lying scumbagSee, it's like this: you'll get caught. I'm still amazed at how many candidates think that the resume game is some variant of bingo, wherein all the words on your resume have optional invisible stars indicating whether you actually know something about that word, and you just cross your fingers hope the interviewer shouts out Bingo! after randomly selecting five starred words.The weird thing is that so many people do it. Maybe they had to write a 10-line program in Forth back in approximately fourth grade, so they shrug and list "Forth" in their programming languages section, squeezed in at the end right between "HTML" and "English", in the hope that it looks good but won't be selected for Interview Bingo. That, folks, is tantamount to lying.I do realize that "lying" is a rather harsh criticism, so I'm willing chalk it up to a gentlemanly misunderstanding over the definition of the number "five". Many people who rate themselves in some skill as being "average", or "intermediate", or "passably fair to middling", or 4 through 6 on a 1-10, have redefined those terms to mean "have been briefly exposed to the concept, but don't remember a single thing about it now except the name." Really. I'm not making this up.Seeing as candidates are redefining the number five to mean "one", I figure I can redefine "grossly exaggerating" to mean "lying". Fair enough?If you lie on a tech resume, you'll get caught. Of course one of the interviewers is going to be a passionate closet Forth user (as if there's any other kind), and they'll get all excited and ask about it, which sends the candidate into a pants-crapping frenzy of lost-at-Bingo smoke-screen tactics, which include hemming and hawing and saying "oh gosh it's been a long time" and all those other things that so endear them with interviewers.What were they thinking?Incidentally, I know this is supposed to be about resume writing and not interviewing, but let me just state for the record that I remember my college courses from nearly 20 years ago as if they were last week. If I'm interviewing you and I ask about your OS course and you say "oh gosh, it's been a long time, lemme think, choo choo choo, I can't remember" and then I look at your transcript and you took it 2 years ago, well, DYHAQFM?Here's your absolute bestest-best winning strategy: don't lie and don't exaggerate. Everyone's had brief exposure to programming languages they didn't like and didn't understand, and there's nothing to be gained by listing them on a resume. Do your best to give a qualitative estimate of proficiency for every skill on your resume (the acceptable levels being "novice", "amateur", "tyro", "newbie", and "invented it" if you want extra insurance towards Tip #7).SummaryResume writing is a fine art, and everyone has their own cherished opinions about it, and no doubt I've angered even more than the usual number of certified agile consultants. But I estimate that I've screened well over five thousand tech resumes, and I've interviewed or phone-screened over 1200 candidates in my 18-year career, and I've worked with people who've got those numbers beat by a wide margin. Despite broad philosophical differences in opinion about how to conduct technical interviews, all the engineers I've talked to over the years pretty much look for the same things in resumes.At the risk of boring you to death, I'll reiterate that I'm not speaking for Google here. It's not actually possible to speak for a whole company on a subject as diverse and opinionated as resume writing (or screening), but even if it were possible, I wouldn't be doing it.This concludes today's little set of free, personal tips on writing programmer resumes. Thanks for reading!DYHAQFM?
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59,769 | JohnN | 2007-09-26T09:58:07 | Feedback for UK Writing Startup | Hey everyone. I setup this startup with my confounder. Its for people who don't have time to blog, to write articles/essays etc and get feedback themselves. Typically, Paul Graham-esque essays and articles are likely to be written, as opposed to news reports for example. | http://www.scribblesheet.co.uk/index.php | 2 | 1 | [
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59,783 | mqt | 2007-09-26T12:23:14 | "You be the VC" launches | http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/25/you-be-the-vc-launches/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,785 | nickb | 2007-09-26T12:44:56 | How To Lose All Your Friends Immediately, In Real Time | null | http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/24/how-to-lose-all-your-friends-immediately-in-real-time/ | 6 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,786 | nickb | 2007-09-26T13:03:28 | SELinux vs. OpenBSD's Default Security | null | http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/SELinux_vs_OpenBSDs_Default_Security | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git - Part 1 30 Years Of Linux | null | null | For Part Two, click here.
Thirty years ago, Linus Torvalds was a 21 year old student at the University of Helsinki when he first released the Linux Kernel. His announcement started, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional…)”. Three decades later, the top 500 supercomputers are all running Linux, as are over 70% of all smartphones. Linux is clearly both big and professional.
For three decades, Linus Torvalds has led Linux Kernel development, inspiring countless other developers and open source projects. In 2005, Linus also created Git to help manage the kernel development process, and it has since become the most popular version control system, trusted by countless open source and proprietary projects.
The following interview continues our series with Open Source Leaders. Linus Torvalds replied to our questions via email, reflecting on what he's learned over the years from leading a large open source project. In this first part, we focus on Linux kernel development and Git. "[Linux] was a personal project that grew not out of some big dream to create a new operating system," Linus explains, "but literally grew kind of haphazardly from me initially just trying to learn the in-and-outs of my new PC hardware."
Regarding creating Git and then handing it off to Junio Hamano to improve and maintain, Linus noted, "I don't want to claim that programming is an art, because it really is mostly just about 'good engineering'. I'm a big believer in Thomas Edison's 'one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration' mantra: it's almost all about the little details and the everyday grunt-work. But there is that occasional 'inspiration' part, that 'good taste' thing that is about more than just solving some problem - solving it cleanly and nicely and yes, even beautifully. And Junio had that 'good taste'."
Read on for the first in a two-part interview. Check back next week for the second part, where Linus explores the lessons and insights gained from three decades at the helm of the Linux kernel.
Translations: [Chinese], [Korean], [Vietnamese]: (Contact us if you'd like to translate this interview into another language.)
Linux Kernel Development
Jeremy Andrews: Linux is everywhere, and has been an inspiration to the entire open source world. Of course, it wasn't always that way. You famously released the Linux kernel back in 1991 with a modest Usenet posting on comp.os.minix. A decade later you wrote an engaging and personal book titled, "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" exploring much of that history. This year, in August, Linux will celebrate its 30th anniversary! That's amazing, congratulations! At what point during this journey did you realize what you'd done, that Linux was so much more than "just a hobby"?
Linus Torvalds: This may sound a bit ridiculous, but that actually happened very early. Already by late '91 (and certainly by early '92) Linux had already become much bigger than I had expected.
And yeah, considering that by that point, there were probably just a few hundred users (and even "users" may be too strong - people were tinkering with it), it probably sounds odd considering how Linux then later ended up growing much bigger. But in many ways for me personally, the big inflection point was when I realized that other people are actually using it, and interested in it, and it started to have a life of its own. People started sending patches, and the system was actually starting to do much more than I had initially really envisioned.
I think that X11 was ported to Linux some time in April '92 (don't take my word for the dates - it's a loong time ago), and that was another big step where suddenly there was a GUI and a whole new set of capabilities.
To put this all in perspective - I really didn't start out with any big plans of high expectations. It was a personal project that grew not out of some big dream to create a new operating system, but literally grew kind of haphazardly from me initially just trying to learn the in-and-outs of my new PC hardware.
So when I released the very first version, it was really more of a "look at what I did", and sure, I was hoping that others would find it interesting, but it wasn't a real serious and usable OS. It was more of a proof of concept, and just a personal project I had worked on for several months at that time.
And going from that "personal project" to being something where others used it, sent feedback (and bug reports), and occasional patches, that was the big change for me.
Just to give an example of something really fundamental: the original copyright license was something like "you can distribute this in source form, but not for money".
That was because for me one of the issues had literally been that commercial unix was expensive (well, for a poor student who spent all his money on the new PC it was), and so to me a big important thing was that the source code be available (so that people could tinker with it), and I wanted it to be open to people like me who just couldn't afford the alternatives.
And I changed the license in late '91 (or maybe very early '92) to the GPLv2 because there were people who wanted to distribute it on floppies to local Unix Users Groups, but wanted to at least recoup the costs of the floppies and their copying time. And I realized that was obviously entirely reasonable, and that the important thing wasn't the "no money", but the "source needs to be openly available" part.
End result: not only did people distribute it at Unix user group meetings, but early floppy distributions like SLS and Slackware happened within months.
