Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Transient Systems (transient.net) was started 10 years ago (registered May 3, 1996). But it is the master of nothing.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Joseph Scott does some testing to remind us that while database abstraction layers are nice, there is a performance price to be paid — sometimes an expensive one.

The Price of PHP Database Abstraction | Gadgetopia

Microsoft has developed a fascinating style of using language--Microspeak, let's call it--with a refinement, a subtlety, a fine polish all its own. To understand certain announcements and news releases issuing from Redmond, Wash., requires rhetorical analysis and possibly a glossary. The exercise can be worth the effort, though, because after all, Microsoft is Microsoft. These days, if you don't savvy Microspeak, you're going to be left behind.

A Bug by Any Other Name by James Gleick

For those predominantly commercial source (IBM prefers "private" source) vendors, which have made amends with open source and cherry-picked among products to "open," the continued preservation of their commercial code is now suspect. The escalating JBoss-Red Hat stack strikes at the heart of the data center software infrastructure business. This expanded Red Hat stack is both wide and deep. If end users determine that scale, reliability and manageability of this stack meets their needs, this puts significant downward price pressure on the other infrastructure vendors as they sell a solution, or one-throat-to-choke, value.

Indeed, there are two major trends in open source, as evidenced by last week's LinuxWorld show: open source is moving downstream from Linux into virtualization in a big way, and simultaneously open source is moving up the stack abstraction to SOA. In the meantime, open source is hollowing out the middleware components beyond runtime to groupware, portal, directory, and transactional messaging. Tools is a done deal.

� Red Hat-JBoss points up seismic shift to an open source stack model | Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com

RedHat just took aim and shot its partner IBM in the foot. Or maybe IBM shot itself in the foot. While the deal makes little difference to IBM Systems and Technology group (hardware, servers and storage), for Software Group the deal serves to increase pressure on IBM margins.
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I suspect in the long run that Oracle could still end up as JBoss steward, by acquiring Red Hat. Charles Phillips has plenty more deals in his sights.

The acquisition announcement is net positive for Novell SuSE "in light of its relationship with IBM. We might also now expect to see IBM reaching out to the Debian community. If you want to divide and rule, you need options to balance against each other. Red Hat is now a more troublesome partner than it was. We now have a new top reason why IBM could support Debian.

The deal shines a clear focus on the Linux market. Can IBM really afford not to be in control of its own distribution for the long term? Sure Linux can be swapped out but ISV relationships and hardened environments at customer shops can't. Let's not forget that IBM already paid Novell $50m to strengthen the relationship.

James Governor's MonkChips: Some thoughts on Red Hat's JBoss acquisition

PRICING: We will shortly be adding an additional page to go into detail about our pricing structure.

In a nutshell though, it`s like this:

Uploads: Entirely free

Downloads: Totally free from your own account, $20 for 1000Mb worth of files when downloading from other accounts

Bandwidth: No limits

Public Storage: Unlimited space, totally FREE for the lifetime of your account with us!

Private Storage: Storage for files marked `Private` will be charged at $20 per Gb after the first 12 months of storage.

Hope this is clear. To confirm, that`s unlimited storage space, totally free, for the life of the account and free downloading whenever you need your files.

Yet Another Online Storage Pricing Model (and associated startup)

Swapzies

I was having lunch with a friend recently who was telling me about some of his dealings with Google over the last year. As an ex-Wall Street guy, it struck him that some of the meetings he had with Google were like the ones he had at Long Term Capital years ago. Even when LTC was about to crater, he remembers going to their offices, being sequestered into an off-campus conference room, and not being able to get any information out of them to even help bail them out. In addition, people would show up and leave during the meeting, take notes, and not even introduce themselves. Well, it turns out that his meetings with Google over the last year were pretty similar. While the Google employees were clearly bright and technical, my friend was not sure who the decision maker was and what they actually wanted to do with the company.

Very interesting article drawing parallels between LTCM ("When Genius Failed") and Google.

BeyondVC: Remember Long Term Capital?

What this really means: TV is grabbing a share of online advertising by redefining TV as both broadcast and broadband. Advertisers have always been more comfortable spending big money on TV. Now they can continue to spend their money with those familiar players and get broadband, too. And TV is doing this so as not to lose money to other media even as broadcast — and next, cable — shrink; this is how they rescue upfront. And if TV succeeds at holding advertisers’ attention and money, other players — online companies, magazines, newspapers — may not be able to break in. This an effort for both networks and ad agencies to keep ahead.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Exploding TV: KA-BLOOM!

His point, to paraphrase it, is that it doesn’t matter what information you have, it’s how you use it that makes the difference. This was always my biggest bitch about analytics apps, they always stopped short of allowing the user to turn the knobs and dials in the transaction system to effect some kind of change as a result of the dashboard the BI app provided.

Venture Chronicles

Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, announced on April 10 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open-source Java middleware company JBoss.

JBoss has been rumored to be on the acquisition block for months. Earlier this year there was much speculation that Oracle was going to acquire the Atlanta-based JBoss, but JBoss CEO Marc Fleury said he had no immediate plans to sell the company.

Red Hat will pay at least $350 million for JBoss. That will be made up of 40 percent cash and 60 percent Red Hat stock. An additional $70 million may be paid depending upon JBoss' financial performance. Oracle had been alleged to have been looking to pay from $300 million to $480 million for JBoss.

I think that's better than Oracle buying them.

Print Story: Red Hat to Acquire JBoss on Yahoo! News