My latest tirade revolves around Hiring Managers (and I’m referring to Microsoft Hiring Managers … but I know this problem exists in other companies) not “getting” the talent landscape. Not only do they not seem to understand that brilliant software engineers don’t grow on trees (you don’t, do you?) … but they can’t seem to get it through their heads that 1) Microsoft isn’t the only place hiring, 2) Working at a big company isn’t everyone’s dream, and 3) Redmond is not the first place people say they want to move when they wake up in the morning. (Unfortunately, I don’t think the slogan ….”Where do you want to go today? Redmond, of course!” would fly.)
Coldplay are excited to announce several new tour dates across Europe later this year.
The band will play at the following venues:
26/10/05 Sports Palace - Antwerp, BELGIUM
28/10/05 Arena - Oberhausen, GERMANY
30/10/05 Forum - Copenhagen, DENMARK
31/10/05 Spektrum - Oslo, NORWAY
7/11/05 Globe - Stockholm, SWEDEN
9/11/05 Arena - Leipzig, GERMANY
10/11/05 Maimarkhalle - Mannheim, GERMANY
12/11/05 Hallenstadion - Zurich, SWITZERLAND
14/11/05 Fillaforum - Milan, ITALY
15/11/05 Palamalagott - Bologna, ITALY
17/11/05 Dome - Marseille, FRANCE
18/11/05 Zenith - Toulouse, FRANCE
20/11/05 Palau Saint Jordi - Barcelona, SPAIN
22/11/05 Palacio de Deportes - Madrid, SPAIN
23/11/05 Atlantico Pavillion - Lisbon, PORTUGAL
25/11/05 Velodromo Anoeta - San Sebastian, SPAIN
28/11/05 Tony Garnier Hall - Lyon, FRANCE
29/11/05 Bercy - Paris, FRANCE
Tickets for France, Italy and Denmark go on sale in the next few days.
The combination of accelerating retirement rates with a significant decline in the number of European students graduating from IT-related courses leads many firms to fear an IT skills shortage beginning in 2006. However, the reality is more complex, according to a recent report by Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ: FORR). In the future, companies will see their IT skills requirements shift away from technicians and more toward business-oriented profiles. They will continue to outsource more routine activities. This shift in the enterprise impacts education and recruitment. In theory, the educational system should be able to rapidly create new programs to train IT/business analysts, architects, enterprise program managers, and vendor managers — skills that firms expect to need in greater numbers in the future; however, Forrester believes that, in practice, this will take too long to meet company demands.
While some companies may have a clear picture of their future IT skills needs in mind, few academic IT departments yet reflect this profile in their curricula; and — as Forrester uncovered in a parallel study of European technical universities and engineering schools — academia has barely begun to transform its IT programs. Meanwhile, many European countries can’t even generate a respectable level of enthusiasm for computer sciences among young people planning to enter higher education.
Forrester reports that many companies don’t renew “routine” positions in development and operations simply because they will outsource them. This trend is particularly evident in the finance and public sectors. However, outsourcing does not mean simplification. Companies that opt for global or selective outsourcing can’t afford to move all responsibilities and decisions to service providers. Security, enterprise and technical architecture, innovative solutions, new technologies, and evolving business remain critical challenges. The decisions should be made internally by people with high skill levels — positions that Forrester believes are not “offshorable.”
The wait has come to an end: with Mixed Tape 08 Mercedes-Benz introduces the latest edition of its hugely successful free music compilation.
Until the 4th of October 05, we invite you to explore, download and enjoy 15 exclusive new tracks by bright young hopefuls at http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape.
Kicking off with one of the world's most-sampled artists, renowned vibraphone virtuoso and soul specialist Roy Ayers, Mixed Tape 08 features a plethora of fresh musical talent.
London's soul and jazz scene, for example, features prominently with a range of instant classics: while Colonel Red excels at warm, funky beats, D'Nell and Low Budget Soul prefer to blend modern trip hop rhythms with timeless soul harmonies.
With their exuberant disco funk, German collective Flowarea add a breath of fresh, continental air to the proceedings and whet your appetites for the compilation's many further, exciting forays into beats and tunes from around the globe.