Compared to those initial really fundamental changes, everything else was "incremental". Sure, some of the incrementals were pretty big (IBM coming aboard, Oracle DB being ported, Red Hat IPOs, Android becoming big on phones etc), but they were still less personally revolutionary than that early initial "people I don't even know are using Linux''.
JA: Do you ever regret your choice of license, or how much money other people and companies have made off something you created?
LT: Absolutely not.
First off, I'm doing quite well. I'm not insanely rich, but I'm a well-paid software engineer, doing what I like to do, on my own schedule. I'm not hurting.
But equally importantly, I'm 100% convinced that the license has been a big part of the success of Linux (and Git, for that matter). I think everybody involved ends up being much happier when they know that everybody has equal rights, and nobody is special with regards to licensing.
There's a fair number of these "dual license" projects where the original owner retains a commercial license ("you can use this in your proprietary product if you pay us license fees") and then on the other hand the project is also available under something like the GPL for open source cases.
And I think it's really hard to build a community around that kind of situation, because the open source side always knows it's "second class". Plus it leads to a lot of just licensing paperwork in order for the special party to always retain their special rights. So it adds a lot of friction to the project.
And on the other hand, I've seen a lot of BSD (or MIT or similar) licensed open source projects that just fragment when they become big enough to be commercially important, and the involved companies inevitably decide to turn their own parts proprietary.
So I think the GPLv2 is pretty much the perfect balance of "everybody works under the same rules", and still requires that people give back to the community ("tit-for-tat"). And everybody knows that all the other people involved are bound by the same rules, so it's all very equitable and fair.
Of course, another part of that is that you also get out what you put in. Sure, you can try to "coast" on the project and be just a user, and that's ok. But if you do that, you also have no control over the project. That can be perfectly fine too, if you really just need a basic operating system, and Linux already does everything you want. But if you have special requirements, the only way to really affect the project is to participate.
This keeps everybody honest. Including me. Anybody can fork the project and go their own way, and say "bye bye Linus, I'm taking over maintenance of my version of Linux". I'm "special" only because - and as long as - people trust me to do a good job. And that's exactly how it should be.
That "anybody can maintain their own version" worried some people about the GPLv2, but I really think it's a strength, not a weakness. Somewhat unintuitively, I think it's actually what has caused Linux to avoid fragmenting: everybody can make their own fork of the project, and that's OK. In fact, that was one of the core design principles of "Git" - every clone of the repository is its own little fork, and people (and companies) forking off their own version is how all development really gets done.
So forking isn't a problem, as long as you can then merge back the good parts. And that's where the GPLv2 comes in. The right to fork and do your own thing is important, but the other side of the coin is equally important - the right to then always join back together when a fork was shown to be successful.
Another issue is that you really want to have the tools to support that workflow, but you also have to have the mindset to support it. A big impediment to joining forks back is not just licensing, but also "bad blood". If the fork starts from very antagonistic reasons, it can be very hard to merge the two forks - not for licensing or technical reasons, but because the fork was so acrimonious. Again, I think Linux has avoided that mainly because we've always seen forking things as natural, and then it's also very natural to try to merge back when some work has shown itself to be successful.
So this answer kind of went off at a tangent, but I think it's an important one - I very much don't regret the choice of license, because I really do think the GPLv2 is a huge part of why Linux has been successful.
Money really isn't that great of a motivator. It doesn't pull people together. Having a common project, and really feeling that you really can be a full partner in that project, that motivates people, I think.
JA: These days when people release source code under the GPLv2, they generally do it because of Linux. How did you find the license, and how much time and effort did you put into reviewing other existing licenses?
LT: Back then, people still had fairly big flame wars about BSD vs GPL (I think partly fueled by how rms really has a knack for pissing people off), so I'd seen some of the license discussions just through various usenet newsgroups I was reading (things like comp.arch, comp.os.minix etc).
But the two main reasons were probably simply gcc - which was very much instrumental in getting Linux going, since I absolutely required a C compiler - and Lars Wirzenius ("Lasu"), who was the other Swedish-speaking CS student at University in my year (Swedish being a fairly small minority in Finland).
Lasu was much more into license discussions etc than I was.
To me, the choice of GPLv2 wasn't some huge political issue, it was mainly about the fact that my original license had been so ad-hoc and needed updating, and I felt indebted to gcc, and the GPLv2 matched my "you have to give source back" expectations.
So rather than make up another license (or just edit the original one - just removing the "no money can change hands" clause could have been an option), I wanted to pick one that people already knew about, and had had some lawyers involved.
JA: What is your typical day like? How much of it is spent writing code, versus reviewing code, versus reading and writing emails? And how do you balance personal life and working on the Linux Kernel?
LT: I write very little code these days, and haven't for a long time. And when I do write code, the most common situation is that there's some discussion about some particular problem, and I make changes and send them out as a patch mainly as an explanation of a suggested solution.
In other words, most of the code I write is more of a "look, how about we do it this way" where the patch is a very concrete example. It's easy to get bogged down into some theoretical high-level discussion about how to solve something, and I find that the best way to describe a solution is often to just write the snippet of code - maybe not the whole thing - and just make it very concrete that way.
Because all my real work is spent on reading and writing emails. It's mostly about communication, not coding. In fact, I consider this kind of communication with journalists and tech bloggers etc to literally be part of my workday - it may get lower priority than actual technical discussions, but I do spend a fair amount of time on things like this too.
And yes, I spend time on code reviews too, but honestly, by the time I get a pull request, generally the code in question should already have been reviewed by multiple people already. So while I still look at patches, I actually tend to look more at the explanations, and the history of how the patch came to me. And with the people I've worked the longest with, I don't do even that: they are the maintainers of their subsystem, I'm not there to micro-manage their work.
So quite often, my main job is to "be there", and be the collection point, and be the person who manages and enforces the releases. In other words, my job is generally more about the maintenance process than the low-level code.
JA: What is your work environment like? For example, do you prefer a dark room with no distractions, or a room with a view? Do you tend to work in silence, or while listening to music? What kind of hardware do you typically use? Do you review code with vi in a terminal, or with a fancy IDE? And, do you have a preferred Linux distribution for this work?
LT: My room isn't exactly "dark", but I do have the blinds on the window next to my desk closed, because I don't want bright sunlight (not that it's necessarily very common this time of year in Oregon ;). So no views, just a (messy) desk, with dual 4k monitors and a powerful desktop computer under the desk. And a couple of laptops sitting around for testing and for when I'm on the road.
And I want to work in silence. I used to hate the ticking of mechanical disk drives - happily long relegated to the garbage bin as I've used exclusively SSD's for over a decade by now - and noisy CPU fans are unacceptable too.
And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's.
University of Helsinki used it because it worked on DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix, which is why I got introduced to it. And now my fingers are hardcoded for it. I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. But my hacked-up piece of historical garbage works just barely well enough that I've never been really forced to teach my old fingers new tricks.
So my desktop environment is fairly simple: several text terminals open, and a web browser with email (and several other tabs, mostly news and tech sites). I want to have a fair amount of desktop space, because I'm used to having fairly big terminal windows (100x40 is kind of my default starting size), and I have multiple terminals open side-by side. Thus the dual 4k monitors.
I use Fedora on all my machines, not because it's necessarily "preferred", but because it's what I'm used to. I don't care deeply about the distribution - to me it's mainly a way to get Linux installed on a machine and get all my tools set up, so that I can then replace the kernel and work on just that.
JA: The Linux Kernel Mailing List is where kernel development happens publicly, and is extremely high traffic. How do you keep up with so much email? Have you explored other solutions for collaboration and communication outside of a mailing list, or is there something about a simple mailing list that is perfect for what you do?
LT: Oh, I don't read the kernel mailing list directly, and haven't in years. It's much too much.
No, the point of the kernel mailing list is that it basically gets cc'd on all the discussions (well - one of the kernel mailing lists do, there are many - and then the traditional lkml list is the fallback for when there isn't some more targeted list). And that way, when a new person is brought into the discussion, they can see the history and the background by looking at the kernel mailing list.
So what I used to do was to be subscribed to the list, but have all the lkml email that I wasn't cc'd on personally be auto-archived, so I'd not see it by default. But then when some issue escalated to me, all that discussion would show up, because it was there in my email, just not in my inbox until it was needed.
