Posts

RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady took off from my Do you want to be in the software business? post and discussed why we’re seeing so many Web businesses roll their own platform components rather than building on the standard LAMP or Java/J2EE/RDBMS stacks that have dominated in the past. Great stuff: Until the last few years, when more accessible languages, cheaper hardware, and a growing catalog of open source software assets led firms small and large to question the status quo. To decide, on a volume basis, that the available frameworks, development tools, databases, operating systems, and so on weren’t quite right for their needs, and that rolling their own was preferable. And that, once built, they could amortize the costs of developing these assets if they made them publicly available. Which has led to Rackspace contributing to Facebook’s Cassandra, Facebook contributing to Yahoo’s Hadoop, and IBM contributing to all of the above. The days of rolling your own are back for some portion of the would-be enterprise software customers, if not for the same reasons as in the past. ...

At this point, Stewart is doing more harm than good by giving people whom he thinks are liars and frauds a platform on his show. Ezra Klein on Jon Stewart’s interview with John “Banality of Evil” Yoo.

Here are a few links that I accumulated today, all slapped into one post. A former intelligence agent explains the process of connecting the dots, turning leads about potential terrorists into an end result, like putting a person on the no fly list. The Sunlight Foundation explains how they determine what the final version of the health care reform is, given the convoluted process being used to merge the House and Senate versions of the bill. ...

Alex Payne’s post Don’t Be a Hero is important, everybody should read it. In it, he explains why hero programmers do enough damage from a process standpoint to more than offset the value that their heroic efforts provide. Here’s the crux: Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch. Sure, you might sit around talking about how reliability is a priority, but in the back of your mind you know that the hero will be there to fix what doesn’t work. ...

Is it ethical to walk away from an underwater mortgage? The New York Times’ Roger Lowenstein says it is. Stan Collender at Capital Gains and Games says it isn’t.

I have long known that GPS receivers provide altitude information, but I had a poor understanding of how they do it. It’s complicated. By the way, the Earth’s shape is more irregular than you may think.

This year’s Edge Annual Question is, “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Follow the link to see answers from a lot of smart people. My answer follows. The Internet has trained me to be less reactionary and actually consider the positions I take before I take them. I have written so many blog posts, blog comments, discussion group posts, and emails over the years and been embarrassed by my own half thought out positions enough times that I’m better at thinking things through than I once was. A fair amount of the time, I realize that my original argument is not correct, and I wind up thinking differently. That results from putting one’s opinions on display in a medium where it’s possible to get instant feedback from people who have little to dissuade them from being honest, and where it’s easy to find contrary and complementary arguments to measure yours against. ...

I was trained that the worst officer is stupid and industrious. Stupidity makes them do ridiculous things and industry makes them do lots of ridiculous things. The very best officer is brilliant and lazy. Whenever possible, I try to have stuff done by other people. Stewart Brand on what he learned in the military, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Freelance journalist Paige Williams tracked down an interesting story, and when she couldn’t find a buyer, she reported it on spec and then tried to sell it to a variety of publications. When that didn’t work, she launched a Web site and published the story online. The result is Finding Dolly Freed, a really nice piece of journalism about a teenager who wrote a book about living outside the economy in a sustainable fashion in 1978, and the life she’s lived since. The second edition of her book, Possum Living, will be published next week. ...

New York Times’ Bits Blog has the details: He says that Netflix was willing to compromise on the issue because “our number one objective now is expanding the digital catalog.” Netflix’s streaming service won’t receive any newer movies from Warner – “it’s not that much of a breakthrough,” Mr. Hastings said – but it will get a larger piece of the Warner back catalog. The issue at hand is Netflix agreeing to a waiting period before they start sending out new releases on DVD. Warner Brothers wants a window during which customers have to buy DVDs in order to watch them when they are initially released. In exchange, Netflix gets access to more movies that they can stream instantly, and better prices on DVDs. ...