Earth contains nearly 6.5 billion inhabitants [...] Of every 100 people in the world, 61 live in Asia, 14 in Africa, 11 in Europe, nine in Latin America, five in North America and less than one in Oceania [...] The six most populous countries - China, India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan - contain between them 3.3 billion inhabitants.
Life expectancy is longest in Japan at 82 years, followed by Iceland and Switzerland at 80. But people can expect to live just 36 years in Zimbabwe, 38 in Zambia and 40 in Malawi - mainly as a result of the AIDS epidemic in those southern African states.
Agronomists say the earth has the potential to support many more inhabitants - up to 15 billion. The question is how to share out the resources rather than whether we can produce enough.
Let's just get this out of the way... Konfabulator is now free. Yup. If you download version 2.1 you know what you'll never ever see? That's right a registration reminder. Fear not, there's nothing sneaky in there, no spyware, no ads, nothing that's keeping track of information and sending it to us... it's pure, uncut Konfabulator goodness.
Now, we can currently hear the cries of all those people who've recently purchased Konfabulator. Fear not, people, for you will be given the gift of a refund if you purchased Konfabulator 2.0 or later. Revel in the glory of it.
[...] The primary issue is that you're always afraid your VC is going to fire you. It's the unspoken thing that founders live in fear of. They work like hell to create something from nothing, take this great VC's money, get invited to all their great parties, get told how much everyone loves them, but live in fear that after each board meeting, they're going to get the call. "Hi Joe - it's your VC. Listen, we need to get together for breakfast." Uh oh.
Let's put it right out on the table - VC board members are always evaluating the performance of the CEO. That's the fundamental job of the board of directors: hire, fire and compensate the CEO. When you're a "hired gun", professional manager, you know the drill. You're only as good as your last quarter, goes the old board room yarn. But founders are typically less glib about it all, because a founder can't just bounce from one CEO gig to another - they've put their blood, sweat and tears into this start-up and it may be their only ticket to the big time. And they're damned if they let some pencil-pushing VC who simply doesn't "get it" ruin it for them.
On the VC side of the table, watching a founder run out of steam and lose their ability to manage and build the company is incredibly frustrating. Great company, great technology, great market position and a huge opportunity, but the founder just won't let go and let the best people in the world come in and take the company forward. It's like watching a train wreck - you know exactly how it will end and it's impossible to stop. Founders love to cite Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell as young, founding CEOs who run their companies from the garage through multi-billion dollars in revenue. Why can't they do the same? If it were that easy, there would be far more than a mere handful of Fortune 1000 companies still run by their founders. A friend of mine used to talk about the three stages of a company's life: the jungle, the dirt road and the highway. The right CEO and executive team in the jungle tends to be very different from who you need when you're on the highway. Founders very rarely can be effective leaders during through all these complex transitions.[...]
A source close to Hewelett-Packard indicated over the weekend that the company plans to cut at least 15,000 jobs from its workforce, with the biggest cuts coming to the IT, sales and service divisions. The news comes as HP said in a filing that it planned to offer new CIO Randall Mott a $15.3 million pay package.
Sources said that the job cuts would save the company an estimated $1 billion per year and were being done to improve cost efficiency compared with HP's competitors. The official word on the layoffs could come as early as this week; company representatives said they would not comment on the speculation.
The goal of this paper is to convince you to consider using OSS/FS when you’re looking for software, using quantitive measures. Some sites provide a few anecdotes on why you should use OSS/FS, but for many that’s not enough information to justify using OSS/FS. Instead, this paper emphasizes quantitative measures (such as experiments and market studies) to justify why using OSS/FS products is in many circumstances a reasonable or even superior approach. I should note that while I find much to like about OSS/FS, I’m not a rabid advocate; I use both proprietary and OSS/FS products myself. Vendors of proprietary products often work hard to find numbers to support their claims; this page provides a useful antidote of hard figures to aid in comparing proprietary products to OSS/FS.