These days, I actually use the lore.kernel.org functionality instead, because it works so well and we have some other tools built around it. So rather than having it auto-archived in my own mail archives, the discussions end up being visible that way instead. But the basic workflow is conceptually the same.
I do get a fair amount of email still, obviously - but in many ways it has been getting better over the years, rather than worse. A big part of that is Git and how well the kernel release flow works: we used to have many more problems with code flow, and tooling. My email situation was actually much much worse back around the turn of the century, when we still dealt in huge patch-bombs and we had serious scalability problems in the development flow.
And the mailing list (with tooling around it) model really does work very well. That's not to say that people don't use other means of communication in addition to email (both person-to-person, and the mailing lists): there are people who enjoy various realtime chat setups (IRC being the traditional one). And while that has never been my thing, it is clearly what some people like to use for brainstorming. But that "mailing list as an archive" model works very well, and works seamlessly together with the whole "send patches between developers as emails" and "send problem reports as emails".
So email remains the main communication channel, and makes it easy to discuss technical issues, with patches embedded in the same medium. And it works across time zones, which is very important when everybody is so spread out geographically.
JA: I followed kernel development closely for about a decade, blogging about it on KernelTrap and writing about new features as they evolved. I stopped around the time the 3.0 kernel was released, which had followed 8 years of 2.6.x versions. Is it possible to summarize some of the more interesting things that have happened in the kernel since the 3.0 release?
LT: Heh. That's so long ago that I couldn't even begin to summarize things. It's been a decade since 3.0, and we've had a lot of technical changes in that decade. ARM has grown up and ARM64 has become one of our primary architectures. Lots and lots of new drivers, and new core functionality.
If anything, what is interesting about the last decade is how we've actually kept the actual development model really smooth, and what hasn't changed.
We've gone through many different version number schemes over the decades, we've had different development models, but the 3.0 release was in fact the one that finalized the model we've used ever since. It kind of made official the whole "releases are time-based, version numbers are just numbers, and don't have any feature dependencies".
We'd started the whole time-based releases with a merge window in the 2.6.x days, so that part wasn't new. But 3.0 was when the last vestiges of "the number has meaning" were thrown overboard.
We'd had the random numbering scheme (mainly before 1.0), we'd had the whole "odd minor numbers means development kernel, even means stable production kernel" model, and then in 2.6.x we started doing the time-based release model. But people still had that "what will it take to increase the major number" question. And 3.0 made it official that even the major version number has no meaning, and that we'll just try to keep the numbers easy to deal with and not let them grow too big.
So for the last decade, we've made absolutely huge changes (Git makes it easy to show some statistics in numbers: about three quarters of a million commits by over 17 thousand people). But the development model itself has actually been quite smooth and stable.
And that really hasn't always been the case. The first two decades of kernel development were full of fairly painful development model changes. This last decade has been much more predictable release-wise.
JA: As of now, the latest release is 5.12-rc5. How standardized is the release process? For example, what sorts of changes go into an -rc1, versus an -rc2 and so on? And at what point do you decide a given release is ready to be officially released? What happens if you're wrong and a large regression is found after the final release, and how often does this happen? How has this process evolved over the years?
LT: So I alluded to this earlier: the process itself really is pretty standard, and has stayed so for the last decade. It went through several upheavals before that, but it's actually been almost like clock-work since 3.0 (and in fact a few years before that - the switch to Git in many ways was the beginning of the modern process, and it took a while before everybody got used to it).
So we've had this cadence of "two weeks of merge window" followed by roughly 6-8 weekly release candidates before final release for almost 15 years by now, I think.
And the rules have always been the same, although they haven't always been entirely strictly enforced: the merge window is for new code that is supposedly "tested and ready", and then the subsequent roughly two months are for fixes and to actually make sure all the problems are shaken out. Which doesn't always happen, and sometimes that supposedly "ready" code gets disabled or outright reverted before the release.
And then it repeats - so we have a release roughly every 10 weeks or so.
And the release criteria is me feeling confident enough, which obviously in turn is based on what kinds of problem reports are still coming in. If some area still shows issues late in the rc game, I'm fairly aggressive about just reverting things, and saying "we'll deal with this in a later release once we've figured the thing out fully", but on the whole it's fairly rare that that is needed.
Does it always work out? No. Once the kernel is released - and particularly once a distro picks it up - you get new users, you get people who didn't test it during development that find things that didn't work and we didn't catch during the rc series. That's pretty much inevitable. It's part of why we have the whole "stable kernel" trees, which continue to add fixes after the release. And some stable kernels are maintained for longer than others, and get called LTS ("Long Term Support") kernels.
All of this has remained fairly unchanged in the last ten years, although we do end up having a lot more automation in place. Kernel testing automation is hard in general - partly because so much of the kernel is drivers which then obviously depends on hardware availability - but there are several farms doing both boot and performance testing, and do various randomized load testing. And that has improved a lot over the years.
JA: Last November you were quoted as being impressed by Apple's new ARM64 chips found in some of their new computers. Are you following the development effort to support them with Linux? I see work was merged into for-next. Is it likely Linux will boot on Apple's MacBook hardware as early as the upcoming 5.13 kernel? Are you likely to be an early adopter? What is the significance of ARM64?
LT: I'm checking in on it very occasionally, but it's early days yet. As you note, the very early support will likely be merged into 5.13, but you need to realize that that is really only the beginning, and doesn't make Apple hardware useful with Linux yet.
It's not the arm64 part that ends up being the problem, but all the drivers for the hardware around it (the SSD and GPU in particular). The early work so far gets some of the really low-level stuff working, but doesn't result in anything useful outside of early hardware enablement. It will take some time for it to be a real option for people to try out.
But it's not just the Apple hardware that has improved - the infrastructure for arm64 in general has grown up a lot, and the cores have gone from "Meh" to being much more competitive in the server space. The arm64 server space was pretty sad not that long ago, but Amazon's Graviton2 and Ampere's Altra processors - both based on the much improved ARM Neoverse IP - are much better than what the offerings were a few years ago.
I've been waiting to have a usable ARM machine for over a decade by now, and it's not there yet, but it's clearly much closer than it used to be.
In fact, I guess I could say that I've been wanting an ARM machine for much longer than that - back when I was a teenager, the machine I really wanted was an Acorn Archimedes, but availability and price made me go with a Sinclair QL (M68008 processor) and then obviously a few years later a i386 PC instead.
So it's been kind of brewing for decades, but they still haven't been widely available and price/performance competitive as computers for me. One day. Hopefully in the not too distant future.
JA: Is there anything in the kernel which is not optimal, but would require a complete rewrite to address properly? In other words, the kernel is 30 years old and knowledge, languages and hardware have changed a lot in these 30 years: if you rewrote it from scratch now, what would you change?
LT: We've actually been really good about even completely rewriting things if necessary, so anything that would have been an unmitigated disaster has long since been rewritten.
Sure, we have a fair amount of "compatibility" layers, but they are usually not horrendous. And it's unclear if even those compatibility layers would really go away if rewriting from scratch - they are about backwards compatibility with older binaries (and often backwards compatibility with older architectures, e.g. running 32-bit x86 apps on x86-64). Since I consider backwards compatibility to be very important, I'd want to keep those even in a rewrite.
So there are obviously lots of things that are "not optimal" in the sense that anything can be improved, but the way you phrase the question, I'd have to say that no, there's nothing there that I despise. There's legacy drivers that nobody is ever going to care about enough to clean up, and so they may do ugly things, but a key part of that is "nobody cares enough". It hasn't been a problem, and when it does become a problem we tend to fairly actively remove true legacy support that we can't find anybody that cares about. So we've gotten rid of lots of drivers over the years, and we've gotten rid of whole architecture support when it no longer makes any sense at all to maintain.
No, the only major reason for a "rewrite" would be if you end up having some use-case where the whole structure no longer makes sense. The most likely scenario would be some small embedded system that just doesn't want everything that Linux offers, and has a hardware footprint so small that it simply wants something smaller and simpler than what Linux has become over the years.
Because Linux has grown a lot. Even small hardware (think cell phones etc) today is much more capable than the original machine Linux was developed on was.
