keeping simple

Category: software business

  • Corporate Law and Programming State of the Art

    Big companies that want to use our software but don’t want to use our standard EULA keep sending proposed sales contracts that include a really peculiar provision. The provision asks us to guarantee, to represent, to warrant and all that stuff something which everyone knows is false: that our software has zero bugs or errors.…

  • Social Network and Lessig

    Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out…

  • Microsoft by the numbers

    From correspondent AY: 150,000,000 Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history. <10 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. 96 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009. 9,000,000 Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, the largest…

  • out of the loop in silicon valley

    NYTimes. But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.” Another potential backer, reports Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times, invited her…

  • Shape of the internet

    “When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring…

  • An interesting article in ACM communications: is the world ending?

    Coverity has a program that reads other programs looking for errors. The company started as a research project from Stanford (how unusual!)  and the  Communications article is really about what they found in commercial world. One thing they found was a lot of crappy programmers. Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body…

  • Toyota’s problem: hardware weenies and poor accounting practices [updated]

    Jamie Kitman’s look at the twisted path Toyota followed to it’s current difficulties inspired me to think about software and money – two topics I spend way too much time thinking about. As a purely disinterested observer (ahem) it has come to my attention, repeatedly, that manufacturing companies undervalue, underinvest in, and undertest software.  On…

  • Computer Science as a failed discipline

    I write an email to a CS Prof. asking if they have any followup work on some nice OS measurement research they published a couple of years back. The response is that there is no followup and then: Me: Too bad. Is it just me or has everyone given up on measurement in OS research?…

  • Amory Lovins on smart engineering

    Data centers show up around minute 24. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28RmpedUYLk&w=425&h=344]

  • Green energy and smart devices

    We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or…