Below is data discussing market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. I close with a brief discussion of non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and conclusions. A closing appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS. Each section has many subsections or points. The non-quantitative issues section includes discussions about freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation. The unnecessary fears section discusses issues such as support, legal rights, copyright infringement, abandonment, license unenforceability, GPL “infection”, economic non-viability, starving programmers (i.e., the rising commercialization of OSS/FS), compatibility with capitalism, elimination of competition, elimination of “intellectual property”, unavailability of software, importance of source code access, an anti-Microsoft campaign, and what’s the catch. And the appendix discusses definitions of OSS/FS, motivations of developers and developing companies, history, licenses, OSS/FS project management approaches, and forking.
[click for the original, 3'504x2'336, 1.4 MB]
U2log.com is an independent weblog and online magazine about the Irish band U2. We are not affiliated with U2, Island, Interscope, Universal or Principle Management.
U2log.com was originally set up as a 'webcam watch' when U2 were recording All that you can't leave behind in their Dublin studio.
Four of U2log.com's editors have roots in IRC 'chat'. We met on (channel) #U2 as far back as 1997. When U2 set up their first webcam, during the recording of Pop, we were among the few people to watch it. Religiously. We still watch, but we're looking at the bigger picture now.
11% of people say they've bought from spam, while 9% said they were scammed by spam. It certainly sounds like your chances aren't very good if you're buying from spam. At the same time, 39% admit to clicking on spammed URLs, most of whom now admit that they get more spam because of it.
New version 1.0.5 of Firefox released!
[click to download, 32MB]
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.[...]
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Generally speaking, filing for patents is an expensive and time consuming task. Most startup CEOs don't understand and can't afford a patent strategy. I have done a number of calculations on the cost of filing and maintaining software patents, and one estimate we did for a company that I am working on was that it would cost about $750,000 to file and maintain a single patent in the major markets over the lifetime of the patent. Most companies I invest in raise only $1M or less their first round. In addition, to properly protect a technology and continuing developments around a technology, a portfolio of patents must be filed or you can be "surrounded" by application patents and derivatives filed by competitors. In away, filing a patent is practically like putting up an ad balloon for people to see where you are focusing.
Some startup companies I have looked at and worked with have in fact, invested in a portfolio of patents, but from my experience, most of these companies end up spending so much time on their patents that often the products never make it to market. The patents just become fodder for some large company when they are purchased in the bankruptcy fire-sale.
I personally believe that software patents are primarily the tool of large companies with portfolios of patents which they cross-license with each other. Generally, it serve to keep competition out of the market and allows those with patents to push those without patents around or cut them out of markets entirely. A number of open source licenses are now dealing with software patent issues by creating incentives for participants not to litigate against each other. A focus on open standards is also another important way to try to keep innovation unencumbered by patents.
I am not against patents generally and I have worked in materials science and manufacturing technology companies where patents serve as a strong incentive for innovation and royalties provide a fair return for the investments. I just believe that the notion that software patents somehow help venture businesses is a red herring and that software patents are primarily a tool for software monopolies to stay keep the little guys out.
In 1956, writing as Ed McBain, he launched what became known as the police procedural genre, focusing in detail on the work of police squad as it investigates and solves a single crime.
The 87th Precinct series were set in an unnamed city which bore a strong resemblance to New York.
There were more than 50 "Precinct" novels, forming crime's longest ever series. They were set in Isola, a city clearly based on New York. Although they had no central hero, the viewpoint was often that of Detective Steve Carella, who, like McBain, was of Italian descent and the father of twins.[...]
McBain began a second series of novels in 1977, featuring Florida lawyer Matthew Hope. Each title was that of a nursery tale and included Goldilocks (1977), Three Blind Mice (1990) and Mary, Mary (1992).
"We may not be interested in chaos, but chaos is interested in us."
Welcome to 2005.
And to pick up on a theme of Re-imagine: "We are not prepared!" Regardless of the might and advanced technology of Superpowers, the power of determined (fanatic!) individuals to disrupt nations and wreck havoc on individuals in vast numbers has never beeen higher. On the good side, that's the ability of consumers or irate citizens to band together in a flash on the Internet. On the bad side it's New York and Madrid and London.