JA: What about rewriting at least parts with Rust, a language that was specifically designed for performance and safety? Is there room for improvement in this way? Do you feel it’s ever possible for another language like Rust to replace C in the kernel?
LT: We'll see. I don't think Rust will take over the core kernel, but doing individual drivers (and maybe whole driver subsystems) in it doesn't sound entirely unlikely. Maybe filesystems too. So it's not "replace C", but more of "augment our C code where it makes sense".
Of course, drivers in particular is about half of the actual kernel code, so there's a lot of room for that, but I don't think anybody is really expecting to rewrite existing drivers in Rust wholesale, more of a "some people will do new drivers in Rust, and a couple of drivers might be rewritten where it makes sense".
But right now that's more of a "people are trying it out and playing with it" rather than anything more than that. It's easy to point to advantages, but there are certainly complexities too, so I'm very much taking a wait-and-see approach to see if the promised advantages really do pan out.
JA: Are there any specific parts of the kernel that you are personally most proud of?
LT: The stand-out parts I tend to point to are the VFS ("virtual filesystem") layer (and the pathname lookup in particular) and our VM code. The former because Linux just does some of those fundamental things (looking up a filename really is such a core operation in an operating system) so much better than anything else out there. And the latter mainly because we support 20+ architectures, and we still do it with a largely unified VM layer, which I think is pretty impressive.
But at the same time, this is very much a function of "what part of the kernel do you care about". The kernel is big enough that different developers (and different users) will simply have different opinions of what matters most. Some people think scheduling is the most exciting part of the kernel. Others like the nitty-gritty of device drivers (and we have a lot of those). I personally tend to be more involved in the VM and VFS areas, so I then naturally point to those.
JA: I found this description of pathname lookup, and it's more complex than I expected. What makes the Linux implementation so much better than what is done in other operating systems? And what do you mean by "better"?
LT: Pathname lookup is really such a common and fundamental thing that most people outside of kernel developers don't even think about it as a problem: they just open files, and take it all for granted.
But it's actually fairly complicated to do really well. Exactly because absolutely everything does pathname lookups all the time, it's hugely performance-critical, and it's very much one of those areas where you also want to scale well in SMP environments, and it has lots of complexity in locking. And you very much do not want to do any IO, so caching is very important. In fact, pathname lookup is so important that you can't leave it to the low-level filesystem, because we have 20+ different filesystems, and having each of them do their own caching and their own locking would be a complete disaster.
So one of the main things the VFS layer does is really handle all the locking and caching of pathname components, and handle all the serialization and the mount point traversal, and do it all with mostly lock-free algorithms (RCU), but also with some really clever lock-like things (the Linux kernel "lockref" lock is a very special "spinlock with reference count" which was literally designed for the dcache caching, and it's basically a specialized lock-aware reference count that can do lock elision for certain common situations).
End result: the low-level file systems still need to do the actual lookup for things that aren't cached, but they don't need to worry about caching and all the coherency rules and the atomicity rules that go along with pathname lookups. The VFS handles all that for them.
And it all outperforms anything any other operating system has done, while basically scaling perfectly to even machines with thousands of CPU's. And it does that even when those machines all end up touching the same directories (because things like the root directory, or a project home directory, are things that even heavily threaded applications all touch at the same time, and that don't get distributed to any kind of per-thread behavior).
So it's not just "better", it's "Better" with a capital 'B'. Nothing else out there comes even close. The Linux dcache is simply in a class all its own.
JA: The past year has been difficult all around the world. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the kernel development process?
LT: It actually has had very minimal effect, because of how we always worked. Email really ends up being a wonderful tool, and we didn't rely on face-to-face meetings.
Yes, it did affect the yearly kernel summit last year (and this year is still up in the air), and most conferences got cancelled or turned virtual. And people who worked in offices before mostly started working from home (but a lot of the core kernel maintainers already did so). So a lot of things around it changed, but the core development itself worked exactly as before.
And it obviously affected all our lives in other ways - just the social ramifications in general. But on the whole, being a kernel developer who already interacted with people almost entirely over email, we were probably some of the least affected.
Git Distributed Version Control System
JA: Linux is only one of your ubiquitous contributions to open source. In 2005 you also created Git, the extremely popular distributed source control system. You quickly migrated the Linux kernel source tree out of the proprietary Bitkeeper and into the newly created and open sourced Git, and in the same year handed off maintainership to Junio Hamano. There's a lot of fascinating history there, what led you to handing off leadership on this project so quickly, and how did you find and select Junio?
LT: So there's two parts to this answer.
The first part is that I very much did not want to create a new source control system. Linux was created because I find the low-level interface between hardware and software fascinating - it's basically a labor of love and personal interest. In contrast, Git was created out of necessity: not because I found source control interesting, but because I absolutely despised most source control systems out there, and the one that I found most palatable and had really worked fairly well in the Linux development model (BitKeeper) had become untenable.
End result: I've been doing Linux over 30 years (the anniversary of the first release is still a few months away, but I had started on what would become Linux already 30 years ago), and I've been maintaining it the whole time. But Git? I did not ever think I'd really want to maintain it long-term. I love using it, and I obviously think it's the best SCM out there by a huge amount, but it's not my fundamental passion and interest, if you see what I'm trying to say.
So I always wanted somebody else to maintain the SCM for me - in fact I would have been happiest had I not had to write one in the first place.
That's kind of the background.
As to Junio - he was actually one of the very first people who came in as Git developers. His first change came in within days after I had made the very first (and very rough) version of Git public. So Junio has actually been around some since pretty much the beginning of Git.
But it's not like I handed the project off to the first random person to show up. I did maintain Git for a few months, and the thing that made me ask Junio if he wanted to be the maintainer is that very-hard-to-describe notion of "good taste". I don't really have a better description for it: programming is about solving technical problems, but how you solve them, and how you think about them is important too, and it's one of those things you start to recognize over time: certain people have that "good taste" thing and pick the "right" solution.
I don't want to claim that programming is an art, because it really is mostly just about "good engineering". I'm a big believer in Thomas Edison's "one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" mantra: it's almost all about the little details and the everyday grunt-work. But there is that occasional "inspiration" part, that "good taste" thing that is about more than just solving some problem - solving it cleanly and nicely and yes, even beautifully.
And Junio had that "good taste".
And every time Git comes up, I try to remember to really make it very very clear: I may have started and designed the core ideas in Git, but I often get too much credit for that part. It's been 15+ years, and I was really only involved with Git in that first year. Junio has been an exemplary maintainer, and he's the one who has made Git what it is today.
Btw, this whole "good taste" thing and finding people who have it, and trusting them - that's very much not just about Git. It's very much the history of Linux too. Unlike Git, Linux is obviously a project that I still do actively maintain, but very much like Git, it's also a project with lots of other people involved, and I think one of the big successes of Linux is having literally hundreds of maintainers around, all with that hard-to-define "good taste", and all people who maintain parts of the kernel.
JA: Have you ever given control to a maintainer only to later determine it was the wrong decision?
LT: Our maintainership structure has never been so black-and-white and inflexible that that would ever have been an issue. In fact, it's not like we even make maintainership control be something very documented: we do have a MAINTAINERS file, but that's so that you can find the right people, it's not really a sign of some exclusive ownership.
So the whole "who owns what" is more of a fluid guideline, and a "this person is active and is doing a good job" than some "oops, now we gave that person ownership and then he screwed up".
And it's fluid also in the sense that maybe you are the maintainer of one subsystem, but if there's something you then need from another subsystem, you can often cross borders. Usually it's something that people talk about extensively before doing, of course, but the point is that it does happen and it's not some hard "you're only supposed to touch that file" kind of rule.
In fact, this is actually somewhat related to the earlier discussion about the licensing, and another example of how one of the design principles of "Git" was that whole "everybody has their own tree, and no tree is technically special".
Because a lot of other projects have used tooling - like CVS or SVN - that fundamentally does make some people special, and that fundamentally does have a "ownership" that goes along with it. In the BSD world, they call it the "commit bit": giving a maintainer the "commit bit" means that he's now allowed to commit to the central repository (or at least parts of it).
