No wonder the shareholders are mad, Yahoo! has been falling to pieces since Google got into scene and now with the $31 / share offer when it was barely holding it self above $20 the shareholders saw all the return for their investment happening in a very short time, what might be the last chance they have to see any money back at all.
So here’s a bit of futurology:
David Filo moves to Hawaii, shareholders sue Jerry Yang and he’ll end up very poor on his own Caribbean island, Yahoo! is bought by Microsoft by half the price (after the lawsuits there will be few left) and the shareholders will be very happy to, at least, get some money back.
All FreeBSD / Apache / PHP will be converted to Windows 2003 Server / .NET / C# and Yahoo! services will be even worse than they used to be, Microsoft will take the users and force them to start using Google services (no one likes to eat crap anyway) and Google will be the last hope of the Internet.
Fortunately Google is by far more efficient than Microsoft and Yahoo! together (it’s not that hard anyway) and it’ll be piece of cake to take them both down while still holding their hats with the other hand. I just hope Google doesn’t try to dominate the world as Microsoft is attempting for decades, they probably know by now that it’s like reaching the speed of light, the bigger you are the more energy you need to increase speed.
Microsoft and Yahoo! will still exists for a loooong time and Google will have a bit of competition for a while, at least until the “next-Google(tm)” shows up and put all three in the sack “with a wave of her hand(tm)” and the cycle will start all over again.
Seems like Google is finally to join the dark side and Darth Sidious is going to be replaced by Vader:
Obi-Wan: You were the chosen one. It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them. You were to bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness. Anakin Skywalker: I HATE YOU! Obi-Wan: You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.
It has now passed almost 170 years since the first programmer did the first code in the first analytical machine and yet we are so lame I can barely be proud of what I do, professionally of course.
Coders are now among the richest people in the world, programs sell more than bananas nowadays and the investment in technology is considered now one of the basic blocks of modern society and still we can’t build a piece of software that lasts for more than 5 years without being completely scraped.
The open source community is probably the biggest anarchist movement in history with all the good and bad things we all knew about anarchy and for the surprise of capitalists it’s working far better than big technology companies (check IBM’s OSS support and Vista’s problems in the general news).
Of the hundreds of open source softwares that emerge only a very small fraction have success but yet they manage to stay for longer in a stable status and growing smoother than paid software.
Companies are so worried about money that even tech companies can’t write proper code. Scientific institutes are so worried about doing the perfect way every time that they re-write everything everytime and still need to re-write from scratch next time again. Money and ego are the villains in our industry and unfortunately most of us are affected by at least one of them.
Case studies
Banks, for instance, focus on what works instead of what will last. The result is a complete mess (our beloved ball of mud) that eventually have to be re-written in the future and replaced by another ball of mud with bits of the legacy balls (just in case something breaks). If customers could see the code that run a bank before opening an account they will never open it, in ANY bank.
Internet companies have the same problem but a few more, it must look good and it must be new. It doesn’t matter if the code is good, or if someone really need that feature, but the more features it have the better. (Not) Maintaining that in the future is a completely different problem.
Big companies only follow standards when it’s not needed, like writing core libraries in PHP because that’s the company’s default language or sticking crappy systems together with tape just because they’re the standard libraries used worldwide.
Scientific institutes are not free of problems too. Money is much less a problem but the ego is so big that it can be even worse. Everyone wants to re-write everything their own way and no one disagrees and just shake their heads and wait years to have another non-working beta system to maintain alongside with all other systems made by people that left the institute decades ago but there is still one person using (and normally afraid of moving as it’s not his code as well).
So, why?!
Simple: ego, fear, pride and prejudice.
Not many programmers really care about money, as much as they care about their own ego. The money problems in private companies is institutional and not personal. Our problem is personal.
Most CTOs, CIOs etc know about all problems of taking the actions they take but they’re often afraid of taking radical decisions (even when it’s for the better) or their ego demand them to change something that is working well just because it was someone else who did it.
Most programmers will have a huge pride of their systems and consequently an even bigger prejudice on the others’. Reason can’t work where pride and prejudice rules, nothing good can come out from an environment as bad as that.
Now take those four problems and you know why are we SO lame!
