Maybe you and many others would be better off by paying attention to actions vs words, and notice which company was the first to push back on the government to provide transparency to national security letters when everyone else bowed down before the government. Being skeptical and not falling for feel good platitudes could help all of us.
The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.
Actually, in some ways it's easier for those of us who work in the infrastructure groups to demonstrate monetary value. Google has a very large number of machines, and an even larger number of hard drives. Hard drives have fundamentally not changed seek times in over a decade, even as capacity has doubled (up until relatively recently) every 18 months. So more often than not, for many work loads (not just at Google, but across the entire industry) are seek constrained, not capacity constrained. So when Google migrated from ext2 to ext4, it's actually pretty easy to calculate how much money was saved by utilizing disks more efficiently, and the team which spearheaded this _was_ in fact recognized by the company and by the founders.
As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels?
Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.
That is great if your project impact can be measured, but sometimes metrics aren't available for accurate assessment. If sales uses your tool, bringing in millions, that's not so easy to measure, and those projects will languish unless some value can be placed for the project. Good luck with that, or at least coming up with a system that can measure it and having it be accepted. That's a big gap and you don't want to be in that group.
Do you really work for Google? It's possible to find metrics for most things. It might be the number of times SRE's get paged. It might be reducing the amount of time SWE's need to worry about thread safety; so even code cleanup can have metrics. The trick is to think big, and to think at scale. Not how to improve things for SWE's working in one team, but many teams, if not all of Google.
This is why life is sometimes easier for the infrastructure teams; increasing disk or CPU utilization by even a fraction of a percent, when multiplied across a large number of systems, can be a big number.
Now, if your product which is measured as having a small number of users, and worse, that number is decreasing over time (which was the case with Google Reader, as has been publicly disclosed), the problem is not that you don't have metrics, but the metrics aren't telling you want might have necessarily wanted to hear. Down and to the right; that's a different story...
Yup, and it's used by everyone, especially execs, and acts as a swiss army knife. Yet the team is mostly leaving in droves because although it's quite useful, it isn't correctly measured and it doesn't bring home the bacon. So the project is sometimes wrapped up and repackaged by a customer-facing team to steal the glory and get bonuses, or teams put it under them and scale back perks/force us to use them vs other teams who want us to cater to them. So silo'ing, everyone wants the goods. I've contributed lots of infrastructure code that customer-facing teams use, gets who gets the large bonuses. Proposals to fix this and measure impact have been brought up and slapped down by managers. I'm leaving the group after wrapping up some stuff. Fortunately I have high perf scores. People make warm comments about how useful the project is, but at the end of the day, it's never going to give me a $200k bonus, so it goes in one ear, out the other.
> The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property
> With U.S. companies suffering losses and American workers losing jobs
Jobs. Translation: this is a PR piece.
> The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of
Defense, and law enforcement agencies should have the legal authority to use threat-based deterrence
systems that operate at network speed against unauthorized intrusions into national security and
critical infrastructure networks
Huh? This includes national security now? Are they deliberately blurring the lines between pirating and national security? Why I think so.
> Informed deliberations over whether corporations and individuals should be legally
able to conduct threat-based deterrence operations against network intrusion, without doing undue
harm to an attacker or to innocent third parties, ought to be undertaken.
They want to legalize Sony's rootkit, but they want to do it right. Rootkits in the wild cannot be tamed, don't even go there.
> if counterattacks against hackers were legal, there are many techniques that companies could employ
that would cause severe damage to the capability of those conducting IP theft.
You do something that the system thinks is pirating and your computer blows up. What could go wrong.
> ...The Commission is not ready to endorse this recommendation because of the larger questions of
collateral damage caused by computer attacks
Ahh I see, they're reasonable after all! IOW, they want to make their rootkit legalization idea sound sane.
> Recommend to Congress and the administration that U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) program budget in whole or in part be withheld
At this point I want to punch someone in the face.
Someone mentioned that having one syscall that sends multiple udp messages is patented. That is ridiculous IMO. It meets the guideline you lay out: you can define the abstract process of calling a method of an API then that itself sends out UDP messages. However, it's blatantly obvious to all programmers. But probably not to lawyers. Pretty much all software is blatantly obvious and trivial to implement. Microsoft's patent on long filenames is another example. Software is trivial to implement. Want long filenames? A high school student can do it.
However, with chemistry, it is nontrivial. It is not a matter of writing code that a CPU runs instantaneously. You have to devise a method on paper, try it(sorry, a cpu won't mix chemicals), go back to the drawing board. Vs software, where it's trivial so millions of people have probably already coded what you thought was novel.
That happens often with software: I come up with an imaginative awesome new algorithm, only to learn, it has been done before. that's because I work in a line of work that is trivial. We're glorified code monkeys, and we don't deserve to be awarded patents by any means.
I just tried fish, way too slow. I held down the backspace key, and instead of deleting 10 characters, the entire line was gone. zsh is also too slow. bash may not have the bells and whistles, but it's at least super fast and doesn't get in your way.
OMG, it's like we can't focus on multiple things at once.
How about this revelation: people in cyprus can't use ATMs because they can't manage their money, and Chinese government-sponsored hackers are also targeting American businesses. I know, it's a lot to concentrate on.
But seriously, I like many others on this tech-centered news site where we pretty much run the entire internet collectively, have seen first hand Chinese-sponsored hackers. So you can't really pull the wool over our eyes so easily.
You really shouldn't try to use metaphors when making an argument. Someone says A is like B, another person disagrees that A is like C. But no, says another, A is like D. Finally, an internet troll points out A is like B and D, but definitely not like C. By then, everyone's brain gives up trying to figure it all out.
If you're gonna make a point, make a point, it's that simple.
Are you arguing that metaphors have no value when explaining a concept? I'm sure Shakespeare would be a whole lot more boring without the use of metaphor:
To be, or not to be: one could ponder:
Whether one's sense of self-worth increases
In direct proportion to one's ability to accept adversity,
Or to address challenges,
And in so doing solve said challenges?
Personally, I prefer the original:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
[Apologies in advance for the inevitably botched translation.]
Explaining a concept to a friendly listener is an entirely different challenge than convincing even an honest skeptic of something. Metaphors are good for the former, dangerous at best for the latter (but beware the continuum between them).
And of course entertainment is yet another game. Any sort of serious argument in a work of entertainment is probably trying to fly under the radar of skepticism anyway... Dang it. Point is, fiction is not usually a good model for rational discussion.
The comment I replied to said "You really shouldn't try to use metaphors when making an argument." Was Shakespeare not using his characters to present an argument for dramatic effect?
Shakespeare is entertaining and metaphors are fun. Do you disagree with a poem and bring up logical fallacies? Of course not, we read them for entertainment value and anything we learn is a bonus. That is separate from metaphors used when trying to discuss the nuances of an argument within the confines of trying to have a logical argument. Poems and Shakespeare aren't supposed to be logical all the time, that would be boring.
Which logical argument are you referring to? Scott Hanselman used an analogy to make an observation about javascript. It's a blog post, not a rigorous mathematical thesis. Who are you to say what rhetorical devices someone should or should not use?
None of those things you brought up are illegal. Oracle is a scourge and just a step above SCO, but that's a pretty low bar. Making it so you designate something arbitrarily as a "language" and you can be the only princess that implements it is plain evil. Fortunately the appeal is going no where.
Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that.
Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.