I always detested that model, because it inevitably results in politics and the "clique" model of development, where some people are special and implicitly trusted. And the problem isn't even the "implicitly trusted" part - it's really that the other side of the coin is that other people are not trusted, and are by definition outsiders, and have to go through one of the guardians.
Again, in Git that kind of situation doesn't exist. Everybody is equal. Anybody can do a clone, do their own development, and if they do a good job they can get merged back (and if they do an outstanding job, they become maintainers, and they end up being the ones doing the merging into their trees ;).
So there's no need to give people special privileges - no need for that "commit bit". And that also means that you avoid the politics around it, and you don't need to trust people implicitly. If they end up doing a bad job - or more commonly, just end up fading away and finding another interest - they don't get merged back, and they also don't stand in the way of other people who have fresh new ideas.
JA: Do new features of Git ever impress you, and become part of your workflow? Are there features you'd still like to see added?
LT: My use cases were obviously the first ones to be fulfilled, so for me it has seldom been about new features.
Over the years, Git has certainly improved, and some of it has been noticeable in my workflow too. For example, Git has always been fairly fast - it was one of my design goals, after all - but a lot of it was originally done as shell-script around some core helper programs. Over the years, most of that shell scripting has gone away, and it means that I can apply patch-bombs from Andrew Morton even faster than I could originally. Which is very gratifying, as that was actually one of the early benchmarks I used for performance testing.
So Git has always been good for me, but it's gotten better.
The big improvements have been about how much better it has become to use as a "regular user". A lot of that has been people learning the Git workflow and just getting used to it (it is very different from CVS and other things that people used to be used to), but a lot of it is Git itself having become a lot more pleasant to use.
Conclusion, Part One
In the second part of this interview, Linus talks about what he's learned from managing a large open source project. He offers much insight and advice to maintainers about what he's found works best for him, and how he avoids burn out. He also talks about the Linux Foundation, and what he does when he's not focused on developing the Linux kernel.
For Part Two, click here
Click the link to see what other Open Source Leaders talk with Tag1 about. | 2024-11-08T09:33:26 | en | train |
59,787 | nickb | 2007-09-26T13:08:38 | What actually happens when you plug in a USB device? | null | http://www.technovelty.org/code/linux/plugging-in-usb.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,790 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T13:10:29 | Facebook IM: Killer App or Nobody Home? | null | http://www.centernetworks.com/facebook-im-launches | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,792 | nickb | 2007-09-26T13:13:12 | Google Street View to blur Canadians | null | http://valleywag.com/tech/your-privacy-is-an-illusion/google-street-view-to-blur-canadians-303754.php | 2 | 1 | [
59840
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,794 | mqt | 2007-09-26T13:23:08 | Why Programmers Don't Like Relational Databases | null | http://typicalprogrammer.com/databases/programmers-vs-rdbms/ | 43 | 80 | [
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59,795 | jslogan | 2007-09-26T13:26:14 | How to use guarantees to close more business - Part | http://www.jslogan.com/content/view/220/106/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | http_404 | Page not found | Saleskick | null | null |
404Page Not Found
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| 2024-11-08T07:33:37 | null | train |
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59,796 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T13:28:01 | Kara Swisher Deconstructs Facebook | http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more-reasons-to-worry-about-facebook | 11 | 4 | [
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59,798 | nickb | 2007-09-26T13:31:15 | Economics of iTunes and AmazonMP3 Stores: Does Amazon and Apple make any money from selling digital music? | http://daringfireball.net/2007/09/more_amazon_mp3_store | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
|
59,801 | nickb | 2007-09-26T13:45:13 | Karatsuba Multiplication | null | http://mathworld.wolfram.com/KaratsubaMultiplication.html | 4 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,806 | dpapathanasiou | 2007-09-26T14:11:00 | What's in Google's Name? | http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/whats-in-googles-name/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
|
59,807 | nickb | 2007-09-26T14:16:06 | Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs | null | http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/business/worldbusiness/25outsource.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin | 4 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,810 | nickb | 2007-09-26T14:17:23 | 15 Billion More Reasons to Worry About Facebook | http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more-reasons-to-worry-about-facebook/ | 2 | -1 | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
|
59,814 | raju | 2007-09-26T14:27:01 | Going freelance... | http://ianozsvald.com/2007/09/26/becoming-a-consultant-freelancer-part-1/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
|
59,823 | jsjenkins168 | 2007-09-26T14:58:33 | AOL betting on mobile search, touting more traffic than Google and MSN | http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc20070925_177090.htm | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | Bloomberg Businessweek - Bloomberg | null | By Michael Riley | Why a Cybersecurity Prodigy Carried Out a Hacking SpreeA cyber prodigy defended companies against intrusion while continuing to amass data through a series of his own hacks.How US Voting Machines Became Safer Than EverClear Ballot shows just how slow, steady and paper-dependent the industry is.The Big TakeAmerica Is Filling Notorious Former Jails With Asylum-SeekersDetainees await immigration court hearings in Deep South facilities with long records of mistreatment.Businessweek DailySign up for the newsletterJoe Raedle/Getty ImagesHow Trump Weaponized Nostalgia (Again)Looking backward can be a potent force. Plus: Elon Musk’s victory, and what polling got wrong.Trump’s Epic Victory Is a Story of Widespread DiscontentThe Election Night Party ConundrumThe Big TakeBYD Is Winning the Global Race to Make Cheaper EVsThe Chinese company is flooding markets with its cars—while the US is doing everything it can to keep the booming brand out.PursuitsFive New Movies About Family Drama This Fall Might Ease Your OwnThe $2.5 Billion Plan to Transform Six Historic Blocks in South BeachTrendy Sparkling Wines to Get Your Holiday Parties Started RightEver Wanted to Ski in Japan? This Is Your YearThese New Skis and Boots Can Instantly Improve Your Technique and ConfidenceDynamic US Restaurateurs Are Taking Their Talents to the SlopesIn this issueBYD Is Winning the Global Race to Make Cheaper EVsHow Starbucks Became a Sugary Teen EmporiumA Fentanyl Vaccine Is a Long Shot That Just Might WorkIn this issueWhat Kamala Harris Would Mean for Wall Street and Main StreetHow Apple Rules the WorldThe Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online PokerIn this issueHow Legal Sports Betting Changed Everything for Players, Fans and MoreWhat Happens When Ozempic Takes Over Your TownInside Worldcoin’s Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of HumanityIn this issueTrump on What He’d Do With Taxes, Tariffs, Jerome Powell and MoreRoblox Is Fighting to Keep Pedophiles Away, and Not Always WinningHow Rivian Became the Anti-TeslaSee all issuesChevron RightIn this issueBYD Is Winning the Global Race to Make Cheaper EVsHow Starbucks Became a Sugary Teen EmporiumA Fentanyl Vaccine Is a Long Shot That Just Might WorkIn this issueWhat Kamala Harris Would Mean for Wall Street and Main StreetHow Apple Rules the WorldThe Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online PokerIn this issueHow Legal Sports Betting Changed Everything for Players, Fans and MoreWhat Happens When Ozempic Takes Over Your TownInside Worldcoin’s Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of HumanityIn this issueTrump on What He’d Do With Taxes, Tariffs, Jerome Powell and MoreRoblox Is Fighting to Keep Pedophiles Away, and Not Always WinningHow Rivian Became the Anti-TeslaSee all issuesChevron RightRadioArk's Cathie Wood Interview23:39 | 2024-11-08T04:11:52 | en | train |
|
59,825 | vlad | 2007-09-26T15:11:38 | 7-Year Updated Ajax Timeline of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon Acquisitions | http://www.shmula.com/blog/timelines/google-microsoft-yahoo/g-y-m.htm | 12 | 7 | [
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|
59,837 | ivankirigin | 2007-09-26T15:50:26 | The Case Against Adolescence | http://www.kottke.org/07/09/the-case-against-adolescence | 22 | 15 | [
59874,
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|
59,841 | luccastera | 2007-09-26T15:57:01 | Rails and JPA (Instead of ActiveRecord) | null | http://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2007/09/rails_and_jpa_i.html | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,846 | tomh | 2007-09-26T16:08:40 | DOM Assistant 2.0 released | null | http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/dom_assistant_20_released/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,848 | iamwil | 2007-09-26T16:21:19 | Software Radio | null | http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/technology/23prototype.html?_r=1&oref=login | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,851 | markpeterdavis | 2007-09-26T16:23:00 | Sit On One Side Of The Table | When your team arrives at the VC's board room you should all sit on the same side of the table. There are several reasons for this. | http://getventure.typepad.com/markpeterdavis/2007/09/sit-on-one-side.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,854 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T16:32:23 | How to bootstrap your startup | null | http://foundread.com/2007/09/26/how-to-bootstrap-your-startup/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,856 | chaostheory | 2007-09-26T16:34:03 | Facebook IM Client Coming Soon | http://uk.blognation.com/2007/09/25/facebook-im-client-coming-soon/ | 2 | 1 | [
60007
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|