This is also the same reason why open source software is not as lame as closed source. Programmers still have ego and pride but code is pure logic. When your code is exposed you won’t be proud of a bug and if someone points you to one in your code you rather fix it than yell at him/her. In this case your ego and pride will not save your job but make you loose credibility in the community and your project will be put aside and other will arise, so if you don’t cooperate, you die.
Open source promotes dialogues, refining code and algorithms, finding bugs and fixing them the best way possible. It might be (arguably) slower than big companies but still the overall local quality is much better.
What to do?
It’s not just a matter of solving one or other problem, as the environment is already filled with rubbish up to the top, it’s a matter of acting different, from scratch. (my ego is working now)
If you know something is wrong, report it. If someone says it’s impossible to do, demand proof. If someone takes actions based on ego, fear, pride or prejudice, open your mouth and speak loud.
You might loose your job but I’d rather loose my job than work on such a lame place and today, unfortunately, it quite difficult to find somewhere not lame.
Are you trying to decide what type of website hosting you’ll use?
Well, let’s know our choices:
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data centre.
Types of hosting services:
Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported website hosting, and is extremely limited when compared to paid hosting.
Shared web hosting service: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.
Managed Dedicated Servers: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server.
A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service is a form of web hosting service where more than one instance of the same web service is hosted on a single physical server. This is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.
Disadvantages:
- Reduced security due to many sites on one server.
- Restrictions on traffic volume.
- Restricted database support.
- Restricted software support.
In other hand, Managed Dedicated Servers, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting where the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc.
Advantages:
- Good for large business.
- Good for high traffic.
- Multiple domain names.
- Powerful email solutions.
- Powerful database support.
- Strong (unlimited) software support.
Now you can choose wisely. Next time we’ll talk about how to choose a good domain name.
You already know those Mac widgets and now Windows Vista widgets. But now we are living the “Web Widgets Fever”. Widgets are little pieces of dynamic content, and it has been spread through several sites and blogs.
Widgets has several functionalities, like marketing, show the weather, site statistics, and others.
Pros:
Well, it’s a clean, with no logo or ads and you have the option to remove the link for the iBegin homePage.
Cons:
Works only for USA and Canada.
For those security paranoids, yes, I also think it’s not a good idea share a script generated by another user in you website.
So, I have to recommend you to always check the widgets’ origin before use it, since download and install widgets is one of the most known methods to spread malware.
Disclosure: This review was sponsored.
An new service is available to Brazilian professionals, it’s called Services Market and is a new way of connecting companies that need projects to be done with professionals that need projects to do.
Quite complete for a brand new service, it’s a mix of a consulting company with eBay, cover not only IT but lots of professional areas such as architecture, CAD, legal, marketing, translations, etc. It’ll heat up Brazil’s services market for sure!
After working for Yahoo you start to look at search engines in a different way…
You probably noticed microsoft’s new Live search with some nice new concepts on web search interface, but nothing really revolutionary.
I’m not the best person to talk about any MS products so please check also what slashdot is talking about it http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/08/1433235.shtml
Anyway, I have some impressions myself:
Search features:
- Couldn’t find image search, what’s something really important for search engines these days.
- News search is poor, worst than yahoo (images) and google (images and categories).
- the Live.com idea of adding searches and feeds to “my live” is very old and much more flexible on google (ig) and yahoo (my).
- No image, video, shopping, business, local, maps, nothing…
Quality:
- Web results are fine but still worse than google and yahoo
- scientific results are crap (perceptron, alpha helix, drosophila melanogaster, dna sequencing, etc)
- technical results are crap (acpi linux, sql server, windows, DBI, STL, rsync, etc)
Layout:
- Nice to have all-in-one page and also nice to use home/pgup/pgdn buttons and mouse scroll on the result page, but also it’s bad because it’s not searchable.
- The sponsored matches tool is funny, it changes when you scroll down the page
- The verbose level gauge is cool
- Add to live.com doesn’t work, you have to click on the plus signal
- A reload on any page will lead you to the home page, that erally sucks.
- Ajax is cool, but would not make the tool cool just by itself! It needs more content!
In a nutshell, it’s just like all stuff microsoft does: it’s a beautiful way of doing not so well the same thing others are already doing very well. And, of course, a big marketing budget to make people believe it really is a new revolutionary thing.
