Month: August 2006

Tim O’Reilly has discussesan interesting post that talks about Open Source Software in the Web 2.0 times.

It’s a very interesting time to be in open source. Open source zealots need to realize that open source needs to be reinvented for the new platform architecture, and web 2.0 companies need to remember that open source isn’t just goodwill, but an integral part of keeping the developer ecosystem healthy. And everyone needs to experiment with new models, and not believe that the story has already been written.

Steve Yegge tells “The Truth About Interviewing“.

If you want a job at a company like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, or Amazon.com, they’re going to have high standards. It doesn’t matter if you “know how to program”. They’re going to test you on algorithmic complexity analysis, advanced data structures, algorithm design, searching and sorting, internationalization techniques, network protocols, OS-level memory management, parsing and semantic analysis, recursion and mathematical induction, graph theory, combinatorics, programming language theory, machine architecture, discrete math and logic, graphics and window systems, fonts and typesetting, color spaces and representations, databases and query languages, filesystems and storage, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile and wireless protocols, and internet standards and technologies.

If you’re lucky, that is.

If you’re unlucky, they’ll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they’ll ask you about the darkest corners of C syntax.

These are some good ideas on how to have good ideas.

One problem with the way we typically brainstorm is this: it’s unnatural. We bang our heads against the wall while chanting “think, think”. If you’re like me, your brain doesn’t like to be told what to do. The second I sit down and “make” myself be creative, my brain goes on lockdown. Nothing in, nothing out. There’s no such thing as forced creativity.

Via 43 Folders.

More importantly, I think many of us couldn’t have ever predicted how email would demand so much attention in our lives. So most of us are still having a hell of a time figuring our how to give it exactly as much attention as it deserves.

Amen.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!

At the Linux World conference in downtown San Francisco this week, the world’s leading cell phone manufacturers, Nokia and Motorola, took a decidedly different approach to embracing the Penguin. Motorola took the stage – Nokia chose a back seat.

I’ll go with Motorola. The approach of “Don’t ifx if it’s not broken” shouldn’t be applied everywhere. Particularly, I think, it shouldn’t be applied to the mobile market at this stage. The time will tell, of course.