59,857 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T16:34:13 | A Tale of Two Cities: Red Hat and JBoss | null | http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/09/26/a-tale-of-two-cities-red-hat-and-jboss | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,858 | transburgh | 2007-09-26T16:34:33 | Stanford's Facebook App Development Group | null | http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/09/26/stanfords-facebook-application-development-group | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,867 | terpua | 2007-09-26T16:50:27 | CoScripter For Firefox: Automate Your Tasks | null | http://mashable.com/2007/09/26/coscripter-firefox/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
59,875 | danw | 2007-09-26T17:06:17 | Shipping a 1.0 product isn't going to kill you, but it will try | null | http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/04/20/10.html | 4 | 1 | [
59920
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59,880 | mqt | 2007-09-26T17:14:32 | A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel | http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1190803943&count=1 | 15 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
|
59,882 | nsimpson | 2007-09-26T17:19:53 | Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. | http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2007/09/logic-will-get-.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | no_article | null | null | null | null | 2024-11-08T08:16:06 | null | train |
|
59,889 | johnrob | 2007-09-26T17:33:56 | The Ridiculously Clever Dock | http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Ridiculously-Clever-Dock/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,894 | jsjenkins168 | 2007-09-26T17:49:41 | Angel Networks | This morning I attended a seminar about attracting angel investment which was hosted by a regional angel investor network. Essentially, this angel network is a non-profit organization of independent angel investors who review and discuss business plans submitted from early stage (primarily tech) startups seeking funding. Each quarter they filter down submissions to 4 promising companies, which are invited in to present in front of all of the angels.<p>Does anyone have experience with such Angel Networks? <p>My impression from reading PG's essays and elsewhere is that the really "good" angel investors are typically independent and work almost entirely off of recommendations. It was mentioned in the talk that referrals really help, but they will also look at business plans which are submitted cold turkey (although there is a $250 application fee, which I found strange given the organization is non-profit). Does anyone have input on this?<p>Some things I learned:<p>- With the exception of basically 1 VC (Austin Ventures), VC money is still dried up post-bubble here in Austin. Angel investments are on the rise to fill this void in the mid-sized investments area however.<p>- An underlying theme of the talk was "risk aversion". It sounds like investors here are still very weary of risk, and therefore will only really invest in companies which have an established business plan with a viable plan for turning profit. If you are not cashflow positive already, you better have a plan to get there quick.<p>- Not only would this risk-aversion make getting seed investment more difficult, it might also yield terms which are less desirable than they should be. For this reason it really does look like moving to Silicon Valley is a good idea when seeking early-stage investment. I always speculated this before, but now it is pretty clear. | 8 | 25 | [
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59,898 | noelchurchill | 2007-09-26T17:55:57 | If you don't know how to program | and you have a relatively simple web app you want to make, where do you start. What scripting language would be best to learn on? All the RoR buzz started to lead me in that direction and I bought the agile web dev book, but now I'm not sure if that is the best place to start. Now I'm more thinking about PHP. It's simple and very forgiving. From an unexperienced programmer, it seems much easier to just hack something together. <p>Any other input? Thanks! | 4 | 6 | [
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59,900 | jkush | 2007-09-26T17:59:39 | The next best thing to actually piloting a plane | http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/remote-flying-with-vr-goggles-and-a-camera-202964.php | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,902 | andrew_null | 2007-09-26T18:03:09 | 5 things that make your social network monetize like crap | http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/09/why-your-social.html | 17 | 4 | [
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59,906 | ereldon | 2007-09-26T18:10:44 | Is scientific journalism doomed? | http://nouseforadave.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/is-scientific-journalism-doomed/ | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,908 | DocSavage | 2007-09-26T18:13:22 | Slides from RailsConf Europe '07 on Scaling Rails and Joyent Architecture | http://jxh.bingodisk.com/bingo/public/presentations/JHoffmanRailsConf-Berlin-Sept2007.pdf | 6 | 7 | [
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59,933 | nickb | 2007-09-26T18:54:39 | Are Second Life's users brain-damaged? | null | http://valleywag.com/tech/virtual-worlds/are-second-lifes-users-brain+damaged-304031.php | 2 | 1 | [
59977
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59,937 | nickb | 2007-09-26T19:02:09 | The End Is Near For Mongrel (Glassfish is here) | null | http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/09/end-is-near-for-mongrel.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,969 | lackbeard | 2007-09-26T19:56:16 | How Hard Could It Be?: Unfocused and Unabashed | http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071001/how-hard-could-it-be-unfocused-and-unabashed.html | 16 | 1 | [
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59,975 | tx | 2007-09-26T20:02:24 | The Real Reason why Programmers Dislike Databases | http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2007/09/real-reason-programmers-dislike.html | 3 | 2 | [
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59,987 | puneetht | 2007-09-26T20:24:27 | Using the internet for dissidence in Burma | http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7012984.stm | 3 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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59,988 | luccastera | 2007-09-26T20:25:24 | blog.pmarca.com: I think I can, I think I can | null | http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/i-think-i-can-i.html | 7 | 6 | [
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59,990 | byrneseyeview | 2007-09-26T20:29:10 | Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy | null | http://paulgraham.com/valueofphilosophy.html | 15 | 11 | [
60101,
60068,
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60,008 | gibsonf1 | 2007-09-26T21:23:10 | Microsoft leaks its own search plans | null | http://www.news.com/Microsoft-leaks-its-own-search-plans/2100-1032_3-6209535.html | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
60,020 | vlad | 2007-09-26T21:44:04 | Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer ) | http://kickin-the-darkness.blogspot.com/2007/09/confessions-of-terrible-programmer.html | 32 | 20 | [
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60,021 | byrneseyeview | 2007-09-26T21:44:21 | What Happens When Housing is Cheap? | null | http://www.byrneseyeview.com/marketview/what_happens_when_housing_is_c.html | 3 | 3 | [
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60,026 | bluishgreen | 2007-09-26T21:58:46 | Science Lovers' Dating Service | Except it has 0 matching profiles near 1000 miles of my zip. I am doomed! | http://www.passion4science.com/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
60,032 | alaskamiller | 2007-09-26T22:15:58 | 10 Interesting Future Web Trends; SFP08, anyone? | http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_more_future_web_trends.php | 2 | 2 | [
60053,
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60,036 | bootload | 2007-09-26T22:32:05 | CoScripter Simplifies Web Experience | http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2188979,00.asp | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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60,038 | bootload | 2007-09-26T22:34:24 | Inventor of the Web Criticizes 'Stupid' Male Geek Culture | http://blogs.eweek.com/careers/content001/competition/inventor_of_the_web_criticizes_stupid_male_geek_culture_1.html | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | http_404 | Page not found | eWEEK | null | null |
eWeek has the latest technology news and analysis, buying guides, and product reviews for IT professionals and technology buyers. The site’s focus is on innovative solutions and covering in-depth technical content. eWeek stays on the cutting edge of technology news and IT trends through interviews and expert analysis. Gain insight from top innovators and thought leaders in the fields of IT, business, enterprise software, startups, and more. | 2024-11-08T06:26:58 | null | train |
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60,039 | bootload | 2007-09-26T22:39:54 | Paul Tallon: The Alignment Paradox | http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1375476,00.asp | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | http_404 | Page not found | CIO Insight | null | Drew Robb
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September 7, 2022 | Property of TechnologyAdvice.© 2024 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights ReservedAdvertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace. | 2024-11-08T20:37:00 | null | train |
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60,040 | petenixey | 2007-09-26T22:48:12 | YC startup Clickpass looking to hire a designer in San Francisco | http://www.webkitchen.co.uk/2007/09/yc-startup-clickpass-requires-htmlcss.html | 20 | 5 | [
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60,041 | whacked_new | 2007-09-26T22:48:42 | Emerging Technologies Conference 07 news around the web | http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/21860/ | 1 | 1 | [
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60,042 | bootload | 2007-09-26T22:50:30 | 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network | http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/24/9-ways-to-build-your-own-social-network/ | 3 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network | TechCrunch | 2007-07-24T17:25:40+00:00 | Mark Hendrickson |
The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.
