Richard Tibbetts has called me out for conflating Web 2.0 startups with all startups in my recent blog posting, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap”. His complaint was that I was over generalizing from Web 2.0 startups to all startups.

He’s right, of course. The traditional “technology startup” by definition does have a large amount technology work that needs to be done, in addition to the business development work. However, things have changed a lot even for technology startups. Consider a company like Sequent Computer Systems, which started in 1983. At the time the founders had a key idea, which was to use multiple commodity intel CPU’s to create first SMP, and then later, NUMA minicomputers. But in order to do that, they had to design, build and manufacture a huge mount of hardware, as well as develop a whole new Unix-derived operating system, just to bring that core idea to market.

I recently came across the Transitive Grace Period Public License (alternate link) by Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn. I fonud it interesting because it’s very similar — almost identical — to something I had first starting floating about ten years ago. I called it the (TPL). I’m sure this is a case of “great minds think alike”. One things that I like about my write up is that I gave some of the rationale behind why this approach is a fruitful one:

Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google’s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there. Kudos to Google’s management team for having made (IMHO) the right decision. Hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will consider carefully what the ethical implications of their collusion and collaboration with the Chinese government’s attempt to control free speech and the human rights implications of the same.

The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com. The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on).

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application.

Andrew Binstock interviewed Donald Knuth recently, and one of the more amusing tidbits was this: I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. More seriously, I found his comments about about multi-core computers to be very interesting:

The Open Source Commands Really good ideas that companies should take to heart. Open Source Commandments II: Passover Penguins More really good ideas, especially for companies like Sun… Did Canonical Just Get Punked by Red Hat and Novell? Interesting thoughts about Linux desktop strategies rPath to OEM SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell for Appliances I know a bunch of the folks at rPath, and I very much respect their technology; I think this is a very good thing for them.

Although I lot of people have been lauding the Kindle, I recently decided to go with the Sony PRS-505 instead. Yes, the Kindle has built-in EVDO access, and the ability to buy books without a computer, or even browse the web; and yes, the Sony has once again demonstrated it can’t create a compelling 21st century computer application to save its life. However, it had a few things that at least for me, made a better choice for me than the Kindle:

The following exchange between a CentOS developer and the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma (City Motto: “The Place where People Grow — Friendly!”) is just too funny for words.

I was shocked to find a Y2K bug in Solaris 9, half a decade after Y2K, but I don’t know how else to explain this…. The following program prints a date with a year in 1905 under Solaris 9. Under Linux it displays a date of 2005, and my reading of strptime specification, as well as the Solaris 9 man page, indicates that strptime %Y is supposed to parse a 4 digit year correctly.