On 7 July 2005, beginning at 08:49, during the height of morning rush hour, a series of four bomb explosions struck London's transport system. Three Underground trains were hit within half an hour, and a bus a further half an hour after that. At least 37 died. The number of injured treated is at least 700. At least one news report has quoted 360 injured. Fox News reported 700 injured. This number is expected to rise as authorities survey the impact of the blasts. It is the worst terrorist attack to take place within the United Kingdom since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed upwards of 200 people.
Are you using MySQL? We are, and quite intensively, but not everywhere. Oracle (what an arrogant company...) is still in place in some of our e-business high-available productive environments. I am dreaming of the day when we will be able to get rid of the last Oracle database....MySQL is not the primary topic of his talk so he just states that it is the largest open source company, doubling revenues every year, growing 20 times over the past 4 years - to $20M run rate (not sure if this is their run rate, or their 2004 actuals). MySQL is used by the largest corporations in the world now, Internet "giants" and is THE standard database for most startups as part of the LAMP infrastructure. Just one data point: it is downloaded 40K times a day (1 every 2 sec). Marten refers to the company as the "RyanAir" of databases.
MySQL today is a company with 200 employees, 70% working from home, in 22 countries, and almost 100 locations. This created a lot of HR, legal and logistical headaches... but is also a great asset from a support standpoint. Employment contracts and stock options plans were a big issue because of the different tax and regulation systems MySQL had to deal with. Also they implemented a five weeks of vacation policy like in Sweden, no matter the country. Healthcare benefits are adapted to each country, with a policy of not being equal, but to be fair.
During the Q&A, Marten pointed out that the database market was worth $15B, which means that MySQL still has a massive growth potential. The will maintain its sheer focus on being the reference database vendor for all types of applications, not competing with its clients/partners going "up stack" like Oracle did/does.
He also pointed out that Open Source is a software production model (and philosophy), not a business model. Each Open Source company needs to come up a clear value proposition that allows it to grow profitably without offending the community. Example is Apache: most successful Open Source piece of infrastructure in the world, and nobody is making a lot of money from it.
Deep Impact consists of a sub-compact-car-sized flyby spacecraft and an impactor, about the size of a washing machine. The dual spacecraft carry three imaging instruments, two on the flyby and one on the impactor.
The impactor has an auto-navigation system that will make final corrections to its flight path just minutes before the scheduled collision. Scientists hope the resulting crater will expose fresh material from below the comet's surface and subsurface.
"That is the whole point of Deep Impact," said mission principal investigator and University of Maryland astronomer Michael A'Hearn. "We want to find out what are the guts of a comet."
The flyby spacecraft will use medium and high resolution imagers and an infrared spectrometer to collect and send to Earth pictures and spectra of the event. Space-born science platforms will also be watching Deep Impact. These include NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Swift and Submillimeter Wave Astronomy satellites, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory and Rosetta spacecraft. Observatories on Earth will view the impact and its aftermath.
Today, we hit the 10 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes served mark at around 18:00 GMT. Let’s recap. Skype was released in August 2003. We hit 1 billion minutes served somewhere in July 2004. Now, it’s 10 billion minutes in June 2005.
So it took roughly the same time to get from 0 to 1 billion, as it took to get from 1 billion to 10 billion. Does this mean we’ll be able to celebrate 100 billion next May?
We have been around the start-up block enough times to have a very clear idea of what kind of company we want to build. Here are some of the things we believe in:
- Run fast, fly low, and be cheap
- Promote from within--quickly
- Keep everyone informed, both on the good news and the bad news
- Organize based on a cell structure for both technical and non-technical functions
- 3-5 person teams
- Flat organization
- Be transparent
- Review projects every 2 weeks
- Reward innovation, ingenuity, and hard work
- Meritocracy
- Evaluate and reward managers based on development of people
- Top down reassignments of high achievers
- Build a team with potential, drive, curiosity, intelligence and ambition
- Don't have to have experience or a track record
- We want people to build experience and track records with us
- Train people
- Everyone teaches
- Honest, frequent feedback
- Weekly 1:1, staff, and all hands meetings
- Written career development plans
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Again, a new version of 