The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent. While definitions of “social networking” may vary, social networks are primarily defined by member profiles and some sort of user generated content.
There are roughly three types of companies that have emerged in the space of white label social networking. The first provides hosted, do-it-yourself solutions with which customers can largely point and click their way to a brand new social network. Companies of this type interact minimally with their customers and rather focus on providing the network-building tools that they demand.
We have taken a sample of nine of these companies – Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite – all of which provide free baseline services, and reviewed them individually below. We have also included the chart on the right summarizing all of these companies’ offerings. Credit for initial research into these companies goes to Jeremiah Owyang who compiled a comprehensive list of white label social networking services.
The second type of company provides social networking software for download and installation onto one’s server. The third type works very closely with clients to build a social network based on their needs. These companies might suite your needs much better than any do-it-yourself social networking service, so you may want to check out companies such as Social Platform (a personalized service) or phpFox (a downloadable solution). We’ll take a deeper look at these services in Part 2 of this post.
Out of the services that we review below, we found that Ning provides the best platform for setting up good-looking, sophisticated social networks with minimal effort. KickApps provides the best platform for integrating social networking components into existing websites. CrowdVine and Haystack are viable options for organizations that are looking for simple social networks to improve personalized communication online. CollectiveX is most suitable for existing groups that want to collaborate online. And GoingOn provides a promising hybrid solution with capabilities shared by both Ning and KickApps.
More details on each are below.
Ning
Ning (which means “peace” in Chinese, in case you were wondering) currently provides by a wide margin the best platform for setting up fully functional and visually appealing social networks from scratch. While Ning attempts to provide essentially the same out-of-the-box service as GoingOn, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, and ONEsite, none of its competitors can yet match the professionalism of its product.
The company’s superior execution has so far earned it 76,000 hosted networks (although, browse Ning’s list of “popular” networks and one gets the strong sense that the vast majority of these networks were set up by tire kickers and promptly abandoned).
The standard Ning package allows affiliates to build at no cost an ad-supported network with all of the features that they offer. This entails a point-and-click setup process in which an affiliate chooses a theme, tweaks appearances, and loads features such as photos, videos, groups, and blogging. Within minutes, the affiliate has created an impressive, fully-featured (albeit rather cookie-cutter) network that is ready to accept its first batch of members, which can be invited by email or Ning ID.
For most affiliates, the ease in which you can set up a solid network will be the selling point. However, Ning also has offerings for more advanced affiliates that allow networks to partially break out of the standard Ning format. Affiliates can disable ads or run their own ads for $20 per month, and they can mask their networks’ URLs for only $5 per month. Furthermore, they have access to Ning’s comprehensive Developer Documentation and an API for when they desire advanced customization. Effectively, their API allows developers to take the standard Ning network and retool it, whereas KickApps (discussed below) encourages advanced customization by providing developers with a bare foundation on which to build.
While the Ning platform can be made almost entirely invisible by removing the top Ning toolbar and masking the URL, all networks hosted by Ning share the same user base. When a user joins your Ning network as a member, he or she obtains a Ning ID that works with all other Ning networks. On the one hand, this system facilitates the process by which users sign up for more than one network. On the other, it serves as a constant reminder that the network is actually hosted by a white label social networking platform. Many affiliates will not mind this system at all, but others who want to completely brand their community will consider this a detraction.
KickApps
Whereas Ning holds your hand from start to finish as you construct your social network, KickApps is targeted more at web developers (and companies with web developers on staff) who want to incorporate social networking features into their existing websites without going through the hassle of coding and maintaining those features on their own. As such, when you begin to construct your social network with KickApps, you will be presented with a pretty bland, default template that you then must mould to create anything decently attractive. Ning helps you customize your network with premade templates, but KickApps gives developers more immediate control over header and footer code and CSS styling. Consequently, it takes more time and expertise to get a KickApps network looking good, but in the end it may very well look more seamless and professional than any network hosted on Ning.
Other features provided by KickApps emphasize the intention for its social network components to integrate nicely into an existing site. The company allows you to customize your network’s URL for free so users don’t feel as though they are leaving a main site. Also free of charge: unlimited storage and bandwidth for all that multimedia content (video, audio, photos, etc.) you want your users to upload. Furthermore, each network is given its own user base so that members feel as though they are signing up for a particular network, not a platform (as is the case with the Ning’s universal ID system). To top it off, the company is willing to work individually with affiliates to make their platform as invisible as possible (by removing all references to KickApps, etc).
KickApps’s advertising scheme is particularly unique. Whereas other platforms charge a flat rate to turn off the advertising that supports their free service, KickApps follows a pay per performance model in which affiliates who opt to turn off or run their own advertising only pay KickApps in amounts proportional to their networks’ traffic. With the free platform package, all but a single skyscraper area of an affiliate’s network are controlled by KickApps. However, once an affiliate decides that it wants to control advertising it pays roughly $2-5 for every thousand pageviews to its network, with rates decreasing as traffic grows.
KickApps also provides the most robust set of widget creation tools, which is intended to help affiliates promote their networks through viral marketing. The widgets that affiliates create with an easy-to-use control panel display content shared or produced on a particular network and can be embedded on other websites or social networks. These widgets drive traffic to one’s network by channeling anyone who interacts with a widget back to the network from which it comes.
KickApps’s 4,000 networks may pale in comparison to Ning’s 76,000 but the company appears to be gaining traction as it continues to roll out features. The recently released v2.2 of its platform improves the platform’s video and content moderation capabilities and suggests that the company is moving towards providing better tools for quick and easy customization, thereby competing more directly with Ning for the patronage of laymen. Concurrently, KickApps is developing an extensive API (currently in private beta) that should reinforce its primarily role as service providers for web developers.
CrowdVine
CrowdVine may not be pretty or intricate but it’s not meant to be. Until recently a one-man show embodied by Tony Stubblebine, CrowdVine provides the simplest, most basic solution for those looking to set up their own social network.
The main features of CrowdVine are member profiles, blog posts, and public messaging. You won’t find any rich media sharing capabilities, such as photo and video, in the basic package because Tony intended CrowdVine to be all about connecting people and not about sharing their forms of self-expression. As such, the platform has appealed mainly to conference organizers and attendees, alumni (of businesses and schools), intranet users, and professionals.
The lack of control over the look and feel of one’s social network corroborates the idea of CrowdVine as a utility provider. So does the fairly unique feature of having all members respond to network-specific questions, the answers of which become tags that facilitate the browsing of members by criteria. For example, new members to the PodCamp Atlanta network are asked about their interests and expertise, and their answers become linked tags on the homepage of the network that enable visitors to view members, for example, by their interest in “blogging” or expertise in “video production”.
While Tony is not rushing to add features to CrowdVine, he is happy to work with affiliates to add functionality to their networks. The Foo Camp network has taken advantage of the Tony’s accessibility by integrating calendar and wiki support as well as color coding of members. Tony is also willing to work with affiliates to set up custom URLs and deactivate ads (for a fee of course), thereby achieving more of a “white label” result.
GoingOn
Representatives for GoingOn (still in beta) admit that their site is ugly (and, I should add, quite disorganized), but appearances tend to mask the potential of this company’s platform, which is intended to straddle the divide between those of Ning and KickApps. Built on top of Drupal, GoingOn provides easy network setup a la Ning, but the company is also partnering with media companies (with results such as Forbes Office Pranks and the American Superstar Mag Lounge) to integrate social networks into existing websites a la KickApps.
Currently, GoingOn executes neither of these services as well as Ning or KickApps. However, its platform does provide a wider range of features than either of these two companies (unfortunately, most of these features, or “modules”, are currently half-baked). If you demand features that neither Ning nor KickApps currently provides, it may very well be worth dealing with all of the imperfections that come along with GoingOn’s beta status.
There are structural and strategic aspects of GoingOn that make it worth tracking over the coming year. Since it is based on Drupal, the company claims that it can more readily deploy open source software packages on its platform. This translates into even more features over time, which may help it maintain its feature lead on its major competitors. Its Drupal heritage also facilitates the creation of a Drupalesque API, which the company tenatively plans to roll towards the end of the year.
GoingOn, the self-described “network of networks”, maintains a shared user base for its hosted networks. Unlike Ning, however, it explicitly plans to take advantage of this shared authentication system by providing networks within networks. For example, teachers at one point may be able to join a nation-wide network that contains sub-networks for the country’s school districts. The possibility of nesting networks may give GoingOn the edge with hierarchical organizations.
Affiliates can opt for one of five GoingOn network packages, each of which provides progressively more customization capabilities. Most affiliates will probably choose between a Free Network and a Pro Network, of which the latter costs $20 per month but allows affiliates to manage their advertisements. Custom URLs are free of charge for all packages.
CollectiveX
CollectiveX is a borderline white label social network platform. Its questionability arises from its orientation around exclusive groups (“groupsite” being its word for “network”) and from its very narrow range of customization options. Additionally, members of a CollectiveX group cannot friend each other, so it lacks a basic feature of virtually every social network (apparently, it is presumed that everyone within a group knows each other).
However, beyond these idiosyncracies, CollectiveX provides an impressively refined way for people to share information and content within a controlled, social network environment. The main features of a CollectiveX site include a calendar, forum, and file area (for general uploads and photos in particular). These offerings are not extensive, but the mantra “quality over quantity” certainly applies.
Unique to CollectiveX is the ability of a network’s members to list personal objectives and to declare any “key connections” (read: relationships) they have with particular individuals. These features reinforce the feeling that groupsites are meant primarily for business professionals who are looking to network (in the business sense of the word) in addition to collaborating online with associates.
While CollectiveX’s free package is supported by advertisements as with other platforms, the company’s strategy seems to be particularly focused on earning money through selling premium features. For $9 per month, network admins can remove advertising, but apparently there is no way to run your own advertisements. For additional payments of $9 per month, admins can also gain more control over group permissions, enhance network security with 128-bit SSL encryption, and increase storage capacity to 3 gigabytes. For a one-time fee of $99, CollectiveX will “white label” your network, which basically entails just dropping your own graphic into the header and importing members from another user base.
Me.com
Me.com, which runs on top of software called SNAPP, is the MySpace of white label social networking platforms (and I mean that derogatorily). The idea, as with Ning, is to set up a network in a minimal number of steps. However, each of Me.com’s themes is an eyesore and, worse, the organization of elements throughout the default network is horrible. If you like this MySpace approach to user interface design, then you’ll be right at home. I, for one, get a headache just looking at the thing.
Style considerations aside, Me.com provides an abundance of features, although many of them are poorly implemented. The audio and video sections, for example, don’t support file uploads; you actually have to record the media directly into the browser using a webcam or similar device.
The most bizarre feature is the cars section in which you can actually list the cars you own/once owned/want to own/dream about, etc. Criticisms aside, Me.com does integrate a pretty slick chat applet into each network and the same can’t be said for most of the other platforms.
Network packages on Me.com come in three flavors, which are conveniently compared to one another in a features chart. The biggest differences, of course, are between the free, ad-supported package and the other two. For a minimum (!) of $199 per month, affiliates can control advertising, customize their URL, and implement basic site branding (color schemes, logos, etc.).
PeopleAggregator
Broadband Mechanics’ PeopleAggregator is an experiment in building social networks around open standards so that people can easily move between networks, whether or not those networks are run by the same owners or contain the same features. If the social networking world were run the way Broadband Mechanics’ CEO Marc Canter envisions, Facebook users would easily be able to carry their identity (including all the information they owned on Facebook) over to MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. Then any changes to their identities on those networks could be brought back over to Facebook.
As a model for this sort of interoperability, PeopleAggregator (which comes in both hosted and downloadable versions) implements the OpenID authentication system and strives to support all open standard identity schemes. Broadband Mechanics also provides an API that is meant to enable the import and export of data to or from a PeopleAggregator network. As a long run strategy, the company entreats web service providers to embrace open standards that facilitate interfacing between social networks and non-social networks such as Google Calendar, YouTube, and Yahoo Messanger.
Five years from now, we may look back on PeopleAggregator and consider it a pioneering product. However, in its present condition the platform is clunky and unsatisfying. Others seem to agree: the largest network on PeopleAggregator, Poker Players Alliance, with 499 members gave up on PeopleAggregator and moved its operations to an old school, phpBB forum.
PeopleAggregator could be improved in a number of obvious ways. For starters, the company could and should promptly clean up the platform’s landing page, which is littered with nonsensical text that doesn’t exactly create a stellar first impression. More substantially, the company ought to allow for at least some management of advertisements and to permit more control over the structure and styling of networks. Unless you are banking on open standards as the way of the future, there’s not much for you here.
Haystack
Haystack, a Cerado product, is a social networking utility that is even more stripped down than CrowdVine. Networks (or “haystacks”) built on this platform are very simple, both visually and functionally. The main features consist only of profiles and group blogging.
Haystacks are so plain because their intention is fundamentally different from those of most social networks. While we generally think of social networks as ways for people to interact with one another within a network, haystacks are more outwardly focused as they are meant to provide visitors with detailed information about people in a particular organization. According to Christopher Carfi of Cerado, the initial idea for Haystack was to enable organizations, and particularly businesses, to present interactive information about externally-facing individuals (such as those in sales and support).
Like CrowdVine, Haystack makes good use of tagging as a way to find people according to criteria. Members across all hosted haystacks can search for each other by the tags they have assigned to themselves, and there is even a handy Google Maps integration that shows you where the people in your search results are located across the globe.
Recognizing that the default haystack layout may cramp some people’s styles, Cerado provides an API that can be used by developers to take advantage of the haystack data structure and create applications on one’s own sites.
ONEsite
ONEsite, a subsidiary of the hosting company Catalog.com, provides a hybrid social networking/website hosting solution. They allow you to mask your social network’s URL so that it meshes with an existing website, but they won’t offer you their free social networking solution unless you buy a domain with them. In the limited time of this study, we weren’t able to set up a network of our own.
Browsing the showcased networks, however, gives one the sense that ONEsite’s platform is not half bad. Some of the networks (such as the CEO’s Crull Zone) follow a standard, ONEsite template with simple customizations while others (such as iVillage connect) are more fully integrated into existing websites. However, it is unclear whether the more fully customized networks are designed by the ONEsite team under the expensive, $2,500-per-month Enterprise package or created by affiliates themselves with ready-made tools. I suspect that the former is the case.
Regardless of the platform’s quality, ONEsite’s offerings are steeply priced and their user limits are a bit draconian. The free offering only permits 100 users on your network, the $30-per-month offering permits 1,000, and the $200-per-month offering permits 10,000. I suppose no one is really intending to build the next MySpace on this platform, but from a cost point of view, the difference between 100 and 10,000 users for ONEsite is probably near nothing.
If you have created a network with ONEsite, please let us know about your experience with them in the comments.
| 2024-11-08T10:02:44 | en | train |
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60,045 | karzeem | 2007-09-26T22:56:15 | Web apps: e-mail and games remain hot, office apps cool | http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070926-web-apps-e-mail-and-games-remain-hot-office-apps-cool.html | 5 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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60,048 | kyro | 2007-09-26T22:59:07 | Regarding PHP. | Every time the issue of language choices is raised and php is suggested, many are quick to speak against learning php. I've gotten the impression that php is something I should stay away from, but I am very interested in learning it. Is it worth learning? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Should I just stick with Python (the only language I know currently)? Many of you also say that php will teach you bad habits. It'd be nice to list them so that I, and perhaps others, can stay clear of adopting such habits.<p>Thanks. | 2 | 7 | [
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